Organizing Dystopia
Organizing a novel’s nuts and bolts can be one of the most challenging aspects of its creation. Every novel, no matter the skill level of the writer working on it, contains multitudes. There are worlds and characters and conspiracies and themes — upon themes upon themes. There are the author’s lived experiences, veiled and re-purposed as the details of a character’s life. There are extrapolations based on research — the skinning of the novel’s world across the framework of imagined, borrowed, and reinvented material. Even the amateur’s first novel is a web of details, no matter its quality.
Later, though, after you’ve written a training novel or two, you’ll want to build worlds and orchestrate stories that other people will want to read and, most likely, that publishers will want to purchase. It’s the natural life cycle of the writer. When I worked as an acquisitions editor, reading manuscripts, one of the greatest weaknesses I saw was poor organization. Often, I could tell whether or not I wanted to work with an author within only a few pages. Poorly organized projects are overwritten, because younger writers are still concerned about making sure you understand this exact thing the exact way they intended it, or they’ve failed. This usually isn’t true, so when you see exposition shoehorned in place, it means the author lacks the organization to give you that information more naturally, sometime later. Detail-panic is a hallmark of novelists who are still on the steepest part of the learning curve.
Writers organize their projects to varying degrees based on a variety of reasons, so what works for me won’t necessarily work for you. Each project is different, and so can your organizational approaches be. A few friends asked recently how I went about lining up Totem, which is a far different project than its predecessors in the dystopian cluster (Noise and Chimpanzee). Here’s how I did it.
Building a World
Totem called for a different organizational process than my other novels. While those began by organizing a series of critical events — and the details attached to them — into their proper order in a series of parallel plot lines, Totem required more attention on the characters and the details of their setting, not what they were doing in what order. The central crux of this novel is a pair of characters, Belan and Vesse, who are critical to the lives of all the other P.O.V. characters, even though we never see the world through Belan’s or Vesse’s eyes. They are the common elements that stitch the others’ experiences throughout the novel together — these other characters are largely quite removed from each other. In one way or another, either Belan or Vesse interacts with or appears in the lives of the six P.O.V. characters at least once in each chapter. There are three parts to the book, and each P.O.V. character gets one chapter per part, for a total of eighteen, plus an epilogue. So, how did I determine what those interactions would be?
A Radioactive City?
Totem started as a premise: a historic city made of radioactive stone — and the religion that developed around it. Simple. A little . . . weird, sure, but nothing too complicated. The entire plot line takes place within the confines of this city, so building my world was pretty easy. I needed to determine the realities of living in a radioactive city, and I wanted to base my ideas mostly in reality to keep with the “near-fi” theme of the other two books in the cluster. So, I did it free-form. I begin all of my stories (short ones or novels) with a mind map. I use a sketch book because the unlined paper is more freeing. I start with a simple statement or phrase (usually only a word), and I free-associate, picking and choosing which ideas are worth jotting down and which are better left in my head. I do this over a process of weeks or months, and I consider it no less valuable than actual drafting. During this period, I sit with my sketch book, and I think. I either write down ideas, or I go insane. But as long as I’m not doing anything else, as long as I’m attending the project, it counts.
The Big Targets
Once I feel like I’ve more or less identified all the characteristics that will comprise the story and its theme, I start moving on to Big Targets. I always write backward, from a conclusion, so I know where I’m headed in a story. Similarly, I decide what the Big Target is in each act or chapter — in this case, that meant each of the interactions my characters would have with Belan and Vesse throughout the course of the story. At this point, I don’t bother figuring out how I’m going to get to the Big Target in a given chapter — I just decide that I am.
And then . . . back to the thinking board. Armed with my mind-map and a series of Big Targets, I start deciding what needs to happen in a given chapter to get to the Big Target. And this is where the world-building comes in. Obviously, there are a lot of things you need to know about living in a radioactive city. Why is anyone even living there? How do they stay safe? What do they do? But if I lapse into detail panic and give it all to you as soon as you absolutely must have it, then I’m being expository (i.e. disorganized), and you’re going to check out. It’s during this phase that I list which world-building elements you need in what order in a given chapter in order to slowly parse my fictional world and arrive, fully informed, at the conclusion in a natural and enjoyable manner. Good world-building occurs in a series of meaningful P.O.V. glances at your fictional world, not in a pile.
Leaving a Trail
I go through yet one more planning stage, but I do this one as I draft. I’m done with establishing all the architecture, but there are character insights, bits of history, and last-minute details that could RUIN EVERYTHING. These I put on Post-It notes, and I festoon my data points with them. If I ever get lost, I can easily backtrack through these layers and see how I got where I am. In the case of Totem, that was exploring characters’ lives in an increasingly repressive dystopia. How can they still find joy? Love? Meaning? And will it matter by the time the climax hits? These personalities built the novel, rather than the minutiae of their comings and goings, but every novel is different, and the next one may simply involve a Ouija board and some automatic writing.
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.
