StoryStalking: Playing it Forward

  I call it Story Stalking.

As some of you know, a couple of weeks ago I complained about being stuck in my novel. Not writers block, rather an inability to see how to move the story along. I've now found an answer,  and I want to try to share my experience because I like the synchronicity it kicked up. It's a bit complicated, but I'll do my best to keep it simple. The problem started when I couldn't see how to keep moving toward the resolution of my plot—which after some difficulty, I decided involved getting a couple of my characters together on the page.

My novel is set in early 19th century Paris and I'm dealing with two women who come from very different social classes. Louise (upper left) is married and respectable and sheltered. Among other things, she's hiding her acquaintance with Juliette (right), who is an actress and a courtesan, and lives a much more Bohemian life than Louise. They originally met by accident and liked one another. Now, six years later, Louise needs Juliette's assistance.

Lousie Farrenc is a composer, and the first thing I explored was a conversation about a piece of music she was composing, Ma Tendre Musette. A musette is a bagpipe. I'd written a conversation in which, Aristide, Louise's husband, commented that he heard the pipes as a boy living in the south of France.

I've been talking about how, as writers, we leave breadcrumbs for ourselves, Hansel-&-Gretel style, as we write. And this reference to hearing bagpipes in the south of France was just such a breadcrumb. When I looked at it a second time, I remembered that Louise and Aristide had traveled together in the south of France right after they married. I decided they heard the pipes together during that journey and looked for a specific village where it could have happened.

Researching on the Internet, I found a village that advertises its old windmills as a tourist attraction. Since windmills were already mentioned in the book, I decided to use that village. So I moved from a vague idea about describing a musette for the reader, to a specific memory that belonged to Louise as she composed.

The next day I attended a piano concert at the music festival. (This is where the synchronicity kicks in.) It featured music by Franz Liszt, another character in my novel. The pianist quoted Rousseau, a philosopher who greatly influenced the times I'm writing about. "Music," Rousseau said, "gives the ear eyes" and can portray anything—even the physical world. Liszt, the pianist explained, had composed the music he was about to play to reflect the stillness of Lake Wallenstadt. I blogged about my experience in some detail at Paris on My Mind.

I came home and thought about Louise's musette. I knew she had borrowed the melody from an old folk tune and then created variations of it. Because the windmills were part of her memory, I decided she wanted to capture them somehow, in the same way Liszt tried to capture the lake. I also realized she could get word to Juliette by going through her brother, who was studying art in Rome at the French Institute there. The director of the Institute, Horace Vernet, was a painter who had been intricately involved when Louise and Juliette first met. Louise wrote her brother and asked him to have Vernet contact Juliette who was still modeling in Paris for Vernet's cohorts, including Delacroix.

It was a round about way of getting to Juliette, but Louise was being careful. She didn't want her husband to realize what she was doing, and she didn't know anyone else she could ask. One problem solved.

I still couldn't figure out how they were going to have this clandestine meeting, even when Juliette knew about it. That's when the windmill popped back up... Louise realized she could tell Aristide she wanted to go to the new café, Le Moulin de la Gallete, to be in the presence of the windmill there. Le Moulin de la Gallete is in Montemartre, which is in the northern part of Paris and part of the novel. The fortuneteller, my storyteller, had, only a couple of chapters back, told the reader about Le Moulin de la Gallete. Like Louise and Juliette, Madame Lenormand is an historical figure. She lived in Paris during the times I'm writing about and was quite famous; she'd read cards for Napoleon.

So now, not only can my characters meet; they're meeting at a locale where they might run into Madame Lenormand who may have something to tell them both that will allow the larger plot issue (the reason they're meeting) to move toward resolution. I'm not sure what's going to happen because I haven't written the scene in the moulin yet, but Madame Lenormand is the one who originally told Louise to seek Juliette's aid.

I hope I'm communicating the significance of what I'm trying to explain. Really, when I was first stuck, I had written that Madame Lenormand told Louise her maid could help her. That was the real dead end. The first change I made was to Juliette, mostly because someone in my writing group asked me what had happened to Juliette. Juliette Drouet, Victor Hugo's mistress, had been kind of a local color character—not that involved with the plot. Now, suddenly, she's relevant.

So. A couple of things: first of all, I learned the answers were in what I'd already written, and that I'd made a mistake I had to catch and change. It's kind of like getting the perspective wrong in a painting. The most important moment of undoing my problem came when I turned action over to a different character... when I realized the maid had very little to offer. Even though she had connections to the larger problem, she didn't have the connections that Juliette, as an actress, did. Secondly, I had to see how to involve this new character—in this case, get word to her. I didn't want my reader doubting the validity of how it all happened, which is where the windmills came in. They give Louise the excuse she needs to go off on a risque adventure.

The changes came from conversations, from the concert I attended, and from bits I'd already laid into the text. Executing it meant writing forward and back too—something I've begun to do more and more. All of this is based on the notion that it's better not to have all the answered figured out (outlined) up front in a novel... because it gives your unconscious more opportunity to be involved in the unfolding. Novelist Peg Kingman, who I heard speak this spring, pointed out that if she figures it all out ahead of time, generally speaking her readers see it coming and can anticipate everything before they get there. If, however, she allows the story to unfold, when her characters get stuck, the reader can't see how its going to work out. They're kept off-balance about where the story is going—a much more interesting story to read.

I call it story stalking.
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crossposted at Paris on My Mind