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

[missmorte.livejournal.com]

I start with penning romantic letters to cute bois and being penpals with them so they have to do the same. :)

[etcet.livejournal.com]

*checks inbox*

[/subtle hint]

Hehe.

I wonder if being chattier in email or wherver would carry over into my fiction. It really doesn't have much anything to do with the stuff I normally correspond regarding, for the most part (damn surreal dystopian futuristic wibblings!)

Re:

[missmorte.livejournal.com]

I said penning romantic letters, not emailing them.

emailing is fooey for romance, really I think it is.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

not when your handwriting is as bad as mine. . .

"d34r n1c3 gurl. . . . *scribble, scrawl, maybe something that looks like the letter G, or maybe an ampersand. . . *

*sigh*

Glad your new beastie is bringing nice things to your household, btw. . . *s*

Re:

[missmorte.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

Hmm well you could type me a letter, but I insist you send it by the postoffice. That's an order mister!

Hmmm, does Rafe 3.0 do html and flash? Because Stasha 2.0 is old and boring, she would like to upgrade but doesn't have the knowledge to do so all by her lonesome.

If you help I won't show that picture of you to everyone... hehe you know the one I have! or wait, do you?

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Rafe doesn't do code, other than HTML1.1 (no tables or frames for me), unfortunately.

No, what pic is this you speak of?

[sukipot.livejournal.com]

I have been meaning to reply to this since I first saw it... but you know that story.

All my life I have been a character generator. Fully-completed characters, with names, genealogies and physiologies spring from my headache like Athena. But I never know what to do with them. It's great when I RP, because the plot happens for me. When RP is on, it's interactive fiction at its best.

For plain old written by one author fiction, though, I have trouble getting past a set of characters and maybe a situation. But. I was quizzing my novelist friend about this the other day, and asked her how she organized and got after the work, and here's what she told me.

First, she writes a 3-4 page treatment that describes the events in 3rd person. "Hamlet's a prince whose father has just died and whose mother has just married his uncle. He's really pissed off about it. One night his friend Horatio comes up to him and says a ghost has been spotted on the castle ramparts. Hamlet goes with him that night to see what's going on, and the ghost talks to him. It turns out that it's his father's ghost, and the ghost tells Hamlet that he was murdered, and that Hamlet's uncle is the murderer." And so on.

Then, she reads through that and, if it all makes sense, she takes it and divides it in half, and then subdivides the halves. So let's say there are ten chapters in each half. She then takes the treatment and plots at what point things there should occur in the chapters, and what must happen by such-and-such point so that the next plot point can be reached. From that, she gets a chapter outline from which to start writing.

The chapter outline is not rigid but fluid; sometimes as the writing goes, it becomes clear that something needs to happen in chapter 8, not chapter 10, or maybe chapter 7 needs to be broken up into two chapters. Along the way, she asks herself questions like, is it feasible for this to happen this way, would this character know about that, and so on.

I like the whole divide and conquer idea that goes with this approach; one of my problems has always been plot sprawl. If I try it this way, I think I might get a handle on what the real story is. (I'll have to let you know, since I haven't started yet.)

If you tend to sit down and write it all in one go, I think plotting some things out ahead of time might be very helpful to you as well. Maybe not exactly the method she described to me, but something like it.

[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.

Free Associate

[david-deacon.livejournal.com]

(gone back over your old posts for amusement)

Just start writing. Damn. How do you think Stephen King writes ten pages a day? He just sits there and churns that stuff out. Censor later, for now, just write. Don't worry about style or comprehensibility--if it's odd, people will just think it's avant garde.