Using a River Chart to Map the "Flow" of Your Book

One rainy Saturday, I was teaching at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. Outside, trees were in full leaf, lilacs are blooming, signs of spring are everywhere, unheard of in Minnesota in late April. But because of the rain, my class of 25 writers was content to be indoors.

They'd been working on their books all morning. After lunch, I sent them off to draw the river that is their book.

We don’t usually draw in a writing class but viewing a book as a drawn river —with points of entry or exit—is an easy way to let me imagine the story as a journey. This may be the way your reader will view it, but it’s surprising how many writers feel unable to get this overview of their story. There are too many words, honestly. Too many pages.

Drawing the river is one way I gain this overview in my own work.

River chart steps

The steps are simple:

1. Make a list of the main entry and exit points in your story—major things happening.

2. Draw a river on a piece of paper (you can do this virtually but it somehow helps to draw it by hand, maybe because it engages a different part of the brain).

3. Mark the main points from your list at intervals on the river, spacing them as they occur.

4. Look at the balance of empty spaces and events. Are they crowded together on one section of the river leaving the rest without much happening?

The main thing you get to see, when you draw your story as a river, is which part of the river makes the most engaging focus. You get to look at the whole, the flow of it, and see what stands out.

I also ask myself these questions:

1. What part stands out to me?

2. What part might stand out to the reader?

3. What’s the most interesting landscape the river passes through?

That leads to my most important question: What content is most relevant to the story I want to tell? Because the river chart often lets me see, very clearly, where I’ve deviated from the story I really want to tell.

So let’s look at the three parts of story creation: content, structure, and language. Assessing the success of each part sometimes tells you where you need to revise.

Part One: Content

Choosing content is a basic first step in crafting a manuscript, no matter what the genre. Memoirists look at the content of their lives, the events that happened, and try to select those with the most impact. While memoirists work from true events, novelists create story from fictional ones, but in the same manner--what engages the reader most easily? Nonfiction writers also do this. I may be writing a book on learning to play the piano, but the first essential question is What do I include and what do I omit?

Content is the outer story, the facts or events your book revolves around. You must have content, dramatic and engaging moments, to create any momentum. To keep us reading. A river always moves.

How do you begin gathering content?

You may have scenes written, you may have journal entries, you may have ideas jotted down. Writers who attend my book-writing workshops learn about crafting these scenes, free writes, or "islands" as unlinked sections of writing, free from any overall structure or organization.

I learned this method when I was writing my fifth book. It's used by many writers because it allows a great amount of creative flow, unimpeded by writer's block. We write content and don't worry yet about the structure, a very freeing experience for the creative self.

But there comes a time when the writing accumulates, the scenes grow, the islands get impossible to keep track of, because there are so many. A next step is needed.

If the writer doesn't begin to structure the content, this is where the writing stalls out.

Part Two: Structure

Why not structure first? Why do I recommend accumulating content before starting to organize it? Why not use an outline?

As a writer, I've written books from outline and books from the content/structure method I'm a big fan of now. But as an editor, I've worked with way too many book outlines that needed serious rearranging to be publication worthy.

It really depends on the writer's skill at seeing "inner story." Most of us can't--or we only see a shallow version of it when we're writing our book's initial content. If this is true for you, an outline may limit you from taking necessary detours--and this is sad, because such sidetracks surface unexpected meaning that you don't plan for. But working without an outline requires you to give up control of the direction of your story. It becomes more organic--and actually more fun to write.

I've seen too many writers get stuck because what's next to write from the outline isn't what's burning to be written. So I advise waiting to structure until there is content written.

Study other writers you admire, to learn how to structure your own story. Select two pages from a book you love. Read it as a writer, looking at the arrangement of elements on these pages--what choices did the writer make? What effect did it bring to you, the reader? You can learn a lot about how the "inner story" conveys the emotion.

So when you work with structuring your own story, look at the pieces you've written and first imagine the effect you want to create from them. Then arrange them toward that effect.

Part Three: Language

Language is the intangible, the thing you can't go after directly. It's all about voice and tone, the rhythm of the writing. It's where the book's deeper message emerges almost organically.

Good content combines with good structuring, an interesting story with an arrangement that provides a strong reaction in a reader. The last step is adjusting the language to enhance that reaction. As you do this more and more, your unique voice will emerge.

Editing with These Three Steps

When we've drafted the manuscript, working through these three steps of content, structure, and language, there comes the crafting time. We need to edit the manuscript and make sure that each of these three is working in harmony with the others. The story has integrity and reads as a whole experience.

You review the content--does the story you're telling have enough happening, enough dramatic action, enough important information?

You review the structure or organization of this content, asking yourself where you want the greatest emotional impact on the reader. Does your arrangement of islands achieve this?

You review the language--how is the pacing, the sentence length, the word choice that you're using? Does the language of tense dramatic moments reflect this tension?

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

Three to try this week, if you’re game.

Ask yourself which step you're on: are you working with content, gathering pieces of writing for your book? Are you beginning to structure that writing, arrange it for the impact you're after? Do you have your manuscript completely drafted, ready for language development?

Choose one of the exercises below, whichever one matches your particular step in the river journey, and try it this week.

Content: Make a list of topics for your book. Brainstorm anything that might be interesting to include--even if you can't imagine how it would fit. If you're drawn to write about it, follow that nudge. Try to gather 25 topics on your list. Most of these should be outer events, to provide dramatic action, but they can also be descriptions of a place, person, thing.

Structure: Take 5 scenes or islands you've written, that seem to fit together and might become a chapter. Letting go of chronology for a moment, play with different arrangements of these 5. What if you started with the most dramatic one? What would still need to be written to make good transitions between them?

Language: Print out one of your finished chapters, double-spaced. Lay the pages on a table so you can see all of them. Squint and look for the balance of white space and dense text. Where is there too much of either? Now read that section. How can you bring in the missing element to balance the pacing?