Lately, I’ve been getting anxious queries from a lot of close friends, who know a) exactly when my book deadline is, b) just how many other desperately important things I have going on to distract me from writing, and c) how many plot threads I still have to wrap up. “How is the book going?” they ask. “You do know what happens next, don’t you?”
Well, not exactly. I have a pretty good notion of what’s going on – what secrets they still have to uncover, what problems are about to materialize, what old decisions are going to come back to bite them. I can list three or four scenes that I’m pretty sure I’m going to need. Trouble is, a fair number of those scenes are still at the “There is a big fight and somebody might get killed, but maybe not” stage.
Yet the book is currently buzzing along nicely, with things dropping into place one after another. How is this possible?
It’s possible because I don’t have to know what happens next, not really … and certainly not in detail. All I really need to know is what each of the characters intends to do next. With as many characters as I have, some of those plans are bound to be incompatible, meaning that as soon as A and B both try to make time with C, somebody is going to be disappointed.
In the event that the characters have plans that clearly don’t conflict – such as “Hey, everybody! It’s time to head farther west! Pack up and let’s get moving!” – I have Murphy to fall back on. “Anything that can go wrong, will” as much and as often as is necessary. Bad luck, in fiction, is always much more believable than good luck. When they start marching west and they break an axle two days out, the reader isn’t going to blink twice.
Most often, though, the reason things go wrong is that whatever plans the characters have made, there’s something they haven’t taken into consideration. Usually, it’s because they don’t have enough information, but sometimes it’s that they just didn’t think of it, or didn’t expect whatever-it-is to be as bad as it turned out to be (see “Bad Luck,” above…). One does have to be careful with those last two, though; if the characters “just didn’t think” of some really obvious possibility, they usually look stupid or negligent, which is usually undesirable.
Being overly optimistic can work, if it’s an established character trait, but taken to extremes, this, too, can make the character look stupid. It depends on how far out-of-the-ordinary the Bad Luck is. A character who doesn’t take an umbrella because he doesn’t anticipate rain on a cloudy April day looks a bit stupid; a character who runs indoors when the thunderstorm blows up, instead of heading for the storm cellar, can be forgiven for not anticipating the twister that picks up the whole house and carries it off to Oz.
So I may not know exactly “what happens next,” but I know that A is sulking around camp, not expecting anyone to notice. Obviously (to me), what goes wrong is that B does notice, and confronts A, so A has to do a lot of explaining that wasn’t in his plan. B then drags A off to talk to C and D, figuring that this will solve A’s problem and get him out of his sulk. Unfortunately for B, that goes wrong, too – C and D aren’t willing to cooperate. So A is worse off than when the whole thing started…and B now has to worry about A, as well as whatever other things were already on deck for B, and C and D have a bunch of stuff to react to and make new plans about. Which I can then have more things go wrong with.
And while the characters are spiraling deeper into the mess, I, the author, am chortling because in the course of all these supposedly-unproductive discussions, a lot of information came out that I can see will be useful, if not critical, when I get to the grand finale; also, in about three more paragraphs, A, B, and C are going to develop a tentative alliance which will move the plot forward in exactly the direction I want…at least, until something goes wrong with my plans.
Murphy is a writer’s best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he’ll steal the silver.
I came to terms with my way of just writing, not outlining at all when I realised that I didn’t have to find ‘the’ story. All I need is _a_ story: something with increasing challenges for the protagonists, with beginning, middle, end… and if necessary, I can tweak the beginning to point at the ending.
And I can do that without an outline, because my backbrain is *really* clever in that respect. The middle bits are ‘eyes closed and into the breach’ for me – even *I* don’t always trust myself that the story will make sense – but with two exceptions, it’s worked out well.
One was the story i wrote out of order which turned out to not have a plot after all. Kind of embarassing to realise that when you stare at 120K of fragments.I got to 30K in the rewrite, realised the problem, and stuffed it back into the trunk.
The other is a coming-of-age story that works for me but which is lacking an outside threat. Everybody we see acting and chasing goals in that book is connected to the protagonist, and while it’s important to *him* that he should act with integrity and be happy, the world in general will not take much notice, and that’s the sort of thing that *would* have become much clearer if I’d outlined the story first, assuming I would have recognised it.
Ah, the Valley Full of Clouds — as Terry Pratchett puts it. You can’t see across the valley. Maybe here and there you can see bits. But you can see the nearest trees, and you head off for one. . . .
Me, I do that in the outlining stage. Blazing the path before I settle down to building the trail. But I am often without a notion of what happens next in the outline.
how long does it usually take you to finish up story? I mean it seems to be really thrilling to be a writer because you have all the controls in the story, but the hardest part is, creating an idea to get started. How do you do that?
@ AML
That is pretty much a variation on the standard question “How do you come up with your ideas?”
The standard answer is usually a Blank Look while the creative-type person tries to come up with something that will make you go away without feeling too insulted. (or just a really good zinger if he/she is cranky that day) The REAL answer is that all creative-type people (not just writers either) have brains that are easily distracted and will hop down a million rabbit trails the second you stop focusing intently on your ‘important task’.
Its never matter of “finding” or “creating” a good idea. Its usually more like going “enie-meny-miny-mo” and simply starting. Don’t worry about choosing a stupid idea, if this one is bad a dozen others will immediately start jumping up and down and demanding to be used instead.
Actually….. they will probably do that even if you chose a good idea. Practice will help you tell the difference.
green_knight – You don’t NEED an “outside threat,” necessarily; it’s just one of the things that’s common in SF. Your coming-of-age story sounds like it has a perfectly good emotional, character-focused plot. It still may not work, but lack of threat may not be why.
Mary – Outlines don’t work that way for me, because I keep finding that the route I picked LOOKS fine if you’re just drawing a line from tree to tree, but under the fog, the bridge is down and big sections of the path are washed out, so I have to take a comepletely different route across the valley than I’d planned. So to speak.
AML – What Esther said, mostly. Ideas are, for most writers, the easy part. It has a lot to do with how you look at the world. You see your cat sleeping in the sun and you think about all those jokes about cats ruling the world, and you write a story where that’s really true. You’re at the grocery store and you start wondering where elves and dwarves get their groceries. And then you take whatever idea you have and look at what can go wrong. I may have to do another post on this soon… 🙂
As for how long it takes, that depends on the story. A novel usually takes me somewhere between one and two years, depending on how stretchy it is for me and what else is going on in my life. Short stories vary over an even wider range, from a couple of days to months if I don’t have the details worked out clearly.
Esther – You’re right for many writers, but I have several professonal-writer friends who have terrible trouble coming up with their next idea, so it’s not quite as universal as you make it sound. Also, most of us don’t actually start off with too many ideas; it’s more like once you learn how to see them, you can’t turn them off. But somewhere along the way, you had to turn them on to begin with. Except for the people who started the process when they were three months old, and really don’t remember being any other way, of course.
@ AML and Esther –
I think another thing that’s important about coming up with ideas is maintaining curiosity. You need to engage with people and problems, math and science and news and politics and history, and something will spark. I think it is very possible to have a hard time coming up with ideas if you don’t have enough things in your head that let you look at ordinary things in different ways. Boredom and the inability to make your mental life less boring is death to creativity. Even if you devote yourself to one particular area or discipline you can still lose that engagement with ordinary things. Well-roundedness and insatiable curiosity are useful things for writers.
On ideas – it’s definitely not just writers. I still remember my husband’s colleague at an engineering research lab who said, “Ideas are easy. I have hundreds of them every day. Good ideas, those are harder.”
And, of course, the process of separating the Good Ideas from the rest of them is a combination of art and science.
I always struggle with including bad luck in my stories. I know that people believe it more, but in real life, when you open the fridge to pour milk in your coffee, nine times out of ten it’s going to be there, and only the tenth time will your husband have used the last of it on his cereal. In fiction, though, it seems you have to reverse it, or else people won’t believe it. Why is it that we find bad luck so much more understandable in our fiction, but we expect good luck without even thinking about it in our lives?
Louise – We expect good luck in fiction, too; that’s why nine out of ten books don’t bother to even mention getting the milk out of the fridge. Because we expect it to be there, and it is, so it isn’t unusual or worth mentioning. It’s when something is unexpected, unusual, or different that it gets interesting enough to mention, most of the time.
I’ve come to write the same way you do. I just finished outlining the novel I’m working on and wrote up scenes with one or two words of actions, feelings, discoveries to know that I will have covered all the important stuff.
I get bored and stop writing when I outline too much but I’ve spiced up my writing in that I can never go back and change the direction of the plot. If I include something earlier I have to come up now with a reason why that happened or explore the consequence. It’s forced me to be very creative and it keeps my muse/subconscious happy.
Pat, I don’t think it needs to be a threat (much less of the ‘Save the World’ variety, but apart from to a couple of people, the story does not seem to matter – if my protag fails, it’s just the same. And the longer I think about it the more I wonder whether the central quest really *is* in character for my protagonist, or whether it would work better if he had an external reason to act. Doesn’t have to be a Big Thinig, just bigger than Kinush himself.
Alex – Yup. Figuring out your process is the hard part; once you know how you work, it’s a lot easier to keep going. Until it changes on you for no good reason. 😉
green-knight – How much does what he’s doing matter to your protagonist? If it obviously matters a whole lot, then your difficulty may lie in getting your readers to care more about the protagonist, so that they’re interested in what he’s interested in. If he’s just sort of wandered into whatever he’s doing, then you may need to look more at his motivation. Which is what it sounds like – you’re talking here about giving him “outside” motivation, basically, which implies that you’re not totally satisfied with his reasons for doing what he does. What does the guy really WANT?
Pat
he wanted to pass his examns, be accepted by the in-crowd, and lead a life of idleness. He got the first at the beginning of the book, the second at the end of the first scene (and a bath in the sheep dip) and found that the third was not to his taste at all. In fact, he looked at the in-crowd, at himself, and did not like what he saw. So he tries to apologise to the people he hurt most. Which is… kind of important, but not enough of a plot driver.
green-knight – But it could be enough of a plot driver. Because what you have there is a classic man-learns-lesson story. At a guess, though, you made “not to his taste” more a matter of personal preference than a moral problem, so that “apologizing to people he hurt” is like “I’m sorry I pretended not to know you that time,” rather than “I’m sorry I told that lie that resulted in your wife believing it and leaving you” or “I’m sorry my slander cost you your job.” (All unintentionally, of course – unintended consequences.) Also, if there are serious consequences, then he’ll need to do more than leave the group and make an apology to make up for his mistakes.
To put it another way, you have a nice, strong “must” (the desire to be part of the in crowd and live in idleness), but your “cannot” is weak (the character’s ability to accept the things he has to do to stay part of the in-crowd/live in idleness). And “what he has to do” doesn’t necessarily need to be vile; it can be something as silly as always wearing blue – as long as the character hates it strongly and obviously enough that it sets up the choice.
Alternatively, you could make getting out of the in-crowd a lot harder than he expects – not necessarily getting them to drop him, but whatever revenge they decide to take on him for being the one to leave. One of the features of that sort of in-group is often that THEY make the decisions about who is in or out; having your main character take that on himself, even just for himself, might well provoke some rather nasty retaliation, perhaps in unexpected areas. Again, I’m not talking physical action here; I’m talking about the kind of gossip that can do in significant parts of a person’s reputation and life.
If this is the one I think it is, I really liked the bits of it I saw, and based just on that, I think it’d be worth doing something with. If you’re in the mood.
Pat – Yes, I totally expect my process to change without any warning and likely at the worst possible moment, but that’s part of being in a Murphy-world, no?
But both types of stories still require your characters to have desires of their own or you risk winding up with passive nonentities who just drift through the story having terrible things happen to them. Plus the difference between fiction and real life is that people have a lower threshold for boredom in fiction. Often you sometimes have to compress and simplify events in fiction so that all the interesting stuff happens at the same time.
I recently found your blog and have been working my way back through the past posts, and have found each one entertaining and informative. This post, however, has a slight error. Murphy’s Law is actually “If there are multiple ways to do something, and one of them will end in certain disaster, someone will do it.” The oft cited “Anything that can go wrong, will” is actually part of Finagle’s Law, which reads “Anything that can go wrong, will — at the worst possible moment.”