Chapter 117: Diagram-o-rama

Do you like getting emails from friends that give you license to stop writing because you need to check this out? I do. Especially if it’s a Tweet (are we still saying Tweet because I cannot get my head around saying an X) followed by a long, long thread. 

Minute upon minute of procrastination await. 

So thank you James Robinson, friend, colleague and author, for sending me just such an email the other morning with the best subject line there can be: Thought You Might Find This Interesting

Indeed I will. Writing must wait. 

The email contained a link. The link took me to this Tweet (X?) from Matt Vella, who edits the Financial Times’ Weekend Magazine. 

Another 49,400 people had also seen it and I had to wonder whether the writers among them were experiencing it and the thread that followed as I did: with panic. Because maybe I was going about things the wrong way. 

I wrote to James to tell him that as I scrolled through the thread I felt as if I was hurtled back in time, standing at a bin in what was called a “record store,” searching through 60s era albums whose covers captured a psychedelic experience. Far out. 

The image, as you see, is of a “story clock.” An idea, I sheepishly confess, that is new to me: A circle and many lines that overlap and lead to words that, on close examination (reading glasses required) tell the story of…a story. 

Here, with a precision my generally nonlinear mind could only look on with awe and admiration, was the map of a story, how it began, unfolded, progressed, built in drama, incorporated characters, drew them into the drama, and led to the climax. 

The story began as the clock, graphically speaking, struck twelve, with the killing of someone named Nicholas Green. One o’clock saw the introduction of Salvatore and Pasquale, “small time hoods.” By five Pasquale had gotten permission from a character named Fiare “to do drug deal and borrows money.” Uh oh.

By the eleventh hour “Salvatore’s kid brother murders his friend with Salvatore’s gun.” 

Vella explained that he’d posted the clock after getting a lot of DMs about how he used it to structure a particular story, which was both generous of him and fascinating in how he did it. He then took a deeper dive into different ways to diagram stories. 

That is when my head started to hurt.

So many diagrams. So many ways. Which to choose?

Vella offers some useful history of the story diagram, tracing its origins to a failed Masters Thesis by Kurt Vonnegut which nonetheless begat, by Vella’s estimate, thousands of diagrams. He offered some examples. I then made the mistake of seeing if there were more.

They are. Lots:

Vella was not wrong when he wrote “they get ridiculous fast.” But a closer, slower look does reveal some patterns. Story diagrams come in triangles, circles, whorls, and parabolas. They convey several essential components, chief among them momentum. They allow room for character, digression, scenes and are arranged in a way that allows the drama to build. 

In short, they are a very useful tool.

They are also, as Vella notes, highly personal. But it is hard to remember this when you are in the midst of writing and trying to find a way into and through your story and experiencing that inevitable sense of being lost. 

Being lost means searching for a lifeline; any will do. At such moments it is tempting to go diagram shopping. 

I’ve made no secret of my own struggles with my book; there, said it, struggles. Lest you think that there comes a moment in a writer's life when they’ve got it all figured out, guess again. With each new story come new challenges in how best to tell it, to make sure you are saying everything you need to say in a way that will leave readers so eager to find out what happens next that they will keep turning the page. Because if they stop, it is always your fault.

Some months ago, I wrote a chapter in which I included a diagram of my story. It was, as my wife put it, a look inside my brain. Not a pretty picture. I still have the diagram tacked to a cork board in front of me. 

I glance at it from time to time. But it has been a while since I consulted it. This suggests that it has outlived its usefulness. 

But why?

My diagram does not fit into the aforementioned categories. 

Instead it is a series of discrete boxes and circles, each representing a potential chapter. They’re connected by lines that are meant to suggest arrows in that they point in certain directions. But there is one place they do not point and that is the ending. 

My diagram contains the themes and thoughts that comprise parts of my book. But it is not, in its present form, a map. And a map is what writers need, especially as their stories grow in complexity with characters, scenes, plot twists, and digression.

There are writers who impose order on the chaos of their work by outlining like mad. I am not one of them. I’ve written enough stories to tell myself that I have an intuitive sense of how things should unfold, what comes next, when we need to meet Character A, B and C. And I do like the sense of feeling my way through a story, relying on instinct and experience to be my guide.

But Vella’s Tweet thread and all those diagrams got me thinking that perhaps I was making things harder for myself, that by proceeding without a diagram, a road map, I was undermining the creativity that can happen, say, in an individual scene by adding the distracting pressure of wondering what comes next and where the scene fits.

Hence, the panic. Because in proceeding as I was – with a map that was the equivalent of those tattered pirate movie treasure maps that are supposed to lead you to the hidden dubloons, I was flailing more than I needed to, as I tried to find my way.

At the end of the day success in writing depends on the ability to harness and control anxiety - the fear of failure, in all its many forms. That fear, controlled, is  useful because it propels us to take on the irrational work of using the only tool we have – words – to transport, move, excite, sadden, and sway readers. 

Outlines can do this. So can diagrams in that they, too, can take what feels like so much damn stuff and give it a shape, direction, purpose. They can make the complex appear simple. They impose order.

They are, as Vella pointed out, writer specific. One writer’s diagram is another’s hologram. Years ago I read how John McPhee organized his stories by arranging his notes chapter by chapter in envelopes that he tacked to a cork board. I had to try it – I mean, this was McPhee after all. I used it for one story. It didn’t work. More precisely, it didn’t work for me. Different writer; different brain. Different way of landing the story.

I am a diagrammer. Time to get a blank sheet of unlined paper and a pen and start a new one that will be all mine.

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