You know how time in novels can be nonlinear, what with flashbacks and internal monologues, and how we don’t have to walk or drive or sail through space to change our settings? Thank you, white space. It's a narrative superpower, but it can also make things pretty complicated.

To navigate your vast and possibly disorganized space-time continuum, you can create a set of narrative waypoints that represent essential moments from your book. These won't include every scene, just as you may not need to add Schenectady as a waypoint on your route from Albany to Buffalo... you'll likely end up passing through along the way without having to schedule it in. But if you're going indirectly, you'll want to mark the turns.

Waypoints are essential moments that move the story forward, and can be plot events or conversations, trips taken or meditations on themes your characters ponder. Any narrative element, possibly at the scene level, but maybe bigger or smaller. Some of the most important to keep track of may be flashbacks, precisely because they occur out of chronological order.

While you don’t need to worry about completeness or comprehensiveness when building waypoints, do try to come up with a good number -- between ten and thirty — that are spread out throughout the story. The idea is to figure out the sequence of your narrative — the order in which events will unfold on the page, rather than in chronological time. The reason to make them modular is so you can change things.

You might try doing it with index cards or sticky notes, because these are highly modular. You can rearrange them. I like placing waypoints on a line graph with their place in the book as the X axis and either joy or anxiety on the Y axis. I might move things around till the chart looks like an EKG of normal sinus rhythm or a volatile stock market. If there's too much drama at one point, I'll take some of it off that spot on the docket and save it for later.

For an example, let's consider Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and the stops her characters make on the way there: We are in the house with Mrs. Ramsay and James and various others. James wants to kill his father with a poker. We walk into town with Mr. Tansley. We stop in at spousal fealty, love, painting, "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and the degree to which Mr. Ramsay is a great thinker (he's a q, not a z). Dinner is served. They do not get to the lighthouse. In part 2, "Time Passes," in ten quick chapters, ten years pass. War is waged, deaths are announced, decay ensues, great changes are wrought, yet life and the waves roll on. More time is devoted to Mrs. McNab's cleaning of the dusty mantle than the death of Mrs. Ramsay, but both are waypoints. In part 3, the Lighthouse is attained after another series of conversations had and avoided, meals eaten , vistas painted. In her memoir of childhood, Woolf called such scenes "moments of being." Strung together like stops on an itinerary, they become waypoints on the journey that is the novel, and are a little different from plot points. Many do not include much action. Nor are they a mere list of events, as the choice to include each one (and leave out many more) is so idiosyncratic. They are one way of charting the shape of the book, a jagged and wavering line drawn across a map of the book's fictional world .

PROMPT:

Develop a list (or stack, or Post-It covered whiteboard) of waypoints as you write scenes, going forward. Do it for what you have already written, too. It will become a flexible itinerary for the journey of your book, a modular, rearrangeable map that can help you get where you’re going, keep track of where you've been and redesign the route from here to there. Because while you can get to Buffalo from Albany via Schenectady and Syracuse, you can also do it by way of Montreal and Toronto — or even LA and Iceland. Each one is a different trip, a different book. Feel free to reroute till you achieve the shape your book requires.