DEBORAH CROMBIE: I love the writing community. The friends you make in this business are many, and are one of the best parts of getting to make up stories for a living. Today it's my very great pleasure to introduce one of my earliest writer friends, B.A. Shapiro. In our newbie writer days we, along with our friend Steven Womack, organized a couple of book tours together. (We even had t-shirts printed!)
I was in awe of Barbara's plotting skills, and that certainly hasn't changed! Her newest novel, METROPOLIS, is an absolute can't-put-down-page-turner. How does she do it? you ask. Her answer might surprise you!
WRITING A NOVEL WITH STATISTICS
My latest novel, Metropolis, is set in Metropolis, a nineteenth-century self-storage facility in a five-story brick monstrosity resembling a medieval castle—including turrets—that sits across the street from MIT. There are six viewpoint characters who have nothing in common but their connection to this building. The six couldn’t be more different from one another, on completely different paths in life, each with their own separate struggles and secrets. Black, brown and white. Christian, Jew and atheist. Gay and straight. Rich, poor and in the middle.
So how the hell does one go about writing a novel with such a large unconnected cast and so many intertwining plots? How about Excel spreadsheets, bar graphs, bubble maps, pie charts and scattergrams? Not to mention intersecting and overlapping normal curves. Granted, one of my areas of specialization in graduate school was statistics, and everyone knows that being able to invert a matrix is a prerequisite for a successful literary career. Or not.
The bubble maps came first. Which of the characters know each other? Which don’t? And how does this change over time? Bubble Map 1 shows there’s hardly any interaction between them, but by Map 8, almost everyone knows each other. By the end of the book, some have crushes, some are in love, some are helpers and some are friends. And there are those who knowingly cause the downfall of others.
Obviously, each person is the hero of their own story, but who are these people? What are their dreams, hopes, problems, backstories? You may not be aware of this—because I made it up—but every plot can be mapped on a normal curve. This is true of all character arcs and subplots, and is exactly what I needed to get Metropolis to work.
I graphed out each character’s normal curve: their story, with all its obstacles and conflicts and major plot points. Then I did the same for each subplot, along with the overarching plot that ties it all together. When each of these was complete, I combined them into a single graph, with time running across the X axis, the one on the bottom, and the progression of events on the Y axis, along the left.
How to organize this into a cohesive novel? I used a very sophisticated statistical method: multi-colored file cards. Each character, sub-plot and plot gets a color, and each card represents an individual’s plot point. Rose had about twenty plot points, Jason seventeen and Serge eleven, so I had twenty green cards, seventeen red ones, eleven blue ones, and on and on for each plot and character.
Then I took all the cards—almost 100 of them—and laid them out on my dining room table. I moved them around for days until I created a structure that had a beginning, a middle and an end. When that was complete, I formed the cards into sequential scenes based on a four-act structure. Then I began to write.
But writing wasn’t the end of statistics and charts. Far from it. Throughout the process, I kept a tension chart for every chapter. The chart includes when, where and who is narrating each scene, but most important is the “tension coefficient” I assigned to each. My coefficients ran from 0.25 through 1.0, reflecting the amount of emotion the events created.
Obviously, you can’t have a scene with no tension because that would be totally boring, but sometimes you have to do a bit of backstory or buildup or just need to give the reader a break after a high-tension chapter. This type of scene got a tension coefficient of 0.25. It was 0.50 for those with a cliff hanger, 0.75 for those where three or four different colored file cards intersect, and the big 1.0 for the really, really big ones.
When I finished the first draft, I plotted theses coefficients on graph paper. If there were too many low numbers in a row, I knew I needed to add something to keep the reader reading. And if there were too many high numbers clustered together, then it was clear the reader needed some breathing room.
But this all this provided just the skeleton. For me, the magic is in the revisions. Where my imagination adds the muscles and skin and faces to the characters, where the themes and plots are deepened, where true connections emerge. This is when my story becomes different from every other story. The right brain and the left brain working together.
In the case of Metropolis, through eight drafts, almost four years, and many iterations of normal curves, bubble maps and scattergrams. Not to mention those many, many boxes of multi-colored file cards.
B.A. Shapiro is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including Metropolis (May, 2022), The Collector’s Apprentice, The Muralist and The Art Forger, which won the New England Book Award for Fiction, among other honors. Her books have been selected as Community Reads throughout the country and have been translated into over a dozen languages. She holds a PhD in sociology and has directed research projects for a residential substance abuse facility, worked as a systems analyst/statistician, headed the Boston office of a software development firm, and served as an adjunct professor teaching sociology at Tufts University and creative writing at Northeastern University. She likes writing novels the best. Barbara splits her time between Boston and Naples, Florida.
DEBS: Are you in awe yet?? I have seen Barb's multi-colored index card covered walls and they are a marvel--as are her books. If you want to write novels (or improve you craft) and you ever have the opportunity to take a plotting masterclass from her, jump on it.
(I'm not going to be graphing normal curves any time soon, but I am definitely trying the bubble maps.)
REDS and readers, Barbara will be stopping in to chat, so get your plot questions ready!
