Icon by Peg Kerr Ihinger
It’s Open Mike day again, and we now have an icon to represent it! And it’s also the vernal equinox (OK, a few hours after the actual equal point, which happened before midnight, so technically the equinox was yesterday, but close enough). Talk amongst yourselves while I try frantically to catch up on…everything.
I made a massive amount of progress (22K words) on a new project over Spring Break, and while it’s got a whole lot of first-draft problems, it’s cleared up a lot of the questions and problems I’ve had for my actual WIP, so I’m very pleased.
(Of course, Spring Break is over now so I have to return to Real Life, which means I have less obviously-open time to write…)
I’m in the throes of “Let’s Do Revision Again!” At least I have a complete draft, now marked up with highlighting and notes about Stuff I Might Want To Change. Also a handful of notes “Do a special revision pass to fix or make consistent some particular recurring bit.”
And of course everything takes twice as long as I hope. Or longer.
I’m trying to figure out a subplot for the webcomic script I’m working on. The central plot is the emotional one – the MC navigating her relationship with her birth mother and finding a different kind of family with her two closest friends – but I realized recently that I need a plotline focused on her job as well. The whole concept of the comic is telling the stories of people who work behind the scenes at a complex where representatives of various magical races come to do business, so their jobs need to feature as more than just set dressing.
Thus, I’m pondering what kind of relatively low-stakes problems would best let a competent clerk at that complex display her abilities…
What kind of “business” do the various races do? What, exactly, is the main character’s job–does she specialize in helping/dealing with one of the magical races (or with a specific problem), or is she like a receptionist who sends people to the department/specialist that covers their race or particular needs? Does she like her job, hate it, or just put up with it? Who’s her boss? Do they get along? Are they old management or a newbie, open to winging it or insistent on rules? Who makes the rules–and how often does the CEO/corporate headquarters come up with something new that doesn’t make sense? How long has she been in her current position/department (newbies often get assigned the jobs nobody else wants)? You don’t seem to want to hand her something where her job would be at stake, since the main plot is the relationship one, so any sort of slightly unusual task/request (whether from her boss, corporate HQ, or a customer) that’s a little outside the norm would probably do. Bonus points if it causes comic interactions with other departments, or a chain reaction of minor fixes that end up with a desirable effect.
Ooh, good things to think about! I don’t have answers for all of these yet, but:
– The business is mainly intercultural politics and trade negotiations.
– She’s a clerk in one of several offices that handles paperwork for the complex as a whole (forms, contracts, etc.). A wide variety of things would be likely to show up on her desk.
– She likes her job and has only been there a month or so.
– Her immediate boss (the head clerk of the office where she works) is brusque but supportive. The official in charge of the whole complex is actually the aforementioned birth mother, whom she would very much like to impress.
I turn out to have a lot to say about this, so I’m going to do it in next week’s post, if that’s alright with you.
Of course!
I described a story here a while back about a wise mentor and reluctant hero, which our hostess very kindly discussed in a post. I decided that I needed to make the wise mentor a viewpoint character and my backbrain promptly went into seclusion.
It has finally emerged from seclusion and I’m starting the rewrite. Finally making some progress.
Oh, good, I’m glad that didn’t get you stuck forever.
I’m writing merrily along, because I find the characters and their situation quite interesting, but I’m also wondering: where does it END?
They finally have a plan to secure their long-term survival. But it’s a long-term plan. What’s the dramatic point at which we can feel they’ve done enough, they’ve put that plan into action and can reasonably expect success? I have no idea, to be honest.
Well, presumably it is after the playing-out of the plot thread resulting from their former master saying “I’m willing to ally with you but only if you can defend yourselves adequately. I’ll plan to put you to the test next time I’m in-system: you’d best be ready.” I could probably write that now. Is it the end, though? Former master says, “Okay, you’ve shown yourself capable of holding up your end of the deal: let’s do it” and we stop there? Hmm. That doesn’t feel right. But if not there, where?
50K words in computer files, probably 5K in my portable notebook, which has turned out to be the productive approach to this one. When we have long boring work meetings and everyone thinks I’m assiduously taking notes, well….
The obvious plot twist here (obvious to me, anyway) is that former master shows up to apply test, a complication ensues (maybe an attack by one of the former master’s enemies) and the protagonists face a much stiffer challenge than anyone expected. (Maybe they end up having to rescue their former master.)
Afterwards, the protagonists are confident that they’re good for the long term, having survived a worst-case-scenario/proof-test.
But it is obvious to me, so my second thought would be to come up with some other solution to the problem of finding a good ending point.
This is why the accepted wisdom is to come up with ten to twenty possible plot twists, and pick on from the latter half of the list (because most writers come up with the obvious one first).
Having a long-term plan is good; it gives you the option of ending with this book or going on into a sequel or series. The ending depends on two things–what you want to do, and what the main short term plot is for this book. If this book is “characters finally come up with a long-term plan,” then you probably have a series on your hands and this is stage 1 of the plot arc. If this book is “characters build a community/beat off invaders or monsters/make a crucial discovery” and in the process also figure out a long-term survival plan, then you can end with solving this main plot (and you still have the option of going farther if you want).
I think that the fundamental story is Kay going from being a pawn to being a player. She spends the first part of the story following increasingly distressing orders from human agents, which ends in her being captured by alien bugs. She spends the second part following orders from her alien-bug master and building her colony/community. And then the third part would be her insisting that she is a player in alien-bug politics and deserves a seat at that table –which will potentially circle around to put her in conflict with the human military that was coercing her in part 1. When she has demonstrated that she is in fact a player, I think that’s an ending.
Who she has to demonstrate it to, that’s not totally clear to me. I have a scene where she talks to a telepath in the human military, maybe they begin a negotiation process to avert war; but I’ve never been sure that scene belongs in this story. It may be that she mainly needs to demonstrate it to her former master, to her most dangerous on-world neighbor, and then to one of the great planetary intelligences (world-scale bug colonies), because if she can’t stand up to one of those she can’t hope to stay in the game once her value is known. If the human-telepath scene is in there at all, maybe it’s at the end, like the epilog of Cherryh’s _Cuckoo’s Egg_.
I like middles. I could write middle all day, and have been merrily writing more and more middle since October. Endings? Endings are hard.
Endings are what drove me to outlines. Remember that more and more middle may be vacuuming the cat.
Maybe think about arcs. There are fantastic series that could feel like a neverending middle because resolving the initial quest is a very very long way away, but they’re really divided up into arcs, chunks of story which don’t forget the main quest but cover a discrete chunk of middle, such as a training arc or a first mission arc, etc.