Plotting and Planning with Fabula & Syuzhet
A few notes on bottling your muses when you don't have time to write
Dear Friends,
Do you ever find yourself in that situation where you have a daunting deadline approaching so you decide to clean out the fridge and scrub the bathtub instead? I’ve been in that hole the entire past week, if not longer. I’m on a deadline for something related to my doctoral degree, and my unruly imagination keeps returning to this one particular novel manuscript (one that is about 95% notes-for-writing and 5% actually-written-chapters) that I truly cannot work on until other more pressing documents are delivered to the powers-that-be.
I don’t know if this happens to you, but sometimes I just have too much going on and there’s this overwhelming guilt that prevents me from fully submersing myself in a creative project I’m vying for because something else takes precedent. It’s also possible that some of my yearning to throw myself in something like a novel manuscript comes from avoiding more pressing responsibilities. Cognitively, it feels like I can think about the creative work with some type of planning part of my brain, but I’m not necessarily in a place to throw myself into the writing at the somatic level where I can just feel it and lose time inside it.
Maybe this is not a problem for you at all, but it often feels like a problem for me. Which is why the topic of the day is about ways to dip a toe in the ocean of a creative project that you’re itching to work on when everything else is competing for your time. With a brief detour to Russian Formalism. While I am going to be talking about fiction and novel-writing, I hope that even if that’s not your artistic practice or genre, that there’s something to grab onto here.
For what it’s worth, I’ve written at least one novel. Possibly more. This/these manuscript(s) may be trunked. Maybe not. Stay tuned to a future episode to find out their fate(s). I’ve also published a story collection and poetry collection, so I know what it’s like to work on short-form projects and then order them in a way to present to the world. And I can tell you it’s a very different experience from long-form writing such as novel-drafting.
The first time I approached novel-writing, I did it the wild way—i.e., what some people refer to as pantsing it. This is what made sense to me. It’s the way I taught myself to write. There is something you are imagining or thinking or feeling or desiring or deliberating over. It is a thing that is out of reach, and you are attempting to grab it with your words. And you hold it in your mind like a talisman and move from one sentence to the next as if moving through the pathways of a hedge maze. You chase that idea or emotion down, and you work it out with the writing. In the end, you touch the talisman, briefly, or exit the metaphorical hedge maze, and you feel satisfaction in this thing you’ve chased down and put into language.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with the aforementioned way of being. My way of being as a writer is certainly more woo-woo than my way of being as a teacher. And since I’ve been teaching creative writing to a bunch of undergraduate students all through this academic year, I’d wager my voice I approach you with now is analogous to the type of teacher-voice I use in a classroom. But this voice is a very different voice from the the one that lives inside my artist-brain.
Gut-instinct sprints into the wild have served me (and still serve me) well for writing short-form projects like individual poems or stories. Those are the genres I publish in and the ones that tend to be closest to my heart. I do think there is a novelist inside of me as well, but that novel-writing self I have had to strong-arm into existence. In any case, it’s somewhat easier to write a poem when the muse visits you in a single sitting. Even short stories are doable (if not slightly more challenging) to write in a single sitting. Novels though…?
Generally, the shortest of novels are at least 40,000 words, which presents more of a burden for the talisman-holders, the maze-sprinters. It takes multiple muse visits to complete a novel. And writing a new chapter only when you’re inspired can create additional problems. I learned the hard way that if you later decide to erase a substantial moment from earlier in the manuscript, it creates butterfly effects that you have to remedy. You suddenly have chapters later down the line that shouldn’t exist, or characters moving about the storyworld in a way that no longer quite adds up.
Despite laying out the potential pitfalls to “pantsing,” I’m not sure I can really advocate for any other way for any writer’s single first attempt at novel-writing. While I do still hold a suspicion that some people are natural short-form writers and some people are natural long-form writers (and that I may belong to the former), I also feel that the first time you attempt anything that you have to lean toward the messiness and open yourself up to momentary failures. I don’t think I would still be as interested in my first novel manuscript if it had not come from a place of wildness and mess and self-discovery.
Something else that feels true to me is that no one can teach you to write a novel. Not really. You can get all the guidebooks and formulas and templates and plot beat outlines that will hold your hand along the journey, but there is so much that is individualistic about novel-writing, and you have to find your own way, acknowledge your own idiosyncrasies.
That all being said, I’ve found myself that with every subsequent novel manuscript project I’ve been leaning into the plotter end of the pantser–plotter dichotomy. For me, one realization was that planning doesn’t steal away the magic of writing in the moment. Planning doesn’t mean you’re necessarily meticulously outlining every scene or chapter to the point where you have no wiggle room to improvise on the page. Sometimes I will just make some notes about the general atmosphere I want for a scene. Maybe just a setting. Maybe just a dialogue, with no exposition attached. It still gives me room to play with the unwritten and uncover new truths in the spur of the moment. It still gives me opportunities to find joy in the play.
But today’s letter is not really about the luxury of having writing time to make self-discoveries while being lost in the language. It’s about the opposite. It’s about things you can do when you only have the bandwidth to dip a single toe into the writing project. So I will tell you two things I have been putting into routine to get some of the joy of making time for a creative project, while still compromising and acknowledging that I have other Life Things™ that take precedent at the moment.
The first one I give full credit to a talk by V. E. Schwab for turning me onto (what I call “notecards,” she calls “story bones”). It’s that whenever that cartoon light bulb pops up above my head—one that I know I do not have the bandwidth to follow through with in the moment—I sit down to describe or summarize the idea for the novel chapter or scene. A few sentences. No more than a couple of paragraphs. It’s enough information to fit on a notecard (you may also want to use actual notecards if that’s your jam). Personally, I drop all of my ideas into a Scrivener document for the long-form project at hand.
When I think of ideas popping up in the moment and needing to be captured before they disappear… it reminds me a lot about a story about the poet Ruth Stone (as told by Elizabeth Gilbert in her TED Talk from 2009). Don’t worry, you don’t need to watch the entire TED Talk. I have a transcript of the relevant scene here:
I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, "run like hell." And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it "for another poet." And then there were these times—this is the piece I never forgot—she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first.
This sentiment felt true to me for the longest time, but something I’ve found (at least in my own practice) is that there may be a way to trap that poem-barreling-over-the-fields into a jar for later, instead of prostrating before the emergency of the muses and having to create in every single moment of inspiration or illumination. Because, as I said, sometimes you are just too damn busy or stressed or depressed or distracted to do the thing in the moment. Or it may be as simple as the nature of the long-form project betrays the emergency the muses push upon you. So what I’ve learned is to take meticulous notes about the idea, the feeling behind it, what I want to accomplish by writing a scene…. And while I will admit sometimes you trap the poem-creature in a jar and it’s dead and unrecognizable by the time you come back to it—most of the times you can sing along and get the idea back. It’s like an earworm, and all you have to do is listen to the poem-creature hum a few notes, and then you remember the full song, and you write and write and write….
Something else that has helped me besides keeping notecards of scenes (or story beats, if you will) I’d like to write is thinking about fabula and syuzhet. In the early twentieth century, Vladimir Propp and Viktor Shklovsky, two Russian Formalists, theorized these terms to distinguish between two types of sequences in storyworlds. I’m going to define them with the caveat that I take some creative liberties with each definition and how I talk about them.
I like to think of the fabula as the chronological raw clay of the storyworld. Essentially, this is every scene and event and story beat that occurs in your storyworld, laid out in chronological order. When I stay storyworld, I don’t necessarily mean the narrative your reader receives (that’s the syuzhet). That’s why it’s a type of raw material. It’s all of your notecards, all of your generated ideas, all the information that you need to help you plan and plot and make sense of your unwritten narrative world. If we think of it in the language of worldbuilding, it’s everything that you, the author, know about your fictional world, regardless of whether it will ever grace the page in front of your readers.
"My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three...."
The above is a pull-quote from the second chapter of Nabokov’s Lolita. Humbert Humbert describes his mother’s death in only two words, contained in parentheses. That’s part of the syuzhet: what the reader receives. However—and I’m just spitballing here to use this as an example—but Nabokov could have had pages of notes that were part of the fabula about Humbert as a small child and his relationship with his mother. What we, the readers, receive though is the essence of her life and death. Two words separated by a comma. That’s the syuzhet.
The syuzhet is not only the order of events that the reader receives—but the content—the stylings of the author. It is the once-clay that you have shaped into a narrative and delivered to the reader. Lolita doesn’t start chronologically with Humbert’s childhood. It starts when he is already an adult. That’s the syuzhet. So, to reiterate: the fabula is chronological—yet rough-hewn. The syuzhet is the chosen structure by the author, delivered to the audience. It may not be chronological. Let me give one popular example to drive the distinction home.
You’ll have to excuse me for grabbing the easiest and most obvious model, but I’m not above talking about Memento.
If you’re not familiar with Memento’s plot, it’s centered around a man who suffers from amnesia and short-term memory loss. The film is non-linear, interweaving chronological scenes (shot in black-and-white) with reverse chronological scenes (shot in color). In fact, if you go to the Wikipedia entry for Memento, someone has literally generated an entire fabula–syuzhet graph (which I’ve included above). Because the film makes it easy for the viewer to follow a chronological timeline beside an anachronistic one, Memento is commonly used as an example to talk about narrative timelines. One can understand the raw chronology (fabula) of events beside the specific color-coded non-linear order of events (syuzhet).
In terms of jotting ideas for chapters-to-write, that is the clay that has yet to be molded. It’s part of the fabula. When I come up with idea notecards, I tend to try to place them approximately where I think they’d go in the narrative—but as we’re talking about an unwritten book—it’s all very gut-instinct, all very woo-woo. Sometimes the ideas just get dumped haphazardly into a Scrivener file and left for future me to figure out.
So the secondary task that I like to do when I have a little time to think about a creative project, is begin to plan how it takes shape. This is when I look at my fabula notecards and begin to try to order them in the way the reader would receive them in the syuzhet. This becomes a borderland between pantsing and planning, because I still am able to hold something raw and unwritten, but position it in a way where it becomes part of a larger plan. There’s an ideal behind this that plays through my brain, and it says: hey, you don’t have time to write this book now, but when you do: here is the order of chapters you will need to write based on every idea you’ve had thus far.
I’m not sure what your process is like, but I know new discoveries will emerge while I’m on the page working through the language. Things may even play out a way that render “important chapters” I thought I’d write obsolete. That’s just part of the process. What I like about thinking through fabula and syuzhet though is it gives me space to exercise a creative muscle—and slowly plan out a future book manuscript’s shape—while also making the concession that I just don’t have the time or bandwidth to fully dive into the creative project at the moment. In some ways, writing a newsletter like this scratches that itch for me too.
I know the muses are fickle and fleeting, but learning how to bottle them up can be an resourceful planning exercise when you yourself are low on resources. That way, future-you can uncork some of your best ideas and hopefully run with them when you have the time and bandwidth to douse yourself in your next wild creative project.
Until next time,
JD