About Catherine
How I Write My Novels
From the first idea to a complex trilogy, and how I keep it all together.
By Catherine Lynwood
A Story That Grew Bigger Than I Expected
When I began The Alpha Flame, I thought I was writing one novel. I wanted to give my characters room to develop, and I liked the idea of spending enough time with them to see how a decision made in a moment could change the way they lived for years. What I hadn't reckoned with was how much story there was in those consequences. The histories and relationships I was writing kept opening up questions that mattered in their own right. In the end, I had a trilogy.
I like writing substantial novels. There’s room for a relationship to change by degrees, or for someone to do something I find difficult to forgive and still have time to understand why they did it. The page count is the easy thing to point at, but it doesn't tell you how complicated a book is. A short novel can ask you to keep several versions of the same afternoon straight. In my case, it was the combination of a large cast, shared histories and separate lives unfolding on the same timeline that made things interesting.
Moving a conversation by a day can seem harmless while I’m working on it. Several chapters later, though, someone might make a choice that only makes sense if that conversation has already happened. Sometimes the change improves both scenes. Sometimes I have to put the afternoon back where I found it.
The Joy of Discovery
I like having enough of an idea to begin a scene and enough freedom to see where it goes. A conversation can start with two people discussing something fairly ordinary, and then one of them says just a little too much. The other person picks up on it, and suddenly the brief exchange I meant to write needs the rest of the chapter. I could insist on getting to the next scene as planned, but I’d miss the pleasure of finding out what these people are like when I give them a bit of room.
What I discover in a new scene can send me back to an old one. If a character reacts more sharply than I expected, I want to know whether I've already given them a reason to react that way. It may be a chance to bring out something that’s been there all along. It may also be a lovely bit of dialogue that belongs to somebody else. Going back through the story helps me decide which it is.
When Keeping Track Becomes a Problem
I could remember the big events readily enough. The small things took longer. How old was she when she left home? Was he still in Birmingham on that date? Had they met since the argument, or was the conversation I was writing their first chance to speak? The answer might be in a chapter I’d read a dozen times. That didn't mean I could remember which chapter it was.
Storylines that go their separate ways and come back together are particularly awkward. I can spend several chapters with one set of people and feel I’ve been with them for weeks, then return to another character for whom only a day has passed. The order in which I tell the story and the order in which things happen have to make sense separately. If two people need to be in the same place at the same time, it helps if I haven’t left one of them on the other side of town without a plausible way to get there.
I could search the manuscript for a name, of course, but sometimes the detail I wanted was in a passage that didn't use it. Looking for one answer would turn into reading several scenes, and by then I’d lost the rhythm of the paragraph I’d meant to finish. It was taking more time and attention than I wanted to give it while drafting.
The Little Mistakes That Hide in Big Manuscripts
Clara and Carla, Rachael and Rachel, Lower Beaches Road and Lower Beeches Road: all of those variations have cropped up in my writing. They look perfectly respectable on their own. I could read a sentence with either road name and carry on without a second thought, especially if I was paying more attention to why somebody was on that road. A spellchecker has very little to say about any of them.
Keeping track of the people and places alongside the manuscript helped bring those differences into view. I can use PlotDirector to look up story details before deciding whether a difference needs correcting. Seeing two spellings together gives me a question to answer. Are there two people here? Is someone using a different name for a reason? Or have I simply moved a letter while concentrating on the scene? I have to look at how the name is used before I decide. A blanket replacement would be quick, which is one of the more tempting ways to make a fresh mistake.
The Problem of What Characters Know
It’s one thing to remember what happened. It’s quite another to remember who knows about it. I might have spent three chapters thinking about a secret from one person’s point of view. By the time I switch to someone else, that secret feels as familiar as the furniture. It’s very easy to let the next character react as though they know it too, even when nobody has told them.
In The Alpha Flame, the differences between what people know are part of the mystery. Someone can be quite sure they understand an event because they saw one piece of it. Another person saw a different piece and has come to an entirely different conclusion. The reader may have both pieces and still be missing something neither person noticed. I want the reader to be able to look back and understand why each person acted as they did, even if they were quite wrong about what was going on.
When a scene feels off, I find it useful to go through it from one person’s side. What have they actually seen? What have they been told, and by whom? What do they believe, and what are they trying to achieve before they leave the room? An evasive answer can mean something quite different depending on whether the person is protecting a secret or guessing at one. Working that out can change the words I give them, or persuade me that they’d say nothing at all.
From a Conversation to PlotDirector
Eventually I spoke to my friend Nick Beckley, a software developer, about the time I was spending searching through manuscripts and trying to keep the story straight in my head. I could tell him the questions I kept getting stuck on: where a detail first appeared, how two scenes fitted together, or what I ought to reread if I moved something. It helped to talk about the interruptions themselves. I wanted to answer the question and get back to the paragraph.
Nick started exploring how software could give me a clearer view of the story I was already writing. Those conversations grew into PlotDirector. Nick developed it, and my experience with the trilogy helped shape it. That’s the connection between my books and the software: the problems came from the manuscripts, and the work of trying to make those problems easier led to something I could use alongside them.
A Writing Companion, Not a Replacement
I still write the manuscript in Microsoft Word. When I need to check whether two events can happen on the same day, I can look at the chronology in PlotDirector and see them in story order. That gives me somewhere to start. I may still need to read both passages to see whether the timing is believable. A gap in a calendar can tell me there’s time for a journey; the writing has to tell me whether somebody would make it.
I can also follow a plot line through its scenes when I want to see what the reader has been given so far. Reading those scenes together makes it easier to judge whether I’ve left a question hanging too long, or whether the silence is doing some useful work. When something looks inconsistent, I go back to the words and make up my own mind. Sometimes a detail needs correcting. Sometimes the reader needs to see why it changed.
The Most Important Part Is Still the Writing
The best part of writing a novel for me is still the moment when I know what somebody is about to do and can feel what it’s going to cost them. I want enough room in my head for the characters, their feelings and the story I’m trying to tell. If I can spend a little less of an afternoon working out what day it is and a little more of it getting a scene right, that makes a difference to the book and to how much I enjoy writing it.
Explore PlotDirector, a writing companion developed by Nick Beckley, with features shaped in part by my experiences writing The Alpha Flame.