Anyone Wanna Talk About Plot?

[dr_mabeuse]

Where do you get it? How do you develop it?

Just put your characters together and see what they do? Or see the situation first or feel the emotional tone? Planned or intuitive? Non-existent?

I tend to write stories from images that seize my imagination. I'll imagine two people together doing something, and then write my way towards it, and usually along the way a story develops that explains what they're doing.

Lately I've got a bunch of images but not a hint of a story. I think it's because these aren't porn stories or even erotic. Just horror. In one of them a kid digging in his backyard finds a giant vein under the earth filled with red mud. I don't know what it means or what happens, and I'm terribly stuck and fristrated.

I need a mental jump start.

And speaking of things under the earth, I read this interview with some author who said that the worst part of novel writing for her is the first 3 months, while she's trying to come up with a plot. She described it as "digging at granite with your fingernails."

That about sums it up.

 

[carsonshepherd]

Yeah.

I do all those things, sometimes all at once.

I'm writing a cop story right now, and while I had an idea of plot in the beginning, the specifics weren't there; it was a "write and see what happens" kind of thing. Which works, but involves extensive editing, to fix foreshadowing and development, etc. It's hard for me to write an unedited first draft. I am addicting to fixing as I go; but I'm really trying this time because I want to finish this thing.

I think you would be an amazing horror writer, Doc. I've said it before. I have very deep faith in you and you talent.

 

[Selena_Kitt]

a giant vein under the earth filled with red mud.

are you sure it's mud?
is it a tentacle?

I work similarly, Doc... an image comes... the people aren't even fleshed out most the the time... with advent calendar it was obviously the calendar that came to mind... but I didn't know what it did or why she brought it until I started writing... my characters don't even have names until I start writing... with "A Different Angle" it was math and sex (and tutors... love student/teacher themes ) ... but I'm not the world's most descriptive author... it's mostly the people who move my stories... so the image just brings me into their world, and then I just kind of see what happens when I get there...

 

[Guest]

I think doc should be the next Stephen King...he writes and thinks some scary stuff.

I think of first lines and the rest comes from there...usually about two am something hits and them I'm up until the first chapter comes together. Good thing I don't believe in sleep.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

I'm pretty much the same way, the characters show up and it unfolds from there.
Sometimes I may see something or read something that triggers and idea and then I research if needed and magic happens if I'm lucky.

 

[Aurora Black]

I have very strange and wacky dreams, and that's where I get most of my plot lines for general fiction. For erotica, I use my fantasies. My characters are based on real life people for the most part, either those I know intimately (Vivian=me) or those that I'd really like to know.

 

[rgraham666]

I spend a lot of time thinking about what's going to happen in a story and who the people involved are before writing.

Sometimes something catches my imagination, a scene usually. In The Orange Slip I saw a painting where I worked, a woman in an orange slip with a small, wicked smile and her hands placed to pull her garment up and reveal herself to the observer.

I wondered how she got to that moment and who else was involved. Spent a couple of months thinking before I typed word one.

In The Gift I had no more idea than to write a BDSM piece. Wasn't concerned at all with the mechanics of the act, didn't want a short piece of smut. Instead I really wanted to explore the mind set of the D/s ouvre.

Spent about three months thinking about that one.

Myself, I call the process 'accretion', like growing a crystal in solution. The seed, the story idea, goes into the solution of my mind and the story grows around it.

 

[Aurora Black]

I spend a lot of time thinking about what's going to happen in a story and who the people involved are before writing.

Sometimes something catches my imagination, a scene usually. In The Orange Slip I saw a painting where I worked, a woman in an orange slip with a small, wicked smile and her hands placed to pull her garment up and reveal herself to the observer.

I wondered how she got to that moment and who else was involved. Spent a couple of months thinking before I typed word one.

In The Gift I had no more idea than to write a BDSM piece. Wasn't concerned at all with the mechanics of the act, didn't want a short piece of smut. Instead I really wanted to explore the mind set of the D/s ouvre.

Spent about three months thinking about that one.

Myself, I call the process 'accretion', like growing a crystal in solution. The seed, the story idea, goes into the solution of my mind and the story grows around it.

That's interesting, Rob. I think about it in terms of a growing tree, myself.

 

[zeb1094]

I too have these 'dreams' that give me the basic plot and characters of a story. Once I start writing though the story takes on a life of it's own and could go almost in any direction.

Sometimes I do finish a story in my head before I even set it to paper, then while writing things may or may not change as I type and re-read.

 

[Aurora Black]

I too have these 'dreams' that give me the basic plot and characters of a story. Once I start writing though the story takes on a life of it's own and could go almost in any direction.

Sometimes I do finish a story in my head before I even set it to paper, then while writing things may or may not change as I type and re-read.

That's how it went with my 25+ chapter fan fiction, Dark Impulse. I had a general outline of events in my head, but when I was actually typing it, inspiration would strike out of nowhere and the story would shift in a different (but better) direction.

 

[R. Richard]

I tend to see a plot and then populate it with characters. Apparently this is the opposite of the way it works for many others.

 

[zeb1094]

I tend to see a plot and then populate it with characters. Apparently this is the opposite of the way it works for many others.

Not all the time. Some times I get an idea about a story that is just plot with maybe two main characters. Than as I write I find I need more characters to drive the story forward and have to sit back a think what kind of character I need.

Some times I can start a story with just a phrase.

 

[NoJo]

Where do you get it? How do you develop it?

Just put your characters together and see what they do? Or see the situation first or feel the emotional tone? Planned or intuitive? Non-existent?

I tend to write stories from images that seize my imagination. I'll imagine two people together doing something, and then write my way towards it, and usually along the way a story develops that explains what they're doing.

Lately I've got a bunch of images but not a hint of a story. I think it's because these aren't porn stories or even erotic. Just horror. In one of them a kid digging in his backyard finds a giant vein under the earth filled with red mud. I don't know what it means or what happens, and I'm terribly stuck and fristrated.

I need a mental jump start.

And speaking of things under the earth, I read this interview with some author who said that the worst part of novel writing for her is the first 3 months, while she's trying to come up with a plot. She described it as "digging at granite with your fingernails."

That about sums it up.

A series of powerful images can certainly make a great and successful movie; I'm not so sure about written fiction, but I can imagine it would work with that too.

A common way of devleoping a story is to sort of alternate between thinking about the plot to thinking about the characters. Obviously they have a causal effect on each other.

 

[cantdog]

The plot came first with my first (unpublished anywhere) novel-length mess. This was when I was young, and limbic. I had plenty of issues about parenting to work out, and a backlog of fantasies, red dreams of revenge, really. It isn't suitable for our needs at this time.

The plot came first for my first Lit story, which will never have an H, and never really will deserve one. It's a little turgid because all my writing was, then. As a plot, and as a story-- writing style issues aside, that is to say-- it holds up pretty well. (This is You Can't Come Home Again, or some such title, by the way, so that you can avoid it.)

The freedom of having a story worked out ahead is what strikes me, now. In both cases, knowing what needed to be gotten across, the author could pick points along the story line to develop. He could tell the story in any order, too. Getting from point D to point E? No sweat. Hit the enter key and write the scene which happens at point E. The travel between doesn't move the plot anywhere, just the characters.

But the farces, which are situational comedies, involve the protagonist tumbling into a tangle of difficulties and then wriggling and grunting and kicking his way clear. You'd think plot would be paramount, but it wasn't. I just decided on the difficulties and wrote straight ahead. I had to work out how to get loose myself, the way I would have had to if I were the character. Since the difficulties were social ones, not deadly monsters from planet W, it was fun to write from beginning to end. I did a couple of those.

Short fiction is a different thing. Lit works most satisfyingly, I think, for a reader, if the stories are brief and sensually loaded. Plot is secondary. Something still has to happen, though; I can't write without events, I need the framework within which the encounters take place. But I don't need to sweat plot issues for a short piece for Lit.

 

[impressive]

It varies. Sometimes I'll build the story around a sexual scenario I find intriguing. Other times, the character(s) come to me first, and I let them drive. Still others, an event (like the final siege of Fort Henry in my NaNope novel) will inspire.

Right now, there's an erotic poem tickling the edges of my consciousness. It's entitled "crawl" ... but it won't come into focus (yet). Stories are like that, too.

 

[cantdog]

I hated being stuck for plot, man. You read the AH board, all this rhetoric, y'know: I had to get the story out! The story was in me and needed to be told! and it makes you grumble about how lucky those bastards are. Their goddam story came like a mission from God or something, if you believe 'em. Sprang forth like Athene from the head of Zeus, fully armed and doubtless charmingly arrayed.

But developing plot was never so light a task. I had to give birth to it the old fashioned way, from the gut, with much sweat and cursing. But I guess you dream it up, almost literally. Daydreaming, I suppose, is the mode of thought most like it. In the more dire parts of the process, I was mumbling to myself. Brow-clutching I could usually avoid.

Real dreams, chance encounters, anything at all can serve as inspiration. But inspiration isn't the half of it. Inspiration, for me, nets me a scene or two, sometimes pellucidly clear and exquisite in its detail and form, but it never gives me the plot.

Going back over it in my mind, I see it as a compound process. Inspiring and then those lovely visionary scenes, for step one. Then a little brainstorming. Like the mud vein. There are mines and drill holes all over the earth, man. How come nobody saw the veins before, sapping a tunnel or something? So the vein is a local phenomenon. Somewhere in the neighborhood... his town is built all unbeknownst over the beating heart of Qadgop the Mercotan!! or whatever. This will usually yield only a framework, not a real plot.

Then, the path to the plot splits. You can indeed write straight ahead with only the framework, and your mind will mull the thing and come up with stuff to help you. Or you can sit down and plan with an outline or flowchart-like thing or some other more or less mechanical aid, and just jimmy up a plot for its own sake, before settling to write in a serious way.

Doesn't mean either path is easy or guaranteed.

 

[cloudy]

I get a ton of my plot ideas from song lyrics - especially those that don't make a whole lot of sense until you really, really focus on them. Even then, a lot of times they're not all that clear, but that's even better because I can make up the missing pieces...sort of an authorly fill-in-the-blank.

While I'm listening to the song, I can damn near "see" my characters: what they look like, what they're doing. It's almost as if I adopt it as the "score" for my story.

Doc, that's exactly where I Alone came from.

 

[SummerMorning]

Hey, doc, you're lucky you're dealing with a plot. I'm dealing with a writer's block ever since I had to disgorge 80 citation stuffed pages of critical discourse analysis.

 

[Alex756]

I always start with character, I don't have the writing tools to be abe to start with plot, I've tried and its been BAD.

Sometiems I halfass it from a plot idea to a character idea and that character idea might NEVER make it to a final write.

Like the mud thing, if I were to wrok it, I'd start with the kid, realize no great ideas from me on that front then think back, what if the mud was something old, what could it be, the remnants of something. what something, some massive catastrophe, OK someone has to be kille din that catastrophe, who.

I'd start working that who, probbaly come up with some accident that happened at some mill/ranch.manufacturing/mine something liek that and develope a character killed in it, then how did that all influance the currant scene.

The character in the accident might NEVER appear in the final work, like most of my demonology backstory will NEVER appear anywhere, but its the foundation I would need to move forward from the red mud.

Wow, speaking of mud, talk about as clear as mud.

~Alex

 

[Stella_Omega]

I tend to hear someones voice, or see someone's expression, or some sexual act, or a fragment of one. Then I have to find out how it all happened. Then I have to but my little masturbatory fragment into a plot, then there turns out to be a message involved... well, not that, not usually.
It's amazing to me that any of my stories come to a conclusion!

 

[Guest]

Good question, Mab., especially the way you put it. I've always begun with a character and some tiny thing they do or say. If the persona and thing stay with me long enough I'll need to write them down. I just go on from there, still not worrying a plot; as long as the character keeps my interest the story develops (or not). (I've never thought about plot, even in the midst of writing. I think that's why I can't write mystery/detective stories.)

SubJose posted a thread about Harold Pinter's Nobel prize speech. Most of it was political but his intro (re. Truth) included fascinating stuff re. how his plays developed. I was thinking of posting it in Gauche's thread about 'free will' but I'll paste it here.

The first time I read the excerpt below it took my breath away as I understood exactly what Pinter was saying; it's very like the way the process of writing a story is for me. Whether it helps you particularly, I do find it inspirational. (my emphases)

best to you, Perdita
--------------------

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is 'What have you done with the scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.'

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn't give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.

'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.

In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), 'Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don't you buy a dog? You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're cooking for a lot of dogs.' So since B calls A 'Dad' it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn't know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.

'Dark.' A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. 'Fat or thin?' the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.

It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

Perdita, you rock.

 

[SEVERUSMAX]

I simply picture scenarios, and then try to work out how such a situation might come about.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Perdita, you rock.

What she said.
Pinter, he rocks too. You know, he should get some kind of medal or something!

 

[Alex De Kok]

Are we talking novel plot, or short story plot? For a short story, I tend to go the 'Stephen King' route and put my characters into a situation to see what happens. I have yet to finish a novel (I've got some great beginnings!) but I've now had three goes at NaNoWriMo.

In 2003, I had a skeleton of a plot, with a two or three sentence note of where I wanted each chapter to go. I managed the 50k with a coherent story. Still unfinished, but I'll get there! In 2004 I just started writing. I had some characters, and a situation, but it fizzled out before it started. I changed stories, started again and wrote on. I managed 50k words, but in two different works, neither finished.

This year, I again had short chapter outlines and managed a coherent 50k words. Again, not yet finished (hey, there was a contest to write for!) but again, I'll get there.

I guess what I'm saying is that for a short story I just need an idea or situation and some characters. For anything longer I need, if not a 'plot', then at least an outline of the way I see the tale developing. A map, if you like. No topographical features or contour lines - they come later - but at least a direction to go in, with the major landmarks indicated, even if it's only 'here be dragons'.

Alex