Busted!--Roland Merullo caught foreshadowing with metaphor

Novelist and memoirist Roland Merullo confesses, in print and online interviews, to being a “pantser.”

“I write by the seat of my pants, almost always without an outline,” he says. “I just start, and that seems like opening the floodgates, or drilling a well. All kinds of stuff comes out, and usually very quickly.”

What’s that I hear? Ah yes, the collective sigh of all you pantsers out there, underscored by the shredding of those confounded outlines that were the result of last year’s resolutions.

But Merullo does not surrender the structure of his books to whimsy. He builds from what he calls “a very clear sense of an opening moment.” And in more than one case, he has had the smarts to include an early metaphor that suggests the scope of the book’s conflicts. Meaning that he either a) wrote the metaphor, listened carefully for what his subconscious was saying, then wrote the book without ever deviating from that vision, or—and much more likely for a pantser—b) he went back and wrote the metaphor once the book was finished.

From A Little Love Story (2005):

In the inciting incident, a man re-emerges in public after a year of mourning only to have a woman back her car into his classic and lovingly-kept 1949 Dodge truck.

“Every time I looked at the truck from a certain angle I could see the broken taillights and dented fender and I wondered how hard it would be to get replacement parts and I thought about the black-haired woman coughing in the rain.”

The black haired woman will be his love interest, and her cough is from cystic fibrosis. In order for them to have a future, she might require “replacement parts” that include a new pair of lungs. A great set-up for an imperfect, modern-day love story.

From Breakfast with Buddha (2007):

Merullo sets up the effect that an unwelcome cross-country passenger, some sort of "spiritual guru," will have on the protagonist—who has just described his “superbly satisfying life”:

“And yet, from time to time a gust of uneasiness would blow through the back rooms of my mind, as if a window had been left open there and a storm had come through and my neatly stacked pages of notes on being human had blown off the desk.”

If you have an early sentence that metaphorically foreshadows the scope of your story, I’d love to hear it, because I'm a fan of this technique. Not sure? Re-read your early chapters—the subconscious is powerful. You might be surprised to find what’s already there!

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Kathryn Craft specializes in developmental editing at Writing-Partner.com, an independent manuscript evaluation and editing service. What she believes: 1. Editing forever changed the way she reads. 2. Well-crafted moments of brilliance help her forgive many other problems in a manuscript. 3. All writers have strengths and weaknesses—but why settle for weaknesses? 4. We can learn as much from what other authors do right as we can from what we do wrong. This is her series, "Busted!—An author caught doing something right."