On writing a well-structured story

I've realized much too late -- though thankfully before it's too late, that structures don't just happen to stories, sometimes it takes a conscious action on part of a writer, or an editor to impose a well-crafted structure to it. A house can be made one brick at a time by a visionary architect and a builder, but strong and well-lasting structures are made by those who plan the general structure. Where the beams go, where the support structures go, what the foundation will look like, and what materials the structure will be built off of. The fun, quirky things that are on-the-moment are important, but by themselves they would just be random junk of a homeless person strewn about, not additions to a wonderful structure.

A story or a novel is like that. You have to have a plot, some dialog, perhaps some description, character description, and so on and so forth. If you're an amazing writer, they might come to you as you write, and the words could just assemble themselves into a perfectly-created structures. For the rest of us mortals, however, sometimes you can think of dialogs but not character-building. Sometimes you can go on days of plot-writing, but nothing to spice it up with some quick dialog. Or you can slog through pages and pages of exposition with no clear plot in sight. What I'm saying is, normal writers cannot just evoke the structural elements of writings by wishing them in, even though they realize they need those. Instead, what they do is write a story in parts. A piece of dialog here, some character description there, a thousand words of plot there, all strewn about. In the end, you assemble those, organize it together to make the most interesting, captivating read and then you get a coherent structure.

Perhaps my misconception was born when I was much younger, in school days when the various departmental story-writing competitions were an hourly affair -- write as well as you can in a couple of hours, and some weeks or months later, you may or may not win a prize. Sure, if you're an amazing writer, you can use that time to come up with all the various elements, organize them together, and then rewrite the entire piece so it's a well-crafted garland of words. But that's not what the two/three hours were for -- they were to spew out words the fastest, the wittiest you can in that short timeframe, and the lucky winner took the prize, a certificate, perhaps a medal, and a couple of books to read from the english department.

The way I discovered it today was rather roundabout. At work I was thinking of coming up with an easy structure for my novel, because I can't go on writing plot for pages and pages. Then I thought of dividing the novel into certain number of parts, each with about an equal number of chapters. I started thinking about the organization of each part, and figured one chapter would have dialogs, one chapter would have internal monologue, one chapter would have general overview, and so on and so forth. The more I planned, the clearer it became to me that writing several thousand words of the same thing over and over, just for one part would get tiring quick. What if -- and let me walk you through this so you understand what an amazing realization this was -- what if I reduced the length of each section by a certain amount, so that I'd have to write only a small proportion for a story. And what if I connected those small segments together into a coherent structure, calling it...hmm..maybe a chapter? And, and, here's the kicker, what if those separate segments -- dialog, monologue, descriptive writing, etcetera, weren't all disparate but integrated into a single structure, stitched across each other so the reader could barely tell the difference?!? Mind-blowing, right? It was to me, so please don't make fun of that.

At this point, what remains to figure out is how I'd write the disparate parts, and how the stitching would work. Perhaps it's even harder to write dialog for a chapter now, the plot next week, and other stuff next month, and integrate them all together? Maybe they won't be that coherent after all? Or perhaps realwriters write it all in one big gulp, screw all the theorizing? They do say, those who can, do, those who can't, theorize.

Here's the approach that'll likely work the best for me: first, figure out what the chapter is about, and the general outline (open to deviations) on what events/occurrences would happen in it. Then, for each element of structure, identify what characters/events would be best represented by it. Then, in your mind -- or in commentary text -- explain how those various elements would interact with each other...how the dialogs would intersect with  the storytelling, how the character-description would fit with the monologue, etcetera. Just a very rough sketch, to give a pointer to the future me so I'm not lost. With those guiding marks, I'd start writing each individual part, at separate times, generally on track, and at the back of my mind preparing for the integration. Once I feel all the parts are more or less there, I first rearrange them -- no editing at this point -- so the flow is there. Then, I just add a sentence or two or three so there's some kind of transition. And that's it! I don't have to worry about editing (obviously!), and there's not much overhead. The major advantage of this approach versus 'write as you go, a sentence at a time' it it's much harder to get lost here, and I have a really good vision of where I want to be at every point.

I am thinking of writing a crappy practice novel in the month of October, and I should consider using this approach. My angle is going to be -- So and So, a novel in 15 parts. Each part will be 2000 words long, so the entire novel would be 30k words. Each day I write a thousand or so words, and every two days I complete a chapter -- different parts of the structure, so I don't have to worry about losing the thread of the story. This way, if I get bored or get writers-block, I can just switch to writing a different structure while pausing the story, and come back to it when I feel more able to tackle it. That could be a real approach on a dummy novel! I'm excited, but no promises, and please lets not get too far ahead of ourselves.