When Linda is writing she thinks in terms of progress and impediment.
One difference between YA and MG: YA has more impediment than middle grade.
Linda never has a subplot, instead she thinks of everything as progress and impediment as they relate to internal and external quest.
Weaving:
Any element has to recur more than once. If an element is in a scene, it has to be important enough to show up again in the story. Nothing can pop up later in the book that solves some problem.
Thank you so much for calling attention to this workshop--and to the really fine distinction that Linda Sue made between a subplot unrelated to the character's quest and a strand of story that acts to progress that quest in one of four ways:
ReplyDeleteProgress in internal quest.
Progress in external quest.
Impediment in internal quest.
Impeiment in external quest.
Linda Sue was really lovely on this point, explaining that each scene can and should know what it's doing: either progressing/blocking both internal and external quests or (even more interesting) progressing one quest while blocking the other.
Cheers!