How to Write Activist Literature – Three – Make a List of Things in the Book You Want to See Happen
By Andy Heath
So at this point, you have written your theme and you have written your one sentence summary. If you haven’t done either of these things, that’s okay. If you haven’t even started, that’s ok. These posts are meant for you to be able to come back to again and again whenever you’re ready to review them. As I stated earlier, at the end of this series, I will post a link to these steps so that you can have them all in one place.
This next step, which is making a list of things that you want to see happen in the book, is also very important. I want to take a moment and address one of the concerns that you probably already have – you might be concerned at this point that we are already on step three in the process of writing a piece of activist literature and we have yet to write the first word of the manuscript. The fact is that a good novelist will carefully plan his novel before ever writing the first word – or at least that is the school of thought that I come from.
Writing a novel is a lot like building a house. You will plan the whole project on paper before ever laying the first brick. There might be some people that say that takes all the fun out of building a house. They might say that they don’t want to know what the house is going to look like until it’s already built. There is one problem with this theory – it is madness. How can you construct a house – or a novel – without having planned it out? How are you going to know what twists and turns the plot should take unless you’ve reviewed them in advance. I should dispel the myth that a novel just comes together perfectly just because someone sits down at the computer and types 90,000 words. This is not true any more than a construction worker could build a house just by slapping a bunch of bricks together.
That said, let’s continue.
Once you’ve written your theme and your one sentence summary of the book you intend to write, you must have some idea of what you want to happen in the book. The fact is, it doesn’t matter what these events are; but every work of fiction has events, internal and external. You must make a list of some of these and judge how well you like them.
In addition to events, you must know who your characters are. Again, you may not come up with an exhaustive list, but here’s an assignment for you. Start with your main character – the protagonist. What is his or her name? Let’s assume it’s a male. How old is he? What does he look like? What is his occupation? What are some of the things that have happened to him in the past? What is his personality like? What is his family like? What is he trying to accomplish? Does he want a raise? Does he want to save the world? Does he want to get out of debt? Find love?
Where is he from? What does his house or apartment look like? What is his religious background? What is his education? What does he like to do? Who are his friends? What are his vices? Coffee? Alcohol? Food? Pride? Where does he like to hang out? What does he think of his job? His boss? His coworkers? Does he live alone? With family? Roommates? Is he overweight? Athletic? Tan and beautiful? An old, wrinkled man? A little boy?
Who are his enemies? Why do they hate him? What do they want to do to him? Kill him? Ruin him financially? Break up his marriage?
You may not need to know all of this information, but go ahead and write it out anyway. You can’t write about a character you don’t know. Write all this down for the protagonist, the antagonist (someone that is against the protagonist), and several other characters. It’s better to have too much information than not enough.
Note that you’re still not writing the book. You’re still planning. You have to know your characters and what they do under normal circumstances. You have to know what is going to change them, what will make them do something out of the ordinary. You have to know why he does what he does and what would make him do something different. These are going to be critical things to know in step four.
The other thing you have to do with characters is write out their relationships to each other. We all have relationships, even people that don’t know each other. They’re called strangers. There are strangers, acquaintances, friends, enemies, celebrities (people that I know but don’t know me), lovers, and family. You can probably think of some others. Also, remember that relationships change. Some people start out as friends and then become enemies when they both fall in love with the same person. Some people are friends and then lose contact and go back to being acquaintances. In your notes, you don’t have to allow for every single change your characters’ relationships will go through (you don’t even know them yet, and won’t until Step 4), but have some idea of what is going on. For example, how does the protagonist know the antagonist? Do they actually know each other? Did they meet at some point? Were they best friends in elementary school? Are they applying for the same promotion and work on the same team at the same company? All other relationships in the book should stem from these two very important characters.
In Preston, obviously Preston is the protagonist. There are actually two antagonists – Billy and Jake. That is okay. There can be more than one. An antagonist can also be an event. It can be a feeling. It can be a lot of things. The important thing is to write all that down – but not yet. That comes in Step 4.
Back to your list of events – you don’t have to end up using your whole list, and you will almost certainly add additional events once you get started composing the plot in Step 4. Again, this is not a hard step, but it’s very important that you do it. When I wrote Preston one of the first events I came up with was Preston praying at his bedside in front of a candle. Another event I wanted to happen was a murder scene at the beginning of the book. I wanted a culmination in a cemetery at the end of the book. I wanted to involve a fundamentalist Christian group in the book picketing a funeral, like what Fred Phelps and his people from Kansas do. I wanted to include a few church scenes where a minister preaches on the “sin” of homosexuality.
That’s it. That’s the third step. You need to invent the characters and you need to come up with some events. The events don’t necessarily have to have a relationship with each other at this point. There does not need to be an order of events even. They just need to be listed. And you don’t even have to have a lot of detail about what the events are going to involve. You just need to have some idea of what some of them are going to be, because you’re going to use this in Step 4 and Step 5.
This step is NOT the hardest step to accomplish, but it is the longest step you will have encountered at this point. You don’t want to skimp on this one. Less is not more. More is more. Put details and details and details. Write till you’re sick of writing. And write in long hand – at least that is what works for me. I have found typing this information can be stifling, and plus you might want to draw a few sketches or make a few diagrams. There are very few rules associated with this step; the important thing is that you sit down and do it.
Let’s recap. In Step 3, you will first make a list of characters and answer a number of questions about those characters. Second you will make a list of events that you might include in your novel. Don’t think too much beyond this step until you have completed it. Simply do this activity and then proceed to Step 4, which is Writing Your Plot, and will be posted in two days.
