6 a.m. wake up time + 10-minute meditation + breakfast // Ready for what today brings! (Hopefully, it brings like, three to five sentences because I am stuck with revising some parts of my thesis. Please, universe, please.)
The semester has been so busy! Sorry I’m so slow with posts! I got into the Advanced Honors College this week, and started making my schedule for next semester so there’s a light at the end of the tunnel at least.
Some of my favorite fashion history notes this semester :)
How Much of These Hills is Gold, C. Pam Zhang: In my opinion, a contemporary classic. Weaves Chinese myth with stories of the American Gold Rush. Beautiful prose and valuable takeaways re: family, truth, and gender.
A Little Devil in America: Notes on Black Performance, Hanif Abdurraqib: Essay upon essay of mind-plowing poetics and storytelling. Hanif’s version of Baldwin’s Devil Finds Work. A wide swath of topics from blackface to spades to magic.
Writers & Lovers, Lily King: Came to me at the exact right (or wrong?) time, just when my father passed away. A keenly-observed novel about grief and persona that is something like if SweetbittermetNormal People.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee: Inspired me to get over myself and just start writing again. The essay on roses absolutely floored me.
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman: Hard to stomach, but necessary. Foundational for the way I am thinking about neo-slave narratives and speculative historical fiction.
Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, Kristen Radtke: The minute I read this, I added it to the syllabus for my class on women in isolation. Part graphic novel, part longform essay, part research paper, and wholly extraordinary.
The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening, Jennifer Lynn Stoever: This one’s just for me. The burning core at the center of my reading list and the inspiration and model for my scholarship.
The Street, Ann Petry: Read it because of the book above, but an absolute banger of a book. Devastating ending. Would be extraordinary taught alongside Native Son.
The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin: This book has everything. Polyamory. Earth-bending. An alien creature frozen inside a giant piece of rock in the middle of the ocean. Love this woman, love seeing Blackness-as-default in sci-fi novels.
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel: You read it in high school for a good reason. A true exemplar of the genre and a fascinating way to teach non-chronological storytelling.
rest below the cut
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, V.E. Schwab
Brothers & Keepers, John Edgar Wideman
Bunk: The True Story of Hoaxes, Hucksters, Humbug, Plagiarists, Forgeries, and Phonies, Kevin Young
Ninth House, Leigh Bardugo
House of Earth and Blood, Sarah J. Maas
Children of Virtue and Vengeance, Tomi Adeyemi
Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, Mary Ann Doane
An American Sunrise, Joy Harjo
Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing, Ben Blatt
Rule of Wolves, Leigh Bardugo
The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan
Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology, Brian Hochman
The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin
The Stone Sky, N.K. Jemisin
People We Meet on Vacation, Emily Henry
The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice & Virtue, Mackenzi Lee
The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Legendborn, Tracy Deonn
Josh & Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating, Christina Lauren
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music, Nina Sun Eidsheim
One Last Stop, Casey McQuiston
One to Watch, Kate Stayman-London
Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth Freeman
Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema, Amy Lawrence
An Extraordinary Union, Alyssa Cole
It Ends With Us, Colleen Hoover
Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Safiya Noble
Listening in: Radio and the American Imagination, Susan J. Douglass
How to Fail at Flirting, Denise Williams
The Flat-Share, Beth O'Leary
Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-1952, Michele Hilmes
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud
Now first, I have to say, that the plot you’re able to come up with in one day is not going to be without its flaws, but coming up with it all at once, the entire story unfolds right in front of you and makes you want to keep going with it. So, where to begin?
What is your premise and basic plot? Pick your plot. I recommend just pulling one from this list. No plots are “original” so making yours interesting and complicated will easily distract from that fact, that and interesting characters. Characters will be something for you to work on another day, because this is plotting day. You’ll want the main plot to be fairly straight forward, because a confusing main plot will doom you if you want subplots.
Decide who the characters will be. They don’t have to have names at this point. You don’t even need to know who they are other than why they have to be in the story. The more characters there are the more complicated the plot will be. If you intend to have more than one subplot, then you’ll want more characters. Multiple interconnected subplots will give the illusion that the story is very complicated and will give the reader a lot of different things to look at at all times. It also gives you the chance to develop many side characters. The plot I worked out yesterday had 13 characters, all were necessary. Decide their “roles” don’t bother with much else. This seems shallow, but this is plot. Plot is shallow.
Now, decide what drives each character. Why specifically are they in this story? You can make this up. You don’t even know these characters yet. Just so long as everyone has their own motivations, you’re in the clear.
What aren’t these characters giving away right off the bat? Give them a secret! It doesn’t have to be something that they are actively lying about or trying to hide, just find something that perhaps ties them into the plot or subplot. This is a moment to dig into subplot. This does not need to be at all connected to their drive to be present in the story. Decide who is in love with who, what did this person do in the 70’s that’s coming back to bite them today, and what continues to haunt what-his-face to this very day. This is where you start to see the characters take shape. Don’t worry much about who they are or what they look like, just focus on what they’re doing to the story.
What is going to change these characters? Now this will take some thinking. Everyone wants at least a few of the characters to come out changed by the end of the story, so think, how will they be different as a result of the plot/subplot? It might not be plot that changes them, but if you have a lot of characters, a few changes that are worked into the bones of the plot might help you.
Now list out the major events of the novel with subplot in chronological order. This will be your timeline. Especially list the historical things that you want to exist in backstory. List everything you can think of. Think about where the story is going. At this point, you likely haven’t focused too much on the main plot, yeah, it’s there, but now really focus on the rising actions, how this main plot builds its conflict, then the climactic moment. Make sure you get all of that in there. This might take a few hours.
Decide where to start writing. This part will take a LOT of thinking. It’s hard! But now that you’ve got the timeline, pick an interesting point to begin at. Something with action. Something relevant. Preferably not at the beginning of your timeline - you want to have huge reveals later on where these important things that happened prior are exposed. This is the point where you think about what information should come out when. This will be a revision of your last list, except instead of being chronological, it exists to build tension.
Once you’ve gotten the second list done, you’ve got a plot. Does it need work? Probably. But with that said, at this point you probably have no idea who half your characters are. Save that for tomorrow, that too will be a lot of work.
