Serendipity – or I love it when a plot comes together.

[TheRedChamber]

As I’ve mentioned a few times before on this forum, I’m a pretty structured writer. I tend to view story writing like building a bridge where all the major beams and supports are laid out well in advance before any work starts. However, I’ve also seen writing referred to as a type of archaeology - you find the bits of the wall of a structure poking out of the desert here and there and you brush away the sand carefully until the whole thing becomes visible to you. That’s a metaphor which I’m increasingly finding has some value as I get more and more experienced with writing.

Even with my obsessive pre-plotting, I find it’s very common for a story to surprise you or for you to come across, seemingly by accident, a hidden structure or delight in your story that you didn’t consciously put there, but none the less seems so perfect that it feels like some sort of gift. This is going to be one of those long and self-indulgent topics, both for me and the posters who come after (if any) to talk about their work in depth. Go crazy. What I’m really asking about though is going to be the extent to which you find this happens to you and for specific examples of things which seem to develop organically from your writing.

As Lit limits the size of a post, lets break here and start the anecdote below.

 

[TheRedChamber]

You see I had the perfect example of this during my writing session. Without going into the whole plot, the important points for this scene are.

• It’s June/July 1963 and we’re in London.
• Flora, our PoV MC, is getting married to John in a month’s time.
• The arrival of Ashlyn, a stunningly beautiful American model who will be staying in John’s house for a few weeks, is making Flora insecure about their relationship. (There’s a 4th member of the group who isn’t important for the purposes of this post).
• Flora’s insecurities will largely prove to be unfounded (but not until they’ve driven most of the rest of the plot).

My task for this morning was to write part of scene 3 of 11 from my masterplan. The notes for this part simply say “The group go to a coffee shop with loud rock’n’roll music in Soho. Flora’s jealousy grows.” Not a terribly important scene. I saw a YouTube video about 1960s coffee shops during my research and it seems cool. I needed the characters to walk through London’s red-light district to foreshadow later developments and a coffee shop seemed like something Flora would agree to. How does Flora’s jealously grow? I didn’t particularly know, I was expecting her to look at Ashlyn and go ‘Sigh, she’s a lot more attractive than me,’ and maybe for Ashlyn to say something charming and intelligent to the group. Here’s how the conversation with my muse went down.

• Why is Flora going to get jealous? – John and Ashlyn are going to be talking about something that excludes her.
• What are John and Ashlyn going to talk about? – They’re in a music café so let them talk about music. (Flora has already been established as ‘uncool’ regarding practically any type of modern culture, so will be naturally feel excluded.)
• What music are John and Ashlyn going to talk about? – Well, a really good music discussion usually involves people recommending stuff to you that you have no idea existed. So John is going to talk about British music and Ashlyn is going to talk about American music.
• Yes, but what American music? – According to Wikipedia, Bob Dylan released his second album in the US in May that year. We’ve established Ashlyn’s pretty socially conscious, she’d love it.
• And would anyone in the UK have heard his first album? – Nope, not until he got famous way later. In fact, come to think of it, we’ve never heard it and we’ve got a dozen Dylan albums.
• So is John into English folk music? I didn’t think he was into folk music – Well we haven’t said he isn’t into folk music. Besides we’ve already established that two of the four characters don’t like the Beatles (Flora prefers Cliff Richards and Ashlyn thinks that instead of insisting he only wants to hold her hand, McCartney should come out and admit he just wants to stick his dick in her). Let’s make it a running joke.
• Okay, fine, John likes English folk music. But I draw the line at a beard. So what English folk music does John like? – Most important English folk singer of the time is (google, google, google) Martin Carthy. Oh, and look here, Dylan visited the UK the year before, met with Martin Carthy in a London club, learned the song Scarborough Fair from him and adapted it into the song Girl from the North Country.
• So John could have potentially already seen Dylan if he’d happened been in the folk club on the right night even if no-one else in the UK knows anything about him? – Sure seems that way.
• Wow, John is a pretty cool dude? – Yes I had no idea either. So him and Ashlyn have a deep and meaningful conversation about the differences between American and English folk music.
• What are the differences between American and English folk music? – Fucked if I know. And I don’t much fancy researching a whole paragraph trying to sound intelligent about it only to bore the pants off our readers. Let’s have Ashlyn just grab a guitar from the band and play a Dylan song at John.
• Dylan on an electric guitar? That’s sacrilegious! – Shit, your right. Okay, change of plan. The band in the coffee shop is playing skiffle.
• So this is the least cool coffee shop in 60s Soho? - Sure. Flora chose it. It’s half empty and about to go out of business.
• Seems a bit mean just so Ashlyn can get an acoustic guitar for five minutes, but fine. So she borrows the band’s guitar during the break and plays Girl from the North Country at John? – Yep. Flora doesn’t have any musical talent so that’ll really rub it in.
• And then John goes ‘that’s just Scarborough Fair’, grabs the guitar and plays back at her? – Yep.
• So, what, are we just going to dump the lyrics of both songs in the text? – No, Literotica’s pretty uptight about that. We’ll just have to do the first lines and last lines of the first verse from each song.
• Okay, sounds fair. So what’s the last line from NC Girl? – ‘She once was a true love of mine’.
• Okay and what’s the last line from Scarborough Fair? – ‘She once was a true love of mine’ dumbass, that’s why they’re the same song.
• So let’s get this straight, we now have John and Ashlyn both finishing a song looking into each other’s eyes and talking about ‘true love’ – Sure, seems that way.
• So Flora is presumably going crazy by this point? – It’s only logical to conclude that Flora will very much be going very quietly and internally ape-shit at this point.
• And John and Ashlyn are actually just having a perfectly innocent discussion about folk music? – Yep. Total deniability for both characters.
• So can I put a big tick by this ‘Flora’s jealously grows’ bullet-point? - I already did.
• So, wait, just exactly how the hell did we get here again? – Don’t ask me. I was going to suggest that Flora gets bored during the conversation and notices that Ashlyn has bigger tits than her. Again. This actually explains something about the motivations of the character for the rest of the story.
• So we just write that up, round off the chapter with some terrible Dylan based puns and our work here is done? – I guess this whole chapter has left Flora…blowing in the wind. Don’t think twice, Flora, it’ll be alright. He he he.

The point I’m really making about this is, all this seems to flow from a few logical deductions and question from the few basic parameters I’d set up for this section of the story and a string of sensible questions. At no stage did I feel like I was doing anything particularly creative or inspired, and I ended up with something way better than I had at the start (which was basically nothing). This is probably the most explicit example of it happening to me, but it does seem like it’s something that happens fairly commonly when writing.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I'm sitting here thinking, Christ on a bike, you planners go through that kind of detail, and come up with a thousand words of notes? And THEN start writing your story?

This is just so utterly, totally foreign to me - I cannot even begin to think like that.

In several of my stories, a character has arrived between the first sentence of a paragraph and the last sentence, and I'm thinking, "Where the fuck did you come from?"

Deep down in your subconscious, she replies, and let me tell you, I'm here to stay! And proceeds to take over the story, or at the very least, gets a chapter of her own. Several of my favourite characters have arrived in stories like that, out of the blue.

 

[Lifestyle66]

My Lifestyle Ch.11 – Demons Past started out as a plan to show my MC couple returning to their small hometown to reminisce. The original thought for this chapter was to return for a high school reunion, and for the husband getting hit on by the wife’s former hateful rival.


As I began writing, I had trouble developing that 30-year reunion as a motive to return. Neither of them got along well with their high school peers (as described earlier.) And how do I have this financially successful couple return to their old hometown without addressing the families they left behind? Do they stay at one of their parents’ houses? The husband’s family was described as rather poor in earlier chapters, and the wife grew up dealing with a mentally disturbed mother. (Their drive to move away from those pasts.)

I finally hit on the idea of them returning instead for a final visit to her old home, which her parents left empty to sell.

To provide another conflict and further the story, they stop at a hotel just before arriving home, where the wife encounters an aging band member at a nightclub. An earlier chapter mentioned she had fucked the band guy before the MCs married. I pulled from that brief passage in chapter 2 when she found a week later the band member was married. Is the band guy now divorced? Does she get together with him again (the MCs are swingers.) How might she handle such an emotional reunion with a former cheater?

I expanded on that to develop what I thought was a good thought-provoking scene of her dealing with her past. The sex scene slowly took form with her walking her husband through what she did with the band guy 30 years earlier (a sort of N/C encounter where she didn’t say “No”, but she didn’t want it.) She is now looking for her husband to help her forget it. The whole chapter is about building the strong-willed wife's character.

Unfortunately, I chose to try posting this chapter to “Romance” where it quickly fell below the radar after the first troll gave it a 1. Since then, it has a 4.67 rating, but ONLY six votes. She reflects on how some women could end up in an abusive relationship through slow acceptance. I think some people read it and can't "hate it" but find it a little disturbing and just don't rate it.

 

[TheRedChamber]

I'm sitting here thinking, Christ on a bike, you planners go through that kind of detail, and come up with a thousand words of notes? And THEN start writing your story?

This is just so utterly, totally foreign to me - I cannot even begin to think like that.

In several of my stories, a character has arrived between the first sentence of a paragraph and the last sentence, and I'm thinking, "Where the fuck did you come from?"

Deep down in your subconscious, she replies, and let me tell you, I'm here to stay! And proceeds to take over the story, or at the very least, gets a chapter of her own. Several of my favourite characters have arrived in stories like that, out of the blue.

I was hoping to avoid the old conversation about planners vs pantsers again in this thread, but I suppose it is fundamental to how I view the process. Still, for pantser writers, I'd assume the kind of serendipity I'm talking about would happen more often, not less often. Surely, you've done the equivalent of stopping at end of the penultimate chapter of your story, and then saying to yourself "Right, the hero has about twenty minutes to find the heroine in the woods and save her from the Runcorn Strangler, how exactly does he do that? Oh wait, in chapter one I wrote that the heroine's mother works in a kennel for retired police dogs. I only did that because I thought it was cute that he works in a pet shop and she comes in everyday to buy a hundred cans of dog food, but blow me if that doesn't work perfectly. Let's get the whole village out with a dog a piece and the conclusion of the story writes itself. Oh and good thing she stuffed her knickers into his pocket after the sex scene in chapter four, so the dogs have something to use for scent. I wondered why she did that at the time. Might be a bit embarrassing to explain to her mum, but with a woman's life on the line, he's just going to have to man up and own those panties."

 

[KeithD]

I find it’s very common for a story to surprise you or for you to come across, seemingly by accident, a hidden structure or delight in your story that you didn’t consciously put there, but none the less seems so perfect that it feels like some sort of gift.

Yep, this is a real reward of writing. More often than not, I'm more pleased with where the story went and ended up than I thought I would be when I began writing it.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

You see I had the perfect example of this during my writing session. Without going into the whole plot, the important points for this scene are.

• It’s June/July 1963 and we’re in London.
• Flora, our PoV MC, is getting married to John in a month’s time.
• The arrival of Ashlyn, a stunningly beautiful American model who will be staying in John’s house for a few weeks, is making Flora insecure about their relationship. (There’s a 4th member of the group who isn’t important for the purposes of this post).
• Flora’s insecurities will largely prove to be unfounded (but not until they’ve driven most of the rest of the plot).

My task for this morning was to write part of scene 3 of 11 from my masterplan. The notes for this part simply say “The group go to a coffee shop with loud rock’n’roll music in Soho. Flora’s jealousy grows.” Not a terribly important scene. I saw a YouTube video about 1960s coffee shops during my research and it seems cool. I needed the characters to walk through London’s red-light district to foreshadow later developments and a coffee shop seemed like something Flora would agree to. How does Flora’s jealously grow? I didn’t particularly know, I was expecting her to look at Ashlyn and go ‘Sigh, she’s a lot more attractive than me,’ and maybe for Ashlyn to say something charming and intelligent to the group. Here’s how the conversation with my muse went down.

• Why is Flora going to get jealous? – John and Ashlyn are going to be talking about something that excludes her.
• What are John and Ashlyn going to talk about? – They’re in a music café so let them talk about music. (Flora has already been established as ‘uncool’ regarding practically any type of modern culture, so will be naturally feel excluded.)
• What music are John and Ashlyn going to talk about? – Well, a really good music discussion usually involves people recommending stuff to you that you have no idea existed. So John is going to talk about British music and Ashlyn is going to talk about American music.
• Yes, but what American music? – According to Wikipedia, Bob Dylan released his second album in the US in May that year. We’ve established Ashlyn’s pretty socially conscious, she’d love it.
• And would anyone in the UK have heard his first album? – Nope, not until he got famous way later. In fact, come to think of it, we’ve never heard it and we’ve got a dozen Dylan albums.
• So is John into English folk music? I didn’t think he was into folk music – Well we haven’t said he isn’t into folk music. Besides we’ve already established that two of the four characters don’t like the Beatles (Flora prefers Cliff Richards and Ashlyn thinks that instead of insisting he only wants to hold her hand, McCartney should come out and admit he just wants to stick his dick in her). Let’s make it a running joke.
• Okay, fine, John likes English folk music. But I draw the line at a beard. So what English folk music does John like? – Most important English folk singer of the time is (google, google, google) Martin Carthy. Oh, and look here, Dylan visited the UK the year before, met with Martin Carthy in a London club, learned the song Scarborough Fair from him and adapted it into the song Girl from the North Country.
• So John could have potentially already seen Dylan if he’d happened been in the folk club on the right night even if no-one else in the UK knows anything about him? – Sure seems that way.
• Wow, John is a pretty cool dude? – Yes I had no idea either. So him and Ashlyn have a deep and meaningful conversation about the differences between American and English folk music.
• What are the differences between American and English folk music? – Fucked if I know. And I don’t much fancy researching a whole paragraph trying to sound intelligent about it only to bore the pants off our readers. Let’s have Ashlyn just grab a guitar from the band and play a Dylan song at John.
• Dylan on an electric guitar? That’s sacrilegious! – Shit, your right. Okay, change of plan. The band in the coffee shop is playing skiffle.
• So this is the least cool coffee shop in 60s Soho? - Sure. Flora chose it. It’s half empty and about to go out of business.
• Seems a bit mean just so Ashlyn can get an acoustic guitar for five minutes, but fine. So she borrows the band’s guitar during the break and plays Girl from the North Country at John? – Yep. Flora doesn’t have any musical talent so that’ll really rub it in.
• And then John goes ‘that’s just Scarborough Fair’, grabs the guitar and plays back at her? – Yep.
• So, what, are we just going to dump the lyrics of both songs in the text? – No, Literotica’s pretty uptight about that. We’ll just have to do the first lines and last lines of the first verse from each song.
• Okay, sounds fair. So what’s the last line from NC Girl? – ‘She once was a true love of mine’.
• Okay and what’s the last line from Scarborough Fair? – ‘She once was a true love of mine’ dumbass, that’s why they’re the same song.
• So let’s get this straight, we now have John and Ashlyn both finishing a song looking into each other’s eyes and talking about ‘true love’ – Sure, seems that way.
• So Flora is presumably going crazy by this point? – It’s only logical to conclude that Flora will very much be going very quietly and internally ape-shit at this point.
• And John and Ashlyn are actually just having a perfectly innocent discussion about folk music? – Yep. Total deniability for both characters.
• So can I put a big tick by this ‘Flora’s jealously grows’ bullet-point? - I already did.
• So, wait, just exactly how the hell did we get here again? – Don’t ask me. I was going to suggest that Flora gets bored during the conversation and notices that Ashlyn has bigger tits than her. Again. This actually explains something about the motivations of the character for the rest of the story.
• So we just write that up, round off the chapter with some terrible Dylan based puns and our work here is done? – I guess this whole chapter has left Flora…blowing in the wind. Don’t think twice, Flora, it’ll be alright. He he he.

The point I’m really making about this is, all this seems to flow from a few logical deductions and question from the few basic parameters I’d set up for this section of the story and a string of sensible questions. At no stage did I feel like I was doing anything party particularly creative or inspired, and I ended up with something way better than I had at the start (which was basically nothing). This is probably the most explicit example of it happening to me, but it does seem like it’s something that happens fairly commonly when writing.

I will mentally arrange things like this as I am writing, but from a structural perspective, I focus more on tracking continuity of the characters and plot. I use an Excel spreadsheet with separate tabs for each story I write which allows me to manage characters, locations, and events that may have happened in another story that gets referenced in a new one, even if it's not part of a series.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I will run down research rabbit holes. But even more often, while not sleeping, I'll run through chains of 'what ifs', pondering what might happen so I can write up what I decide once I'm more sentient. So I end up building various headcanons until I have to pick one to write down.
My head is a scary multiverse of multiple versions of my characters. What would happen if some of them met? I may end up in the SF&F category yet...

 

[SimonDoom]

I relate to both aspects of what you are saying. Like you, writing a story for me is much more like building a bridge or a chair or painting a painting than it is like setting off on a path and wondering where I'm going to end up. I've NEVER written a story that way, and I've published 51 stories here at Literotica.

But planning only goes so far, and serendipity plays a big role, too. More often than not, I'll plot my story, but I'll deviate from the plot once I start writing it. That can be a fun part of the process. And I love those "ah ha!" moments where I figure out how to solve a challenge in the story or where things suddenly seem to come together.

 

[KeithD]

And I love those "ah ha!" moments where I figure out how to solve a challenge in the story or where things suddenly seem to come together.

Or when you discover that with just a phrase or two you can add a whole new dimension to the story theme--none of which appeared in an outline beforehand.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I was hoping to avoid the old conversation about planners vs pantsers again in this thread, but I suppose it is fundamental to how I view the process. Still, for pantser writers, I'd assume the kind of serendipity I'm talking about would happen more often, not less often.

Well, you wanted comments, so you got one, from the opposite side of the page - more an incredulity that people do this.

And yes, that serendipity is constant. Every sentence. That's the joy of being a pantser writer, watching how it all unfolds. The difference is, I get a story progressing, down on a page. I suppose you do too, sort of, once you convert notes to a story. But it's not hard to see how (most) writers end up with dozens of unfinished stories, if they do this every time - I do recognise that we pantsers seem to be the rarer beasts.

But, you have to write how you write. There is no other way .

 

[Emilymcplugger]

As I’ve mentioned a few times before on this forum, I’m a pretty structured writer. I tend to view story writing like building a bridge where all the major beams and supports are laid out well in advance before any work starts. However, I’ve also seen writing referred to as a type of archaeology - you find the bits of the wall of a structure poking out of the desert here and there and you brush away the sand carefully until the whole thing becomes visible to you. That’s a metaphor which I’m increasingly finding has some value as I get more and more experienced with writing.

Even with my obsessive pre-plotting, I find it’s very common for a story to surprise you or for you to come across, seemingly by accident, a hidden structure or delight in your story that you didn’t consciously put there, but none the less seems so perfect that it feels like some sort of gift. This is going to be one of those long and self-indulgent topics, both for me and the posters who come after (if any) to talk about their work in depth. Go crazy. What I’m really asking about though is going to be the extent to which you find this happens to you and for specific examples of things which seem to develop organically from your writing.

As Lit limits the size of a post, lets break here and start the anecdote below.

I LOVE this part of writing.

In my published story ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE, I was very much plot inspired from the off and it went something like this.

Couple that are split meet by accident out one night, each with a new date
Circumstances move them to the same costumed Halloween party
They lose each other in the party
They find each and reconcile
They explore the house
They overcome the things that split them in a huge hot tub orgy where Kate (the female protagonist) is wearing a collar and chain.

However as I wrote this several things occurred that I did not expect.

Nikki, the main character’s new date was lovely, just as much as Kate and her sexually free and liberated viewpoint was intoxicating to all around her, meaning I kept bringing her back into the story.
A drug Segway to keep the main character going allowed him to recall what had torn his marriage apart in the first place, and a couple they both disliked turned out to be …less bad than I planned.
And finally the BDSM angle really exploded in the end part in a way even I didn’t see coming with toys and clamps and slave and master power plays and all sorts.

The characters really made a place in my head and moved it in exactly the best ways, even beating my original plans for them.

I loved them and the story they created.

 

[Bramblethorn]

It's happened to me a few times. Some favourites:

• Riddle of the Copper Coin: Rafi is telling Penny a story in which a copper coin is used as a metaphor for the speaker's beloved, a red-headed woman. I was almost at the end before I thought about what "Penny" meant beyond being a common woman's name. Complete accident but it would have made perfect sense for Rafi to choose that word-play on purpose.
• Anjali's Red Scarf: at one point I introduced a bunch of minor characters. I pulled names for them out of the air, and one of them happened to be "Lucy". She was never intended to appear again. But some time later, I realised that Lucy was also the name of Penny's ex in "Copper Coin" (another story set primarily in Melbourne) and thinking about "what if they were the same Lucy?" gave me a whole heap of unexpected character development. Suddenly Lucy became a significant character in the story.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Well, you wanted comments, so you got one, from the opposite side of the page - more an incredulity that people do this.

And yes, that serendipity is constant. Every sentence. That's the joy of being a pantser writer, watching how it all unfolds. The difference is, I get a story progressing, down on a page. I suppose you do too, sort of, once you convert notes to a story. But it's not hard to see how (most) writers end up with dozens of unfinished stories, if they do this every time - I do recognise that we pantsers seem to be the rarer beasts.

But, you have to write how you write. There is no other way .

I was going to say, regarding your earlier post, that I don't have 1,000 words of notes, and that would normally be true. For this story actually I have almost exactly that, but it's kind of a special circumstances. Normally, I do most of my planning during my daily walks, so time I wouldn't be able to write anyway and for most of my stories which tend to be 6,000-15,000 words I can hold everything in my head until it needs to come onto the page. For this story, I did most of the planning while I was travelling last month as that environment wasn't condusive to sitting down and actually writing. So because I wouldn't be able to write it immediately and because it was clearly going be longer than anything else I'd written, I wrote everything down so I could come back to it later and so I could see how it looked on the page. i find writing prose is challenging enough, having to focus on flow, word choice, dialogue etc, if I had to stop every paragraph to work out what my characters were doing next as well, I'd waste even more time than I do planning.

The other reason I've ended up planning a lot more for this one is it's my first 'historical' story - by which I mean a time period I didn't personally experience. The 1960s should be fairly easy as a historical setting as they're pretty embedded in popular culture and I've always loved the music from that period, but 1963 specifically is a pain because its so early in that zeitgeist that I'm constantly checking to see who I can reference and how much exposure they'd actually have had then (as witnessed in my previous example). Then I've also created issues for myself by having half the cast British and half American (and fresh off the plane) so I'm constantly having to reference when various films and music crossed arrived in different places. I'm also being anal about getting these things right - I had to delete a joke about I Wanna Hold Your Hand when I discovered it was the Beatles third single and not their first and so hadn't be released at the time of the story. Would anyone have cared if I left it in? Yes, me. So I went away and wrote a different joke about Please Please Me instead.

But as a hobbiest writer, I'm finding the research as fun as the writing and it turns out to be a great source of serendipity. Another good example, the pill was only available at the time to married women which gives our heroine another, perfectly reasonably, excuse to insist on waiting to have sex with her fiance rather than just traditionalism. But this excuse can then be completely destroyed by our American character handing over her FDA-approved pack and saying "Here, go nuts." (And being an obsessive planner I've just realized scene 5 needs to be 7 days+ after scene 4 and not the next day as my notes originally say, which is useful to know now rather than halfway through writing scene 5)

 

[TheRedChamber]

I will run down research rabbit holes. But even more often, while not sleeping, I'll run through chains of 'what ifs', pondering what might happen so I can write up what I decide once I'm more sentient. So I end up building various headcanons until I have to pick one to write down.
My head is a scary multiverse of multiple versions of my characters. What would happen if some of them met? I may end up in the SF&F category yet...

The benefits of planning is you can quicky run through these chains and discover the ones that work better. My favourite example of this in my recent stories is that moment when I was trying to figure out in my recent Nude Day story whether the girl who dancing naked at on the moors at midnight on the summer solstace was just messing around or was an actual functioning witch with actual witchy powers. I'm boring, so her implied pregnancy in the epilogue isn't actually with the Anti-Christ, but it could well have been. I'll also need to work out before Halloween if the (obviously completely fictional) Prince of Wales is actually a Nazi Vampire or just a Nazi dressed as a vampire.

(Yes, he's the villian not the romantic interest before anyone asks)

 

[Duleigh]

Have you ever seen the TV show Magic of Painting starring Bob "Happy Little Tree" Ross? He paints the way many of us write. He comes up with an idea and lets the muse take over. As he paints you can see how ideas take over and become the foreground and your original idea fades to background. I had an idea for a quick little fan fiction on a Japanese anime, a guy gets drawn into a fantasy world, meets the elf of his dreams, happily ever after, the end. It didn't work out that way.

The Gate - A New Green Man Appears took on a life of his own, and my little story got pretty big. but then he started feeling worse, his elf/wife started feeling younger and The Gate - Elvish Has Left became a second episode. Then the idea of a "Harem Anime" a popular anime genre appeared, and could a dragon enter the harem? so a third episode, The Gate - Going Home hit and damn did I have fun with that whole thing! I think between the three my 7,000 word original idea became novel length 80,000 words.

As Bob Ross used to say, there are no accidents only opportunities.

 

[Voboy]

I'm sitting here thinking, Christ on a bike, you planners go through that kind of detail, and come up with a thousand words of notes? And THEN start writing your story?

This is just so utterly, totally foreign to me - I cannot even begin to think like that.

Amen!

Sit back and let the story flow, OP. It wants to. ALWAYS let it tell you where it wants to go. If your characters are engaging enough, or rather real enough, they'll handle themselves just fine.

The "serendipity" you're describing can happen all the time while you're writing. As in, the entire time. It does to me. That's why this is all so enjoyable. Give it a try.

 

[Voboy]

The benefits of planning is you can quicky run through these chains and discover the ones that work better.

But planning obsessively isn't the only way to do that.

If you've read and written enough stories, you know what works already. It's there in your subconscious. It won't lead you astray. My characters are all strong and well-drawn enough that the things they do in my stories are true to themselves and the personalities they've developed. So if the story doesn't "work better," that's because those characters are acting irrationally or even inexplicably. And then that provides its own tension, which in turn becomes a part of the story.

It's all unified because the characters are being themselves. The serendipity, for me, comes from discovering what they want to do. I don't care if it would "work better" some other way, because for that character? It wouldn't. That character is doing things that only that character would do.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Have you ever seen the TV show Magic of Painting starring Bob "Happy Little Tree" Ross? He paints the way many of us write. He comes up with an idea and lets the muse take over. As he paints you can see how ideas take over and become the foreground and your original idea fades to background.

Bob Ross has a certain presence in England. However, amongst my generation, his influence is probably most keenly felt in this series of spoofs. Which is probably an fair approximation of what would happen to me if I tried to write in that style, only with less death and more sexual perversion.

The "serendipity" you're describing can happen all the time while you're writing. As in, the entire time. It does to me. That's why this is all so enjoyable. Give it a try.

I was assuming, even from the first post, that it happens more often to panter writers. But even so, presumably sometimes it doesn't - or at least whatever level of serendipity usually applies to your stories, you must sometimes get more, maybe to a surprising or even spooky degree and sometimes get less, and however great your characters were, maybe feeling you didn't quite hit a home run with how things turned out. As you say, maybe your subconcious is naturally very good at dragging you down the right roads and that's why you've had no little success in writing here. On the other hand, we've also had a couple of threads recently about the number of stories people have lying around unfinished and another one about an OP who apparently never finishes anything.

But planning obsessively isn't the only way to do that.

If you've read and written enough stories, you know what works already. It's there in your subconscious. It won't lead you astray. My characters are all strong and well-drawn enough that the things they do in my stories are true to themselves and the personalities they've developed. So if the story doesn't "work better," that's because those characters are acting irrationally or even inexplicably. And then that provides its own tension, which in turn becomes a part of the story.

It's all unified because the characters are being themselves. The serendipity, for me, comes from discovering what they want to do. I don't care if it would "work better" some other way, because for that character? It wouldn't. That character is doing things that only that character would do.

But even if you assume the characters are completely deterministic in their behaviours and have fully defined personalities independent of the author, the author is still going to be responsible for a whole bunch of 'fate' that is happening to the character. Does he make the drive home safely this evening and make love to his wife, or is he hit by a truck coming out of nowhere and spend the next six months in physiotherapy - and if he does how many words is that going to add to your story that you thought was nearly finished? In the example I gave earlier, there came a point when I basically had to decide if magic was real in my story - that wasn't anything to do with pre-existing character, but it would have had a major impact on the characters and story going forward.

I think it's certainly true that a danger of planner writing is that character can become mere pawns on the chessboard of the plot and it's possible to get yourself into a position where characters simulatiously need to do something to make the plot work and also would never do that exact same thing. Generally though, planning is an interative process where I go round round variously possibilities until I find the combinations of events that are interesting and characters that I like, and that's when the story starts to work.I can also think of at least a few occassions where, if I'd written the first scene of an idea straight away, instead of coming up with a completed plot outline first, it would almost certainly have turned out worse because my ideas radically changed during a process of about an hours thought spread out over the space of about six months.

 

[Comshaw]

I was hoping to avoid the old conversation about planners vs pantsers again in this thread, but I suppose it is fundamental to how I view the process. Still, for pantser writers, I'd assume the kind of serendipity I'm talking about would happen more often, not less often. Surely, you've done the equivalent of stopping at end of the penultimate chapter of your story, and then saying to yourself "Right, the hero has about twenty minutes to find the heroine in the woods and save her from the Runcorn Strangler, how exactly does he do that? Oh wait, in chapter one I wrote that the heroine's mother works in a kennel for retired police dogs. I only did that because I thought it was cute that he works in a pet shop and she comes in everyday to buy a hundred cans of dog food, but blow me if that doesn't work perfectly. Let's get the whole village out with a dog a piece and the conclusion of the story writes itself. Oh and good thing she stuffed her knickers into his pocket after the sex scene in chapter four, so the dogs have something to use for scent. I wondered why she did that at the time. Might be a bit embarrassing to explain to her mum, but with a woman's life on the line, he's just going to have to man up and own those panties."

I'm kinda' halfway between your "planners" and "pantsers" definitions. I usually start by knowing how my story begins, how it ends, who is going to be in it, and a vague idea of the in between. It's like standing on a ridge and being able to see your destination, but between here and there is a vast tangle of forest, with a faint path to follow. Most times I listen to my characters and let them lead me through that tangle. Sometimes it's a straight shot through. Sometimes they take me on a path that twists and turns, disappears and reappears before I get to the end.

There are those here who have made a vocation of writing, who are very prolific and have turned out literally hundreds of stories. I find that admirable.
But writing is an avocation for me. I do it solely for pleasure. I have no pressure to produce works other than my own inner drive. Because of that I have the freedom to do it when I feel like it, walk away when I don't. So my style is set for that. If I were to do it as a vocation, I'm sure I'd be more diligent in using some kind of structure as a planning guide.

Comshaw

 

[TheRedChamber]

I'm kinda' halfway between your "planners" and "pantsers" definitions. I usually start by knowing how my story begins, how it ends, who is going to be in it, and a vague idea of the in between. It's like standing on a ridge and being able to see your destination, but between here and there is a vast tangle of forest, with a faint path to follow. Most times I listen to my characters and let them lead me through that tangle. Sometimes it's a straight shot through. Sometimes they take me on a path that twists and turns, disappears and reappears before I get to the end.

There are those here who have made a vocation of writing, who are very prolific and have turned out literally hundreds of stories. I find that admirable.
But writing is an avocation for me. I do it solely for pleasure. I have no pressure to produce works other than my own inner drive. Because of that I have the freedom to do it when I feel like it, walk away when I don't. So my style is set for that. If I were to do it as a vocation, I'm sure I'd be more diligent in using some kind of structure as a planning guide.

Comshaw

Thanks for this. I'm actually going to start a separate thread asking people (pantsers especially) what they know about their stories before they write the first words of their story as I think it's an interesting topic for discussion.

 

[Comshaw]

Bob Ross has a certain presence in England. However, amongst my generation, his influence is probably most keenly felt in this series of spoofs. Which is probably an fair approximation of what would happen to me if I tried to write in that style, only with less death and more sexual perversion.


I'm was assuming, even from the first post, that it happens more often to panter writers. But even so, presumably sometimes it doesn't - or at least whatever level of serendipity usually applies to your stories, you must sometimes get more, maybe to a surprising or even spooky degree and sometimes get less, and however great your characters were, maybe feeling you didn't quite hit a home run with how things turned out. As you say, maybe your subconcious is naturally very good at dragging you down the right roads and that's why you've had no little success in writing here. On the other hand, we've also had a couple of threads recently about the number of stories people have lying around unfinished and another one about an OP who apparently never finishes anything.


But even if you assume the characters are completely deterministic in their behaviours and have fully defined personalities independent of the author, the author is still going to be responsible for a whole bunch of 'fate' that is happening to the character. Does he make the drive home safely this evening and make love to his wife, or is he hit by a truck coming out of nowhere and spend the next six months in physiotherapy - and if he does how many words is that going to add to your story that you thought was nearly finished? In the example I gave earlier, there came a point when I basically had to decide if magic was real in my story - that wasn't anything to do with pre-existing character, but it would have had a major impact on the characters and story going forward.

I think it's certainly true that a danger of planner writing is that character can become mere pawns on the chessboard of the plot and it's possible to get yourself into a position where characters simulatiously need to do something to make the plot work and also would never do that exact same thing. Generally though, planning is an interative process where I go round round variously possibilities until I find the combinations of events that are interesting and characters that I like, and that's when the story starts to work.I can also think of at least a few occassions where, if I'd written the first scene of an idea straight away, instead of coming up with a completed plot outline first, it would almost certainly have turned out worse because my ideas radically changed during a process of about an hours thought spread out over the space of about six months.

I think the difference is which part of your mind you allow to lead you through or construct the story. I believe a planner type does so with the conscious mind. They want to know consciously where the story line is going, which character is going to do what and how it will all work out. A panstser on the other hand allows their unconscious mind to present the story line as it is made up. I see my characters as real people. I hear their voices, see their facial expressions, know their fears, dreams and wants. I don't sit and try to do this, it just floats up out of some place inside, my subconscious. Much of the time those things hit me while I'm doing other things. I'll be mowing my pasture or cutting firewood and out of seeming no where the direction for the plot of a story I put away six months ago slams into my brain.

I've done this all my life. I was a heavy equipment mechanic for years. Many times while troubleshooting a CANBUS system or a complicated hydraulic system I'd run into a dead end. I'd stop and go do something else. Nine times out of ten the answer to the problem would whack me upside the head while I was engaged with that other job. My subconscious had been working on it all along.

My muse is that part of me that stands in the background, assembles those things and whispers them to me. And for the record, no I am not on antipsychotic medication, at least not yet.


Comshaw

 

[Duleigh]

I was hoping to avoid the old conversation about planners vs pantsers again in this thread, but I suppose it is fundamental to how I view the process. Still, for pantser writers, I'd assume the kind of serendipity I'm talking about would happen more often, not less often. Surely, you've done the equivalent of stopping at end of the penultimate chapter of your story, and then saying to yourself "Right, the hero has about twenty minutes to find the heroine in the woods and save her from the Runcorn Strangler, how exactly does he do that? Oh wait, in chapter one I wrote that the heroine's mother works in a kennel for retired police dogs. I only did that because I thought it was cute that he works in a pet shop and she comes in everyday to buy a hundred cans of dog food, but blow me if that doesn't work perfectly. Let's get the whole village out with a dog a piece and the conclusion of the story writes itself. Oh and good thing she stuffed her knickers into his pocket after the sex scene in chapter four, so the dogs have something to use for scent. I wondered why she did that at the time. Might be a bit embarrassing to explain to her mum, but with a woman's life on the line, he's just going to have to man up and own those panties."

I really don't understand your point, what you say doesn't make much sense to me. By trade I was a certified aircraft mechanic specializing in medium and heavy bombers, particularly their weapons delivery systems. After that I started a career in video conditional access and was one of Comcast's top engineers when I retired. I could write an OPlan (Operational Plan), TCTO (Time Compliance Technical Order) SMOP (Standardized Method of Procedure) all you want, but these are fantasies, not technical documents

The way you carry on about the supposed advantages of plotting out an erotic story may work for you but for me it sound like:
1. In
2. Out
3. Repeat 34 times
4. Switch to doggy style
5. Repeat steps 1 through 3...

That's really not titillating for me. As my favorite pantser once said

“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.”

Just a quick list of writers who are pantsers:
Diana Gabaldon, author of Outlander
Matthew Hughes, author of What the Wind Brings
George R.R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones
Isaac Asimov, author of I, Robot (and many more)
Rex Stout, author of the Nero Wolfe Series
Sally J. Ling, author of Frayed Ends and Unraveled
James Joyce, author of Ulysses
Stephen King, author of IT, Carrie, The Shining, and many more
Mark Twain, author of the Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn
Ernest Hemmingway, author of A Farewell to Arms
Dean Koontz, author of Odd Thomas
William Gibson, author of The Peripheral
Stanislaw Lem, author of Solaris
Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale
Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and The Light
Jami Gold, author of Stone Cold Heart
Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods
David Morrell, author of Rambo
Raymond Chandler, author of The Big Sleep

 

[Voboy]

But even if you assume the characters are completely deterministic in their behaviours and have fully defined personalities independent of the author, the author is still going to be responsible for a whole bunch of 'fate' that is happening to the character.

It's going to be very difficult to explain this to you, and probably even fruitless, but I'll give it a go:

Yes. For me? It's almost entirely deterministic. I begin most of my stories with a whisper of a hint of inspiration. Hell, I routinely begin what you would probably consider no plot at all. Most of the time, my stories begin with just a single "what if?" sentence in my head, often suggested by things I see around me.

I'll sketch it briefly. I saw a news story a month or so ago about puffin researchers off the Maine coast. Being a naturally curious fellow, I fired up the ol' laptop and did some research, because the news story left many, many things undiscussed. I came to find out that for nearly fifty years, there's a nonprofit that has placed volunteers on these tiny, treeless, waterless islands for weeks on end, obsessively cataloguing puffin numbers and behaviors during the summer months. Google maps gives a vey good impression of what their setting is like, as does their website (which also includes a rather formidable set of job descriptions).

So, being a pervert, I just automatically assumed a lot of these volunteers masturbate the time away in their tents.

But the problems would be legion: privacy is nonexistent. Everyone is tired of being there. Nobody showers. Your tents are all literally inches apart. But I couldn't shake the idea of this little puffin-filled corner of the world as a whack-off den, so I asked myself how anyone there could get privacy. The website gave me hints, and my imagination filled in the rest. Meanwhile, I began thinking of characters I've written about, with an eye toward deliberately mismatching the character for the setting: I ended up choosing one of my most avowedly sexual women. I thought it would be amusing to strand her out at sea and withhold sex from her.

From there? It was a simple matter of putting her on the island, asking myself how she could go about meeting a new man, and then just stepping back and letting her work. Literally, that's what I did. It was fast and fun, and once I post it I'm confident it'll find an audience. It's not a contest-winner, but it's a fine story. The plan was literally two sentences long, plus a short paragraph of character description and the knowledge of how this character behaved in two other prior stories. From that, I just started typing. Opened my mind, let my fingers fly, and went for it.

I often find inspiration in such minor things. My summer contest entry (which is, admittedly, not performing well!) was inspired by just one mid-sentence clause in a National Geographic. It was actually a mention of a job title. From such tiny seeds do trees often grow. And, FWIW, I've got about six uncompleted stories to date.

 

[Duleigh]

It's going to be very difficult to explain this to you, and probably even fruitless, but I'll give it a go:

Yes. For me? It's almost entirely deterministic. I begin most of my stories with a whisper of a hint of inspiration. Hell, I routinely begin what you would probably consider no plot at all. Most of the time, my stories begin with just a single "what if?" sentence in my head, often suggested by things I see around me.

I'll sketch it briefly. I saw a news story a month or so ago about puffin researchers off the Maine coast. Being a naturally curious fellow, I fired up the ol' laptop and did some research, because the news story left many, many things undiscussed. I came to find out that for nearly fifty years, there's a nonprofit that has placed volunteers on these tiny, treeless, waterless islands for weeks on end, obsessively cataloguing puffin numbers and behaviors during the summer months. Google maps gives a vey good impression of what their setting is like, as does their website (which also includes a rather formidable set of job descriptions).

So, being a pervert, I just automatically assumed a lot of these volunteers masturbate the time away in their tents.

But the problems would be legion: privacy is nonexistent. Everyone is tired of being there. Nobody showers. Your tents are all literally inches apart. But I couldn't shake the idea of this little puffin-filled corner of the world as a whack-off den, so I asked myself how anyone there could get privacy. The website gave me hints, and my imagination filled in the rest. Meanwhile, I began thinking of characters I've written about, with an eye toward deliberately mismatching the character for the setting: I ended up choosing one of my most avowedly sexual women. I thought it would be amusing to strand her out at sea and withhold sex from her.

From there? It was a simple matter of putting her on the island, asking myself how she could go about meeting a new man, and then just stepping back and letting her work. Literally, that's what I did. It was fast and fun, and once I post it I'm confident it'll find an audience. It's not a contest-winner, but it's a fine story. The plan was literally two sentences long, plus a short paragraph of character description and the knowledge of how this character behaved in two other prior stories. From that, I just started typing. Opened my mind, let my fingers fly, and went for it.

I often find inspiration in such minor things. My summer contest entry (which is, admittedly, not performing well!) was inspired by just one mid-sentence clause in a National Geographic. It was actually a mention of a job title. From such tiny seeds do trees often grow. And, FWIW, I've got about six uncompleted stories to date.

My summer lovin' story was one nice summer day where friends are camping in the woods, fishing and swimming in the pond, sitting by the campfire and sipping some fine whiskey, puffing on a good cigar, and enjoying their friendship. How do you plot that? It's just friends and lovers enjoying the summer. It's not Raymond Chandler by any means, but some readers like it, it's barely holding an H and getting some feedback and DAMN did I love writing it.