It’s been six weeks, so time for another open mic! Talk amongst yourselves about whatever interests you. (For the record, I’m not inclined to be strict about conversations wandering off-topic and into the writing weeds when it comes to regular weekly posts, either.)
I’m back to my usual worrying and head-banging (against wall, against desk…) about plot.
Some random thoughts:
A plot-skeleton starts at the tail and ends with the skull – because the start of a story can often use a stinger, while the end of a story is the part that needs bite.
Start at the end and work backwards; somehow come up with at least the nose of the plot skeleton and work from there.
A “Mission Statement” for each story, a la Roy Clark
Non-traditional plots.
Minimal or weak plots, with the story being carried by the Cool Bits.
Maybe borrow and pervert the ‘plots’ of porn stories?
Micro-plotting / choreography at the chapter, scene, and sub-scene level. How do I do this?
A plot-skeleton starts at the tail and ends with the skull – because the start of a story can often use a stinger, while the end of a story is the part that needs bite.
I just wanted to admire that again.
Minimal or weak plots, with the story being carried by the Cool Bits.
I think you just described every story I’ve ever written. 😉
Micro-plotting / choreography at the chapter, scene, and sub-scene level. How do I do this?
If you get an answer to this, I want to hear it.
For all that I can analyze plots, and even work them out in advance (I almost never do, but I can), mostly my subconscious does the work, and my conscious mind just makes an occasional course correction.
That said, on the macro level, consider taking something like Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey) and adapting it to whatever story you want to tell.
Or look at the overall plot of some story you like, and take the structure and, again, adapt it.
On the micro level, what kind of pacing are you looking for? Slow dread means you want a lot of description and dialog, with only occasional action scenes. Something faster-paced will have more action, but you’ll want to leaven it with characterization and world-building (if sf/fantasy, anyway).
Something atmospheric will need a lot of description baked into it, whatever else might happen in the scene.
Alternatively, ask yourself what readers would expect to happen next. Then either give it to them, or change it up.
Hope this helps…
I’m trying to work on a plot skeleton because I have a plot that needs a mystery, which I find I can’t just pants through.
Since the last open mic, I’ve launched the webcomic I’ve been working on for the past couple years! It’s called The Shifting City, and it can be found here: http://theshiftingcity.the-comic.org/ It updates weekly on Wednesdays.
This is the official description:
Rosana, Sage, Corbin, and Elidor share the complicated task of mapping a city where the streets continually shift position of their own accord. The friends are used to encountering the unexpected, but their latest assignment may involve more adventure than they bargained for…
Congratulations!
Thanks!
That six weeks went by quick. Here’s some background before I get into the particulars.
If you go to some cities in the northern part of South America, you will see walls everywhere. Instead of being surrounded by an open lawn or a neat picket fence, the houses are surrounded by 8 to 10-foot concrete walls, frequently topped with ceramic tile. If you go into the business section, the walls continue, and they tend to be topped with barbed wire, broken glass, or razor blades. The wall is sometimes part of a storefront (with barred windows and door). The roofs tend be rather flat. (Roofs are slanted so snow will slide off. Tropical area, no snow, no slant.)
This story is set in a secondary world. Sometime before the story started, disaster struck and the sea rushed in and swallowed a coastal city. The city is in ruins now, but, depending on the tide, you can sometimes see the tops of the walls and the buildings.
Our hero is a teenage boy with a hoverboard. He glides around on the walls and buildings looking for salvage. (The hoverboard doesn’t work very well on water.) When he finds something, he marks it with a beacon and then marks a path through the canals (former streets) so the salvage boat can come and pick up the salvage.
In my original plot, the village on the coast was suffering from hunger because supplies had to be ferried by rowboat through the ruined city. Our hero found a gap in the city that allowed a freighter to bring the food to the shore. When I ran it by some people who know about shorelines and freighters, they said it was completely implausible and there was no way a freighter could fit through a gap like that.
So, now I’m back to the drawing board. What can the hero do to save the day?
I would kind of like some sort of character arc where he develops, but I have no idea what he would develop into.
As a side note, roofs are also sloped for rain. Flat roofs usually happen in areas with little to no precipitation (desert, not tropics), otherwise you get puddles and puddles lead to leaks/mold/mosquito colonies/etc.
(Mostly) sunken city on the coast. I’m assuming this was a matter of land sinkage as opposed to tsunami? Is the village part of the city or is it back farther on drier land? What’s behind it?
Does the hero look for salvage for the cool stuff he finds? Is he in it for the money? Is salvage worth much money?
He could find someone/thing trapped in the ruins, rescue them, and help them get back to where they want/need to go. Antagonists could range from people hunting them to landscape problems to superstitious/uncooperative villagers, etc. He could also find something that was better left not found….
I don’t know what he actually can do – you can design both the challenge AND his actions freely.
A few thoughts:
– if he’s the hoverboard guy, the hoverboard should feature in the solution – it should be something only he can do/see/find.
– both problem and solution have to happen now; they must be anchored in time. Anyone could have mapped the streets of the city to find a passage for a bigger boat, and in the meantime, why don’t they just build more boats or row more often? You can build a raft even if you’re not a boat builder, and tow it. So something happened recently (maybe a trade route got cut off?) and now the need is urgent, and there wasn’t time for a better solution.
What he’ll develop into: right now he sounds like a guy who takes a lot of risks, somewhat carefree. Will he learn to pick his battles better?
The only alternative is that the hoverboard is holding him back and he has to give it up to achieve what the story needs. Which does strike me as an implausible plot twist.
If he’s an ‘all problems look like a nail’ kind of guy, that might be what is needed. And maybe what he needs to do is teach someone else to use the hoverboard so he can concentrate on something where his talents are also needed. Which doesn’t mean that hoverbarding was childish/frivolous, especially if he can take the lessons learnt and apply them to something else. Maybe he can learn to make hoverboards, so more people can use them simultaneously or adjust them so they work at a greater water depth or something.
What would it take to be able to get a freighter through?
Is there any way the hero can cause that to happen (or at least find the macguffin that makes it possible)?
I severely underestimated the size of a freighter. A freighter is big enough to carry dozens of containers (the big boxes that are pulled by semi-trucks). If the water is shallow enough to show 10-foot walls, it is WAY too shallow for a freighter.
Hmm. Could there be a deep chasm through the city, perhaps that opened up as part of whatever disaster caused the flooding? And the hero finds that, or figures out that it’s freighter-depth.
Alternatively, could there have been something all along that was making the rowboats a challenge — maybe sea monsters that destroy a certain percentage of the rowboats, so the village has been getting barely enough supplies? And the hero finds/figures out a way to scare off the sea monsters. Or maybe they’re not monsters; the hero discovers that they’re sentient underwater dwellers who’ve been attacking the rowboats because they need the supplies, too. His character arc could be him learning to negotiate the villagers and the underwater-dwellers working together — becoming a diplomat instead of the water equivalent of a skate-punk.
Your ruined/drowned city sounds really interesting. So does hoverboard guy.
There are two ways to go: a character-focused story or a plot-focused story. Your protagonist either needs a dream/want/goal (winning the hoverboard championship, learning to fix spaceships, getting cancer meds for his ailing grandmother) that he actively wants to pursue, or else something has to happen that threatens what little he and/or the town still has (i.e., something that upsets the status quo – an earthquake or tidal wave that totally submerges the salvage they depend on; the appearance of a large salvage company that’s going to use giant robots and drills to power through the sunken city in a couple of weeks, leaving nothing for the town; lawyers who are suing the people salvaging the ruins; archaeologists who want the ruins preserved and the salvagers arrested for looting; the discovery of an unexpectedly valuable item that attracts lawyers, archaeologists, and giant corporations; the announcement of a hoverboard tournament with a giant grand prize).
In other words, you need to provide your protagonist with either an opportunity that will take a bunch of work to get to, or a threat to something he values (his town, his grandmother, his hoverboard) that he will have to overcome. Famine seems unlikely, as the original city had to get food from somewhere, and sinking it wouldn’t cut off land-based supply routes (and the sea-based ones still seem to be working to some degree). Plus, your brief description makes it sound as if the current village is smaller than the original city.
Some alternative possiblities: Your hero’s “village” is actually an archaeological expedition investigating the ruined city (so they haven’t been there long, there are no long-established supply routes, and they do need outside supplies). Their backers expect some dramatic/valuable discovery, and are running out of patience. Our Hero can either find some valuable item/information, or find a way to get alternate backing.
The village has been salvaging the sunken city for generations, and useful stuff is running out. Our Hero figures out how to make/trade for stuff they need.
Our Hero is badly injured trying to salvage something on the hoverboard and has to find a new way of making a living.
Actual archaeologists/treasure hunters show up, searching for some valuable item they are sure is somewhere in the ruins. They disrupt the villagers’ salvage efforts, and then get convinced that their objective is hidden in town somewhere and decide to attack to get hold of it. Our Hero warns the town and helps sabotage the invaders.
Archaeologists/treasure hunters show up and hire Our Hero to help them find something in the sunken city. The other villagers don’t like this, as they think it is infringing on their salvage and/or losing them Our Hero’s services. Eventually, this leads to Our Hero having to make a choice: stay and live his status quo life, or leave with the newcomers.
Our Hero finds something new and unusual in the ruined city – a new fish/mollusk/plant that’s adapted to this environment, and that turns out to have some useful/valuable properties (as an ingredient in life-extension drugs, as a recreational drug, as an immune booster, as a cheap substitude for some super-expensive man-made substance).
Awesome! Thank you!
sigh
Still hoping to kick a book out the door this summer. We’ll see. It’s not like there’s anything wrong for me except the general state of the world.
On another forum, I am having another round of the discussion about How To Do Plot where the other person is being very kind and generous and really trying, and is answering every question but the one I’m asking.
I really need a better way to ask it.
My current version is: I need a better way to generate ideas for actions/events that will fit the parameters I know the story needs.
Well, I’m sure I can be very kind and not give you the answer you need either. :}
Would a list of functional questions (that’s the best I can call it) help? I.e., “Should I do a scene focused on characterization?” or “focused on advancing the plot?”
Would a list of story-focused questions help, i.e., “What would make the plot go sideways here?” or “What would disconcert my viewpoint character most?”
Would a list of genre-oriented questions help, i.e., “Should I work some world-building into this scene?” or “Should I put in a few words about how magic works?”
They probably won’t help, but it’s what I got.
None of the above. But thank you kindly for trying!
What I’m looking for is more like: Joe goes to the store to buy milk, and [Thing happens] that sucks him into a plot to overthrow the Broccoli Growers Association of America. What is Thing?
(And by Thing I don’t mean character goal or pacing shift or any “high level” stuff, but an actual practical event that would achieve this result.)
Note that in this case I’m not asking for suggestions for Joe’s story; I’m looking for tools that will help me come up with my own Things, and future sticking points like it. Because I get stuck like this A Lot.
Answering that is both difficult and valuable, so let’s hope our hostess weighs in with an entire entry sometime!
I think the best I can do here is:
– If you’ve got a theme going, an incident that fits will help. I.e., if you’ve got “life is precious” underpinning your story, having the protagonist, oh, be looking for something on her phone and see an old photo of someone they’ve lost. “I’ve got to stop messing around buying milk and go overthrow those growers like I promised!”
– If you’re writing in a genre, like a mystery, a genre element, like discovering or being reminded of a clue will work. “Is that handwriting–? No, it just looks like that dubious document.”
– If the character has some established backstory, something related to that can work.
– If all else fails, I do an incident and invent some backstory, so it’s not just a coincidence. I.e., Joe sees the frozen broccoli, and comments to himself on being allergic. Someone in the next aisle looks up, stares at Joe, and gets out her phone. He’s allergic because his mom was one of the people who’d been given the Macguffin Serum years ago, and its effects, including the broccoli allergy, are passed on to progeny.
I hope that helps. Don’t worry, when you tell me it doesn’t, I won’t try again. 🙂
Oh no, please do keep trying if you feel so inclined! I really do appreciate the effort.
…even if, yes, that’s still not quite it.
a genre element, like discovering or being reminded of a clue will work. “Is that handwriting–? No, it just looks like that dubious document.”
I need a way to prompt my brain to supply things like the document and the handwriting. As it stands, I go “I need a clue. I wonder what the clue could be?” and then stare at the walls for the next three hours (or days, or years).
I don’t have this problem with character or setting or anything else. Just plot-incidents and plot-items.
(I kind of love the Macguffin Serum, btw. It’s not at all what I would have in mind for this story if it was a real story, but I’m wildly impressed by your spinning that up out of nothing.)
Spinning stuff up out of nothing is one of my strengths. Also weaknesses; I have to keep my imagination under control. (Parallel worlds stories have the potential for anything from anywhere, but story coherence says no.)
Would it help if, every time you had something like this to do, you started brainstorming lists of things that could trigger an incident (documents, handwriting, a lost shoe, an empty prescription bottle…) and save them for the future?
A dozen or so such lists might help give you ideas?
A dozen or so such lists might help give you ideas?
It certainly wouldn’t hurt to set such lists aside for future use, and I think I will try doing that, the same way I set aside character names that I don’t end up using. However, the Things for any given story tend to be very specific to that story, so I’m not sure how effective Thing-recycling will be.
I think because I don’t know what Thing is, people assume that the field is wide open. But often my brain has very solid parameters for Thing, some of which have to do with other parts of the story and some of which are set in my subconscious, which I assume has its reasons.
As an insight into how my brain works, if I were really going to write Joe and the BGAA: Joe takes a packet of frozen brocolli out of the freezer case. There is an object between that packet and the one behind it. The object is small, dark, and probably non-porous. It could be a USB drive, but I don’t think it is. (Also, that would just move the problem, because then I’d have to figure out what’s on the drive.) There is something about the object which makes Joes *not* just turn it in to lost-and-found. There is another character lurking nearby; she(?) has something to do with the BGAA, but I don’t know which side she’s on.
All that is integral to the story, and my brain ain’t letting go of it. The lurking character isn’t any more than that right now, but she will be as soon as I’m ready to use her. Which I will be as soon as I know what the object is.
This is very typical of the kind of parameters my brain has for Thing, whether Thing is an object or an event/action. You’d think if I know that much about Thing, I’d be able to figure out what it is, but if my back-brain knows, it’s not telling me.
@LizV
This sounds a bit like your backbrain wants you to be more of a pantser and you would prefer to plan.
I don’t know if this will help, but if it were me, I’d probably go with what I know and try to jar things loose. It might help to think of that as in-the-moment micro-planning, as if you have just entered a video game world and are trying to find the interactions that will continue the story.
I’d start with writing as much of the scene as I can (maybe save a copy at this point). Look for possibly relevant/interesting details. Ask why they seem to be relevant (the usual answers are item/person is unusual/out of place, item/person is familiar, item/person is interacting/trying to interact with character). Ask what character(s) is/are likely to do about item(s) (in what way are they going to interact? ignore/observe/handle). Note, sometimes the backbrain says the details you want to know aren’t important now, just keep moving.
If nothing springs to mind, start with adding as much detail as possible to the relevant details to see if that pries more info out of the backbrain. Continue on with more detail in the rest of the scene to see if that helps. If nothing still springs to mind, you may have what the scene needs at the moment. Time needs to pass, thee character needs to leave, or something else may need to be added/changed with scene (new characters/items/alarms/ninjas).
If desperate, Choose Your Own Adventure at this point and write out results of multiple possible branches of interaction to see if any of them move you forward better.
For the hypothetical example:
Freezer object is obviously out of place. It may look vaguely familiar. It may have enough frost on it to make it unrecognizable. What it is probably isn’t important at this instant. Character can ignore it or pick it up (intending to look at it closer, keep it, or turn it over to the store manager. The reason they pick it up also might not be important at the moment if that interaction triggers something else happening.)
Woman may have caught character’s attention because she’s looking at him, because she looks odd/familiar/pretty. Character can (try to) interact with her or continue on with what they were doing.
Character may have caught woman’s attention because he noticed/interacted with object or because he (also) noticed woman. This seems to be setting him up for either mistaken identity or wrong place/wrong time (or both)
etc. etc.
Most importantly: Don’t panic. Have faith there is a pathway through the story that your backbrain wants; you can fix it up to look nice later ^_^;
Uh, no, I’m fine with just winging it. In fact, I’m not sure I can approach a story any other way. But I still need to come up with Things; the only difference between pantsing or planning is when that gets done.
Obviously, “What is Thing?” is the wrong question for you, since it results in staring at the wall instead of words-on-page.
If your main character doesn’t have any obvious reason to wake up in the morning and go “I know! I’ll see if somebody wants to help me overthrow the BGAA!”, then something else is going to have to get him involved. The first place to look is what other characters/groups are doing that would affect your main character directly.
So instead of looking at what happens to Joe, try looking at what the BGAA and the plotters are each doing to advance their side of things. If, for instance, the plotters are leaving leaflets at all the grocery stores in an attempt to recruit, Joe can pick one up. If both sides are leaving promotional leaflets, he can pick one of each. If one side or the other is picketing the store in an attempt to further their ends, Joe will certainly run into them. If the plotters are sabotaging the BGAA broccoli, Joe could catch one of them at it (ditto if the BGAA is sabotaging locally grown broccoli to promote their own products). Or perhaps he innocently buys broccoli seeds, and is then visited by BGAA thugs warning him that if he wants to grow broccoli in his backyard, he’d better join their organization.
If what you are staring at isn’t generating any ideas, try staring at something else.
That’s very logical, and it sounds like it should be a good approach, but I think it just moves the problem? And makes it bigger, because now I have to come up with more Things for more characters, some of whom I haven’t met yet.
(I swear, I’m really not trying to be difficult. But I’ve been trying to think about the story that way for days now, and it’s making my brain feel like it’s in a vice.)
My initial thought would be to try brainstorming or mind mapping. Write down a list of possible things that Joe might encounter, from an Alien Assassination, to Nut Milk being on special, to a Xylophone lying in a Zebra crossing on the way to the store. For each one, invent quick, one-sentence it-doesn’t-have-to-make-any-sense plots, not necessarily connected to the Broccoli Growers. Then see if any of them strike you as being worth working out further.
Maybe a better way to ask (at least part of) my question would be “I need more tools for brainstorming.” I don’t dispute the usefulness of it, but I find making that sort of semi-random list extremely difficult.
(replying here because I’ve run out of nesting)
Firstly, I’m a person who does not have a lot of ideas naturally. Thankfully, I only need one idea per problem. Secondly, for me the ‘million words of crap’ theory was spot on in one respect: after I’d written a million words, I started having better ideas. Third, I found much to my surprise that learning to make art has led to having more visual ideas (both in the sense of ‘more visuals’ and ‘ideas with the stronger visual element).
All of this adds up to ‘don’t get too frustrated, it will get better.’
In the meantime, if I have no idea, I follow my characters around. A lot of this might need to be cut in the next draft, but Joe goes into the supermarket. What does he see? What advertising displays are out? Who are the other shoppers, and is there something odd about them?
That’s how I get to the object you describe below, but once I have it, I repeat the thing: what does Joe do with it? However Joe describes it, this is my plot element (unless I realise that he was mistaken because I now know so much more about it).
But that’s all I have, I have nothing better, I just take it from there.
Ask your characters what they want, then find the best way to thwart their getting it.
Thank you for the suggestions, all! I appreciate the discussion!
Thinking about hoverboard guy and what can be found in or done with a mostly submerged city.
How long ago was the city drowned, and how cataclysmic was it?
Was it part of a much larger catastrophy? How large?
This impacts the kinds of things that might be going on, and I see at least three different options for this starting point for your story-world.
1) Relatively small and local flooding, either recent or long ago.
A local dike or narrow row of dunes breaking through during a stormy springtide or hurricane can drown a town while sparing some higher elevated areas and leaving many survivors who know what was where, so salvage would proceed quickly (the history of the Netherlands contains several such occurrences, the most recent large one in Zeeland in 1953, but historical floods like Genemuiden are remembered in songs and landscape features).
If the loss of the town is fairly recent, lots of stuff could be still around to be found – the big bronze church bells might be the costliest item to salvage from a drowned village, but it might also be something small and valuable hidden in a hole in a house or shop wall, not picked up by the owner because he was one of those who died. Perhaps the old headman stole the government or traders’ money meant for the villagers and hid it, so finding it means they can now buy more food?
Or some of the animals escaped from the zoo during the catastrophe, that hoverboard-boy had befriended before the city drowned – more suitable for an MG story. Maybe a dolphin that had learned some basic communication from the trainers at the maritime park, and can now help find a safe channel for the bigger boats?
If it was long ago, there might be songs or local lore about something precious that was lost when the town drowned, and he might find some clues leading to the “treasure”.
2) Larger catastrophe, recent, or several years ago up to several decades ago. Or even centuries, if you’re talking about a near Chixculub (sp?) size event.
A tsunami or typhoon that overwhelmed the entire coast would cause more death and wider devastation, with less local memory left as well as destroying a lot of the landmarks and fixtures by which salvagers with memories of the original town could work, and it could move even big things far from their origin. So no quick and comprehensive salvage right after the event; the area might even have been abandoned for some time.
So that would mean that even long after some interesting stuff could be found unexpectedly.
If food is scarce, maybe something like a feedstore or seed vault with sealed casks of good seed grain?
Or if you want to go dark, something dangerous like the Fukushima reactor?
3) Really long ago, either a sudden catastrophy or a gradual decline.
The coastline could have changed, and it could be lost through gradual erosion; or when a rivermouth silts up and moves and the people move away. I’m thinking of the Egyptian harbor town from antiquity that got covered up by desert sands and then drowned when the coastline changed, and was rediscovered several years ago, at an unexpected distance from the present river.
That could mean it was lost so long ago that no-one presently remembers anything about it exactly, and it’s primarily interesting for archaeologists and historians. That means salvaging for artifacts and inscriptions. That could lead to the discovery of a priceless “Rosetta stone” inscription, that needs to be saved before it’s blasted to smithereens when the channel for the freighter gets cleared. Or a unique old gold artifact, that pirates want to steal and melt down.
Just a few of the directions my mind skitters off to, when there aren’t many limiting parameters set…
It’s a good thing I’m not a writer, I’d never get anywhere with this.
Thanks for the ideas. My mind doesn’t skitter very well.
You’re welcome. At least not skittering is probably useful for sticking with the story you want to tell, instead of getting lost among dozens of irrelevant fragments!
Well, my problem with getting ideas is that I’m 78 and slowing down.
Also that I no longer have access to the libraries at the University of California at Berkeley. Even before the quarantine, I now live in Vallejo and would have to walk a couple blocks to the bus station, take a bus to the transfer station, take another bus to the nearest BART station, BART to Berkeley, and then walk about half a mile to the Library complex. Which I can’t do.
Which means that I have nothing but Google to depend on for factual information … and Google is better than nothing, but it can’t compete with walking through the stacks, eyeing the titles and picking out something that looks interesting, rinse and repeat.
Also, I finally got up the gumption to write to my agent, and he said he was swamped with Actual Work, but he read the first couple chapters of _The Golden Road_ and found them rather slow-moving until the heroes actually set out to find Theodoric.
So rather than trying to tinker with that now, I’m trying to liven up the early chapters of the current WIP, still untitled, in which Virgil is saved by magic from dying of heatstroke in 19 BCE, decides to study magic as an escape from polishing the Aeneid, and flees to Alexandria. He has encountered one of the secondary bad guys already, but he doesn’t know it yet. And I am having to invent the layout of the Library of Alexandria.
But one of his companions has just observed the secondary bad guy doing something suspicious, and I can work with that for a while.
So, I’ve got a character who wants to get a job as a Monster Hunter/ Magical policewoman (The setting for this story is similar to Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter books, or Brandon Mull’s Fablehaven, where the time is similar to now, but magic is a thing, and unlike their stuff, commonly known about.) What I’m wondering is how to give my character the kick to go from dreaming to doing, and what difficulties she might hit along the way.
Some plot tools I’ve got include: a cursed sword (family heirloom), a Fairy princess who owns a bookshop, and (un)helpful family members.
Any suggestions for getting the story moving?
How dramatic do you want to be? You can upend her life (she loses her job, her parents kick her out, she breaks up with her boyfriend/girlfriend/theyfriend, or you can have a smaller transition – she moves into a flat near the bookshop and starts hanging out there, she’s taking a part-time job at the bookshop, she’s graduating and needs a job. She can be pushed into this by circumstances, or she can take the step – maybe it’s a New Year’s or birthday resolution, maybe it’s a drunken dare.
Does this character need to be pushed, and who will do the pushing? Is there a supernatural element to it? A familiar? A case she’s stumbling into or reading about?