Forensic Plotting
I’m often asked in interviews about my writing process. It’s a common opener for artist interviews of all types, and for good reason. People (fans, cohorts, even competitors) want to know how other people do things, especially people they’re interested in following. It’s a sound form of research. If someone else is doing something that interests you, how are they getting their results? If you’re a competitor or creating in the same cohort, other artists’ processes are worth knowing in case you can improve your own efforts by their example. Fans and aficionados want to know simply because there is a cult of small truths behind the art and entertainment we admire, and knowing these things is where real fandom — real understanding, even — lives.
So, it’s a good question: how do you do what you do? And I always answer it the same way.
I write backward.
Skip to the End
Not backward backward — more like in reverse. I don’t use mirrors or ciphers or anything like that; rather, I write from the conclusion instead of toward it. It’s an approach I began using when I was still teaching and admonishing my students to write from an argument.
I didn’t come up with this idea — wiser professors than I handed me this gem — but I laid particular claim to it and made sure my students did, too. It’s not dissimilar to not burying the lede. If you let readers, of any flavor, wander around your article or story or manifesto too long undirected, they will begin making associations and forming conclusions that you didn’t intend. If winning your audience’s attention is like a game of chess, then writing toward something is like losing the tempo. You’ll be a move behind until the endgame, if you’re lucky enough to even get there. Writers working toward an argument or lede or conclusion are tilting at windmills, reaching for conclusions or one-liners or indictments for an audience they’ve already lost.
Interrogate Your Climax
If you write from an argument or conclusion, you write from a position of confidence, authority, and (best of all) information. You have your ducks in a row from the start, and you can give me one at a time, in the order you want me to have them, until you have successfully lured me into the pond — or whatever it is you do to someone to whom you’ve gifted all your ducks.
In my fiction, that means knowing the ending, the big climax, before knowing the beginning. I’ve used this approach in each book. I have a general idea what the book is going to do or be about, but I don’t know how I’m going to pull it off when I start. So, I concentrate my efforts on ambitious, interesting pay-off endings, and I start working backward.
- How did the book end up like this? Because of these factors.
- How did those come together? Because of these influences.
- Who is responsible for creating those opportunities? These people.
And so on and so forth. You might call it forensic plotting.
Re-Create Your Story First
By re-creating your story rather than creating it, you are in complete control of your writing experience. Rather than chasing an ending and discarding chapters, scenes, and characters that just don’t jive with your end result, you can concentrate on a surgical delivery of what you already know will work.
But you have to go big. Machining a story like this needs real payoff, so shoot for the moon — otherwise, you run the risk of a staid, paint-by-numbers product. In my first novel, that meant an open-ended conclusion dragging the reader into the main character’s radicalization. In my second, it meant burning the world down. Literally. My third is even more ambitious, but we’ll save that for October, when you’ll see what I mean.
Darin Bradley is the author of three novels — his latest, Totem, will be available in October. He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature and Theory, and he has taught courses on writing and literature at several universities. He keeps a website at darinbradley.com.
