Methods & Margins: Transforming Research Into a Plotline

Part 1 of 2

Welcome to the first post of Künstlerroman! As I mentioned in the intro post for this new section, I’m currently working on the sequel to my first novel, which is being submitted to agents.

Sequel doesn’t feel like quite the right word, though. It is book 2 of a proposed trilogy, but it starts earlier than the first book and is told from a different character’s perspective. The three proposed books follow three different women as they fight in a single war in Medieval Europe.

They really existed, as did the war they fought in.

While writing the first book over the last two years, I did a lot of tangential research into book 2’s main character (MC). I knew the basic shape of her story—when it started, where it ended. But I’m dedicated to telling the true story as much as I can. I didn’t want this novel to be weakly “inspired by”—the truth is so incredible that I want to keep as much of it as I can.

I spent the last few months getting my hands on all the research into her life that’s available. That makes it sound like a lot, but actually, she’s an understudied figure, often shoved aside in Medieval chronicles in favor of the more famous men she was surrounded by.

There exists a single biography of her. One.

There is one academic article about her from 2000.

Both are only available in certain archives, and I had to travel to them to read them.

I took dozens of pages of notes. Hundreds of quotes, tons of takeaways. Not only did I note where my MC was, when, and what she did, but I especially noted the blank moments of her life, the places that I’ll need to fill in.

The challenge came last week when I sat down to transform all those notes into a plotline. The book was not organized chronologically, but thematically, so my notes were organized the same way. My first move was to form a timeline. I went year-by-year, tracing everywhere she was during the 14th century.

Then I layered in the war. Battles, negotiations, treaties. Major losses, important wins.

Then I added in other important figures—kings, generals, enemies, family members.

But that wasn’t it. What was incredible about the biography I found was that it named employees of my MC. Servants, advisors, soldiers. These individual names are often lost to time, but the biographer found them and detailed how they served this woman. I layered them into the timeline, too.

Once all of that was done, I had a 12-page timeline with detailed bullets for every year. It’s great—but a timeline isn’t the same thing as a plotline. There are no motivations, no plots versus subplots, and—well, reality is so much messier than fiction.

So next, I’m going to be transforming that timeline into a plot line.