Category Archives: Ideas & Plotting

The Upside to Being Messy and Unfocussed

Character Evan Braun Rewriting Storyline No Comments

RubiksCubeFor the most part, I’m a gardener. And proud of it! If you’ve spent any amount of time in the writing community, you probably know what this means: I explore my story as I go along, finding my way to the ending through a process of trial and error rather than moving through the book strictly according to a preordained outline. I don’t eschew outlining entirely; I do keep fairly detailed outlines of the two or three chapters ahead of wherever I happen to be in the story on a given day. Working this way gives me confidence in the story’s immediate future, but beyond that I admit it can get a little murky. I only have a general idea of how I want the story to resolve while I’m in the midst of it (usually it’s a solid, workable idea, but nonetheless I only work out the details very generally).

This doesn’t mean the endings aren’t well-earned or carefully orchestrated. In fact, I feel that working this way forces me to spend a lot of time considering how satisfying various plot and character developments will be when push comes to shove. If any particular idea isn’t panning out, I don’t have qualms about jettisoning it in favour of an alternate approach. In my experience, this allows my books to get better, stronger, tighter as I work through them, solving them in the same way one might tackle a Rubik’s Cube. (Full disclosure: I’ve never managed to solve a Rubik’s Cube, so I guess that’s a bad example.)

So what does this have to do with character? Everything.

When you don’t have an airtight outline guiding you through the storytelling weeds, you have to create potential in your characters. In the earlier stages of writing a novel, it’s profitable to spin dozens of little threads that may or may not pay off in the long run. You don’t have to tie them all together. Once your story is worked out, you can trim the book down to focus only on the threads that coalesce. At the beginning, though, the key to creating great, story-propelling characters is to pinball them off other characters and events to see what sticks. In my experience, this leads to a host of options which can be exploited down the road.

This can feel messy and unfocussed while in progress, but a lot of the detritus doesn’t make it into the final cut. I end up writing a number of early scenes that don’t see the light of day, because they don’t lead anywhere interesting. But I often won’t know if particular character combinations work until I attempt them. So Margaret clashes with Fred, and Fred makes a pass at Steve, and Steve can speak with the ghost of a long-dead alien consciousness from Europa, and the long-dead alien consciousness from Europa… The point is, none of these may be central to the premise of my story—at least to begin with—but the few threads that really click create enormous depth and interconnectivity to my characterizations in the long-term. And several of them likely will become central to the premise by the time I type “The End.”

Knowing what will come together and what won’t is a mysterious, unscientific alchemy I have yet to master—and maybe I never will. But in the meantime, I’m going to keep the gardening the hell out of my characters and sees what sprouts up. Sometimes it’s this. Other times? Not so much.

Don’t Break Your Promises

Author's Perspective Craft & Skills Frank Morin Reflection Storyline The Writing Life 1 Comment

Break PromisesAs authors, we make lots of promises to our readers.  What genre is this book?  Is it going to be a fast-paced adventure or a slow, character-focused drama?  Is it funny, horrific, or simply entertaining?  We set the tone in the opening of the book and the reader picks up on those hints and sets certain expectations for what to expect.

Betraying those expectations shatters a reader’s bond with a story and leaves an angry residue, no matter how good other aspects of the story might have been.  This happens both in books and in movies.  Sometimes false expectations are set in movie trailers or book jackets as a marketing ploy to suck in a wider audience, but any short-term gains will be lost in the long run as people realize the trick.

One movie that did this to me was Cowboys vs Aliens.  The trailer made it look like an action comedy and I entered the theater with that expectation.  Some parts of the story were well done, but I kept waiting for the punchline that never came.  It wasn’t an action comedy.  It was more like an action horror movie.  Despite some quality acting and a halfway decent plotline, I left the theater feeling betrayed.

Another movie tried the same ploy.  The trailer showed a hilarious scene that made it clear, this movie was a comedy.  It wasn’t.  It was a terrible flick with no redeeming qualities.  Unlike some of those dumb comedies I remember fondly only because they made me laugh, this one was just dumb.  Another betrayal.

Books are worse though, because we invest so much more time in them.  A couple examples jump to mind.  One novel, by a well-known author, started as a very interesting fantasy adventure with high stakes and a hero in deep trouble.  I read on, drawn by the intrigue of how this hero could ever escape the predicament.  I was looking forward to being amazed by the character’s wit and cleverness in escaping certain death.

What a huge disappointment when the climactic showdown resolve itself without any of that.  The ‘magic’ saved them, the same magic that had been blocked in a thoroughly explained way that prevented it from coming to the rescue.  The lame excuse offered by the author was that the hero just figured it out and boom – the magic solved all their issues.

I’m a fan of great magic systems.  I read and write all types of fantasy, so magic is an integral part of many stories I love.  But this was a cop-out, a deception, a betrayal of the contract the author made with me as a reader.  Since then, I only ever started one other book by that author.  In that one too, I picked up on a different deception.  I put that book down unfinished, and that author lost me as a reader forever.

Is that harsh?  Maybe.  But it’s reality.

When we set expectations, we have to fulfill them.  We can’t take the easy way out.  If we set up our heroes with seemingly insurmountable obstacles, we’d better have an equally awesome solution.  The hero has to figure it out, often in a split-second flash of understanding as they put all the pieces together we’ve worked into the script.  We have as long as we need to figure it out and craft that moment so that readers exclaim in wonder at the hero’s creativity and then think, “Yeah, I can see how they figured that out, but that’s clever.  I get it now.”

If we can do that, we’ve got a winner and readers will come back to us again and again.

Because they know they can trust us to entertain.

Clive Cussler, Guy Gavriel Kay and DJ McIntosh are Masters at …

Ace Jordyn Craft & Skills Prologues The Writing Process Writing Tools 2 Comments

… the dreaded, overused, abused and misunderstood prologue.

I’ve never been a fan of prologues. Sometimes prologues create expectations that the book doesn’t meet either in story content or style or it’s an info dump. If it’s designed to foreshadow or tease I read no further because I want to experience that within the context of the story itself. The prologue must signal that it contains important information which can’t be placed elsewhere in the book. Before I buy a book, I’ll skim the prologue and the first chapter to ensure that chapter one is gripping and that the prologue wasn’t added because the first chapter failed to hook.

Sometimes the prologue works well and in the hands of good writers, you know the story wouldn’t be the same without it. The prologue should entertain, read well and provide a set-up that can’t be integrated into the novel proper.

In The Navigator, Clive Cussler and Paul Kemprecos interpret history to create a fast paced action adventure. Set in 900 B.C., the prologue is a well written short story with compelling characters, feuding brothers, interesting detail and contains a mystery that the reader knows will be revealed in the thriller’s modern day setting. Like the novel, the prologue is an action adventure with plot twists and turns. We expect that in Cussler’s books and he delivers.

The prologue in Guy Gavriel Kay’s novel Tigana is set back only 20 years and is a delight to read because although it is set in the time of war, it isn’t an information dump and it skillfully sets the mood and the theme. Unlike Cussler’s story approach, Kay paints only a scene between the court’s sculptor and the prince who are steadfast friends. This scene, in the hours before the hopeless final battle, the sculptor and the prince reflect that, despite knowing that they will lose this battle, their legacies will live on through their children and their work and they will die at the hand of a vengeful sorcerer for they have killed his son. There is also the delicate touch of themes, remembrance, the good and evil in people, the ugliness and beauty of a situation, hope and despair. ‘There was singing on the other side of the river too, he noted, listening to the enemy soldiers north of them. It was curiously hard to impute any absolute sense of evil to those harmonizing voices, or to hate them quite as blindly as being a soldier seemed to require.’ The writing is introspective without being melodramatic. ‘There will be ripples of tomorrow that run down all the years.”

D.J. McIntosh is a historical thriller writer touted as the next Dan Brown. The first book of her series, The Witch of Babylon, is set in 2003, just after the National Museum of Iraq becomes a casualty of war. The prologue is unusual in that it has three vignettes: the first sets the time and place, in the ruins of the museum where a thief after a relic observes a museum archeologist; the second where the American archeologist outsmarts the thief; and the third, where a woman is tortured for information and is left to die in a sandstorm. The intimate nature of these situations is information which can’t be known or revealed later because the story is told in the first person and not by any of these characters. These vignettes are handled deftly for they contain well-paced action and adventure written in vividly descriptive, yet not overdone, prose–just like the rest of the novel. For example: ‘And yet on the ninth day of the month of Nissan, a time well chosen by the invaders to avoid the brutal heat of summer, the city did fall, crushed as easily as the delicate shell of a baby bird.’ and ‘She dreamt of water—the feeling of cool liquid slipping down her throat, reedy pools at the edge of the Tigris, icy moisture on ancient rock walls. She was cracking and she knew it.’

These three authors wrote their prologues in very different ways. Each successfully conveyed information without it being an info dump and promised a story/writing style upon which they delivered. They all made for good and memorable reads: Cussler’s ability to deliver action adventure with an interesting historical twist; Kay’s ability to weave a poignant scene with thematic overtones; and McIntosh’s deft delivery of an action based thriller with roots in ancient and modern history.

Yes, that dreaded, maligned prologue can be a joy to read!

cussler104089McIntosh

Art Is Pain: A Brief Overview of the Role of Catharsis in Fiction

Author's Perspective Evan Braun Reflection Self-Awareness Storyline The Writing Life 1 Comment

Writing is scary. Like, really scary.

It’s also liberating and beautiful and a host of other very positive things, but like all art, the process of creating it is often full of pain. When I first learned of this month’s theme, I realized I’d struck gold. After all, it sometimes seems as though I have enough insecurities to fill an entire week of posts.

Most writers (and probably all of the truly good ones) mine heavily from their own lives to spin their tales—and more importantly, the characters that inhabit them. No question about it, real-life influences keep books feeling fresh, relevant, and relatable to the reading public. The dark side is that sharing of one’s self in such personal and intimate ways also requires gut-wrenching honesty. And artists are, as a rule, slightly more tormented than average. Put this all together, and you have a recipe for maximum creative angst.

In psychotherapy, it’s referred to as “catharsis”—the discharge of pent-up emotions so as to result in the alleviation of symptoms or the permanent relief of the condition. The term also applies to drama, with more or less the same definition. A play, a movie, a book (any kind of art, really) explores highly emotional themes, often through tragic narratives, all in an attempt to get the audience/viewer/reader to feel some combination of strong emotions, and by feeling these emotions express the pain and torment within themselves in such a way that relieves them of it, so that they don’t have to actually carry out similar tragedies in the real world.

But it’s not just the consumer of the art who goes through the cathartic process. To an even greater degree, the artist experiences it through the act of creation.

I have to admit that I often get emotionally involved in my stories. When I’m writing something sad, I work myself up into a state of sadness. It’s not always conscious, either. I don’t make myself sad so that the writing will better convey the sadness. Rather, the act of writing about sadness takes its toll on me. The same goes for a wide range of emotional states. And this effect is amplified when I’m writing about scenarios that are relevant to my life; if my character is experiencing a sort of sadness I myself am sincerely steeped in in my personal life, it’s awfully easy to get worked up about it. (The challenge in editing then is to remove some of the melodrama from the first draft.)

I’ve probably made myself sound sufficiently insane now. A bit schizophrenic, perhaps.

Well, you’re welcome. Delving into my own pain is a sacrifice I willingly make to enhance my reader’s potential enjoyment of my work! This doesn’t just make the books better, though. While the writing process is somewhat painful at times (and perfectly enjoyable at other times, yes), it’s also incredibly fulfilling.