Meta-cognition and Story Structure

When I write a poem I usually impose a stringent structure on myself - it may be a rhyme scheme, a recurring pattern of syllables, or some other combinations of devices that make it necessary to craft and recraft the piece before it is finished. This has assisted me in some mysterious, serendipitous fashion, to discover my true intent, pushed as I am to make the piece work - as with solving a Sudoku, there is one right set of answers even though the building blocks rearrange themselves forever.

I had a similar set of rules, a template, if you will, for each chapter when I wrote Pastor's Ex-Wife. Each chapter had to advance the plot and also contain:

• A church service - using a fictitious construct which was a composite of a different church building, congregation, pastor, and service
• An anecdote from when I taught music in an inner city elementary school district
• A metaphor or symbol that carried the psychological/emotional impact of the chapter
• Dialogue

I have a similar set of rules for a historical novel - the working title is Isabel -that is based on a series of letters written in 1894 between Benjamin Edwards and Isabel Woods. Most of the research for that book is done but I am not ready to write it yet. However, I can watch it unfold in my mind as though the book were a dance choreographed for the stage - each chapter is one day in the week before Isabel dies. When I do write it, I think it will flow fairly freely - at least for the first draft.

My current struggle is with Stuck in the Mud. It is a murder mystery - think "cozy", not "thriller." But I want to incorporate big issues into the story - the pain that spiritually abusive marriages cause the children, how gender issues play out in today's American Protestant churches, and how the issues of class, philanthropy, and status intertwine in the context of a nonprofit organization. The setting is contemporary Ste. Genevieve, Missouri - the Bolduc House Museum, in fact, so at some level I hope that the novel will be a marketing device for both the museum and the town. There are three corpses: one in St. Louis, one washing up at the Mississippi River marina in Ste. Genevieve, and one accidentally plowed up behind one of the houses at the museum. The requisite but uncertain romantic sub-theme is there.

I'm thinking that the plot itself has to be the driver of Stuck in the Mud....unlike the shifting settings and symbols of Pastor's Ex-Wife, or the character-driven Strindberg-like expose of Isabel. So for me, the task of planning Stuck in the Mud is unexpectedly the most difficult writing task I have undertaken to date.

So much for a writer's meta-cognitive process, right?

Laying out a story's bones

I have been thinking a lot about my writing process lately. My conclusion - at least for now- is that mine is not easily described. It matches how I approach any large creative project. As soon as I can envision the finished product it is easy to define the detailed steps that it will take to arrive at the goal. The other imperative for me is to conceptualize it graphically or physically but always visually. It doesn't matter what the genre is either.

I wrote lots of serious papers in college and graduate school. Before computers or word processors when only the elite among us owned electric typewriters, I typically wrote quotes from research documents longhand on single index cards with the citation information on the back of the same card. Then I assigned a category to the quote, arranged the categories by sequencing the cards in a logical order. I didn't usually bother writing a formal outline. Instead I hand-wrote text to connect the quotes on pieces of paper to which I taped the cards where they went in the narrative. To rearrange the paper I did not rewrite sections; I used scissors to cut the document and taped it back together.

The place that best worked to do this was the Asian studies library at Washington University. It had very large tables and very few students ever used it. So I could spread out. Sometimes my paper looked like a badly designed very long kite damaged after too many collisions with trees. When I was happy with the end product I typed it in triplicate with the requisite carbon paper between the copies. It was a messy task that inevitably also required the use of those little white correction strips - also in triplicate - and don't even remind me of the agony of spacing footnotes so they displayed properly at the bottom of the same page that contained the information discussed or cited below.

The other day my office manager watched me organizing a complex set of project tasks for an important staff meeting at the museum. She described me as a visual thinker. I never would have said the same about myself but in retrospect upon reflection I think she is correct and therein lies the key to what is slowing down my progress with Stuck in the Mud. I lack both the place and the mechanism to lay out the story's bones - the cut out pages to tape back together before writing the actual story.

When I wrote Pastor's Ex-Wife the structure was clear from the start. The first and last chapters function as bookends. In the first chapter, Terry Soldan found the courage to revisit her ex-husband, Pastor Ed's church - incognito in the guise of an African American woman but really in her role as the anonymous church critic for a newspaper. The first chapter describes the service from her perspective. The last chapter is the text of the article she wrote about Abundant Love Church for the newspaper the following week. In between the first and last chapter is the chronological story of how she decided to leave Pastor Ed and how she gained the self-confidence and courage to go back (to the church for one Sunday service - not to the abusive marriage or the twisted braid of lies that had kept her trapped there for 24 years previously.)

Each chapter advances Terry's story, relies on a specific metaphor, profiles a church, a pastor, a Sunday service, and a congregation. Each chapter also contains an anecdote inspired by my work as a music teacher in an urban inner city public school system. So as soon as I decided on the particulars for a chapter I was ready to write it. I even created a chapter planning sheet for the book.

Stuck in the Mud does not rely on such symbolism. It is a murder mystery with three corpses to deal with. I have some serious themes to weave through the story and I know my cast of characters and the settings very well. I think I will get a few rolls of adding machine tape tomorrow. Then I'll visually arrange the story as it will be experienced by each character. Next I'll cut it up and rearrange it on a wall.

That should help a lot.

Boxes and other symbols

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to structure the Pastor's Ex-Wife before I wrote the main part of the book. As I explained in an earlier blog, I spent a day merging two very different ideas for writing projects in a simple story basically to get the project out of my mind, not wanting to write a book that would require this much courage, chicken that I tend to be. The result turned out to be the first and last chapters in which Terry and William, in costume, of course, return to Ed's church so that Terry can use her observations in the next week's syndicated "Anonymous Church Critique" article. As William says, the purpose is to "close the door" on a very bad season of Terry's life as the abused wife of a pastor.

When I realized that the main part of the novel had to show the series of events that combined to provide Terry with the resolve, resiliency, and courage she needed to face and finish her past, next I had to structure the chapters.

Each chapter is written around a central metaphor. One metaphor is a door, another a box....Each chapter portrays a different church building peopled with another church's congregation and led by a third church's pastor. Each chapter contains a story based on something that actually happened in the inner city music classroom where I taught for real and each chapter moves the linear time-line forward while making sure that there is both flashback and foreshadowing in the pages. 

You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.