Heightening Emotional Impact

How can you get your reader to feel emotionally moved by your story?

Well, first off, you can't just tell them, "you should be emotionally moved." This is obvious, I think. I had been thinking about the topic of emotional involvement and creating intensity at particular points of the story, and then I ran across this article by Lydia Sharp, where she gives the following quote from Donald Maass:

You can’t expect your reader to feel what your protagonist feels just because they [the characters] feel it. Only when that emotion is provoked through the circumstances of the story will your reader feel what you want them to.

Lydia then asks:
"So what does this mean? For starters, it goes back to the age-old advice of "show, don't tell." Where emotions are involved, it's best not to simply outright tell your reader what the characters are feeling. Let the reader experience it.

"And how do you do that? By not being obvious."

All of this, I agree with. If I were to take the Donald Maass quote and give my own take on it, I would have to say that our impressions of the emotional experiences of characters grow more out of our own emotions in a particular part of the story than the other way around. In other words, it is our own emotional understanding of the story that deepens the character's experience, rather than the character's emotional state deepening our own.

In a way, this makes sense. Because the character inhabits the story, he/she is limited in his/her ability to grasp the entirety of the story. The reader usually does not have these same limitations. I'm going to come back to the idea of the entirety of the story in a moment, but first let me address Lydia's advice.

Lydia suggests we should let the reader experience what the characters are feeling, rather than telling them, by not being obvious. An excellent point. There are a number of ways that emotional states can be shown. One way is to describe the internal physical sensations of a person - adrenaline surges, feeling hot or cold, and many different kinds of metaphorical descriptions of pain, fear, embarrassment, joy, etc. can be of use for internal points of view. Another way is to show the external behaviors of a person feeling an emotion. If the point of view is external, you can show facial expressions; this is awkward to do with internal points of view, but you can still show actions of rage (as one example) like throwing things across the room, or pacing, stomping, etc. Still another way is to have the emotional state of the character in a scene be reflected somehow in the way that person perceives things around him/her, by including a sense of rage or other emotion in the surrounding descriptions of setting, descriptions of the actions of others, etc. There is a descriptive passage in Snow Falling on Cedars where the destruction wreaked by a storm is treated in intensive detail...and that reflects the inner state of the protagonist, Ishmael.

All of these tools are at our disposal. All of them fit with the idea that comes from qualitative anthropology about field notes - as I've discussed here before - that a researcher should not try to lay out any deductive conclusions in field notes, but simply observe the details of what is there, write them down, and let the reader taking in those details formulate the same conclusions that the researcher did. (I consider this a very extreme form of show-don't-tell.)

But if we're talking about overall emotional impact, this isn't everything. Here is the point where I return to the idea of the entirety of the story.

Anyone who writes with the thought of story arcs in mind knows that there are large-scale patterns in a work. Small points link together across the story to form this larger structure. We talk about character arcs, and plot arcs. I suggest we also think about emotional arcs for the reader. By seeding small details one after the other, we can create an impression that builds up in a reader's mind.

I'll give an example of a situation that I created in my novel that I'm currently writing. This one was very difficult because the situation was so awful it made me sick. I knew what that situation was, but I also knew that my viewpoint character wasn't going to be in the room with it - only listening in from outside. I realized pretty quickly that there would be no way for a simple emotional description of the pov character's reaction to have impact unless readers knew what that situation was. However, I needed the impact to hit all at once. No time for lengthy description (which would defeat the point anyway because it would come across as strenuous). So I had to set it up by seeding it earlier in the chapter.

This is tricky because the list of elements is long, and it's not like reading the text itself (obviously) but I'm going to do them as bullet points, and insert my own commentary in certain places. Critical elements to piecing together the unseen situation are marked in red.

The characters: Lady, Lady's servant, Husband, Husband's servant

The scene begins with Lady and Lady's servant in a room with her sleeping teenage son, who is recovering from a deadly illness. Previous chapters have established that both of them are exhausted and rather upset about this whole situation. This establishes a state of vulnerability which contributes to their reactions to the ongoing events.

• Husband enters, and Lady instantly goes on the defensive; Husband embraces Lady and she goes stiff.
  
• Husband and Husband's servant together try to force Lady to give up control of Lady's servant to them for political purposes.

This establishes that the Husband will not hesitate to threaten them even when they are in a state of vulnerability.

• Lady's servant worries whether Lady will cave to Husband's wishes, but decides not to try to influence Lady because he would be punished for presumption
  
• Lady takes charge and with Lady's Servant's help, denies Husband control of her servant.

Because of the early vulnerability and husband's threat, this is a point of triumph for the Lady. It also brings her closer to her servant and makes her servant feel that she cares about him. He cares for her more deeply as a result (this question of whether the two of them have a relationship of trust has been established over a large portion of the story to this point). This is a reader emotion arc going from sympathy to triumph on behalf of the Lady and her servant. Now we go into the next piece.

• Husband leaves, angry.
  
• Lady's servant realizes that the denial was presumption and punishment will be coming.
  
• With Husband gone, Lady begins to relax and speak trustfully to her servant
  
• Lady's servant confesses to Lady that Husband's servant frightens him.
• Lady confesses to her servant that Husband's servant frightens her too. Says she hates his eyes.
• Lady's servant says his watching is normal because of his servant's training.
  
• Lady insists that this form of watching is not normal.
• In conversation about an earlier life experience, Lady says she wishes she had taken action at that time, in defiance of Husband, even though she knew the consequences.
• Husband returns with his servant.

At this point it should be pretty clear that he is back to deliver punishment, most likely with his servant watching, and that both the Lady and her servant know it. It should be clear also that the Lady has experienced this before. Because of what has been previously established, the Husband doesn't need to show anger overtly here; in fact, it's creepier (in my opinion) that he doesn't. On to the next piece, where I'll give some attention to the servant's emotional state (since he's the viewpoint character). I'm marking the causes of his emotional reactions in orange, and the reactions themselves in blue.

• Lady's servant expects her to become defensive, but instead Lady is submissive and tells her servant to leave on an errand while she speaks to Husband alone. His expectations of her courage, and their mutual trust, are defeated.
  
• Lady's servant is very worried leaving her alone with angry Husband, but must obey. He runs the errand.
  
• When he returns, Lady is not there.
  
• He searches for Lady, demonstrating signs of panic; a more experienced servant looks uncomfortable, tells him to be careful.
• Lady's servant chastises himself for leaving her, can't understand why she would send him away when she knew she needed help.
• Lady's servant turns on a speaker to hear what is happening in Husband and Lady's room, expecting to hear argument.
• He hears "bestial, rhythmic grunting."
• Lady's servant feels nausea and shakes with rage.
  

I'm not going to spell out anything more about the situation in the story. However, I think it's useful to point out a few things.

1. When you're working to create an emotional high or low point, think about what kind of initial emotional conditions would contribute most effectively to the magnitude of the impact (in this case, the establishment of vulnerability for Lady and servant/threat and lack of remorse for Husband and servant)
2. Make sure to include any necessary information that will contribute to the reader's understanding of what is going on. In this case, that includes all the red-marked phrases, including the Lady's dislike of the Husband's physical contact, the idea of punishment for defiance, etc.
3. Make sure that the causes of your protagonist's emotional state precede the protagonist's emotional reactions. What should be happening is that the circumstances that cause the protagonist's emotional state will be causing a strong emotional state in the reader, a split second before the reader actually reads what you've written about the protagonist's reaction. If at that point the protagonist's reaction matches the reader's reaction, the impact will be magnified (which is what I was trying to do). If it doesn't match, then you'll get an entirely different effect, turning the strength of the reader's reaction into a judgment about the character who has the unexpected reaction.

A story contains innumerable links across it (arcs, patterns of repetition, etc.). The further you go in, the more the significance of each word or event depends on everything that has come before it. I often call this phenomenon resonance. When I get something right, I feel like I can hear the entire story ring like a bell. When you're trying to create emotional impact, this is an enormous advantage.

It's something to think about.

Story Arcs Again: Repetition and Development

I was fascinated by the response to my post the other day, "Three points makes a story arc." One of the things I noticed was that people in various contexts took issue with my simplification of the arc into a series of three "repetitions." Yes, indeed, repetition makes it seem simple. On the other hand, what I was trying to do was take a look down through all the layers of complexity and try to figure out what the absolutely most basic form of an arc would be. I've seen a lot of fantastic discussions (including this one) of story arcs that look at the arc in terms of its intuitive form, but one of the things I like to try to do here on the blog is tie things down as concretely as possible.

I'm still convinced it is the sense of repetition that sensitizes us to arcs when we read - however, repetition should not be defined in its most simplistic sense. We see something occur. Then we recognize it the second time it occurs, but something gets added. This sets up an expectation for further progress, or progress of a particular type, going forward. The next time we see the repeated element, the development that happened between point 1 and point 2 may be turned in a different direction. What takes a simple repetition and turns it into an intuitively recognizable arc is this development over the course of the story - but in terms of the writing, it's not a smooth progression. There are discrete events that contribute to it.

For the purposes of being specific, I thought I'd lay out a few of the arcs that I'm putting into my current novel. There are lots of arcs in this one, and they do very different things - and many of the smaller arcs also participate in larger arcs.

Arc 1 repeating element: Stranger (I mentioned this arc in my last arc post)

• Character 1 glimpses a stranger at a concert
• Character 1 sees a stranger at a second concert, approaches and speaks briefly to him
• Character 1 goes to a private concert and is vaguely surprised when he doesn't see the stranger
• Character 1 meets the soloist from the private concert and is personally introduced to the stranger

So with the stranger, we have repetition that appears pretty simple at first. He comes out of nowhere and doesn't have any development in his first appearance; that's because there would be no plausible reason for him to interact with Character 1 in this context. However, it becomes an arc because he reappears, and when he does, something new happens: they speak together. Repetition+development is what gives the arc its trajectory. The third instance, in which Character 1 doesn't see the stranger, helps to develop the arc because it lets readers know that Character 1 has developed a curiosity about this person he wouldn't otherwise have. That curiosity will actually have its own arc as the story goes on. It also sets Character 1 up to be receptive to the opportunity that happens at the next point, when he's introduced to the stranger personally. There are actually more points on this arc, but I haven't written them yet and don't want to give them away!

Arc 2 repeating element: Della

• Character 1 goes to a concert, is caught in a riot and ends up having to stick with a stranger for his own protection. He never learns her name.
• Character 1 goes to a second concert and Della is at this one as well. He sees her at intermission and offers her servant a drink but doesn't speak to her.
• Character 1 sees Della again after the second concert finishes; this time she speaks to him. Someone else sees him speaking with her.
  
• Character 1 is coerced into going to an event by the person who saw him speaking with Della (another arc branches off here)
• Character 1 is told not to see Della again
• Character 1 gets an opportunity to see Della's servant again and turns it into an opportunity to see her in spite of this advice. Della implies she may invite him to her home.

You can see this one is a major arc, but only for Character 1. Other arcs branch off of it, as when there are consequences for Character 1 being seen with this girl. The repeating element is always the girl, but the things that happen occur in an order of development that increases Character 1's involvement with her, and also raises the risk of him continuing to see her. Just as I mentioned above, it is this kind of continued development and increase of risk at each point which creates the sensation that we have an arc moving upward. Thus as the arc progresses we could imagine a point where Character 1's chances with her are diminished by events, and this point would be perceived as a change in the arc's trajectory, downward for a period of time instead of uniformly upward.

Arc 3 repeating element: Kinders Fever

• Character 1 sees the Speaker of the Cabinet drop dead of Kinders Fever
• Character 2 hears that all people present at the event where the death occurred are having their health checked; also an investigation has begun into the source of infection
• Character 1 learns that the source of the fever has been localized and that news of the source is spreading.
• Character 3 learns that his father is angry at the people who caused the infection
• Character 3 goes to the source location and takes revenge on the people there
• Character 3 learns that another very important person has visited the source location and concludes that another outbreak is about to start.

You might notice that in this arc, the Kinders Fever element repeats across point of view characters and situations. This is an arc that is perceivable by the reader of the story, but not by any of the individual characters (at least not in the same way). As with the first two arcs, at each point new developments, effects, and implications are added. Because this is an arc that goes across characters, it counts as one of the highest-level arcs in the story. The last point listed above for this arc actually then starts a second Kinders Fever arc that is going to take me much further into the novel, with consequences that will reach all the way through.

I hope this discussion deepens and clarifies some of what I had discussed in my last post. I'm happy to talk about arcs in more detail with anyone who is interested.

Three points make a story arc

If you've been around this writing thing for very long, surely you've heard of the "story arc." People talk about character arcs, and plot arcs, and how one should build and sustain them. I talk about them myself, because I can feel them in my work as I write - but I know of a number of people who have difficulty with the idea of the arc, in part because they say they don't know what an arc is and how to detect one.

I have a very simple definition for you. A story arc is created when something in your writing gets repeated three times. In geometry, you use three points to plot (and confirm) a line; in a story, three points create an arc. In geometry, if you only plot two points, you can't be certain you haven't made an error, so the third point confirms that you've plotted the line correctly. In a story, if you've put in two points, then people will sense an arc forming and be looking for a third point.

Here's an example. I have an unnamed character appear in a concert scene chapter 1 of my book; the protagonist notices him as a person out of place. I then have this same character appear at a concert in chapter 3; the protagonist isn't sure this is the same guy, but approaches and speaks to him. Then in chapter 10 he goes to another concert. This is "strange guy appears at concerts" arc, and I expect that when my protagonist gets to the concert, he'll be unconsciously looking for this guy - as will my readers. He won't be there, but he'll show up in another place. This very minor character therefore has an arc in my story. His first appearance sets him up, his second appearance (and the fact that more happens in it) establishes that readers should be looking for an arc, and that way when you want to put in the next piece, you know people will be looking for it.

That's a very minor arc. A major arc can have many more points contributing to it. Each of my characters in For Love, For Power has two major arcs: a love arc, and a power arc. It makes sense! What this means to my writing is that in every chapter, I need to make sure I put in something to advance the point of view character's love arc, and his power arc. If I don't contribute to each in some way, then readers will have the sense that I'm dropping balls and I am not helping them to keep track of things properly. However, because these are large-scale thematic arcs, I can contribute to them in all kinds of different ways. Tagret's love arc can involve his friends, or his mother, or his girlfriend - and each of those can be considered as its own arc, but because they all contribute to the larger thematic arc, I can take turns developing them. Tagret's power arc can involve his father, or his brother, or other politicians.

So to define arcs, we need three points of repetition. This repetition is flexible. It can be a single object. It can be a single character. Or it can be a type of behavior on the part of a character (such as risk-taking). It can be a kind of thought or worry that the character has. But so long as we can be detected as returning to whatever this thing is, we can be construed as creating an arc. Arcs can also have subordinate arcs inside them, such as when instances of Tagret seeing his girlfriend contribute to his larger thematic love-arc.

You might be asking, "Do readers really know we're doing this?"

Well, they may not know it consciously, but humans are very good at detecting patterns of repetition on a subconscious level. It's one of our language-learning skills, and we do it all the time without thinking. In fact, as writers we are usually creating arcs subconsciously rather than deliberately. However, it helps for us to put a label on them and deal with them consciously, because if we do this, it's much easier to keep them under control.

Take a look at your draft. Try to identify the repetitions. Similar situations, or characters, or behaviors, or imagery. That's where you're creating your arcs. Here are some things to look for.

1. Am I only putting in two points of the arc? If so, chances are your readers are looking for a third, and will miss it if it's not there. Either complete the arc, or break it by removing the second point.
2. Am I precisely duplicating the first point with my second point? If so, the repetition may feel strange or uncanny. In an arc, usually the second point develops on the first (if only slightly).
3. Can I put a name on the larger thematic arcs? If you can, it will really help you move your outline and your book forward. If you can't, you might be wandering off the core point of your story.
4. Am I regularly contributing to the larger arcs? There are a lot of ways of doing this, but if you can identify the larger arcs, it will become easier to contribute to them and keep all those balls in the air.
5. Do I have a lot of similar small arcs? If you're struggling with the question of larger arcs, see if you can find patterns in the smaller arcs that you're using. That can help you detect larger patterns and get a better orientation on the overall trajectory of your project.

I hope I've given you some ideas that will help you articulate with the issue of the story arc. Arcs are a very important conceptual tool, and extremely useful, so good luck with them!

Character arcs - how characters change

Do you have character arcs in your story? Chances are you do, even if you aren't aware of them, or don't call them that. On the basic level, character arcs are the changes that your character goes through over the course of the story. This can include coming to a decision, learning to make particular kinds of decisions differently, learning something important about life, getting to the bottom of a mystery, or any kind of development within the character's mind or personality.

Keeping conscious control of character arcs is a really valuable tool in crafting a story, particularly when you're working with a novel. You can have whole-novel-long story arcs, or smaller arcs like the protagonist's relationship to a minor character, or the protagonist resolving a subplot about something (say, a key he found). These typically all happen concurrently. One nice way of thinking of the climax of the story is to imagine your character arcs bouncing across your story like rocks skipped across water, and then to imagine that several of them must all land at the same spot at the same time - for maximum effect!

At this point I'd like to think about character arcs from two major angles: the plot direction, and the character direction.

Approaching character arcs from the plot direction is something you can do without even having conscious awareness of your plot arcs. You know what needs to happen in the story events, and you know what does happen in the story events, and as the character goes along, he or she just changes with his/her natural reactions to the story events. This is good. It's important (in my view) to keep two things in mind.

1. Story events will make your character react and learn. If they don't, you're missing an opportunity.
2. Some actions by the character will require them to learn things/change before they can happen.

This is where it's helpful to be able to trace the arc backward. If your protagonist needs to be able to fly a helicopter, then it would be good to set that up - either he knows how to do it already (mention how), or he learns how to do it, or he learns different sub-components of the skills at different points (the arc approach). Take the example of Trinity in The Matrix. She very quickly learns to fly a helicopter in the midst of the action, without any time for explanation. But the preconditions that make that possible (she has a data port; people can learn through data loads) have been set up in her actions, and in the actions of others, previously in the story. So if you find your beta readers going "huh?" when your character pulls out his sword and starts swinging, you might want to check his arcs and make sure swordsmanship and/or its precursors, were included in there somewhere. Another possible arc example is if your character has to make a very bad decision that runs contrary to his/her morality - think about how to lead into that decision with smaller plot elements that show the character's non-reliability, or his/her doubts, the ability of another character to sway him/her, etc. so as to prime the possibility of that uncharacteristic decision.

Then there's approaching a character arc from the angle of character change. "Over the course of the story my protagonist has to go from being a bigot to learning to accept others." "My character believes in the status quo, but when he finds out about X, he has to accept that the status quo has always been a lie."

This is what I do a lot, because a lot of my stories are about people changing their minds, or learning what the key to understanding is, etc. I go very psychological in my stories. If you're doing something similar, take a look at that change that needs to happen, and try to break it down into smaller components. The bigger the change, the more different conditions will have to be in effect for it to happen. If my bigot must change his mind, then he probably needs to be put in an extreme situation where only a member of his despised group can help him, and that person becomes a friend/exception as a result. But there will be many things that need to happen in order to create an extreme situation like that - and many things that must happen thereafter, once the bigot has actually engaged with the despised person, to solidify his impression and expand his doubts about his previous views into a broader personal change.

I'll be a bit more specific with another example. My highly educated and informed character X isn't someone you could call a bigot, but has always been taught that people have different fundamental natures. He then meets character M who is in disguise as a member of the same group as X. What will it take for him to accept that M and he have enough in common to maintain a relationship when he finally discovers who M is? He will:

• discover the history of how the different groups were formed out of the same population
• discover that M's group was the victim of a terrible injustice
• go through a series of interactions with M during which he will come to have a high opinion of her.
  

Only when all these things are operating at once does it seem plausible for X to have the reaction he does when he finds out the truth.

Before I leave the topic of arcs, I want to mention a couple more things. First, do you need character arcs if you're writing about real characters and events - say in a memoir or in historical fiction based around factual events - when you know "what really happened"?

My answer is emphatically, "Yes." Character arcs are patterns of systematic change that build on themselves and give a story the sense of being strongly coherent and tied together. If you're working with real events, those should work their way into the character arcs. Character arcs don't have to be predictable, and they don't have to be uniform, but they should be logical and readers should be able to see their plausibility in the context of events - whether those events are fixed by history or not.

Second, what happens when you end up with an arc that you weren't intending to create? I'll take an example from my super writer-buddy Janice Hardy (because I'm sure she'll forgive me!). When I was helping her with an early draft of her Book 3 of the Healing Wars trilogy, I noticed that her character had changed. Nya had gone through so much and experienced so much pain that she appeared to have become less hurt by it. So I asked Janice whether that was what she had intended, and she told me it wasn't. I felt helpful, because after that Janice was able to go through and consciously track how Nya reacted to pain - so that it still made sense in context, but so it didn't accidentally lose the poignancy that it had had through the first two books.

Thanks to the folks at Absolute Write forum for giving me the idea for this post.

Keeping The Balls in the Air

My new novel is complex. Those of you who know my writing probably won't find this surprising, since everything I write tends to be complex and develop extra layers. So I thought I'd share a few thoughts on how I keep that complexity under control.

#1. I outline. I'm not talking about the standard-format Roman numerals and then letters etc. but I will write an outline. If my vision on the story is foggy - which it often is for latter portions of long novels until I get closer in the process of writing them - then I just write down an unnumbered list of critical events that have to happen, in the order in which they happen. Those can include things as big as "X character gets killed" or as small as "Y character makes a decision." The closer I get, the more things start fleshing themselves out into scenes and chapters, and then I write down a general description of what should happen.

#2. I manage my worldbuilding. I design until I'm blue in the face, and compile lots of files full of notes. After mostly finishing the design, I try to wrap this all together into one bundle which I call point of view. Once I have the point of view right, it pulls a lot of the worldbuilding and basic character elements together at once and lets me work with them together instead of separately. As I write, I then selectively deepen my understanding at different points depending on the needs of the story.

#3. I keep explicit track of plot and character arcs. Plot arcs and character arcs often parallel one another, but are not always the same. If there are only two or three arcs going, I can usually keep track of them in my head, but my current novel has about six, all of which are interrelated, so what I'm doing is making a list of them and appending it to the back of each chapter. Then once I've got the chapter sketched, I can check to make sure all the arcs are addressed in the action I'm planning - and again after I've finished writing I can write notes about how each arc has been pushed forward. This is information that I can then carry forward into planning and writing the next section. So as an example, my initial arc list looks something like this:

Ongoing arcs:
Catacomb/Kartunnen Ryanin/Akrabitti
Kinders Fever
Reyn/Fernar jealousy/Della/Yoral
Tagret/Imbati
Nekantor/Speaker of the Cabinet/Garr
Tamelera/Aloran

As you can see, it's pretty much incomprehensible to anyone but me (and others who know character names or to whom I've mentioned plot elements!). I stick notes on the end of each arc label to track what I've done. Ideally, each chapter should do something for every arc. It's probably okay if one or two of them don't develop through a single chapter (due to the pov character I'm working with) but I want to make sure I don't drop them for too long.

#4. I keep track of characters' mental states (psychology). This is related to plot and character arcs, obviously, but I do track it independently. Given that I place a lot of importance on characters' decisions (related to romantic or platonic relationships or to any other critical plot element), and I like to have my characters build up gradually to those decisions. Motivation is really important - so important to me, in fact, that it's the reason why I write chronologically. What a character thinks at any given point will change what they do, and thus what the story does as well. I can't be certain whether an event will happen - or more critically, how it will happen - unless I have a continuous process of development in the mental states and motivations of the characters and their interactions. If I don't keep track I will have to go back and find the lost thread of psychology where it dropped off, and rewrite everything from then on (which makes me scream and want to bang my head on walls!).

#5. I keep track of "arrows." Literally, this is what I call them; my friend Janice will say to me, "You need to line up your arrows," and I'll know exactly what she means. I'm not sure whether to call it "theme" but I usually have an underlying issue that I want to have going on in a story. The plot and characters tend to serve it on some level; descriptions will also serve it on some level. In my linguistics stories, it tends to be the critical social or linguistic issue that underlies the misunderstanding between human and alien characters - so a good many of my arrows serve as clues to the hidden solution. The arrows can be words, phrases, word repetitions, dialogue elements, events, etc. so long as they contribute to the drive and focus of the story. When I write with attention to arrows (and believe me, I give the arrows a great deal of attention in revisions because they're tougher to track in a first draft), it's not just a question of just finding a cool way of describing something, but finding the right way: the precise description that will align its arrows with the character, the plot progress, the worldbuilding elements, the dominant metaphors, the theme, etc. This may all sound rather abstract and possibly a bit frivolous, but "lining up the arrows" often makes the difference with my beta readers between a story being cool but not having much impact, and a story being vibrant and amazing. Another way to talk about arrows is in terms of "alignment" and "focus." They're worth some attention, because they can make a huge difference.

One last note: I don't feel I have to keep track of all levels at once. I bundle things together to get them going (like pov, which subsumes worldbuilding and character and elements of character arcs etc.). I don't try to keep my outline in my head; that's what the written outline is for. The only part I keep in my head is the immediate section I'm working on. I keep my focus in the character's point of view and develop the plot along with the mental states. I try to keep my arrows aligned on a basic level but if I don't quite manage it on the first go, that's okay. That's what revisions are for!

Those are my thoughts on complexity for today. Now I have to go do some juggling.