The Writing of Radiance: Plotting for Nerds

Craft and self-critique and COMING SOON.

Welcome to The Story Scrapbook, a fiction newsletter by E.B. Howard. If you’re new in town, check out my Fiction Directory for navigation.

This post is an inside look at the development process of my major focus this last year, my superhero serial Radiance. If you haven’t read it already, proceed at risk of spoilers!

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We all have our bad habits as writers. —no, no, don’t lie to yourself. We’re in this boat together.

Me, I find myself constantly seduced away from actually writing by the call of pointless nerdery. That’s why I’d always resisted digging into story structure: what if it became another rabbit hole, like those characterization worksheets where you get three lines in and it has you trying to figure out how many pillows they sleep with?¹ I mean, I like a good rabbit hole, but there have to be some limits.

However, I’d successfully dipped my toe into story structure during GWC ‘24, and it had been a fun experience that kept me from getting too lost when it came time to get the actual writing done. I thought I could at least try to build Radiance around the classic three-act structure, incorporating some of the guidelines that have grown up around that (link to K.M. Weiland’s story structure blog series.)

This didn’t exactly work out. But let’s break down why!

On the Weaknesses of Worksheets

Previously, I reviewed the backstory that led to me sitting down in front of the blank page that would become Radiance #2, still with little more in mind than an outline and some sketchy drafts, none of which covered what should happen between the opening and the last third of the story. I had devoted some time to figuring out Lady Radiance herself, and was looking forward to working with her—even if she did insist stridently to me that she had no problems, she was perfectly happy with her life, and she just wanted to help everybody else. I’d also made a joke in passing about stolen pizza rolls which had now abruptly become a thing² , and realized that I was going to have to deal somehow with a beta couple with a history of taking over my plots.

As I began filling in the rest of the outline, I did my best to impose a structure onto all of this mess. Here’s the thing: structure is good, but my structure choices didn’t always fit the story’s needs.

1. The lesson I thought my heroine should learn didn’t turn out to be the one she needed to.

2. The question I thought my story should answer didn’t turn out to be the one I really wanted to write about.

3. The pace I tried to set didn’t make allowances for the intertwined spinoff I ended up with, and I didn’t listen to my work when problems 1 and 2 resulted in scenes in all the wrong places.

Radiance’s heading section on my aptly named “Big Ol’ Worksheet” looked something like this:

Protagonist: Lady Radiance / Christabel Jones
Supporting Characters: [cast list]
Antagonists: Archangel, The One-Winged Army, and Lord Hades
Central Question: Will Christa have to give up her powers in order to find a place in the world?
Subplots:
Can the protagonists track down and defeat Archangel?
Can they handle their new double lives as celebrity vigilantes?
Who keeps stealing Marissa’s pizza rolls?
Will the main couple ever confess their love like normal people?
Will Lord Hades break Archangel’s grip and become a hero?
Motivation (What the Protagonist Wants): Christa wants to help others, however she can.
Theme (The Truth / What the Protagonist Needs): The things we’re given in life are a critical part of who we are, more so than the ones we choose.
The Lie: ???

You may notice how similar this is to my long introduction on the about page. That’s very intentional; I wrote that introduction off the cuff and then broke it down here to ensure I didn’t forget to resolve anything (quite proud of that.) You may also notice that I’m missing a pretty big component.

Yeah, uh, minor thing about using a structure where the protagonist starts out believing a lie about the world and learning the truth as part of their character arc: it doesn’t work so well with a protagonist who was right all along. Christabel’s not a flat character exactly, but she also wasn’t going on a classic hero’s journey. Though she may have entertained other ideas along the way, despite all my attempts, she knew very well who she was and what she’d sacrifice for it. This didn’t fully click for me until I hit the second half, now locked in for a collision course with my original intentions and forced to pull a context switch on the fly.

[Further unladylike language from the author.]

The other major issue was more literally structural. Around the time I was writing #4, I started to panic because I was tracking my wordcounts in Excel and could see my pacing plans drifting away: my drafts kept getting longer and longer, and the story’s first half was evidently going to be much shorter than the second. Instead of adding scenes to the first half—or even rethinking whether I had the correct scene labeled as the midpoint—in order to stick with the plan, I cut out chapter 10 of 11. And then, when I actually got there, I then had to add all those scenes back as #8.5 and the first half of #9. I’m pretty sure it actually got longer.

On my list to consider while editing, then: do I have the wrong events designated as quarter and halfway points, or do I have the wrong amount of writing in between them? And how do my B-plot and point-of-view shifts fit into that? My comfort zone with a long story is to write multiple close POVs—I enjoy the character work so much—but I envisioned Radiance as a single-POV story specifically because Archangel’s manipulations were going to have such a hold on the narrative, and I wanted to play with both the readers’ and characters’ perceptions at the same time. However, I’m not sure I trusted myself enough to actually go through with this. And besides, the B-plot that I only allowed to take root ‘because it was just a missing-scene side romance and wouldn’t matter’³ turned out to be integral to the main story.

I want to think more about the pacing and structure for future serials, too. Serials are different from novels, but I haven’t yet seen a discussion of structural variations that I found helpful. (Feel free to link-blast me in the comments! But, yeah, of course I decided to think about it while jumping in the deep end. Announcement about that later.)

Overall, I still think I produced a cohesive narrative—plus or minus some parts where my intentions needed clarifying—and I never got seriously stuck in puzzling out events.

That was all thanks to theme.

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Theme and Creative Constraints

Back in January,

S.E. Reid

wrote on Notes:

Step One: What do your characters want? (If they don’t want something, that’s your first problem.) What do they want more than anything in the world and why? This is their motivation, and it should be strong enough that it leads them through the story (unless it gets transformed into a need; see the next step).

Step Two: Will they ultimately get the thing they want, or will they discover that they actually NEEDED something else? (For example: they wanted romantic love, but actually needed found family.)

Step Three: The way you answer your characters’ narrative questions (want versus need, getting it versus not getting it) usually has a theme lurking in there somewhere. There’s usually one main one and probably a few smaller ones kicking around. Some you’ll see, others won’t be visible to you and only visible to your readers.

and I responded:

Pulling back the curtain a bit further than usual:

I’m sure Sally’s posted something like this before, because I used these exact principles in planning my current serial! Frankly, I would have plotted the wrong endings and messed the whole thing up several times over without:

1. a clear grasp on the want/motivation and need/theme pairs

2. understanding that my instinct is to not give the characters what they want, or to at least withhold it until they’ve first accepted what they need.

Both are good kinds of stories, but I think the writing goes differently if your characters’ wants and needs face obstacles along the way but ultimately mesh neatly, compared to if they have to completely reevaluate their understanding of how the world works in order to get the good ending. The second one can go pretty deep into internal character development, but you really have to know ahead of time what you’re doing with the theme. I’ve actually found it so much easier to publish as I write when starting with one or two solid themes in mind, because they’re such a useful constraint—the plot isn’t wide open. Whatever happens next has to fit into one or more of the thematic buckets I’ve been filling up this whole time, like the reservoir of a dunk tank I’m planning to drop my characters into at the climactic moment.

It’s a weird analogy, but go with it, k.

And now I really should explain what I meant by that.

Play the Hand You’re Dealt

Radiance is a story about crises of identity, accepting the people and situations that life gave you, and how painful it can sometimes be to become who you are. What’s more important—what is given to us, or what we choose? And when reality deals you a hand that’s totally at odds with who you would like to be…well, what do you do?

One area where I used this theme to answer my narrative questions comes to mind immediately: well into the second half of the story, I knew somebody was about to get depowered, but I wasn’t sure if it would be Jacob or Christa. My early outlines had a hard time letting go of the thought that Jacob might keep his powers, while she might choose to sacrifice her nemesis relationship with Hades in order to keep her romance with Liam. But the theme demanded otherwise:

• Jacob doesn’t realize how important it is to him to keep that promise he made to take care of his sister—he wants to be normal. However, rejecting his powers sets his wants and needs at odds, and this leads to him reevaluating his priorities, eventually reinforcing the theme.

• Christabel really doesn’t care about being normal! What she wants, generally, is to love and take care of people. While this ends up getting fixated on Liam and she does have to refocus later, she understood the assignment all along. Having her give up her powers, even temporarily, would have weakened the theme.

Also, having a theme in mind so that I can prove to my inner heckler what my shiny new ideas add to the story has been invaluable. I am slowly getting better at listening to my creative instincts and writing what I want to…but only slowly. For example, I almost talked myself out of letting Baby Sparky happen before realizing that that subplot hit exactly the notes I was already looking for.⁴

Corruption and Redemption

The other driving force that I see in this story is the corruption/redemption arc. This is what Christa’s character development really came down to, I think—but everybody had to go through it, and that made a surprising number of the plot decisions for me. I essentially wanted to write a story where even bad actions end up producing good outcomes, and though that sounds simple, it was not at all easy to pull off. I’m a drama writer at heart—seeing everything that could go wrong in a situation is second nature to me—so the ‘bad actions’ part was no problem at all, but ‘good outcomes’ required some creative work.

It was a fun puzzle, but in several places I had to let my subconscious work for me. This joins up with the first theme in several places, but one point is interesting: I went back and forth on whether Christa should remain Lady Radiance because I didn’t know yet that I needed to bond her to Liam in order to save him. Her understanding of both themes needed to be rewarded somehow, though, and once I had the pieces lined up, there was only one place left for them to fall. Convergence. Beautiful.

Still, I don’t think I managed this as well as I could have. Redemption is difficult to present well. It can come off as scandalous on the one hand (if the audience doesn’t see sufficient conversion from the character) or heavy-handed on the other (if the audience sees the conversion as inauthentic or even, due to values dissonance or bad writing in the ‘corruption’ part of the arc, unnecessary.) Further, all of those concepts are relative!

The overlap with the romantic arc made the situation even more delicate; I was way more sympathetic to the save-you-with-love trope when I hadn’t seen it crash and burn so often in real life. It’s one of the foundational female fantasies, if not the foundation, but still… I think the reason I’m generally still okay with the Hades/Lady relationship is that even if he’s a deeply damaged part-time bad guy, he’s basically good to her when he’s not being used. At the same time, there’s a depth to the darkness behind their relationship that I don’t want to either lose or whitewash over. I do want to work through this again as part of editing. I can fix it to a certain point by adjusting the tone, but there will probably be some light retconning done to the story as well.

Becoming the Mother

One other influence I should mention.

I wrote above that Radiance is partly about becoming who we are. In order to resolve the transitional phases of life—really, to resolve life itself—we have to do the work of becoming who we are, and setting aside who we are not. It can be very painful work, replete with challenges that start all the way back at accepting that we are someone! Although I didn’t think I would ever write about this, Radiance also turned out to specifically be a story about matrescence, the process of growing into motherhood.

I’m not even talking about the pregnancy subplot, or the heroine’s partially accomplished journey through the Maiden-Mother-Matriarch archetype triad. Male adolescence is a common symbolic substrate for superhero stories—unsettling bodily changes, new strengths and obsessions, sneaking out at night, a growing sense of responsibility, the fear sensed from settled men who are older and weaker, the thin line between the wolf and the wolfhound…it’s a classic for a reason. But it’s not an experience I’ve ever had, myself.

I do know all about what can go wrong while trying to accomplish the massive identity shift that new motherhood demands. It can be a harrowing process, and women love to tell each other the horror stories. Your looks and personality change in unpredictable ways, and maybe it’s more permanent than promised. Sometimes you black out strapped to a table and wake up with a brand-new set of sutures and, oops, no painkillers. You can’t talk to your old friends about any of this, and you don’t know why some of your new friends have taken so naturally to this state in life, while others end up feeling like science experiments or existential failures. You’re so much more powerful than before, and doing incredible, miraculous, rewarding things—but the world can’t seem to decide if you’re a hero or a menace, and the people you’re bound by duty to protect seem determined to get into as much trouble as possible.

I mean, Radiance is not an allegory. We’re working entirely at the symbolic level here. However, because the background haze of my subconscious continually insisted that certain things simply are true, that was eventually the way in which my plotlines had to run. That’s how your writing tells on you. You can try to fight it, but I think the work’s better when you don’t.

Having this as an unconscious theme rather than a planned one is also one of the things that sealed my fate for writing sequels. While the plot events were all resolved, I didn’t complete the matrescence arc, and I still want to see Christa transition all the way out of the Maiden role and into spiritual motherhood and matriarchy.

Anyway, speaking of…

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What Next?

Radiance was supposed to be a standalone story. I thought that I would finish it, dust my hands off, and go back to some of my dark fantasy or historical fiction. Instead, the characters and worldbuilding ate my brain.

In the timeline designated Terra-32, the world has been getting increasingly weirder for decades—and now, it’s getting weirder faster. Against a backdrop of cultural anxiety and beneath the feet of a technocracy that can’t keep up with them, humans stubbornly keep on being human. Sometimes while wearing masks and spandex.

So it’s obviously not happening quite that way.

My scheduled posts are basically prepped through July right now, which is great, but such an odd feeling! I’m so used to writing things at the last minute and thus being able to yell about them on Notes as soon as I have enough words put together to post maddening quotes out of context. But this time, there’s really only one other thing that feels close enough for me to bring it up.

While writing this post, I added a note:

I do have an internal logic to how power inheritance works and why there are so few super-moms, and I’m trying very hard to leave the nuts and bolts of that explanation for the future installments where it’s more plot-relevant.

…And then I added another note:

If it helps with the lack of Baby Radiance, one does exist out there in the multiverse—sort of. I’ve been writing myself a Kids From The Bad Future time-travel plot to which I went ahead and added alternate timelines, because it was purely for my own amusement and not something I wanted leaking into canon anyway. In one of these, Archangel stuck with the cloning plan for his new body and eventually created a stable synth-clone of Lady Radiance and Lord Hades as a side project, because staying together for the kids always works out, right?

…And then…because I was writing this post…I remembered how much better my work is when I stop trying to shove my favorite plotlines back into the filing cabinet before anyone can see them. So, joke’s on me. I’m now publishing that project alongside my other stories as a bite-sized serial.⁵ The landing page is going up June 30. After that, regular posts will still come out on Thursdays, while this one will publish every Monday in chunks of 600-800 words (3 to 4 minutes’ reading time.)

Two posts a week is more than I expected to be doing, but I honestly don’t know how long it’s going to run, and I wanted a fun, low-investment approach that wouldn’t replace my other writing or posting. This was the best compromise I could think of; I may mix it up later as necessary. Since the idea is to make every installment punchy and interesting, I’ve been rewriting it as individual posts rather than breaking up my existing draft, and it’s already been a great learning experience about how serial pacing should work. Sometimes you just need to experiment.

After I do a good strong editing pass on Radiance, my plan is to illustrate it liberally, and then find someone to help turn it into a book…somehow (very much working on faith here.) I may decide to rerelease it as a serial beforehand, depending on how the publishing process goes, and how long it takes to get to posting on its sequel. Working title, Blaze.

(Yes, I’m great at naming things. I know. Thank you.)

Blaze is much more consciously about focusing on sparks of hope in a world that feels like it’s circling the drain. My balancing act with this one will probably be in how far I really want to stick my head into the deepening political-cultural mire around atypical issues, versus happy family adventures on the quest to prove that existence isn’t futile. It opens almost two years after the end of Radiance, which is a necessary timeskip for the narrative arc but leaves out a lot of things that I still want to write about—so, although I have no problem moving around in the timeline as needed, at least some of those stories will be coming out first.

Until Next Time

To wrap it all up…wow, again, what a blessing to have you all reading and sharing my work. Thanks for letting these dorks live rent-free in your heads this year! You’ve been wonderful.

—E.B.

1. [obligatory I am not making this up disclaimer]

2. A subplot which will probably see its prominence slashed in editing, as I feel like it kinda got out of control there. Besides which, now every time my coworker and I go to the grocery store to grab lunch, she ends up finding me in the frozen foods aisle, staring at the Hot Pockets and muttering “but I want soggy cardboard pizza” while lines of dialogue replay in my head.

3. The real theme of this post being that I am a walking cautionary tale in favor of just writing what you want to.

4. Yes. Yes, I do owe his parents an apology for the number of times I’ve tried to squish their happy ending.

5. Yes, an alternate grown-up Baby Sparky is in it. No, I’m not planning to tell you up front which character is him. 8)