Structure

[pameladean]

So there are a lot of ways to talk about narrative and fictional structure generally, a lot of ways of mapping it all: scene and sequel, rising and falling action, hysteron proteron, many more. I used to read about them avidly. Long ago when I was in college and struggling with short stories, one of my English professors suggested that I write a play, because the structure was predetermined and you could just plug elements into the template.

None of this has ever been of the slightest use to me except as an intellectual exercise. Well, that's not quite true. It's very useful for enhancing the experience of reading other people's finished works. It took me years to be even moderately good at using theories of structure for that purpose because my brain does not do that and in fact tends to dig in its heels and specifically refuse to do that, but I did manage it after the fact with other people's work.

I can't write that way, though. It will not happen. Everything just turns to water and runs away. I've stolen plots from ballads and Shakespeare, but even then, they warp and twist, and I write what I can write and then move it around and try to make it approximate the structure I thought I was using. I can more or less do thematic structure or emotional structure, but actual plot structure, the arrangement of the incidents, as Aristotle called it, is still opaque to me. It has to proceed from character, setting, theme, and mood and then get nudged around until, if you stand at the right angle, there is a plotlike arrangement of things that happened.

I know a lot of people who can see structure and write with it initially set up like the skeleton of a new building, but I cannot do it.

I'm not exactly asking for advice, though I wouldn't mind it. You'd have to be prepared for me to say, "Nope, won't work" or a more polite equivalent. But I'm curious about how other people, readers or writers, perceive or create structure in stories.

Pamela

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Well, some people find this suggestion useless, others have not, so for what it's worth, here it is: I note the main points of the novel on a single piece of paper, and review it once in a while through the first two thirds of writing. These don't have to be plot points. They can be emotional turning points. And of course eventually there will be a webwork of notes sprawling out in all directions from there, but that one piece of paper gives me a sense of the whole, and as I'm going along I have a sense of where I am in it.

[pameladean]

I do something like that, but the single piece of paper sounds like a good idea to try. I have a Notes file with hectoring and speculative remarks to myself arranged by date, and I put DONE before the ones I feel I've dealt with. (This is more satisfying than deleting them outright, and also gives me a better history of how the book was written.) It's a lot more than one page, though, even early on for a short story.

I wonder if my brain will be willing to decide what the main points are. We'll see.

P.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Yes, I tend to build up scads of notes — pages and pages of them sometimes — which includes lecturing myself on stupid things that I should be on the watch for, but they all have to refer back to the paper. (Now I have to remember to check back on this post to see what other people think — I am always fascinated by the varieties of process people have.)

[pameladean]

Oh, yes, I love hearing how people do their planning and writing and revising.

P.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Re: hectoring and speculative remarks, I have something a little like that. I can keep the overall *notion* of my novel in my head, but I don't (these days) trust myself to remember particulars, so the bottom of my page is full of notes to myself about near-term and more distant things that I should remember to do.

[pameladean]

I was never all that great at remembering particulars. It stunned me what I was able to forget about, though often the back of my head was saying, "Wasn't there something else you were supposed to be doing?"

P.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Your list being a lot more than one page, even for short stories, makes me wonder if there's a sort of narrative interpolation at play here.

With short fiction, I can usually pin down a handful of images and scenes as destinations that I'm driving toward, and then work towards corralling my characters into the narrative sluices that will carry them there. Sometimes I need intermediate way-stations as well, and sometimes I need to crawl towards my ultimate destination with a flashlight, pushing my way through the underbrush, but I (usually) tend to know where I'm heading.

Novels work the same way for me, except the destinations and way-stations I'm working with accumulate in strata, without really helping me avoid getting caught in the brush with a flickering flashlight. The second book I wrote, I had a whiteboard I used to outline the next three chapters in detail, and yet I regularly ended up stuck on how to handle transitions from one scene or setting to the next.

[pameladean]

I hope you didn't acquire any ticks!

I suppose there is something in writing that ticks are the best analogy for, now that I think of it.

I often have an ending in mind, but it's actually easier to get to an ending if I don't know what it is.

P.

[castleclear.livejournal.com]

Fascinating reading! Thanks for sharing these insights into the creative writing process.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

I can't do the structure thing either. Any method of writing that seems mechanical to me -- either constructing the book using a tried-and-true method / structure or breaking up a draft into pieces and rearranging them (and that includes the "index card" method so beloved of my fellow authors) -- makes me terribly fretful and unhappy. I spend a lot of time thinking about my stories and I am also pretty ruthless when it comes to ripping them apart and rewriting them, but not like that.

In the drafting stage I worry a lot that I don't have enough plot to make a satisfying story and/or fill up an entire book, so I keep putting in more and more plot until I realize that I now have TOO MUCH plot and need an extra 10-20K (or in some cases, a whole 'nother book) to wrap up all the loose ends. Revision is a matter of reading over the printed manuscript and cutting or reframing all the plot bits that don't seem to add up or drive the story forward as they ought.

I can't analyze individual scenes and tell you exactly how and whether they do all the Proper Scene Things, either -- or at least my backbrain really doesn't wanna and will probably burst into tears if you force me to try. What I can do is read them over and feel where they're flagging or meandering or otherwise don't seem necessary, but it's all intuitive and based on my internal sense of What Feels Like Story rather than So-And-So's Method of Scene Analysis.

[pameladean]

This is very comforting, because it's pretty much how I operate as well. I have to go with my intuition. I often envy people who do make a mechanical approach work for them. It probably really isn't any easier, but it seems so when my intuition has decided to take a vacation.

P.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

But why do you need to change? Why not just go on writing as you have done? My one experience to date with how you write tells me that DAMN. IT WORKS.

[pameladean]

It certainly has worked (thank you, that review you did continues to cheer and inspire me), and I don't think I could really abandon it even if I wanted to. But I'm stuck on, let me see, five different things at once, so I'm willing to consider anything. It's also just been a kind of nagging puzzle for years. Why can't I approach things this way if I WAAAANNNT to? Why is my process so inflexible? Why don't I GET this? Every once in a while it comes all over me, and then after a while I get over myself. In the meantime, I do like hearing how other writers work.

P.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I think most writers have a particular way that they work, though. It's not just you, it's everyone.

I don't have a single way I structure. Sometimes it's determined by genre. If I'm writing, say, a genre romance and intend to just write a good genre romance rather than deconstruct it or subvert it or otherwise change it radically, then it's already plotted out for me to some degree.

All non-deconstructive romances follow the general outline of introducing the hero and heroine, having them meet (you can do those simultaneously), having there be some compelling quality in that first interaction (it might be strong dislike! but it can't be boredom), give them a reason to keep interacting (external, internal, or both) AND an obstacle (external, internal, or both) which threatens their relationship, have them overcome the obstacle and either realize or affirm (if realization came earlier) their love for each other, and conclude with some scene or statement that says that their love will last.

So that's plotting by genre.

I also sometimes plot by important moments. I have a set of scenes in my mind that are the reason I'm writing the story. Then the plot comes about by figuring out how to hit all those scenes in a logical and coherent fashion. In a short story, 90% of the story might be there in order to get to the final scene.

Or the theme might determine the plot. Like, in Rebel, the theme is family and relationships. So we picked some characters and gave them relationship and family problems, and then pulled the separate strands together at the end with a large event which would cause everyone to participate and also bring their issues to a climax.

Or, I haven't done this in a while, but sometimes I start with a challenging structure which will dictate the content. Like a sestina. The structure is a very strict one with rules, and that dictates everything. In college I once wrote a play which had three timelines running simultaneously. One was the present day, moving forward chronologically. One was the past, also moving forward but from an earlier point. The third was also past, but more recent past, and it moved backward. I had to use colored cue cards to plot out that one. I did it that way because I was reading and seeing Caryl Churchill and Tom Stoppard, and I wanted to try a really complex structure for myself.

[pameladean]

Oh, it's certainly not just me. Almost every writer has things they do without thinking and things that confound them utterly, and things in the middle. As I mentioned to asakiyume, though, I'm stuck on five things at once and I think my weirdness about structure is the reason in each case, so I'm feeling extra-whiny about it.

I love reading genre romances, but there's no point in my setting out to write one. Either it's dead on arrival or it morphs almost immediately into something else. The same is true of most of the structures you mention. The things that start me writing don't want to fit into those channels. I might want them to, but the actual elements of the eventual book, the world, the characters, the theme, won't go in. It's a really strong resistance; and thought of course it really all comes from my own brain, it feels like the characters refusing. There are things I don't want to do because they're tedious or I'm afraid I'll get them wrong, but that's not this.

I have definitely plotted by theme and it works very well for me, but not all stories-to-be present themselves thematically. And the three timelines sounds like something I could sneak past myself. There's only one of my stuck projects it might work for, but I should really consider that seriously.

P.

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

I love the "scene and sequel" idea and can't get my head around doing it on purpose. :)

I generally write in three acts. The Walker Papers is actually three sets of three acts: 3 acts per book, 3 acts per 'trilogy'/set of 3 books (1 act each, leading to a conclusion/leveling up/character point at the end of each 'trilogy', which overall becomes the) 3 acts for the main 9 book structure. That was all very deliberate and I'll probably never be able to do it again.

But the 3 acts per book thing I use all the time. It's nominally 1/3rd setup, 1/3rd development, 1/3rd hurtling toward climactic resolution, but it works out to more like 1/3rd setup, 5/6ths development, 1/6th climactic resolution.

My goal with setup is to get all the players and the basic, initial Problem on the page. *Usually* I do that in the first third, and if it takes longer than that to get all the characters in place it doesn't feel quite *settled* to me until they're all there.

Development is generally about adding new layers of problems, both emotional and plotty, for the characters to work their way through, and finding ways for some of those problems to begin answering the Initial Problem, which is the thing I'm aiming to have wrapped up at the end of the Climactic Resolution.

I might have more thoughts but I'm very sleepy. :)

[pameladean]

Ha! Your actual versus theoretical percentages for the three parts are very familiar to me. I always rush and crowd my endings, and even though I revise to make them less so, I still get complaints.

Three seems a fairly graspable number; I might try to experiment with that with a novella or something.

I so hear you on loving the idea of scene and sequel and not being able to do it on purpose.

P.

[white-serpent.livejournal.com]

Balls of yarn is actually what I picture.

You start with tossing one ball of yarn in the air; obviously it makes an arc. Then there's a second ball of yarn you toss up later, once you're inside the first arc. Then there's a third, and so on. Near the end, the balls of yarn come to rest, and all of them need to be tied off. Some will be tied off in the same order they were launched, some won't. At any given point, you are describing the trajectory of one or more balls of yarn.

You can't let any of the balls drop too long as you're writing, so you end up dancing across the different strands (or juggling the balls, if you prefer). Usually you pick which one to follow by the one that moves you forward most effectively at that point. If none of them do, you may need to add another ball of yarn into the mix, but, if you add too many, others can't follow the pattern. If you don't keep track of the different balls of yarn, you'll fail to tie one off (people will complain of dangling plot threads). Sometimes you can throw up a ball without knowing how it will be tied off, but you have to remember it's there all the same.

Some stories have very few balls of yarn. Some are episodic (so, one or two big balls of yarn, many small balls of yarn, each of which is thrown up and tied off within a couple of chapters). Others have lots of balls of yarn, and carry them throughout most of the story (this can be hard to do, because you're tying off a bunch of things at once).

[pameladean]

That is fascinating, and color-coded sub-plots or thematic elements or whatever could be really helpful.

I sometimes think I'm making a crazy quilt, matching colors across a wide expanse and interspersing complementary ones, but I hadn't thought of yarn.

P.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I did this somewhat literally! Well, I didn't literally _toss_ the balls, but I set up a big push-pin bulletin board, cut pieces of different color yarn, and pinned them up in the shape of arcs.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

For short stories I write them like I would write a mathematical proof, BUT (big but) this only works because like 90% of what I write is didactic fiction. This breaks down horrifyingly if the story is not didactic.

For longer and/or non-didactic things, I write down a list of desiderata, everything from the Big Midpoint Explodey Thing to Oh Yeah I Wanted to Mention That Bit About Guns. Then I write them down on notecards and put them in order. It's embarrassingly primitive but I am loath to mess with something that is working for me.

Now if someone could teach me characterization, I would...probably not pay them cash money, because I don't have that much money, but it would be a thing of wonder.

[pameladean]

I think there might be something about the tactile effect of note cards and the fact that you can shuffle them around and lay them out that might resist complete translation to some software trying to emulate it. I still sometimes resort to physical cutting and pasting (well, technically, paper-clipping) of a printed manuscript, because it satisfies something in my head and lets me work in larger spaces than a screen.

I can do characterization without thinking, but I don't know if I could teach it. If I'm having trouble, I go back to viewpoint. What would this person notice, bother describing; what would they completely not see; what would they misinterpret. Probably not helpful to someone who doesn't work like me, though.

P.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I'm definitely tactile-oriented (also sound-oriented, which is sorta useful because I can analogize structure to musical structure, but usually rubbish for, say, revising writing). I've tried software-y notecard-y things and they just confuse the heck out of me. That and for something at novel length, I can never "see" all the notecards at once.

If I'm having trouble, I go back to viewpoint. What would this person notice, bother describing; what would they completely not see; what would they misinterpret.

See, I could do this maaaaaaaybe as a very mechanical exercise, but I couldn't sustain this. My usual problem with characterization is that all my characters are either me to whatever degree, so I can't separate that sense of self enough to make them distinct, or else they are completely opaque to me and I struggle the whole way through.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

When setting up the structure of a new building it tends to be very useful to have a bunch of Kahnawake Mohawks. So you might try that.

[pameladean]

That might even surpass running for governer of Minnesota as a delaying tactic.

P.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Mr Foisy, my high school sophomore English teacher, talked a little bit about how themes and structure and stuff were sometimes put in deliberately by authors, and sometimes just kind of happen without their conscious effort -- the story just flows that way, or these particular ideas are just the things that happen to be in their heads at the time and they come out as themes. And I've also heard other writer friends talk about reading their first drafts, and noticing that a couple sorts of things show up in it, and deciding to punch those things up, and turn it into a full-fledged theme, motif, or structural element of sorts.

So, what I believe is that structural elements are written into stories in one of three ways: on purpose, accidentally, or somewhere in between.

I post this because I find it simultaneously utterly useless and somewhat encouraging.

[pameladean]

That is absolutely true. It's when they won't turn up at all that problems start.

P.

[rosefox]

As a reader, critic, and editor: almost entirely by feel. I don't tend to pay a lot of attention to whether a book has three or five or N acts, for example, but I notice when I'm impatient or bored.

I care very passionately about good endings, well-earned endings, and so in a sense I see the entire arc of the book as pointing toward the ending. It can take a convoluted path, of course, but the ending must follow from everything else that's happened.

I once edited a book where one protagonist had a classic episodic arc (leave a place of comfort, face a challenge, return to the starting point as a changed person) and the other had a classic tragic arc (begin with what looks like a dire but potentially solvable problem, exhaust every possible solution, use the last shreds of agency to die gloriously). Watching the two threads play together was a thing of beauty. Then the author sold it as book one of three and had to de-kill the tragic protagonist so she could be in future books. I'm still bitter. There are so few good tragedies these days.

As a writer: still figuring this out. I have no difficulty with characterization or scene-setting but really struggle with plot.

[pameladean]

ARGH for the wreckage of the tragic arc and its relationship to the episodic one. I also get unhappy when things in a series come to rest in a good place and it's all been undone by the beginning of the next book.

P.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

So structure is different from plot, and most people seem to be talking about plot?

I think structure goes like this -- there is a beginning, a middle, and an end. And so I have a file called "Plan" and I write "Beginning of Middle" and "Beginning of End" in it (because I can tell where the actual beginning and the end are without artificial aid, even on an empty page. They're at the top and the bottom respectively, ha.)

If it is a book with chapters, which most of my books have been, thank goodness, then I write the numbers 1-8 before "Beginning of Middle" 9-16 before "Beginning of End" and 17-24 after it. Because if it happened to be a 24 chapter book that would be right. Then I write some -- no, actually I've almost always written at least one chapter before I do any of this. But when I've written several chapters, I do a word count of the whole thing, and divide by chapters, so I know how long an average chapter is, and then I divide that number into 93,000 and then I go back into the plan file and adjust the chapter numbers so that makes sense because there probably will really be more than 24. Or less. But anyway, when I am getting to the bit that is supposed to be the beginning of the middle, I ask myself if I am at that point or if I want to write more numbers in, or take some out. It's very comforting and gives me a charming illusion of being in some sort of control.

Oh, and if I happen to know something happens in a book, like that there will be an alien invasion half way through, or that the bears will come home near the end, I will write that in next to a number that seems plausible, so on a 24 chapter structure with an alien invasion in the middle it would say "12: Alien Invasion!!!" (Actually this has super-long chapters so the alien invasion is going to be 8. Or maybe 9. But I think 8, I think I have got all the set-up in 7.)

Sometimes, as with the Small Change books and the Thessaly books, I alternate POV. This is structure. And it's great, because I can fill in all my numbers with the name of the character whose POV it is "1. Lucy 2. Carmichael" and so on all the way through. It looks so organized and as if I know what I'm doing. I love it. All my books that have alternating POVs have them in strict order, and it's very soothing. And in MRC where I was doing that thing -- what an odd thing to do, really -- I did the same, with the names and the numbers, and I think part way through I added some dates. (People sometimes ask me how I did the stuff in that, and the truth is I wrote it very fast so I could keep it all in my head at once and not forget.) Because I am writing Poor Relations in proper omni, POVs do not come in order, which is much less structurally helpful. Except the alien POV I just wrote, which is now all the way through, comes between chapters of human POV. I guess that's structure, yay!

With AO, which does not have chapters, it was very difficult to tell how far through I was. I kept trying to work it out with wordcount alone. AO has no structure. Well, it has time and seasons and the school year, and that sort of did instead. Also I dealt with it by writing very fast, my go-to solution that works when it works.

[pameladean]

I got through my first two books by alternating two POVs and it was extremely helpful. Then I added several more in the next book and that worked all right. Then I wrote three books in a row in tight third. I wonder if I'm a bit out of practice in alternating. I know one of the issues in Going North is that I started out alternating POVs and realized that action was not equally distributed -- I don't mean literal action, but just that one person's progress through the situation was happening at a much slower rate. I know something can be done with that but it stumped me for months.

Time and seasons are also very useful; they really helped anchor Tam Lin.

I'm amazed that your math works; while obviously any book will have an average chapter length in a purely mathematical sense, mine tend to vary wildly within any given book.

P.

[kiya]

I always find that plot is that thing that I can explain after I'm done writing it. I mean, I might have bits and pieces of what the story-shape is, but that's not the same thing as plot.

Like one of my stalled projects is about a hacker and an AI teaming up in a post-humanist cyberspace and starting a relationship that gets complicated when the hacker learns the AI is an AI, not a human in some other part of the world, that's the story I have, but I don't have the plot - the sets of things that get them working together, the things that lead to them falling for each other, the way it develops, the challenges along the way. I just have this sort of seed of what that stuff will crystallise around eventually, if I ever work on it again. I'll learn the plot by seeing what happens, and some of it I'll know ahead of time, and some of it I'll discover maybe ten minutes before the characters do.

Structural stuff though is different. I've finished writing two draft novels, and both of them were partially driven by weird structure. THe easier one to talk about had a six-beat pattern. Odd-numbered sections were first person on the main character; even-numbered sections, third person elsewhere, but the elsewhere was 'someone else in the same family', 'someone else in the poor end of town', or 'someone else in the rest of the city', depending on whether it was a 2-beat, a 4-beat, or a 6-beat. Which meant that I had this whole set of things that was going on, and I would sometimes break through a being stuck by going, "Okay, the next section is a 4-beat, what's going on in the Riverside, how does that further the things I know about?" and sometimes coming up with something that went somewhere useful.

[pameladean]

Your second paragraph sounds quite a bit like how I often work and how I often get stuck.

Your third, while awesome in the extreme, makes me blink a lot. Probably worth further thought.

P.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

We might politely say that my expertise is in other areas or more brashly admit that I know nothing about fiction writing. So, just wondering if you are asking out of dissatisfaction with your writing output/work flow, and if so, if you're wondering if someone else's clothes will fit better than yours.

You write a little bit about your own process, but I wonder if you have scrutinized it pretty thoroughly, and also if you wonder if there might be some small tweaks to make in your process to make you happier with it. (Assuming you are not happy with it; you haven't said that here.)

I guess I am saying that small changes are easier to make stick than big changes, as general thing.

K.

[pameladean]

You've written things that needed a satisfying shape, so I think you have as much reason to weigh in as anybody.

I don't want somebody else's clothes altogether, but I might like a nice new coat or a crazy pair of socks.

I am happy with my process when it works, but not so much when it doesn't, and there's been a lot of doesn't recently. Your point about small changes is very well taken -- maybe the socks are a better idea than a whole new coat.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I keep trying to formulate an answer that is not enthusiastically chirping, "You do the thing! That is the thing! That you do!" Because I think this is a bit like, "How do you make dialog sound natural?" For many people this is a learned skill, and for many others it's a thing that is the thing that you do in the way that you do the thing.

This is why people who are really great at math are often not really great at being math teachers unless they put some time in with the math education people.

[pameladean]

Yes, that's how I'd respond to most requests about how to do characterization. I mean, I have some remarks that I've assembled over the years in the vague hope that they would be helpful, but really I don't think they are much of the time.

P.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Digression:

We had the math teacher thing explained to us at great length in teacher ed, where they distinguished between content knowledge (knowing how to do math, say) and pedagogical content knowledge (knowing how to teach the math that you knew). I had some of the best math background of my cohort, but as I explained to one of my classmates, that was actually sometimes a disadvantage--the math teachers who knew what it was like to struggle with X topic often were better at empathizing with students struggling with X topic and helping them find a way to understand it.

[realityanalyst.livejournal.com]

(I’m a copy-editor but I also write fantasy novels.)

I think of writing more like weaving a tapestry, with all the threads overlapping and combining to create new patterns.

That being said, I do use structure – I just do it mentally. Putting too much structure down in physical form is a good way of ruining any potential to use it. My primary structure is as simple as hook-build-climax-denouement. For books with more action, I also deal with set pieces, but I don’t use any further structure except logic: the protagonist must enter the building before she can leave it.

As for scene-sequel and similar patterns, instead of writing it down, I mentally act it out. (I once read something where the author said she did this to determine how mood influenced physical behavior and expression. When she wanted a character to be angry, she pretended to be angry and then noted what she did.) If I were my protagonist, what would my instinctual reaction be? (Of course, I then have to sort it out from what my reaction would be – usually something different.)

I also never write out character charts. I think about how useless doing that would be for, say, my sister. If I wanted to tell someone about her, I’d never do it in chart form! Likewise, if I want to tell the story in short, I’d do it as a short story, not as an outline.

But everyone works differently. My personal rule is: don’t write like some How to Write book tells you (in fact, ignore them. Read books you like; those are your best teachers). Write in such a way that you finish what you start in a reasonable time period and are happy with the result. Then get a couple of excellent critiquers to tell you what’s wrong with it and listen to them but take only 75% of their advice.

On a side note, I just finished painting this. The type of bird is not coincidental.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Late to the party, but as I find brainstorming works best with a large set of wrong answers from which to extrapolate a better one:

I began by creating plot more or less as I would read it: in order, making the logical connections/leaps, with maybe an idea of where the next scene or two is going, or what the end is likely to be like but not a great deal more until I got there. Which I guess means doing structure on autopilot, since either it comes together fine or the story doesn't work. This works fine for shorter stories, but novels tend to get pretty muddled unless I'm writing quite fast-- I've put coherent plots with bits that wrap up nicely together over NaNoWriMo, but not so much otherwise. (and not always that, either)

My brain doesn't really do 3-act-structure or whatnot unless I treat it like a party trick and make that point of the story (not ideal for making good stories...) Mainly I think I internalized the way the novelists I was reading organized a story and my brain either makes that work or notifies me that it isn't working & I should go write something else. I get all cross about weird modern structures, tho.

Anyway, I was just starting to break out of strict linearity and be able to do a first scene followed by some rough outline bits (just writing key moments or a couple lines of dialogue I want to include) more or less in order at the bottom of the document with lots of space around them and then joining them up, and some loose structural outlines for what I want to happen, or how multiple storylines should match up in longer projects-- when pregnancy & early childhood parenting pretty much knocked my writer-brain in the head. So, I don't really know what my process is going to look like when I get enough downtime to write consistently again.