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So, I was talking to my dahlink on the phone last night, and told her about a conversation I had with a guy at Amanda's wedding, about writing and plot.
See, when I write stories, I write them in scenes. I write them in fits and starts (in two-thousand-word intervals, because this is usually happening during Nanowrimo) and the first bunch are usually me getting to know my protagonist and the other characters.
Eventually, I get to a point where the characters are crystalized enough that, when faced with a given situation, there are only so many reactions they could go with that would be consistent with their personalities.
Which works great.
If you already have a plot.
See, she was asking me about plot.
And I was talking about characters making choices.
Because, in the kind of character-driven, person-against-self (often), stories I write... characters making choices is the plot.
But I think what she was asking about was what are they making choices about??
Which brings me to some areas where I have problems with writing plot.
Thing one: While I'm getting much better at coming up with situations to stick my characters in, I still tend to gravitate towards getting my characters into a situation where they're stable and happy.
Which is great for *life*, but not so great for *plot*.
I think, to a certain extent, a writer needs to be able to tap into their inner 15-year-old-gossipy-drama-instigator, because fiction needs crisis points in order to function as entertainment, if nothing else.
This is part of why my Matrix Fic Ov Doom, "Live Truly, My Heart", stopped developing. I got to a point where Trin, Switch and Apoc were a happy little triad - with occasional communication problems, but by and large everything was fine - and Neo was still about six months to a year from showing up.
And - aside from not entirely knowing what to do once the AU got really, REALLY obvious (and I started writing past the first movie) - I didn't know how to get the story from where it was Right then to the beginning of the movie when I would be able to rely (more or less) on the Movie's original plot to provide the action parts.
Partly, I didn't want to upset the happiness that these characters had found, this little bit of peace and joy and security in a hellishly chaotic and dangerous world. But also... I wasn't sure what it would take to upset it.
You can only write so many action sequences before they start getting repetitive. Likewise, you can only work phrases like "days blur into weeks of sparring, rations and late shifts piloting the Neb along it circuitous course through the tunnels" before it becomes paifully, stupidly obvious that you're just trying to get the story to where you know what to do with it again.
So that was a problem.
(Granted, around the same time, I also started writing a lot more original fic, and then got bitten by the poetry bug. And then got divorced. So there *were* other circumstances involved. BUT. A big part of the problem was just not knowing what to do next).
Thing two: Which is related. I'm not bad at creating protagonists. But I'm a total wash when it comes to creating villains.
Oh, I've come up with some nasty bastards.
But that's not the same thing.
Creating an abusive ex-girlfriend or a really fucked up parent as a plot device isn't difficult. They don't need a lot of meat to them. Take your protagonist's fears/insecurities. Back-date them by X number of months/years/centuries. Create a character whose purpose is to exacerbate (or instill) those Issues in the protagonist. Apply simple motivation such as "this is the only way I know how to love" or "because I feel like it and you let me" or "why do you have to make life so *hard* for yourself" or whatever.
This is easy.
Creating a person who fills in the blank of the plot-creating phrase "protagonist vs ___________" is another thing all together. Creating a character(?) who has hir own motivations and reasons for doing things This Way, that don't boil down to the Mercedes Lakey formula of "I'm totally depraved because I'm totally depraved!! Mwahahahaha!"[1]
The YA story I tried to write for my first Nanowrimo -- and the George story that I got from a dream and would like to try my hand at writing now... They both involve a (mostly) human protagonist who gets caught in a big confrontation between warring supernatural factions, basically.
But I need to figure out how to make those warring factions relevant to the protagonist in a way that goes well beyond "they're all out to get her 'cause she's meddling" or something.
To use the George Story:
If George is a freaked out babygoth bi-grrrl who is, unexpectedly, finding Tribe in a club that, unbeknownst to her, is actually a meet-and-mingle place for the disenfranchised non-human contingent in the local area and the, uh, franchised(?) non-human contingent(s) are none too happy that the dregs of their society are mixing it up with the human folk (or each other, or both, as the case may be), I need to be able to sort out a bunch of stuff pertaining to why this would effect George, specifically, and/or why she *can't* (not *won't*, can't) just say "Screw this craziness. I'm outta here."
For example:
Are her very dear, but very fucked-up, friends actually pretty high-up members of some sort of supernatural-mosaic-freedom-fighting-league?
Was she in the right place at the wrong time and got zapped by some sort of Mystical Energy that means she's now a conduit for some sort of magical power that everybody wants to get ahold of and exploit, and helping her friends just happens to coincide with trying to save her own skin?
Is the location of the club important (e.g.: is it strategically placed over a convergence of ley-lines)? Or is it simply the clientel?
More to the point:
How do I make the "story-plot" of warring factions of supernatural people reflect and reinforce the themes in the "personal-plot" of George figuring out Who She Is and/or what she wants to do with her life or whatever (at age seventeen -- cause we all figure that out by then. :-P)
I like how Black_Holly does this with her characters. She seems to basically get them to stumble into the Otherworld by accident and/or folly, and then get embroiled in Something Big because they made a mistake and *have to* (not necessarily willingly) try to make ammends, and *then* they end up getting personally attached-to/involved-with the other people who are dealing with the same problem(s).
Were I to do that with this, what would I do?
I think that George -- Georgina Francis O'Rourke -- has been hearing about this half-mythical club (you know how it goes, you're fifteen and your friends are all playing Vampire: The Masquerade, and you can't actually tell whether they just play it A LOT, or if they actually think they're vampires. OR if they *are* vampires (or at least heavily into blood play), for that matter), and feels like it's the perfect place to go in order to escape the general alienation she feels at her small highschool where she's the Designated Dyke-Slut Outcast. So maybe the place has an all-ages night (or, more likely, she and her her one-and-only friend get ahold of some fake IDs and tell each others' parents they're sleeping over at each others' houses or something, and just go into the city from, like, Markham or Hoboken, or where-ever they happen to be living) and they get to experience the inside of this meeting place.
And maybe George has a much different experience than her friend (Merideth?) for a whole slew of reasons that could include (A) drug trips, (B) who they interact with, (C) what they were each expecting, etc.
Maybe Merideth gets hooked into some sort of a dangerous game with some of the other patrons who aren't the most scrupulous of people, ends up floating home with George, but is always a little messed up after that.
Maybe the people who screwed with Merideth's head are somehow related to The Villains.
Maybe George managed to avoid that situation by the pure luck of having struck up a conversation with another character who will prove to be an equally good friend and/or a love-interest, or whatever.
Maybe George gets suspended for the fourth time that year (for whatever reason -- acting out in class? Ignoring the dress-code? Someting?) and her mother throws up her hands, and the long and the short of it is that George ends up getting kicked out of her house with nowhere to go, so she goes down town, andd ends up holing up with The Other Character.
But, beyond that, I have no earthly notion what would happen.
I have no idea how to get George's own coming-of-age story to work AND get it to work *with* another story about some variation on the them of Good vs Evil.
So it's finding those plot arcs that I have trouble with.
Anyway. I'm tired and sleepy and definitely in need of bed, so I'm off.
SIDE NOTE: I will be performing in Radical Vulvas on August 14th at the Mercury Lounge. :-D
Go me! :-D
[1] This is the problem with making the protagonists of your entire series Mary Sues. If your main characters are supposed to be long-suffering, self-martyring, abuse-survivors, who are the ultimate in compassion and kindness and honour... then you're kind of stuck making villains who are just as over-the-top on the "evil" scale as your protags are on the "good" scale. Which means they end up these horiffic caricatures that, even when I was *fourteen* and took this stuff way more seriously, I had trouble believing in.
Seriously. One of the best villains I've come across is Brandon of Ygrath (from Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana) because he had a *reason* for doing the horrible thing that he did. He had a deeply personal, deeply fucked up reason for making an entire *country*... unhappen. Brandon was someone who, under different circumstances would still have be a colonial asshole, but clearly wasn't the kind of person who wipes a place entirely off the map (using vast amounts of personal resources, no less) just because he felt like it).
And this made him a sympathetic villain.
The megalomaniac mage who does magical-experiments on the daughter who he regularly rapes (in detail), but doesn't have any motivation beyond "I'm evil. Did you miss the memo?"... just doesn't hold up next to that. Or even *not* next to that. Jaknow?
See, when I write stories, I write them in scenes. I write them in fits and starts (in two-thousand-word intervals, because this is usually happening during Nanowrimo) and the first bunch are usually me getting to know my protagonist and the other characters.
Eventually, I get to a point where the characters are crystalized enough that, when faced with a given situation, there are only so many reactions they could go with that would be consistent with their personalities.
Which works great.
If you already have a plot.
See, she was asking me about plot.
And I was talking about characters making choices.
Because, in the kind of character-driven, person-against-self (often), stories I write... characters making choices is the plot.
But I think what she was asking about was what are they making choices about??
Which brings me to some areas where I have problems with writing plot.
Thing one: While I'm getting much better at coming up with situations to stick my characters in, I still tend to gravitate towards getting my characters into a situation where they're stable and happy.
Which is great for *life*, but not so great for *plot*.
I think, to a certain extent, a writer needs to be able to tap into their inner 15-year-old-gossipy-drama-instigator, because fiction needs crisis points in order to function as entertainment, if nothing else.
This is part of why my Matrix Fic Ov Doom, "Live Truly, My Heart", stopped developing. I got to a point where Trin, Switch and Apoc were a happy little triad - with occasional communication problems, but by and large everything was fine - and Neo was still about six months to a year from showing up.
And - aside from not entirely knowing what to do once the AU got really, REALLY obvious (and I started writing past the first movie) - I didn't know how to get the story from where it was Right then to the beginning of the movie when I would be able to rely (more or less) on the Movie's original plot to provide the action parts.
Partly, I didn't want to upset the happiness that these characters had found, this little bit of peace and joy and security in a hellishly chaotic and dangerous world. But also... I wasn't sure what it would take to upset it.
You can only write so many action sequences before they start getting repetitive. Likewise, you can only work phrases like "days blur into weeks of sparring, rations and late shifts piloting the Neb along it circuitous course through the tunnels" before it becomes paifully, stupidly obvious that you're just trying to get the story to where you know what to do with it again.
So that was a problem.
(Granted, around the same time, I also started writing a lot more original fic, and then got bitten by the poetry bug. And then got divorced. So there *were* other circumstances involved. BUT. A big part of the problem was just not knowing what to do next).
Thing two: Which is related. I'm not bad at creating protagonists. But I'm a total wash when it comes to creating villains.
Oh, I've come up with some nasty bastards.
But that's not the same thing.
Creating an abusive ex-girlfriend or a really fucked up parent as a plot device isn't difficult. They don't need a lot of meat to them. Take your protagonist's fears/insecurities. Back-date them by X number of months/years/centuries. Create a character whose purpose is to exacerbate (or instill) those Issues in the protagonist. Apply simple motivation such as "this is the only way I know how to love" or "because I feel like it and you let me" or "why do you have to make life so *hard* for yourself" or whatever.
This is easy.
Creating a person who fills in the blank of the plot-creating phrase "protagonist vs ___________" is another thing all together. Creating a character(?) who has hir own motivations and reasons for doing things This Way, that don't boil down to the Mercedes Lakey formula of "I'm totally depraved because I'm totally depraved!! Mwahahahaha!"[1]
The YA story I tried to write for my first Nanowrimo -- and the George story that I got from a dream and would like to try my hand at writing now... They both involve a (mostly) human protagonist who gets caught in a big confrontation between warring supernatural factions, basically.
But I need to figure out how to make those warring factions relevant to the protagonist in a way that goes well beyond "they're all out to get her 'cause she's meddling" or something.
To use the George Story:
If George is a freaked out babygoth bi-grrrl who is, unexpectedly, finding Tribe in a club that, unbeknownst to her, is actually a meet-and-mingle place for the disenfranchised non-human contingent in the local area and the, uh, franchised(?) non-human contingent(s) are none too happy that the dregs of their society are mixing it up with the human folk (or each other, or both, as the case may be), I need to be able to sort out a bunch of stuff pertaining to why this would effect George, specifically, and/or why she *can't* (not *won't*, can't) just say "Screw this craziness. I'm outta here."
For example:
Are her very dear, but very fucked-up, friends actually pretty high-up members of some sort of supernatural-mosaic-freedom-fighting-league?
Was she in the right place at the wrong time and got zapped by some sort of Mystical Energy that means she's now a conduit for some sort of magical power that everybody wants to get ahold of and exploit, and helping her friends just happens to coincide with trying to save her own skin?
Is the location of the club important (e.g.: is it strategically placed over a convergence of ley-lines)? Or is it simply the clientel?
More to the point:
How do I make the "story-plot" of warring factions of supernatural people reflect and reinforce the themes in the "personal-plot" of George figuring out Who She Is and/or what she wants to do with her life or whatever (at age seventeen -- cause we all figure that out by then. :-P)
I like how Black_Holly does this with her characters. She seems to basically get them to stumble into the Otherworld by accident and/or folly, and then get embroiled in Something Big because they made a mistake and *have to* (not necessarily willingly) try to make ammends, and *then* they end up getting personally attached-to/involved-with the other people who are dealing with the same problem(s).
Were I to do that with this, what would I do?
I think that George -- Georgina Francis O'Rourke -- has been hearing about this half-mythical club (you know how it goes, you're fifteen and your friends are all playing Vampire: The Masquerade, and you can't actually tell whether they just play it A LOT, or if they actually think they're vampires. OR if they *are* vampires (or at least heavily into blood play), for that matter), and feels like it's the perfect place to go in order to escape the general alienation she feels at her small highschool where she's the Designated Dyke-Slut Outcast. So maybe the place has an all-ages night (or, more likely, she and her her one-and-only friend get ahold of some fake IDs and tell each others' parents they're sleeping over at each others' houses or something, and just go into the city from, like, Markham or Hoboken, or where-ever they happen to be living) and they get to experience the inside of this meeting place.
And maybe George has a much different experience than her friend (Merideth?) for a whole slew of reasons that could include (A) drug trips, (B) who they interact with, (C) what they were each expecting, etc.
Maybe Merideth gets hooked into some sort of a dangerous game with some of the other patrons who aren't the most scrupulous of people, ends up floating home with George, but is always a little messed up after that.
Maybe the people who screwed with Merideth's head are somehow related to The Villains.
Maybe George managed to avoid that situation by the pure luck of having struck up a conversation with another character who will prove to be an equally good friend and/or a love-interest, or whatever.
Maybe George gets suspended for the fourth time that year (for whatever reason -- acting out in class? Ignoring the dress-code? Someting?) and her mother throws up her hands, and the long and the short of it is that George ends up getting kicked out of her house with nowhere to go, so she goes down town, andd ends up holing up with The Other Character.
But, beyond that, I have no earthly notion what would happen.
I have no idea how to get George's own coming-of-age story to work AND get it to work *with* another story about some variation on the them of Good vs Evil.
So it's finding those plot arcs that I have trouble with.
Anyway. I'm tired and sleepy and definitely in need of bed, so I'm off.
SIDE NOTE: I will be performing in Radical Vulvas on August 14th at the Mercury Lounge. :-D
Go me! :-D
[1] This is the problem with making the protagonists of your entire series Mary Sues. If your main characters are supposed to be long-suffering, self-martyring, abuse-survivors, who are the ultimate in compassion and kindness and honour... then you're kind of stuck making villains who are just as over-the-top on the "evil" scale as your protags are on the "good" scale. Which means they end up these horiffic caricatures that, even when I was *fourteen* and took this stuff way more seriously, I had trouble believing in.
Seriously. One of the best villains I've come across is Brandon of Ygrath (from Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana) because he had a *reason* for doing the horrible thing that he did. He had a deeply personal, deeply fucked up reason for making an entire *country*... unhappen. Brandon was someone who, under different circumstances would still have be a colonial asshole, but clearly wasn't the kind of person who wipes a place entirely off the map (using vast amounts of personal resources, no less) just because he felt like it).
And this made him a sympathetic villain.
The megalomaniac mage who does magical-experiments on the daughter who he regularly rapes (in detail), but doesn't have any motivation beyond "I'm evil. Did you miss the memo?"... just doesn't hold up next to that. Or even *not* next to that. Jaknow?
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