Pen. Paper. Keyboard. Monitor. Dammit, I knew I forgot something. . . Plot.

[digitaldiscipline]

As is typical of my increasingly-infrequent self-improvement kicks, I'm cataloging the ideas in my buffer that might make decent stories, and have once again run up against the ever-present realization that, while I can pretty much knock my own socks off in a short scene, stringing anything much more than a couple thousand words into something coherent, much less remaining above an internal waterline of "None of this completely sucks," is somehow eluding me.

What do the other writers among you do in this case? Presented with an idea sans characters or even a distinguishing collection of plot elements, is there a place to start? Do you jump into writing something wholly unrelated in hopes that inspiration will strike? Do you slog in and just try to pull the right words out through brute force?

(I find this lattermost idea to be anathema to me, and it always ends up in my worst writing, because -I- know there's a good idea behind it, horribly disfigured, emaciated, and swathed in buckets of pink Bondo, which I am unable to extricate from the atrocity I first imprisoned it with.)

I either get something right or wrong on the first pass. I cut hair with a machete. I don't seem to have it in me to have any substantial second chances with my writing - it comes from the hip, the gut, the Muse, whatever, for better or worse the first time it's committed to whatever media.

I can only ever write anything once. After it leaves my fingers, it either exists or collapses, but I can't write the same story, or even the same long letter, twice.

Anything over 1000 keystrokes has to breathe on its own, because I can't reassimilate it.

I hate making dead children.

Comments

[etcet.livejournal.com]

First, she writes a 3-4 page treatment that describes the events in 3rd person.

I seldom (if ever) have this much plot on hand. I tend to be struck by random, fragmentary images, none of which tell much of a story on their own, and only tenuously, if ever, string together to form something larger.

Charaters usually grow from the feet up, though there have been a handful of Athena cases. My biggest problem is that they're either tediously eccentric or deadfully boring. I wonder if putting either of those into a worthwhile plot, if I ever come up with one, would help develop them.

It seems that I try to build a fortress out of toothpicks, and your friend is dropping huge blocks from the clouds.

[sukipot.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah... she has close to ten novels published, so, she's a little more together about this than we are. But. I think it took her a while to get there.

I think you are right that the next thing to do is to take these characters and put them into a plot. I need to sit down with my characters in their situation -- I am this far; I have an actual situation -- and see where they want to go.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Now I need to find a plot worth putting characters into. Bah!

Characters, for me, tend to be an afterthought. . . I have a scene or situation, which needs -somebody- to be doing things in it, so whatever skeletons best fit the role tend to happen on an ad-hoc basis. Whether those characters could live and breathe injected into something else. . . I have no idea.