Surprise pain issues have so far cost me like 8 hours of writing time. The next couple of planned posts may be delayed as a result.
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
Book Review: Indexing
I talked a little bit about Indexing by Seanan McGuire in my Monday Update this week. In case you missed that episode, the premise here is that a secret government agency uses the Aarne-Thompson Index to identify fairy tales when they happen in real life (referred to as Mimetic Incursions) and try to minimize the damage they cause. A force referred to as the "narrative" can alter people's perceptions and impulses, and even reshape reality to make these stories play out over and over again. The people cast as the central figures generally referred to by the ATI numbers of their stories (A Snow White is a 709, a Sleeping Beauty is a 410), while other living plot elements can be identified by the number of the story they've been pulled into, but are more likely to be named: a Wicked Stepsister, a Prince, a Shoemaker's Elf.
Protagonist Henrietta "Henry" Marchen is a 709 in "abeyance" who started life as half of a Snow White and Rose Red (426) before her twin brother turned out to be a trans guy, and the narrative rewrote her as the other, unrelated kind of Snow White. This is attributed to the fact that most people who are even aware of Snow White and Rose Red don't actually know that the two Snow Whites aren't connected. The role of belief, and particularly changes in how people think about fairy tales, in how they play out, is emphasized throughout the story. The ATI Management Bureau deals with Peter Pans and Little Mermaids, even though both stories are too new to be in the actual ATI. And the climax hinges on the likely origin of Snow White in older, more brutal stories of ritual sacrifice to ensure the harvest and the return of spring.
The storytelling starts out very episodic, and becomes more connected as the plot unveils itself. This is not at all an unreasonable given that the novel was originally released as a Kindle Serial, coming out in single chapters every two weeks. While there is a sequel, this feels more like on of McGuire's standalones, inasmuch as it doesn't (entirely) start with a small job that's unconnected to the main plot but creates room to introduce the characters and the setting. I mean, it does open with a relatively small job, but they end up hiring one of the people involved.
The prose is up to McGuire's usual standard, using clear and undistracting language, crafting evocative images through mildly synesthetic description (I don't know what color "poison apple green" is, but at the same time I do know, you know?), and allowing the self-aware, grown-up first person protagonist to tell and show what she's feeling. Readers highly familiar with McGuire's writing may be able t predict some lines of narration word for word. To be clear, this is a question of writing style, not characterization. Henry Marchen is not October Daye (however similar her early morning crankiness in the first few pages might feel), nor is she Verity Price. She is a grownup from the start, self-possessed and comfortable being in a position of authority. She grew up under the care of the ATIMB, and there are a lot of normal-person things she hasn't done (like dating, and going to a bar for social rather than professional reasons), but even these unknowns don't seem to phase her much. Henry is a bit rigid in her management of her own potential fairy-tale status, and her greatest personal struggles involve integrating (rather than containing) the Snow White part of herself, and noticing and knowing what to do when the people around her are losing their goddamn minds. There's a lot of room to read mental illness or neurodivergence metaphors into the various fairy-tale statuses of the characters, but it's never forced.
Which brings me to Sloan Winters. Your mileage will almost certainly vary, but I haven't found a McGuire character this painfully relatable since Nancy Whitman, and truth be told I'm much more of a Sloan than a Nancy. Sloan is a Wicked Stepsister "frozen" in her narrative, and struggles against a constant internal monologue of spite and resentment. During the story, Sloan "manifests" and has several near misses with poisoning Henry, having to spill or throw out food or drinks that she herself poisoned. Here again, there is room to read a mental illness metaphor into the effects of the narrative, although as far as I am aware there is no mental disorder which routinely causes an overriding compulsion to poison one's friends and coworkers. (If forced to squeeze Sloan's experience into real world diagnoses, I might assess it as some toxic fantasy hybrid of OCD and Borderline or Paranoid Personality Disorder, with the compulsions gaining their force from anger and resentment over real of perceived slights, rather than irrational anxiety. Circumstances beyond her control alter her thoughts, feelings, and actions, and she just manages as best she can. And this is where it gets really remarkable, because the rest of the team unequivocally supports her. At one point she basically tells Henry "I tried to poison you like three times this week" and Henry just hugs her and says she'll look after her. Obviously this is not in all situations the best way to respond to someone struggling with impulses to literally murder you, but Henry is in a situation where she is reasonably safe doing so, and she does, and that's kind of amazing.
In the writing of this review, I went back and forth on whether I was going to give books any kind of score or rating, and now that it comes to it I find I don't like the ideas. Suffice it to say that I recommend Indexing, especially if you're already a fan of McGuire's work, are a fairy tale nerd, or look for urban fantasy with female protagonists who have their shit together.
Tuesday, June 25, 2019
Monday Update 6-24-2019
I finished reading Night Veil and listening to Middlegame.
Middlegame is amazing, although that's not exactly a surprise since it's Seanan McGuire. It's about two kids who were put together all Frankenstein-like. (I think of them as Prometheans because my household is perpetually immersed in World of Darkness). There are multiple sets of identical-but-opposite-gender twins, and I want to be like "Okay but what if half of one pair were trans", but since Seanan McGuire played with something a lot like that in Indexing (more on that later) and to a lesser extent in Every Heart a Doorway, I can assume that there were important narrative reasons to not do it here. I liked that Dodger (the girls half of the central pair) got the math powers while her brother got the language powers. I liked the Magicians-like elements of "we will reset time until we get this right" and "a rough map to what we're doing exists in a popular children's book (that only exists in the world of the story". (I didn't actually like the book The Magicians, and haven't read the sequels. I did like the TV show).
As for Night Veil, I finally figured out what the like, Thing is with the series. And now I'm sort of embarrassed, because it's playing with Tam Lin, and I'm way to much of a fairy tale nerd to note notice that for a book and a half. Protagonist girl had impulsive sex with her faerie lover in the woods, so we should be hitting "ever alas sweet Janet, I fear ye gae wi child" like, any minute now, although the second book is set about a week after the first one, so either we'll need a bigger time skip or it will take several more books. Or someone (the fae, the vampires, whatever Kaylin is) might have super early pregnancy detecting powers. Or I could be wildly wrong.
I also listened to the audiobook of Indexing, although if anyone is looking here for book recommendations, I suggest reading it with your eyeballs. The chapter transitions are a little awkward out loud. Indexing is a risk I hadn't considered when I suggested looking to the Aarne-Thompson Index for plot ideas. Government agency does damage control when fairy tales start happening in real life, which they do all the damn time. You know how I love stories that bring the government into contact with magic, especially when it's more complicated than Cops With A Specialized Knowledge Base. (The ATI Management Bureau does function as a law enforcement agency, but it's definitely more complicated than that). I like the various ways the book plays with the relationship between fairy tales and real life, although explicating any part of that would involve massive spoilers, and this is the rare case where I actually think it matters, if only because a reader with significant experience of fairy tales will likely catch onto things before the characters do, and that's always fun.
All quiet on the writing front, except that I realized I might be able to resume work on a semi-abandoned project if I change the setting to somewhere I'm more familiar with. That's potentially a massive rewrite, but there isn't enough written to make that too burdensome, and the story is part of my project to write trans guys into traditionally masculine roles, so I think it would be worth the effort anyway. I'm going to need to learn a lot about bats in the next little while.
Also the kittens have now grown up enough to look and move like cats, but smaller, rather than confused jelly beans. That's not about books or writing, but it's adorable. More pictures will soon be available to supporter of my Patreon.
Be gay, do crimes, and read all the thing!
Middlegame is amazing, although that's not exactly a surprise since it's Seanan McGuire. It's about two kids who were put together all Frankenstein-like. (I think of them as Prometheans because my household is perpetually immersed in World of Darkness). There are multiple sets of identical-but-opposite-gender twins, and I want to be like "Okay but what if half of one pair were trans", but since Seanan McGuire played with something a lot like that in Indexing (more on that later) and to a lesser extent in Every Heart a Doorway, I can assume that there were important narrative reasons to not do it here. I liked that Dodger (the girls half of the central pair) got the math powers while her brother got the language powers. I liked the Magicians-like elements of "we will reset time until we get this right" and "a rough map to what we're doing exists in a popular children's book (that only exists in the world of the story". (I didn't actually like the book The Magicians, and haven't read the sequels. I did like the TV show).
As for Night Veil, I finally figured out what the like, Thing is with the series. And now I'm sort of embarrassed, because it's playing with Tam Lin, and I'm way to much of a fairy tale nerd to note notice that for a book and a half. Protagonist girl had impulsive sex with her faerie lover in the woods, so we should be hitting "ever alas sweet Janet, I fear ye gae wi child" like, any minute now, although the second book is set about a week after the first one, so either we'll need a bigger time skip or it will take several more books. Or someone (the fae, the vampires, whatever Kaylin is) might have super early pregnancy detecting powers. Or I could be wildly wrong.
I also listened to the audiobook of Indexing, although if anyone is looking here for book recommendations, I suggest reading it with your eyeballs. The chapter transitions are a little awkward out loud. Indexing is a risk I hadn't considered when I suggested looking to the Aarne-Thompson Index for plot ideas. Government agency does damage control when fairy tales start happening in real life, which they do all the damn time. You know how I love stories that bring the government into contact with magic, especially when it's more complicated than Cops With A Specialized Knowledge Base. (The ATI Management Bureau does function as a law enforcement agency, but it's definitely more complicated than that). I like the various ways the book plays with the relationship between fairy tales and real life, although explicating any part of that would involve massive spoilers, and this is the rare case where I actually think it matters, if only because a reader with significant experience of fairy tales will likely catch onto things before the characters do, and that's always fun.
All quiet on the writing front, except that I realized I might be able to resume work on a semi-abandoned project if I change the setting to somewhere I'm more familiar with. That's potentially a massive rewrite, but there isn't enough written to make that too burdensome, and the story is part of my project to write trans guys into traditionally masculine roles, so I think it would be worth the effort anyway. I'm going to need to learn a lot about bats in the next little while.
Also the kittens have now grown up enough to look and move like cats, but smaller, rather than confused jelly beans. That's not about books or writing, but it's adorable. More pictures will soon be available to supporter of my Patreon.
Be gay, do crimes, and read all the thing!
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
Monday Update 6-17-2019
I finished reading The Glasswright's Apprentice. Actually I finished it last week, but yeah. There is a character who's initially autistic-coded, and portrayed as deliberately playing up his echolalia to scree with his abusive brother and his Evil Royal Advisor, and I really wanted to talk about how that's a thing actual autistic people sometimes do, minus the evil royal advisor, usually. And how his speech patterns shift when he's infodumping about battlefield strategy. And how, fueled by adrenaline and necessity he manages to go all Neurotypical Crown Prince for like 5 minutes but he's exhausted afterwards. Only towards the very end of the book, we're told that his apparent neurodivergence is all an act to help him not get assassinated. Glasswright's Apprentice is the first in a trilogy, and I'm hoping book 2 will walk this back somewhat, like he is actually autistic but he played it up a lot to protect himself. But at the moment I'm very disappointed.
I've moved on to reading Night Veil, the second book in the Indigo Court series by Yasmine Galenorn, and listening to the audiobook of Middlegame by Seanan McGuire. I don't have a lot of thoughts to share about Night Veil other than that the name Rhiannon is weirdly overrepresented in urban fantasy. I have a lot of thoughts about Middlegame, but I think I'll wait until I've finished it.
I'm apparently just not recovered enough from Missouri and its exacerbation of my Health Stuff to do much creative writing yet. So I don't have anything to report on that front except: Don't keep a job for the health insurance if it leaves you without the time and energy to see a doctor.
If everything goes to plan, you'll get a non-update post, and our first actual book review, by the end of the month.
Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read ALL the things.
Thursday, June 13, 2019
Monday Update on Friday!
My mental health stuff has been acting up bad this week. Very little to report on the reading, writing, or publishing fronts except that I got the advice column up on time. I expect to have a more satisfying update for you this coming Monday.
Wednesday, June 12, 2019
Advice Column: Plot for Worldbuilders
Joy asks:
"Not a question because I have so many: Plot writing for people who are only good at world building."
Hi Joy,
Let me start by saying that I. Feel. This. I have a long history of coming up with detailed worlds, and even some complex, relatable characters, only to stall out when it comes time to have anyone do anything. What I have for you is a list of strategies, some of which can be combined with each other, and most of which should be able to be combined with any notion of a plot you already have in mind. You may already have tried a few of these, so feel free to disregard anything that doesn't work for you.
1. Start, then outline. (Then repeat).
Write an opening, introduce your characters, their world, and the place the story starts. Let it be infodumpy if that's an inclination you have; you can always edit later. (And honestly, the world could do with more books, especially in fantasy, that actually establish their premise rather than dribbling out basic information for fear of infodumping). Establish the time of year, the time of day, when in the timeline of your world this is all happening. It's totally okay to pick all these details essentially at random. If you already have a world, you probably know the calendar, the geography, and at least some of the people well enough to make lists and then roll dice to choose a starting point, if that's what you need to do to get started.
Then, see of any next steps present themselves. Is there a major holiday coming up? A war on the horizon? Are one or more of your characters approaching a major life event or milestone? If anything occurs to you, write it the fuck down. Gwythyr sets up his apple cart for the weekly market. Lily goes to dance rehearsal. Gaar stops in at a planet to pick up passengers. Whatever you've got, write it down, either in a separate document or in a separate section of the one you're writing in. If you have any notion what's likely to happen after that, write that down as well, even if you're not sure about it. When you're out of "and then"s, start writing that first thing on your list. As more of the future opens up, write that down too. Hopefully at some point an ending will occur to you, and then you'll have something to aim at in a larger way, but it may take a while to figure out what the story is actually about sufficiently to have an ending.
See also: The Flashlight Method
Drawback: A draft created this way is likely to be a mess, structurally, and the first serious edit is likely to involve rearranging entire scenes and then doing a lot of detail work to make it make sense.
2. Road Trip!
This approach takes a longer view, while but has in common with the above that the plot is going to be permitted to emerge, rather than planned.
Choose a physical place in your world to start, and another place somewhere far away. Come up with some characters, who can be rough, sketchy ideas for now; you'll have time to get to know them. (3-5 people is good, but you can have any size group as long as there's more than one person). Give your group of characters a reason to go from the place they start to the place far away. The reason can be something big and important and high stakes (a dangerous religious pilgrimage, the retrieval of a magical artifact to defeat a great evil), or something smaller and more personal. They want to get out of this stupid town. They're visiting a pen pal. They've been exiled. There's supposed to be a thriving community of the kind of supernatural creature that they are. Maybe they literally just want to see the faraway place. With a larger group, you may need more than one motivation, since it's usually difficult to persuade more than like two other people to come along with you just because, unless you're writing about 16-21 year olds, or the equivalent, for whom "Woo, road trip!" is usually reason enough.
Thinking about the geography of your world, the characters' reasons for making the trip, and what in your world you want to show off, pick out a few stops they might make between point A and point B. Then just start, send them on their way and see how it goes. Try to get into the spirit of the road trip. Unexpected delays and detours, changes in motivation and even destination are part of the fun. You get weirdly close to people, and they drive you sort of crazy, and you have to navigate all kinds of strange new situations together. Unexpected obstacles abound.
This is a mode of creation where the experience of writing should mirror the experience the characters are having. Be persistent, be flexible, be open to the unexpected.
3. Start from characters.
Create detailed descriptions of one or more characters in your world. You can use a character profile format, or just write paragraphs, but if you're doing profiles, make sure to include a "notes" or "other" section so you're not leaving anything out just because there isn't a field for it. Don't be afraid to randomize details if you're stuck on something. A lot of good writing comes out of going ahead with decisions that were initially arbitrary, but you can also always change things later if you need to. When you've written down everything you can think of, look over it for the following:
1. Do they have any goals or aspirations the pursuit of which could make a plot? (This can be as small as getting a cat or as big as overthrowing a globally powerful dark lord. A vastly detailed world doesn't obligate the story to epic-level stakes).
2. Are there any events in their backstory that you would, as a reader, want to know more about?
If you find anything like that, make a quick note of it. (The story of how Gwythyr got that scar on his face. Gaar trying to afford a bigger spaceship so he doesn't have to leave his family behind when he works). Then, start writing that story.
4. The Scholar
If you haven't already written down everything you know about the world, start doing that. Put together loose notes, write encyclopedia entries, do a 20 page research paper. (Feel free to get silly with this and cite texts that only exist in your world). Write up tourist pamphlets, government memos, healthcare handouts for beings or circumstances specific to your world. It helps if you can think about who in your world would be writing this down, and to what purpose, and write from that perspective, but you don't have to. Now, similarly to the character approach, look over what you have and try to spot anything that you might, as a reader, like to know more about. What was that horrible war like from an on-the-ground perspective? Who was the King's secret lover, really, as a person? How did the government of Kansas end up deciding that the fae aren't legally people, and why didn't California do the same? This may tend to suggest more grand scale plots than the character strategy, but it also might not, if what jumps out to you is a small, personal struggle a person might have when interacting with a piece of your worldbuilding.
5. Use a random plot generator.
Seventh Sanctum has a decent one, and links to several others. The plots these kinds of generators produce will of necessity be pretty vague, but they're often enough of a skeleton that you can start working out the specifics of how, when, and where the suggest plot might happen in your world.
6. Steal the plot of another book.
Seriously. Think of the plot of a book you like, in the genre you're writing in, and write out a rough outline of it, or copypaste the Cliffs Notes into a Word document and change the names. Most of what's interesting and unique in a story comes from the characters and the worldbuilding, not the basic plot. Even if anyone notices, they're more likely to be impressed with your literary acumen than anything else. Also a lot of the particulars will need to change, because you're writing about different people in a different world. What you'll end up keeping is structure, a much as plot, and some idea of where you're going at any given point. You can also deviate whenever it feels right. You can say "I don't think this story ends with several tragic deaths after all. I think they manage to resolve their differences in time, and come through better people for having done it. You can also combine plots, like, okay, it's basically Pride and Prejudice, but it's on a spaceship and also the plot of Gaudy Night is happening at the same time. This will have some more logistics to work out to make it fit together nicely, and massive differences in scale may be harder to work with (if you want to combine Lord Of the Rings with Murder On the Orient Express, you'll need to work out how it affects things not to have them all stuck on an actual train, and how the invitation continues after the groups split up), but if still gives you a framework for who does what when.
Drawback: Once you start using this technique, you will see it everywhere. What uses the plot of Pride and Prejudice? Like 1/3 of dystopian YA, and at least one of the Twilight books. Meanwhile, Pokemon: The First Movie is essentially 'What if Frankenstein happened faster and instead of just running off across the ice at the end, the monster went and became Prospero and the rest of the story is The Tempest?'
7. Steal the plot of a lot of other books.
Some genres, like Romance and certain subgenres of Mystery, have one or more established formulas that you can use if they're appropriate to the kind of story you're trying to tell. It's important to note that this doesn't mean you have to restrict yourself to the kinds of characters, settings, or themes that typically show up in that genre. This is also another place to remember that you can always tell more stories in the same world, with or without the same characters. I often hear from newer writers how they have this really cool world, but they're saving it for when they have a worthy story idea. Don't do that thing. Wanting to write a radically different story in the same world later might make publishers nervous, but that's an after-you-have-a-book-deal problem. I know I would read this shit out of a series of science fiction or fantasy novels set in a detailed world, each of which uses the basic plot of a typically-formulaic genre.
Another extremely valid resource here is folklore studies. There are people who will tell you that there are only two stories ("I set out on a journey" and "A stranger came to town") and people who will tell you there are a few dozen, but what's important here is that a lot of those people made lists. (It may help to google Master Plots to find more of these lists. Writers Digest has a PDF with 20 of them.) Or check out the Aarne-Thomson-Uther Classification Of Folktales. Lots of people have made lots of lists of kinds of stories that exist. See if anything on those lists looks like something that could happen in your world, and if it does, take a shot at writing it.
8. Start with short fiction.
This is more an approach to skill building than a technique per se. Short stories are easier to plot than novels, if only because there's generally less to figure out. A short story has less Great Swampy Middle to wade through, and it can be easier to feel comfortable with a lower stakes story, which removes one barrier to figuring out a good plot. It's also an opportunity to go through all the steps of planning and executing a plot in a reasonable timeframe. Unless you are literally Seanan McGuire, writing a novel normally takes at least a year, and a first novel tends to take more like 5. If you can get as far as a basic idea, there's a lot to be said for actually executing the whole thing, getting through writing and editing and if the plot turns out to be terrible, you haven't spent a novel's worth of time and energy on it.
It's always possible that the idea you start trying to write as a short story will turn out to want a novella or novel's worth of space, and that's fine. Figuring out how long any given story needs to be is its whole own skill, and most writers do better not to try to determine in advance the word count of any given piece until they feel like they have a solid handle on plot and structure.
9. Writing exercises.
I really like books of writing exercises. I have about a dozen on my shelf, from the academic and somewhat abstract The 3AM Epiphany to The Amazing Story Generator, which puts together story concepts in the same way PorGuaCan puts together mixed up animals. If you're needing to work on having actual characters doing actual things in your setting, just assigning yourself something to write about this way, and a word count to write to (if the source of the exercise doesn't provide one, I suggest choosing a target between 500 and 1000 words) can be very helpful, and sometimes either spawn ideas for an actual story or serve as usable pieces once you have one.
10. Read. (And reread).
If you're a writer, presumably you already read a lot, but when you're working on any particular thing (in this case plot) you need to read for that thing. Pay attention to how the plot is put together, make notes, try to write out actual plot summaries. Reread whatever books you think of when you think "really good plot", and try to figure out how they do it. You can also learn a lot from paying attention to the plots in movies, TV, and video games, but different media work differently and there is no substitute for actually experiencing and studying the medium in which you're trying to work.
That's what I've got for you, Joy, so I hope some of these suggestions are useful to you. To the rest of my readers, please send in your questions for next month's Advice Column, either in the comments here, on Facebook, or on Patreon.
In the meantime, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!
"Not a question because I have so many: Plot writing for people who are only good at world building."
Hi Joy,
Let me start by saying that I. Feel. This. I have a long history of coming up with detailed worlds, and even some complex, relatable characters, only to stall out when it comes time to have anyone do anything. What I have for you is a list of strategies, some of which can be combined with each other, and most of which should be able to be combined with any notion of a plot you already have in mind. You may already have tried a few of these, so feel free to disregard anything that doesn't work for you.
1. Start, then outline. (Then repeat).
Write an opening, introduce your characters, their world, and the place the story starts. Let it be infodumpy if that's an inclination you have; you can always edit later. (And honestly, the world could do with more books, especially in fantasy, that actually establish their premise rather than dribbling out basic information for fear of infodumping). Establish the time of year, the time of day, when in the timeline of your world this is all happening. It's totally okay to pick all these details essentially at random. If you already have a world, you probably know the calendar, the geography, and at least some of the people well enough to make lists and then roll dice to choose a starting point, if that's what you need to do to get started.
Then, see of any next steps present themselves. Is there a major holiday coming up? A war on the horizon? Are one or more of your characters approaching a major life event or milestone? If anything occurs to you, write it the fuck down. Gwythyr sets up his apple cart for the weekly market. Lily goes to dance rehearsal. Gaar stops in at a planet to pick up passengers. Whatever you've got, write it down, either in a separate document or in a separate section of the one you're writing in. If you have any notion what's likely to happen after that, write that down as well, even if you're not sure about it. When you're out of "and then"s, start writing that first thing on your list. As more of the future opens up, write that down too. Hopefully at some point an ending will occur to you, and then you'll have something to aim at in a larger way, but it may take a while to figure out what the story is actually about sufficiently to have an ending.
See also: The Flashlight Method
Drawback: A draft created this way is likely to be a mess, structurally, and the first serious edit is likely to involve rearranging entire scenes and then doing a lot of detail work to make it make sense.
2. Road Trip!
This approach takes a longer view, while but has in common with the above that the plot is going to be permitted to emerge, rather than planned.
Choose a physical place in your world to start, and another place somewhere far away. Come up with some characters, who can be rough, sketchy ideas for now; you'll have time to get to know them. (3-5 people is good, but you can have any size group as long as there's more than one person). Give your group of characters a reason to go from the place they start to the place far away. The reason can be something big and important and high stakes (a dangerous religious pilgrimage, the retrieval of a magical artifact to defeat a great evil), or something smaller and more personal. They want to get out of this stupid town. They're visiting a pen pal. They've been exiled. There's supposed to be a thriving community of the kind of supernatural creature that they are. Maybe they literally just want to see the faraway place. With a larger group, you may need more than one motivation, since it's usually difficult to persuade more than like two other people to come along with you just because, unless you're writing about 16-21 year olds, or the equivalent, for whom "Woo, road trip!" is usually reason enough.
Thinking about the geography of your world, the characters' reasons for making the trip, and what in your world you want to show off, pick out a few stops they might make between point A and point B. Then just start, send them on their way and see how it goes. Try to get into the spirit of the road trip. Unexpected delays and detours, changes in motivation and even destination are part of the fun. You get weirdly close to people, and they drive you sort of crazy, and you have to navigate all kinds of strange new situations together. Unexpected obstacles abound.
This is a mode of creation where the experience of writing should mirror the experience the characters are having. Be persistent, be flexible, be open to the unexpected.
3. Start from characters.
Create detailed descriptions of one or more characters in your world. You can use a character profile format, or just write paragraphs, but if you're doing profiles, make sure to include a "notes" or "other" section so you're not leaving anything out just because there isn't a field for it. Don't be afraid to randomize details if you're stuck on something. A lot of good writing comes out of going ahead with decisions that were initially arbitrary, but you can also always change things later if you need to. When you've written down everything you can think of, look over it for the following:
1. Do they have any goals or aspirations the pursuit of which could make a plot? (This can be as small as getting a cat or as big as overthrowing a globally powerful dark lord. A vastly detailed world doesn't obligate the story to epic-level stakes).
2. Are there any events in their backstory that you would, as a reader, want to know more about?
If you find anything like that, make a quick note of it. (The story of how Gwythyr got that scar on his face. Gaar trying to afford a bigger spaceship so he doesn't have to leave his family behind when he works). Then, start writing that story.
4. The Scholar
If you haven't already written down everything you know about the world, start doing that. Put together loose notes, write encyclopedia entries, do a 20 page research paper. (Feel free to get silly with this and cite texts that only exist in your world). Write up tourist pamphlets, government memos, healthcare handouts for beings or circumstances specific to your world. It helps if you can think about who in your world would be writing this down, and to what purpose, and write from that perspective, but you don't have to. Now, similarly to the character approach, look over what you have and try to spot anything that you might, as a reader, like to know more about. What was that horrible war like from an on-the-ground perspective? Who was the King's secret lover, really, as a person? How did the government of Kansas end up deciding that the fae aren't legally people, and why didn't California do the same? This may tend to suggest more grand scale plots than the character strategy, but it also might not, if what jumps out to you is a small, personal struggle a person might have when interacting with a piece of your worldbuilding.
5. Use a random plot generator.
Seventh Sanctum has a decent one, and links to several others. The plots these kinds of generators produce will of necessity be pretty vague, but they're often enough of a skeleton that you can start working out the specifics of how, when, and where the suggest plot might happen in your world.
6. Steal the plot of another book.
Seriously. Think of the plot of a book you like, in the genre you're writing in, and write out a rough outline of it, or copypaste the Cliffs Notes into a Word document and change the names. Most of what's interesting and unique in a story comes from the characters and the worldbuilding, not the basic plot. Even if anyone notices, they're more likely to be impressed with your literary acumen than anything else. Also a lot of the particulars will need to change, because you're writing about different people in a different world. What you'll end up keeping is structure, a much as plot, and some idea of where you're going at any given point. You can also deviate whenever it feels right. You can say "I don't think this story ends with several tragic deaths after all. I think they manage to resolve their differences in time, and come through better people for having done it. You can also combine plots, like, okay, it's basically Pride and Prejudice, but it's on a spaceship and also the plot of Gaudy Night is happening at the same time. This will have some more logistics to work out to make it fit together nicely, and massive differences in scale may be harder to work with (if you want to combine Lord Of the Rings with Murder On the Orient Express, you'll need to work out how it affects things not to have them all stuck on an actual train, and how the invitation continues after the groups split up), but if still gives you a framework for who does what when.
Drawback: Once you start using this technique, you will see it everywhere. What uses the plot of Pride and Prejudice? Like 1/3 of dystopian YA, and at least one of the Twilight books. Meanwhile, Pokemon: The First Movie is essentially 'What if Frankenstein happened faster and instead of just running off across the ice at the end, the monster went and became Prospero and the rest of the story is The Tempest?'
7. Steal the plot of a lot of other books.
Some genres, like Romance and certain subgenres of Mystery, have one or more established formulas that you can use if they're appropriate to the kind of story you're trying to tell. It's important to note that this doesn't mean you have to restrict yourself to the kinds of characters, settings, or themes that typically show up in that genre. This is also another place to remember that you can always tell more stories in the same world, with or without the same characters. I often hear from newer writers how they have this really cool world, but they're saving it for when they have a worthy story idea. Don't do that thing. Wanting to write a radically different story in the same world later might make publishers nervous, but that's an after-you-have-a-book-deal problem. I know I would read this shit out of a series of science fiction or fantasy novels set in a detailed world, each of which uses the basic plot of a typically-formulaic genre.
Another extremely valid resource here is folklore studies. There are people who will tell you that there are only two stories ("I set out on a journey" and "A stranger came to town") and people who will tell you there are a few dozen, but what's important here is that a lot of those people made lists. (It may help to google Master Plots to find more of these lists. Writers Digest has a PDF with 20 of them.) Or check out the Aarne-Thomson-Uther Classification Of Folktales. Lots of people have made lots of lists of kinds of stories that exist. See if anything on those lists looks like something that could happen in your world, and if it does, take a shot at writing it.
8. Start with short fiction.
This is more an approach to skill building than a technique per se. Short stories are easier to plot than novels, if only because there's generally less to figure out. A short story has less Great Swampy Middle to wade through, and it can be easier to feel comfortable with a lower stakes story, which removes one barrier to figuring out a good plot. It's also an opportunity to go through all the steps of planning and executing a plot in a reasonable timeframe. Unless you are literally Seanan McGuire, writing a novel normally takes at least a year, and a first novel tends to take more like 5. If you can get as far as a basic idea, there's a lot to be said for actually executing the whole thing, getting through writing and editing and if the plot turns out to be terrible, you haven't spent a novel's worth of time and energy on it.
It's always possible that the idea you start trying to write as a short story will turn out to want a novella or novel's worth of space, and that's fine. Figuring out how long any given story needs to be is its whole own skill, and most writers do better not to try to determine in advance the word count of any given piece until they feel like they have a solid handle on plot and structure.
9. Writing exercises.
I really like books of writing exercises. I have about a dozen on my shelf, from the academic and somewhat abstract The 3AM Epiphany to The Amazing Story Generator, which puts together story concepts in the same way PorGuaCan puts together mixed up animals. If you're needing to work on having actual characters doing actual things in your setting, just assigning yourself something to write about this way, and a word count to write to (if the source of the exercise doesn't provide one, I suggest choosing a target between 500 and 1000 words) can be very helpful, and sometimes either spawn ideas for an actual story or serve as usable pieces once you have one.
10. Read. (And reread).
If you're a writer, presumably you already read a lot, but when you're working on any particular thing (in this case plot) you need to read for that thing. Pay attention to how the plot is put together, make notes, try to write out actual plot summaries. Reread whatever books you think of when you think "really good plot", and try to figure out how they do it. You can also learn a lot from paying attention to the plots in movies, TV, and video games, but different media work differently and there is no substitute for actually experiencing and studying the medium in which you're trying to work.
That's what I've got for you, Joy, so I hope some of these suggestions are useful to you. To the rest of my readers, please send in your questions for next month's Advice Column, either in the comments here, on Facebook, or on Patreon.
In the meantime, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!
Monday, June 3, 2019
Monday Update 6-2-2019
As promised, Monday updates are back!
This week I've been reading The Glasswright's Apprentice, by Mindy L. Klasky. It's a fascinating example of how a story that is very plot driven (in the sense that the action comes from external forces, not from decisions the character makes) can actually be used to illuminate a character. Rani makes almost no proactive decisions in the first half of the book, and the reactive decision she is most often called upon to make is what name to give in any given situation (she has four, and I suspect she'll have five by the end). She's 13 years old, and most of the time life just happens to her, but she is given the detail, complexity, and depth that people sometimes mean when they talk about "character driven" stories, through the way she thinks and feels about the situations into which she is thrust.
Writing progress has still been slow, but I reread the existing draft of Pointlessly Contrarian, in accordance with Chris Brecheen's instructions on how to get back to a story you've been away from for a while. The only actual writing I've done has been this post and half of another one about the economics of fantasy, which should be going up in the next few weeks.
Happy Pride Month.
Be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!
This week I've been reading The Glasswright's Apprentice, by Mindy L. Klasky. It's a fascinating example of how a story that is very plot driven (in the sense that the action comes from external forces, not from decisions the character makes) can actually be used to illuminate a character. Rani makes almost no proactive decisions in the first half of the book, and the reactive decision she is most often called upon to make is what name to give in any given situation (she has four, and I suspect she'll have five by the end). She's 13 years old, and most of the time life just happens to her, but she is given the detail, complexity, and depth that people sometimes mean when they talk about "character driven" stories, through the way she thinks and feels about the situations into which she is thrust.
Writing progress has still been slow, but I reread the existing draft of Pointlessly Contrarian, in accordance with Chris Brecheen's instructions on how to get back to a story you've been away from for a while. The only actual writing I've done has been this post and half of another one about the economics of fantasy, which should be going up in the next few weeks.
Happy Pride Month.
Be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!
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