The Avenues Technique begins with a single specific idea – a place, a situation, an image – and then walks outward down every promising turning that leads off it. At the end of each turning the writer drafts a short passage, following the idea just far enough to see where it goes. Kept and laid side by side, those passages build the wider narrative between them.
Where Facets cuts deeper into a single moment, Avenues travels outward from a single idea. It is a deliberate search for connections – themes, contrasts, consequences, other points of view – and a cheap, fast way to test where each one leads before committing to it.
How does ‘Avenues’ work?
Think of a specific idea as a crossroads. Several avenues lead off it, and each is a turning the narrative could take: a thread back into the past, a step out into the surrounding world, a contrast, a consequence, another character’s view of the same situation. You do not yet know which turnings open onto the main road of the plot and which are dead ends. So you walk each one a little way – by drafting a short, rough descriptive passage – and read its destination.
Two disciplines keep the technique honest. First, the passages must be precise and complementary: they are not loose accumulation but pieces that work together to build a single wider text. Second, Avenues is the standing antidote to the heavy monologue. Rather than have one character explain a situation at length, you dramatise several short views of it, and let the reader assemble the whole from the parts. Exposition that would have sat inert in a speech becomes movement across a landscape.
When to reach for Avenues
Reach for Avenues when you have a strong central idea but do not yet know what surrounds it; when a scene or chapter runs on a single track and needs breadth; when you need to generate plot options and want to test them cheaply before you commit; and – above all – whenever you feel the pull towards a block of exposition or a long interior monologue to carry information. That pull is the signal to open the map and walk instead.
It is the wrong tool for a moment that needs a single, sustained line of tension held without interruption. There, a straight scene – or the depth of Facets – will serve better than a spread of turnings.
The Avenues Method
The process moves in five steps, from one idea to a set of working passages.
- Fix the crossroads. State the one specific idea, place or situation you are starting from, in a single plain sentence. The more specific the starting point, the richer the turnings.
- Find the turnings. List the avenues that lead off it – themes, connections, contrasts, consequences, other points of view, the occasional ‘what if’. Push past the obvious first two or three.
- Walk each avenue. Draft a short, rough descriptive passage down each promising turning, following it far enough to see its destination. The draft is exploratory; it need not be polished to be useful.
- Read the destinations. Ask where each avenue arrived. Does it open plot, deepen character, seed a motif – or dead-end? Keep the ones that lead somewhere; abandon the rest without regret.
- Lay the passages together. Arrange the kept passages so they are precise, complementary and cumulative, building the wider text between them – with no single monologue carrying the load.
A Catalogue of Common Avenues
These are the turnings most often worth walking. They are a palette to choose from, not a route to follow in order – most ideas reward three or four, chosen for where they lead.
Ancestral
What lies behind the idea in time – history, lineage, origin.
Geographic
The world the idea sits in – the town, the valley, the economy, the weather.
Connective
A thread linking the idea to something apparently unrelated.
Contrasting
The idea set against its opposite or its foil.
Sensory
The idea explored purely through texture, colour and sound.
Character-view
The same situation seen through another person’s eyes.
Speculative
A ‘what if’ turning – a hypothetical that could harden into plot.
Thematic
The larger idea of which the specific one is a small instance.
Illustration: Defining the Avenues
The starting idea is the opening of Chapter 1 of The Tailor: Anjali came from a family of tailors. A single, specific statement. The chapter that grows from it is, in effect, a worked example of Avenues – the idea is taken down five distinct turnings, each a short passage, and no two lead to the same place. For each avenue we note the turning taken, what the drafted passage explores, and the destination it reaches in the wider book.
Avenue A – The Ancestral turning
Turning: Follow the idea backwards, into the family’s past.
Exploration: Tailoring running ‘as naturally as silk thread drawn by a nimble needle’ through at least five generations; the needle and loom pulling her ancestors ‘through crumpled and smooth history’.
Destination: Craft established as inheritance and destiny – the ground from which Anjali’s later wish to be ‘more than a shop that alters and repairs’ will grow.
Avenue B – The Geographic turning
Turning: Step outward into the world the idea sits in.
Exploration: The uncle arriving in a grey town at the end of a wet valley bordered by the sea; Wetledale as the valley of the Cabinet Makers, shipping durable goods by sea to bypass the treacherous mountain roads.
Destination: A fully costed world with its own economy and weather – and the sea, quietly set at the valley’s foot as the far horizon of ambition.
Avenue C – The Connective turning
Turning: Trace a single thread that links two separate parts of the idea.
Exploration: The river running ‘like a silken ribbon along the seam of the valley’, connecting the uncle’s colourful upstream workshop to Anjali’s downstream home; the river as ‘the great designer’, making a pattern and rubbing it out.
Destination: The motif that will govern the whole novella – the flow from grey valley to open sea that finally carries Anjali’s decision: ‘It is the flow of the river into the sea. I cannot stop it now.’
Avenue D – The Contrasting turning
Turning: Set the idea against its opposite.
Exploration: The uncle’s workshop – ‘a captivating circus of texture, colour, and sound’ – against the spartan furnishings of her parents’ house.
Destination: Anjali’s defining desire made visible as a pull towards colour and craft over austerity; the four-year-old setting off up the river path is that desire in miniature.
Avenue E – The Thematic turning
Turning: Rise from the specific idea to the larger one it belongs to.
Exploration: Clothing collected ‘as a philatelist collects stamps’; the discovery that ‘there is personality in every garment’, that clothing is ‘loquacious’ and gives away the nature of the person who wears it.
Destination: The book’s central premise – that clothing shapes and reveals character – which becomes the engine of the later plot, when a well-dressed thug becomes ‘a name, is a presence, is a person of note’.
Illustration: Narrative Outcome
Laid together, the avenues above produce the opening of Chapter 1. Notice how the passage never settles into explanation: it moves from the family’s past, out to the valley, along the river, across to the contrast of two households, and up to the eloquence of clothing – each turning a short passage, all of them building one wider picture, without a monologue in sight.
Anjali came from a family of tailors. Tailoring had run as naturally as silk thread drawn by a nimble needle through generations of Anjali’s family. The work of the needle and the loom had pulled her ancestors through crumpled and smooth history across at least five generations – that her grandparents had been able to determine – and possibly many more.
Anjali’s uncle first arrived as an immigrant in a grey town at the end of a wet valley, which was bordered at the bottom by the sea. A river ran like a silken ribbon along the seam of the valley and into the ruffled salt waters of the estuary.
Her uncle’s colourful workshop and the spartan furnishings of her parents’ house were worlds apart. But connecting them was the flowing textile of the river. The silver surface, the movement and the weave of the water through dark and light. [...] The river was the great designer, creating a pattern in a few seconds and then throwing it away as its waters rubbed the idea out; then moving effortlessly on to the next reflection.
There is personality in every garment. Clothing is loquacious. It cannot help but give away the nature and intent of the person who wears it. Some clothing wishes to fit in and some wishes to stand out. Clothing can be confident and determined, it can be hesitant or unreliable, it can be threatening, or it can be warm and supportive.
Avenues in Combination
Like every Glanside technique, Avenues is strongest in company. A few natural pairings:
- Facets – once an avenue arrives at a key incident, cut that incident into facets to give the moment depth as well as reach.
- Redefinitions – redefining the key word of your central idea is one of the surest ways to discover fresh turnings to walk.
- Cascades – when a single avenue proves rich enough to carry more weight, cascade it outward into a fully developed sequence.
- The Telling Detail – furnish each avenue’s draft with one precise, chosen detail rather than general description, so the exploration stays concrete.