Assembling the pieces with quilting - Drafting and structuring - Drafting, researching, and editing

Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Assembling the pieces with quilting
Drafting and structuring
Drafting, researching, and editing

There will be times when disorganization in your writing will discourage you to the point you don’t feel like continuing. You’ll feel like you can’t find a way to order your writing that makes sense, and everything you’ve written seems chaotic. But when it comes to writing, sometimes a little disorganization can lead to a wonderful unforeseen sequence of events.

Often when people start writing books, they have a complete idea for the plot. However, they don’t have a beginning, middle, or an end. In quilting, you take whatever you do have—miniature scenes, bits of dialogue, scenery you think will be great for the setting—and patch them together to form a book. Patchwork writing is like sewing a patchwork quilt. In the following paragraphs, I share some manifestations it might take along with some examples from my novel Confederado.

DEFINITION

Quilting is a writing technique in which the author forms a patchwork whole from many isolated pieces of writing.

You might try to write dissimilar scenes or ideas for a book and then piece them together at a later time:

No one in the family who had served in a war—the French-Indian, the Revolution, or the 1812—had ever died while serving, which made father’s death all the more grievous and dismaying.

Meets old veteran from Bedford County whose home had been destroyed during Hunter’s advance on Lynchburg. Says of Bedford: “It is a pretty little place at the foot of the mountains.”

Robert E. Lee, the newspaper read, was against migration, asserting that “the South requires the presence of her sons in order to sustain and restore her.”

The first of these notes, I will have you know, I simply lost track of. I’m still not certain where I would have inserted it in the finished novel. It seems significant the protagonist’s father is the only person in the history of the family to die in a war. However, I include it here to underscore that it’s okay to not know here to quilt information and that accidents like losing shreds of information occur in most every book’s composition.

I didn’t use the Bedford County anecdote either, but it was more a matter of pragmatics. My interest in Hunter’s campaign had to do with the fact it was the closest real fighting near the protagonist’s home prior to Lee’s surrender. However, including it would have involved several pages of description and new characters. Working it in would have meant the pacing of the book would have been compromised. Reluctantly, I had to let it go, just as you likely will find yourself doing on occasion.

The last note I found attractive was Robert E. Lee’s only commentary on the Confederado migration. However, he was against it, so I had the problem of trying to reconcile the protagonist’s flight with the judgment of a man venerated by many southerners and northerners alike. In the end, my quilting could not accommodate it without potentially diminishing sympathy for the people in the book’s title.

I include these aborted shreds of quilt from Confederado to show you how much thought and difficulty can go into them. However, another strategy that can help you out and keep a scene in mind is saving it alone on your computer, apart from other sections of manuscript. Then, later, you might read it again and decide where it fits best. Because my novel contains several flashbacks to the Civil War, I found myself doing that with the protagonist’s war sequences—often moving them around to feel what different effects they created.

What I’ve just described is part and parcel of the much more general technique of linking scenes into chapters or breaking down ideas for further plot development. I include the following table of contents for Confederado, but really it’s less that and more a list of the events and ideas in the book. Only this is how they ended up in terms of organization:

Prologue: The Fugitive

I. Virginia

  Homecomings: Appomattox

  Departures: Land and Sea

II. Brazil

  Arrival: Espírito Santo

  Departure and Arrival: Espírito Santo and Linhares

  Love and Departure: War of the Triple Alliance

  Homecoming: Brazil

Although the contents is actually chronological, flashbacks and backstories appear throughout the forward-moving sections, hopefully without bogging down the narrative too much.

Ultimately, this will be your challenge as well: quilting together your own narrative in the manner that makes the most sense to you and, hopefully, to your readers as well.

The Least You Need to Know

·  Mining your journal can mean finding potential topics and information to include in your formal writing projects.

·  Freewriting is a good way to get your ideas flowing.

·  Outlining can help organize the vast stores of information you generate while working on your project.

·  Quilting is a good way to assemble information that otherwise might not seem useful or relevant.