Plotting and The Electric Church

Right, we all know the drill now, right? I’m giving a plot seminar at The Writer’s Digest Annual Conference (see here) because like Iggy A I am fancy, and thus I am writing a series of essays about how I plot novels by way of proving my bona fides, right? All right, glad to have that out of the way.

So: The Electric Church. The story about this book is an epic in and of itself. It’s actually simultaneously the book I plotted most, and perhaps the most epically pantsed novel in history. I wrote the first draft in 1993 in about six months, just pantsing along merrily. The end result was a sloppy narrative with what we in the writerly industry refer to as a shit-ton of problems, but it had spark, and verve, and a premise that I wanted to do justice to. So I never quite gave up on it, picking it up a few times over the next decade and starting a few revisions.

Then, in 2004 I saw an ad for a fiction market. They were accepting proposals and required a detailed plot outline, character sketches — the whole nine yards.

As aside: In what has proven to be a reliable rule, the markets that pay the least have the most strenuous requirements. I’ve sold novels to major publishers who ran the book through a warm room full of copy editors and proclaimed it ready for prime-time. Stories and books for which I was paid in admiration and slaps on the back? Gruelling rounds of editing. This was one of those: No money (I did eventually earn $3.14 from it — that is an exact number — but the submission process was epic.

Anyways, I’d never done any of that before. I dutifully plotted the entire novel, sketched characters, and filled in all this incredible detail I had never bothered with before in my life. Then, of course, I had to actually write the novel, and I found there was a curious lack of excitement. Normally when I write I’m excited. I can’t wait to get back to the story, at least if the story is popping along. But this time there was no excitement, because I knew where everything was headed. It might have made the writing more efficient, but I missed that spark.

Of course, part of that might have been the 12-year gap between pantsing out the first draft and the revision. Who can know such things? Jeff merely pawn in game of life.

When I started working on a plot outline — that was, by the way, broken out by chapter — I already had the general outline of the plot, winnowed down from the hot mess of the first draft. And when I started working on the character sketches, I was working with characters who had survived several purges over the years.

The on concrete place I’d say this helped was with speed: I wrote the modern version of The Electric Church pretty fast. The publisher began posting chapters online, and like I said, I got two royalty statements showing a single person reading my book, and I got a check for $3.14, and then everyone went out of business. And then of course the Avery Cates saga continued.

The Coda here is this: I wrote an entire sequel to TEC that was never published. It was a seat-of-the-pants story born from a mixture of smug certainty that having sold TEC to a major publisher I was a genius and a sudden passionate inspiration. I loved it. My agent loved it.

My editor? Not so much.

So it was back to the drawing board. I didn’t have a 3-book deal with TEC. It was a one-and-done, but my editor had expressed interest in sequels, so to get another contract I had to come up with some ideas that passed muster. So it was back to plot outlines: Not as detailed as with TEC, but still definitely plotting. By books #4 and 5, however, I was back to my pantsing ways, just sort of grooving along.

No one ever promised you coherency, kids. In fact, it’s kind of amazing that I can remember anything about how I wrote these books at all. To the bar!