![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjLast week when I asked for brainstorming for a Random Thursday blog, I was offered several suggestions for writing-related topics. Given how much of my blogging is on writing, I figured it would make more sense to work them in on a Tuesday and try to be a little more diverse on Thursdays!
How do you come up with plots? Isn't it hard to come up with something complex and non-linear?
There are times I wonder if I could come up with a simple, straightforward plot to save my life! Well, for short stories, perhaps. A short story can't handle much more than one main plot and there isn't room for complications. Though even there...
If I had to sum up my approach in two words, it would be "presuppositions and implications". That is: given a starting scenario, whether an action, a character, or simply an idea, what other events and timelines are presupposed by its existence? What must have been true in order for that initial Thing to exist in the way that it exists? And given that initial Thing, what does it have as expected consequences? What would naturally happen because of it? And what would be necessary for that expectation not to be fulfilled? From there, it branches off into infinity, because every presupposed detail has its own branching implications, and every implication presupposes other details. Once the web starts weaving itself, it's more a matter of pruning out enough to leave a comprehensible story than of building something up.
Let's look at a concrete example. For Daughter of Mystery, the initial Thing was something corresponding to the reading-of-the-will scene toward the beginning of the book. I started out with more of a scenario than an event: a young woman (who happens to be skilled with a sword) is left alone by the unexpected death of an employer/mentor and finds that he has placed her in the control of a complete stranger for reasons she doesn't entirely understand and is not happy with.
Presuppositions:
* Her legal situation is such that she has no control over the matter.
* She is in some way socially isolated such that she has no allies to call on.
* There is some social context that allowed her to study swordplay and to have a role associated with that skill.
* Her late employer/mentor has no close connections that he would trust with responsibility for her.
* The historical context is one where a man with some standing might have an employee skilled with a sword, but where it would not make more sense to have an even larger armed entourage. (When I came up with this initial scenario, I was already thinking in terms of a vaguely Regency-era setting, but I was thinking in terms of some other details that didn't pan out, so this isn't necessarily a determiner.)
Implications:
* It will take some time for her to develop a level of trust in her new employer, if it happens at all.
* Her new employer may have no idea what to do with her -- or ideas that she dislikes.
* She will begin with a goal of gaining her freedom. If this changes it will require adopting new goals.
* A new, key character role now exists: her new employer. Who is this person? What do they want? How will this event change their life?
The next step in the process was to fill in some of the implied roles and push the causality out a bit in both directions.
* Who is her new employer? This role evolved into Margerit Sovitre. Once I envisioned this character as another young woman (and a potential eventual love interest) there was an explosion of new connections.
* What was her connection to Barbara's first employer? Why was she chosen?
* How much personal control does she have over Barbara? Who else has a hand in the decisions? What do they want?
* What will Margerit do with her?
* How will Barbara's presence change the course of her life? What was the course of her life before Barbara entered it?
I actually spent quite a lot of time and typing simply exploring these initial questions and relationships before any of the long-term plot threads reared their heads.
In some ways, the plotting is easier for the later books because I'm expanding from an existing complex web rather than building it up from scratch. But in other ways that means I have to be more careful about over-complexity. The way I plotted The Mystic Marriage was relatively straightforward. I started out by knowing that I was writing Antuniet's story. I had established a number of facts about Antuniet in the first book, in particular her interest in alchemy, her somewhat detached, analytical personality, her difficult relationship with her family, and the very difficult position she is left in at the end of the first book. I knew that her story would resolve two main conflicts: she would succeed in her alchemical quest and redeem her family's name, and she would find a way out of her intellectual and emotional isolation and achieve productive and positive bonds with other characters. Everything else was just details.
In addition to the facts established in Daughter of Mystery, many of the presuppositions involved previously unknown back-story about the characters, as well as previously unexplored facts about the fantastic underpinnings of the world. But I also needed to presuppose enough difficulties in achieving her ends to make the struggle interesting. If she isn't going to rely on existing personal connections for support, I need to presuppose reasons for that. Either reasons why she wouldn't ask or reasons why they wouldn't help. If she has the intellectual knowledge for alchemical success, I need to presuppose technical or logistical reasons why she can't simply apply it directly and efficiently.
Beyond this self-weaving web, the other major factor in plotting my continuing series stories (which includes not only the Alpennia books, but the skin-singer stories, and my in-progress Mabinogi stories) is the need/desire to plant seeds in each story that will only grow and flower later. There's been enough overlap in the writing/editing/planning process for the Alpennia series that I've had the opportunity to slip things in. (In other cases, details that I'd included simply for background color later turn out to be useful in generating future plot structure.) The skin-singer stories grew much more episodically, by their very nature. But each one supplied the seeds of the next plot-idea, either by introducing a new character, or a change in location.
The Mabinogi series is something between the two. I'm building structures using existing story motifs in new arrangements, but that means that I have the opportunity to build in implications that rely not only on my own story choices, but on story-shapes in the originals. For example, A certain amount of the over-arching story-shape is drawn from the tales of Pwyll, Rhiannon, and Pryderi. I start with a "wooing and winning" story. Next there is a "conflict in the otherworld" story (which I just revised again and am looking for the next potential market). Based on the original story-shape, and enhanced by the situation of my particular protagonists, we might expect to find the third story covering the "acquisition of an heir" motif, as in the latter part of the First Branch. And, knowing that, there are certain seeds planting in "Hyddwen" (my second branch) that just might become relevant to such a plot.
How do you come up with plots? Isn't it hard to come up with something complex and non-linear?
There are times I wonder if I could come up with a simple, straightforward plot to save my life! Well, for short stories, perhaps. A short story can't handle much more than one main plot and there isn't room for complications. Though even there...
If I had to sum up my approach in two words, it would be "presuppositions and implications". That is: given a starting scenario, whether an action, a character, or simply an idea, what other events and timelines are presupposed by its existence? What must have been true in order for that initial Thing to exist in the way that it exists? And given that initial Thing, what does it have as expected consequences? What would naturally happen because of it? And what would be necessary for that expectation not to be fulfilled? From there, it branches off into infinity, because every presupposed detail has its own branching implications, and every implication presupposes other details. Once the web starts weaving itself, it's more a matter of pruning out enough to leave a comprehensible story than of building something up.
Let's look at a concrete example. For Daughter of Mystery, the initial Thing was something corresponding to the reading-of-the-will scene toward the beginning of the book. I started out with more of a scenario than an event: a young woman (who happens to be skilled with a sword) is left alone by the unexpected death of an employer/mentor and finds that he has placed her in the control of a complete stranger for reasons she doesn't entirely understand and is not happy with.
Presuppositions:
* Her legal situation is such that she has no control over the matter.
* She is in some way socially isolated such that she has no allies to call on.
* There is some social context that allowed her to study swordplay and to have a role associated with that skill.
* Her late employer/mentor has no close connections that he would trust with responsibility for her.
* The historical context is one where a man with some standing might have an employee skilled with a sword, but where it would not make more sense to have an even larger armed entourage. (When I came up with this initial scenario, I was already thinking in terms of a vaguely Regency-era setting, but I was thinking in terms of some other details that didn't pan out, so this isn't necessarily a determiner.)
Implications:
* It will take some time for her to develop a level of trust in her new employer, if it happens at all.
* Her new employer may have no idea what to do with her -- or ideas that she dislikes.
* She will begin with a goal of gaining her freedom. If this changes it will require adopting new goals.
* A new, key character role now exists: her new employer. Who is this person? What do they want? How will this event change their life?
The next step in the process was to fill in some of the implied roles and push the causality out a bit in both directions.
* Who is her new employer? This role evolved into Margerit Sovitre. Once I envisioned this character as another young woman (and a potential eventual love interest) there was an explosion of new connections.
* What was her connection to Barbara's first employer? Why was she chosen?
* How much personal control does she have over Barbara? Who else has a hand in the decisions? What do they want?
* What will Margerit do with her?
* How will Barbara's presence change the course of her life? What was the course of her life before Barbara entered it?
I actually spent quite a lot of time and typing simply exploring these initial questions and relationships before any of the long-term plot threads reared their heads.
In some ways, the plotting is easier for the later books because I'm expanding from an existing complex web rather than building it up from scratch. But in other ways that means I have to be more careful about over-complexity. The way I plotted The Mystic Marriage was relatively straightforward. I started out by knowing that I was writing Antuniet's story. I had established a number of facts about Antuniet in the first book, in particular her interest in alchemy, her somewhat detached, analytical personality, her difficult relationship with her family, and the very difficult position she is left in at the end of the first book. I knew that her story would resolve two main conflicts: she would succeed in her alchemical quest and redeem her family's name, and she would find a way out of her intellectual and emotional isolation and achieve productive and positive bonds with other characters. Everything else was just details.
In addition to the facts established in Daughter of Mystery, many of the presuppositions involved previously unknown back-story about the characters, as well as previously unexplored facts about the fantastic underpinnings of the world. But I also needed to presuppose enough difficulties in achieving her ends to make the struggle interesting. If she isn't going to rely on existing personal connections for support, I need to presuppose reasons for that. Either reasons why she wouldn't ask or reasons why they wouldn't help. If she has the intellectual knowledge for alchemical success, I need to presuppose technical or logistical reasons why she can't simply apply it directly and efficiently.
Beyond this self-weaving web, the other major factor in plotting my continuing series stories (which includes not only the Alpennia books, but the skin-singer stories, and my in-progress Mabinogi stories) is the need/desire to plant seeds in each story that will only grow and flower later. There's been enough overlap in the writing/editing/planning process for the Alpennia series that I've had the opportunity to slip things in. (In other cases, details that I'd included simply for background color later turn out to be useful in generating future plot structure.) The skin-singer stories grew much more episodically, by their very nature. But each one supplied the seeds of the next plot-idea, either by introducing a new character, or a change in location.
The Mabinogi series is something between the two. I'm building structures using existing story motifs in new arrangements, but that means that I have the opportunity to build in implications that rely not only on my own story choices, but on story-shapes in the originals. For example, A certain amount of the over-arching story-shape is drawn from the tales of Pwyll, Rhiannon, and Pryderi. I start with a "wooing and winning" story. Next there is a "conflict in the otherworld" story (which I just revised again and am looking for the next potential market). Based on the original story-shape, and enhanced by the situation of my particular protagonists, we might expect to find the third story covering the "acquisition of an heir" motif, as in the latter part of the First Branch. And, knowing that, there are certain seeds planting in "Hyddwen" (my second branch) that just might become relevant to such a plot.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-09-16 08:21 am (UTC)Gosh. This rather feels like a lightbulb flipping on that should've been on years ago. I wonder what direction my fiction career would've taken if it had!
no subject
Date: 2015-09-16 03:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-09-18 11:25 am (UTC)