Plotting scenes out: more recursion

Recursive plotting #3
Appropriately enough, this is a topic I keep coming back to. Original post here. Follow-up here. That makes this number three in the series.

Plot structure holds across a series of books, across a single book, and within the book too. I'd say it reaches down into scenes, but at this scale you're even less likely to actually see it from start to finish.

What do I mean by that? At any scale, the entire plot structure (inciting event, plot points building to a climax, resolution) needs to exist. That does not mean that the reader will see all of them. It's the literary equivalent of a photo of four paws being a photo of a cat -- you know the rest is there without seeing it. If the rest wasn't there, it would be apparent in something wrong about the paws.

Chapters and scenes have inciting incidents, points building to a climax, and resolution. Small ones, since they are themselves the building blocks of a larger plot structure. Maybe the reader doesn't see the structure start to finish, but the writer sees it.

An example
If it helps to look at an example, here's the entire first scene to Disciple, Part I. It's got pretty much the entire structure showing: inciting incident (Kate's teacher fetching her), points building (hints that something important is about to happen) to a climax (the king objecting to her presence) and a resolution (the king is overruled.)

End of scene. I could've continued into what happened next, but at that point the scene had done exactly what it needed to. Its structure had finished and it was a "complete thought." Therefore, the scene ends and we pick up again at the next scene.

That being said...
...all rules are, of course, made to be bent and twisted into balloon animals. (Don't break them. Broken balloon animals are no fun.) This is where voice, style, and pacing come into play.

Jacqueline Carey, author of the many Kushiel books, doesn't write scenes. Each chapter is a segment of the story cut off at a moderately comfortable point.

Stephen King has been known to write one-scene chapters -- where the scene is only a sentence or two long. (Salem's Lot, IIRC.)

There's a correlation between scene and chapter length and the perceived pace of the story. Carey's Kushiel novels are languid things, even in the middle of a war. King's older horror stories moved fast, even when not much was happening. Cutting a scene down to just the climax, if you can, totally changes its impact.

What if that first scene of Disciple had begun with the king identifying her and objecting? Starting with a confrontation puts a more violent spin on the story. It would raise questions about who Kate is and whether she's a victim or a danger. For some stories, that's a great place to start.

Conversely, if I'd started long before the inciting incident -- say, with Kate tossing and turning in bed, giving up on sleep, and dressing -- that would have been a quiet and slow beginning. It can be difficult to hook a reader with that sort of thing. That would require good language and very fast explaining of why she's too stressed out to sleep.

Do you pare your scenes down? Stretch them out? Juggle the structure?

Fixing it in revision

I'm a plotter. When I start writing a story, I've already worked out the sequence of events, the character arcs, etc., to some degree of detail. There's always room for changes within those plots and outlines because it's not unusual for characters to inform me that they're going to misbehave. Things generally stick to the outline, though.

Well, except for Hawks & Rams. That one went straight off the rails and tore cross-country for a few miles. The outlines bore only a slight resemblance to the first draft.

Fix it in revision
That's what I said while I was writing it. Now it's time to do it.

Scale to fit
Since I was coming off writing Disciple, I wrote out four different plot/character arcs for H&R. That sort of complexity isn't at all unusual for a big series of fantasy novels.

Hawks & Rams is much smaller, though. I wasn't sure before I wrote it, but now I know that it really is a novella -- not a novel. I know which character has to make the big choice at the climax, and how he gets there. While the other characters have their own trajectories, they don't make the personal changes that my main character does.

Therefore, I only need to lay out one character arc and one plot. I know what paths the other characters will follow, but it's not the standard inciting incident, build to a climax and then resolution that my main character faces. The main plot -- the series of events that drive Heathric toward his personal crisis -- needs some improvement too...

Raise the tension
More challenges, more complications, more tension are always better. Well, within reason. Toward the end of Apocalypto (terrible movie, sadly) the climactic scene for one character consists of her being trapped in a well, which is rapidly flooding due to the rain, balancing one screaming small child on her head (because the water's neck deep) while simultaneously giving birth to the second that she's carrying... I was just waiting for piranha to show up. For a kitchen sink to fall on her. You know, something that would actually be a challenge. (/sarcasm)

Raise the tension without tipping over into ridiculousness. It helps to go through the sequence of events with a fresh mind (because you put the story aside for a few months and worked on something else) and re-consider why things played out that way. What would've been uglier/nastier/messier? What would've been completely unexpected? What would've been ridiculous, so that you know where your boundaries are?

Trying to write a query letter for the story and getting feedback on that can help too -- a fresh pair of eyes and questions from a different perspective can bring up ideas you wouldn't have thought of.

Devil's in the details
The trickiest part of revisions is, of course, all the little things that shift when events change. People are at a different emotional point, they say different things, topics drop out of conversation that needed to be brought up for something down the line... get out the fine toothed comb!

Have you fixed a story plot recently? What did it need?

IN OTHER NEWS: I've landed my first speaking gig! MRW is hosting a half-day writing workshop on October 26th, and I will be talking about world-building and character development.

Sighting trouble early: tonal anomalies

I mentioned one scene that came to me when my current M/M romance story idea hit. There was a second scene that came along with that. I won't post my sketch of it because this blog is marked as non-explicit and I don't need to get in trouble with Blogger/Google.

Suffice it to say that this second scene raised big questions about the tone of the story.

Now, I don't have a problem writing explicit stuff. I've made no secret of that. (Both here and way back here.) But the events in the scene made me think about both how explicit the sex and violence would be, and how deeply entwined with each other they were. On one hand, I am very much against the "rape becomes romance" and I'm leery of the "you'll like this, even if you don't think you will" tropes... but I know that walking the line between consent and non-consent can be very... energizing.

I also had to think about those hazy borders between romance and erotica. There were several scenes in Disciple where I had to decide when, exactly, to close the bedroom door -- and a few where the door never did close. Hawks and Rams (working title) is a shorter, more compact story than Disciple and, now that I have an outline blocked out, there may not be so much sex in terms of total number of scenes... it just has the potential to be much more... hm, well, I guess the term I want is "memorable." Rather than "scarring." Erm.

Also, to some degree I should just write the darn thing and see what the characters are up for. They might solve the problem for me, if I let them.

Getting back to tone. So if I'm going to have this one explicit, borderline-violent, very sexual scene, the rest of the story needs to match the tone. Or at least not clash with it horribly. In no way should I pad the story with gratuitous violence or sex merely to keep this one scene from looking like it dropped in from some other book somewhere -- but. That one scene does look anomalous given the current outline.

Does the scene need to be that nasty? Will it be a turning point in the tone of the story? Can the rest maintain that level of violence? Maybe a certain unpleasant scene earlier should get nastier?

Have you ever had to deal with a scene that felt like an anomaly in a given story?

Plotting, scheming and pondering

So I'm a plotter far more than a pantser, I'm sure that's obvious, and I've got something in development. I posted about the moment the idea hit me, and now that things have fleshed out a bit more I thought I'd post some more.

Plotters and pantsers work in very different ways: pantsers dive in and start writing, then figure out the structure of the story later, whereas plotters work out the structure first and then dive in. Either way is perfectly valid. Most people do some combination of both, and a lot of people start out pantsers and work their way toward being plotters. I did. And even though I'm very much a plotter, I still "leave room for pants" as I said in a chat once.

I'm a plotter because what I see first, when that idea first hits, are certain emotionally charged scenes. They're often climaxes, or at least points where conflicts turn razor-edged. This happened with Disciple, too -- there were certain scenes haunting me for months before I got to write them. Where my creative gut gets these, I don't know... well, maybe that's not entirely true, but it's too personal to go into. At any given moment, there are scraps of ideas floating around, and sometimes they blossom into scenes.

The challenge is: how do I get the characters to these situations? Why did it have to happen? What will the consequences be?

For example, here's something from the very first notes I wrote for this story:

The shepherd overheard something, out in the woods — bandits? enemy hill tribe? — and they chased him, but he got away. He’s been living in fear ever since. But he has to tend his flocks, they’re his and his parents’ income. He ought to tell the Rangers, but that would out him as the snoop. It’s someone he knows. Blood relation?

I'd had a vague sense of setting: the hill country on the border between two kingdoms. Someplace where there's little border regulation aside from suspicion of outsiders. The moment I saw, specifically, was a young man breathing hard from running, leaning against a tree or maybe a barn doorsill, raking one hand into his hair as he agonized over what the hell am I going to do now?

Conflict. Nice, clear conflict. Why? How? What's the price of him going to the Rangers? Or not? What's the breaking point going to be?

I've got a fairly solid outline, now, but there are still places where I'll have to work things out "in the field" with the characters. Especially around the climax -- I've found it's a good idea to let the details of that figure themselves out along the way. I have an idea what will happen, but if the characters want to surprise me, I'll roll with it.

What sorts of things do you leave room for in your outlines, if you're a plotter?

Antagonists: same rules apply

One of my betas said: "I'm not seeing the crazy, ruthless evil empress we've been building up to" and pointed out some tell-tale signs of ruthfulness.

Now that I've spent some time away from Disciple, Part VI, I'm less wrapped up in wrestling every single plotline that needed resolution. I can more clearly focus on individual problems. That just goes to show that the old advice of putting your story aside for a while is perfectly valid -- but I want to focus on bad guys for a moment. Antagonists.

Bringing their A game
A story isn't so much about how a character managed to do something, but how they worked so hard to reach their goal and almost didn't succeed.

The obstacles between the characters and their goals need to be realistic, well explained, and daunting. If these take the form of antagonists, those also need to be realistic, explained, and daunting. By "explained," I mean that the readers need to know what the antagonist wants and what s/he is capable of doing to get it. We have all seen those "Meet the Bad Guy" scenes where he rants and raves and does something horrible to one of his own flunkies so that we know how bad, bad, bad he is. We should try to be more elegant than that, but it gets the job done.

Whatever's going on in your story, your antagonist is in it to win it. Real antagonists act accordingly, and since they're real they should also stay in character.

So when my beta asked why my empress was suddenly sneaking around when she'd previously done some fairly ballsy things... well, guilty as charged. Time to fix it.

Same rules of character apply
Like protagonists, antagonists need to be fully developed characters. They don't necessarily have a character arc in which they grow and change -- though that makes for an excellent story if you can do it -- but they need to obey all the rules of consistency and realism.

I had laid out a pattern for the empress, and she needed to stick to it. With my 20/20 hindsight, I see the arrogance that I had ascribed her later actions to was not part of the pattern I had set. Or, rather, her arrogance had previously taken the form of ballsy, effective action. Therefore, more of that was needed -- in spite of the measures my protagonists were now taking against her tactics. Because the empress is kick-ass scary like that. She didn't get this job on her looks.

A craftsman should enjoy his work. 

Unfortunately for my characters, a little brainstorming has yielded some interesting ways to make the end of Disciple more difficult for them. About 2.5 chapters at about the two-thirds mark are going to be chainsawed accordingly, and then we'll spackle over the the reattachment scars. Paging Dr. Dexter...

BTW, this is going to be horrible

I recently finished Disciple, Part V, which turned out to be an unusual story -- it contains three chunks, and one is a novella (37k), one is a short story (10.5k) and one is... what are you (6.5k) anyway...?

In any case, the same plot structure applies to each chunk as in a full novel: inciting incident, first plot point, subsequent plot points building to a climax and then a resolution.

The thing that I'm going to talk about being: I nearly dropped the ball on both climaxes, this time. Luckily, my gut notified me that it was going to fix that, and the phrase it used is going to become part of my stock vocabulary:

BTW, this is going to be horrible

This is what did NOT happen.
Photo by Gavin Spencer, on sxc.hu.

because -- and I'm not clear why, no -- I had plotted out both the novella and the short story with these soft, squishy scenes for climaxes. Maybe it was because I was still recovering from the end of Part IV and I wanted to hug my characters, tell them everything was going to be okay, and give them hot chocolate with marshmallows. 

Well, around here you don't get that: you get pummeled with snowballs and... no, no spoilers.

Why do I say the scenes were squishy? There was a lack of tension because the stakes were not high enough. Stakes being all those things that the reader is supposed to worry about: the character's survival, physical health, mental wellness, current and future happiness, etc. I generally put stakes in two categories:

• Long-term: a character's survival and happiness over the course of the next few months/years/stories -- including the rest of their lives. 
• Short-term: a character's immediate survival and well-being. This covers the next few chapters, possibly to the end of this story. 

A scene can have an impact on the long-term stakes, short-term, or both. When it comes to a climactic scene, the more the merrier. I would go so far as to say that a climax that doesn't threaten both short- and long-term well-being isn't much fun.

In both the novella's and the short story's climax, I had laid out how important this was to the long-term stakes of the entire Disciple story... but neither one offered much threat on the short-term scale. Surviving the scene was not an issue, and to be honest one of them was a little too close to fun rather than tense.

Not that my characters aren't allowed to have fun, mind you, but these were serious situations with serious implications. In both cases, the antagonists needed to bring their A game and establish what they were willing to do to get their way. They're here to win, too, after all.

But the short-term threat can't be something so unexpected and irrelevant that it's obviously tacked on to raise the tension. While I'm revising this raw pile of Part V into a first draft, I'll be trying to give the reader a feeling that there's another shoe that's going to drop.

How many things are at stake in your story's climax?

Death and its story functions

The emotional impact of killing a character in your story can range from major trauma to a shoulder shrug. All deaths serve a function in the story, though.

Killing faceless crowds in a zombie-apocalypse story is expected. (Could you write a zombie-apocalypse story without that?) Enemy minions exist to prove the hero knows a thing or two about karate or gun-fu. Or to prove the bad guy is really, really bad because he kills his own minions. These sorts of deaths function as part of the background atmosphere of the story -- setting the tone and telling the reader how gory this will or won't be.

The deaths of major characters and secondary characters are more serious. I've been thinking about how and why characters die, recently, and yes they're all looking nervous and preparing cases for why they need to survive the story... here are some reasons I might kill them:

Noble sacrifice
These characters didn't "need" to die. They didn't do anything to deserve it, and they weren't obviously red-shirts. Yet they choose to step up and cover someone else's escape, or do something heroic that gets them killed. These can be real heartstring-pullers, when done well. A couple thoughts on getting these deaths right:

• The character will need some development and reader sympathy. Don't use walk-on, bit-player characters for this -- it won't have the same impact.
• Careful not to make the character "too good" before their sacrifice. It can be a give-away, it'll make it obvious that they'd do such a thing and it takes the edge off their nobility. At the same time, don't make it out of character either -- though a touch of redemption doesn't hurt.

The most recent example that comes to mind are the ship's pilots in Prometheus. They were not horror-movie idiots, and remained outside most of the drama that was going on. The writers gave them some good banter to develop a little character. And when called on, they made a noble sacrifice which -- given how the rest of the movie went -- was once of the few scenes that really touched me.

Love this photo, let's use it again: Parisian catacombs.
Photo by Atif Gulzar, available at sxc.hu

Too much guilt
A character seeking redemption makes a noble sacrifice as described above. This can be very effective, if it illustrates the fundamental character shift that's needed for a character to achieve redemption -- in other words, if the audience agrees that the character has earned forgiveness. However, the character cannot forgive himself, and his noble sacrifice is a form of suicide. If not, this can look like a cheat, a short cut, and get an eye-roll rather than a heart-felt sigh from the reader.

Perfection attained
This is sort of a Zen thing. It's not the easiest to grasp, as it seems horribly unfair on the surface. The most high-profile example of this type of death (that I know of) is Wash's, in the movie Serenity. The character's final performance (in Wash's case, an insanely difficult flight) displays such mastery and spiritual awareness that -- well, there's nothing more to reach for. Go directly to Nirvana, do not pass "Go," do not collect $200.

On another level, it's the tragedy of someone struck down in their prime. At the pinnacle of skill. It can feel like a cheap shot, to some readers, probably because we want to see people rewarded for perfection and not killed. So proceed with care.

Traditional mentor's death
Story-wise, mentors die because the student needs to make his own way now. They die to raise the tension by reducing the resources the characters have on hand. They die because having them leave would still allow the possibility of a return -- and if they do, they can cheat the story of a properly earned win. 

Mentors can include parents, uncles, anybody helpful to the character. Ever noticed how many stories begin by destroying the character's childhood home and family? Killing the mentor is such a staple, it's hard to give it the weight it deserves. The characters rarely have time to grieve, since the story's plot is taking up their attention. Or if they do have time to grieve, the plot needs tightening up... it's not easy. Some more thoughts on how tricky it is:

• Didn't have enough time to meet them properly. Therefore, they were only a bit-part character and their death has little impact on the reader.  To combat this, some writers pad out the first chapter or two with everyday life intended to introduce the parents we're about to kill -- wasting valuable story time.
• Death was not relevant to the story. Yoda died in Return of the Jedi, and... it meant nothing, really.
• Purpose unclear. Dumbledore's murder was actually perfectly reasonable and on the noble side. But because of how Harry Potter was written, that couldn't be shown to the reader at the time and his death was reduced to a cheap emotional shot that only made me shrug. 

The hand of God
In real life, people die suddenly in car accidents and the higher purpose is hard to see.  In stories, such things can develop a character or set a chain of events in motion. But sometimes a significant character's death is swept up in a larger action sequence and left unaddressed, or the death is "random" and has no real story function. These can really piss fans off.

I try to keep in mind that while I hope my readers are sufficiently immersed in my writing to think that random events are random, the truth is there's no such thing as a random event in a story. Everything is under my control. Every bullet flying in a Matrix-style shootout hits what I want it to hit. I believe that on a gut level, readers know this and they'll call you on it if a character's death doesn't have sufficient purpose.

Maybe writers think that by adding "random" events, they're increasing the realism of their story. Well... I would disagree with that. Unlike real life, fiction is supposed to make sense. And honestly, any "random" event in a story is ultimately the writer falling back on "chance" when s/he ought to be making every event a logical consequence of previous events. They're showing their hand. God does not show his hand.

"Random" deaths can be done, and can be done well. The example that comes to my mind is the death of Buffy's mother in Buffy the Vampire Slayer -- though no, it wasn't truly purpose-less. It was a chance for deep character exploration. And I would argue the writers had earned that "random" death through several seasons of establishing realism in the series.

What purpose did a major character's death serve in your story?

Earning that win -- emotionally

Continuing the topic of story characters earning their wins, some thoughts on character-dependent story elements. See the first part about physical challenges.

Character development accomplished
We've all seen stories where a character simply sets aside a lifetime's worth of habits, beliefs, or fears and fully embraces something they initially rejected or that their society believes is wrong. They cry a few tears, hem and haw a bit, and then they're OK.

As a lifelong fat woman who's ten years into recovering from what popular culture ingrained into my young mind, I find this annoying. Character development is tough.

Fears faced
Once bitten, twice shy. Not "once shy" or someone-told-me-it's-okay and the fears are magically overcome. Fear is a primal urge that makes people behave irrationally, and it's there to keep us alive. The more times a character faces their fears and fights to overcome them, the better developed they are and the more invested the readers will be.

The catacombs below Paris -- I'd love to visit, someday.
Photo by Atif Gulzar, available at sxc.hu

Biases overcome
I have known, all my life -- and experience has reinforced this -- about the universe's contrary nature. If you need a thing, you won't be able to find it. If you don't need a thing, you'll be tripping over it constantly. Things break when you really need them to work, and things only go wrong when you aren't ready for them. If things are going well, disaster is coming to fix that. And if the universe can publicly embarrass me along the way, all the better.

How much would it take to convince me the world is a wonderful, kind, magical place?

Yeah. So the next time a character just decides to see past their racism, sexism, classism, etc., consider how difficult it is to ignore things you know in your bones. This goes double in situations where characters have to suspend their belief in ordinary, reasonable things like "pigs don't fly" or "walls are solid."

Consequences weathered
If your good guys did something questionable, or risky, if they lost a bet and now must pay up -- this makes for excellent character development. It shows the reader what sort of honor this character has, their strengths and weaknesses, and what they'll do when they get desperate. Like facing fears, the more readers see a character putting in the work, the more invested they are in the outcome. A get-out-of-jail-free card is not the writer's friend. 

Redemption
I love a good redemption story, where a character works their way back to honor and dignity, pays for the mistakes they made, frees themselves of burdens they took on or were punished with. We all want to believe that if we put in earnest, hard work, we'll be rewarded. We like to see it happen to imaginary people, too.

It's a specific form of consequence, one where the character does not start out a "good guy" or penitent about what he's done. Realizing the need to face the consequences of past action is usually part of the character's development. There may be a great deal of disagreement on exact shades and precise amounts, but in general people will know when a character has paid for their past sins -- they're sensitive to when there hasn't been enough payment. Accordingly, writers tend to go overboard in the challenges they put before characters seeking redemption, just to be sure, and that's all right. So long as the character's success doesn't strain credulity.

Are there things a character can't earn redemption for? That depends on your audience and your personal biases. This actually leads into another blog post I'm going to write on the functions of death within a story -- because death is the only way a character can buy redemption, sometimes. What do you think?

Earning that win -- physically

I've brought up the importance of characters earning their wins, in a story, in risks being taken and work being done. Stories where solutions are delivered on silver platters don't interest me. Characters who sit on their butts whining and refusing to do anything useful are not people I want to read about. I have enough of those in my life already, thanks.

"Earning it" is defined differently by everybody, of course, but there are general consensuses. Erring on the over-working-your-characters side doesn't hurt -- a lot of writers do it, actually. Careful with the strained credulity, if you're planning to put your characters on a death march, though.

Physical barriers overcome
I'll admit, I'm biased toward character development being more interesting than physical challenges. I don't mean to slight physically-oriented stories -- they can be triumphant and a lot of fun, and fun is not to be overlooked as part of a story.

Earning a physical win involves making clear how difficult this is, what the potential consequences are, and putting the character through some amount of physical suffering in the process of reaching the goal. 

Mountains climbed
The simple, direct, physical challenge: your character must win a fight, survive what the environment throws at him, or build something. Whether success or failure results, give the effort the weight it deserves. Tell us about the preparations, the problems, the interesting things that happened along the way. OK, we're climbing Mt. Everest without supplemental oxygen -- why is that important? What could go wrong? What almost did go wrong?

Photo by John Evans, available at sxc.hu

Answers found
If your character needed more information before making a decision, or if The Answer is itself the solution to a problem, the reader wants to see it. Or at least, if the writer does not show us The Answer directly, demonstrate its impact clearly enough that we can guess at what it was.

Whether your character needed to climb a mountain to talk to the Wise Old Man or had to sort through mountains of dusty books for a bit of data, show us the work. Which leads us conveniently to the next point...

Journey made
Covering large amounts of time convincingly is difficult in any medium. On TV, you might get a two-minute training montage that's meant to summarize weeks, months, or years. It helps to have a yardstick for progress, whether it's an indication of time passing -- showing the reader seasonal changes in the background, for example -- or in the character's skills increasing -- being able to reach that brass ring their teacher set out at the beginning, maybe.

What are some stories of overcoming physical challenges that you've loved? At what point did you agree the character had earned their win?

Part 2 will be about character-driven "wins."

Spending the week at Unicorn Bell

They let me have a second week, so I guess it didn't go too badly last time... I will be blathering about plot over at Unicorn Bell this week.

Handy index of posts for the future:
#1 The five parts of a plot
#2 Walking backwards from the climax
#3 Plotting the way down the mountain
#4 Where the climb began
#5 Which domino fell first?
#6 Wrapping it up

<-- One more week and I will stop pestering everybody about this! Plan B will go into effect over at the book blog, Disciples of the fount. Stay tuned.

The plot doctor is in

You might remember my Plotter FAIL! of a couple months back -- it got a lot of hits.

The fix I came up with worked, more or less, but a small comment from one of my CPs suddenly undermined it all. To paraphrase her: The scene where [big event happens] is kinda rushed. It needs more weight.

The patch I put in because of my Plotter FAIL was what put the squeeze on Big Event Scene. The patch kinda turned into a Big Event itself in the writing -- which meant I ended up with four disasters in my story. This violates the Rule of Three. The patch was causing multiple problems.

It was a good revision session. Pic from Showtime's series Dexter.

So, taking my lead from Dexter, I hung plastic sheeting and prepared to fix the problem. Obviously, the patch and the Big Event needed to merge into one. Tricky, but do-able.

Continuity
One of the biggest concerns in moving events around is the impact it has on the characters. I was moving a scene to slightly earlier in the story, but whichever way you're moving you still need to be aware of where your characters are when the scene begins, how that will impact their reactions to the events, and where they will be when the scene ends.

This is true of any scene, and I think it's easier when you're revising because you can see the whole story more clearly. You are more able to ask:

• Does this make sense dramatically? What problems does it solve and what problems does it create?
• Is there anything the character learned between the two scenes that they won't know when the order of events changes? Or anything they will know, if you're moving an early scene to later? Characters should never act according to information they don't have.
• How does this impact the emotional sequence? Especially if relationships loom large in your story -- moving an event will change its impact. Sit down with your characters and consider all the repercussions carefully.

Logistics
Don't forget about the mundane stuff, either. Worry about the gear the characters have on hand, what they're wearing, how much of the city will burn down in this iteration, what to do with the time you've added or deleted by moving scenes around.

And after you've re-written the whole scene, realize that the city was still on fire at the end... whoops, somebody want to fix that...?

Adjust the fallout
Don't forget to adjust the downstream action to reflect the new sequence of events. Since everything is connected to each other, in a story, shifting a scene will always have some impact further along in the story. Often, that's exactly why you moved the scene in question -- but unexpected details can turn up, so be vigilant.

Have you had to move a major scene? What sorts of problems did that create?

Kickstarter UPDATE! 

I've changed the $100 pledge reward! Go take a look!

I'm running a Kickstarter project to fund the professional editing, proofreading, and cover artwork for my gritty fantasy romance, Disciple, Part I: For Want of a Piglet. There will be six parts in total, published over the course of the next few years.

I'm offering e-books, paperbacks, promotional bookmarks, and more at various pledge levels (ranging from $1 - $100). Check out the project page for my book trailer, budget, and production schedule.

Kickstarter.com is a fundraising platform for all sorts of creative projects. Artists post a profile of their project and offer rewards in exchange for pledged money. The pledges are not collected unless the artist's funding goal is reached within a set period of time. If the goal is reached, the artist receives the money, carries out the project and distributes the rewards promised. It's a fascinating site and easy to lose time in!

Guest Blogging at The Bluestocking Blog

I'm blogging over at The Bluestocking Blog today!

Since my Kickstarter project is for Part I of a six-part series, I blogged a bit about recursive plotting -- because the same structure applies to the series as a whole.

Happy 4th of July! Or, if you're recovering from Canada Day, I hope you're feeling better. I will be posting on Thursday with a regular blog post, unless I get in another guest blog before then.

The dark night of the soul

The phrase "dark night of the soul" comes from Christian theology and refers to those dark times when you wrestle with doubt and despair. It's in the same vein as "it's darkest just before dawn." Dramatically, it's applied to when the characters are handed a major setback and all seems lost. Often, this is just before the climax of the story.

"Moon and trees 3" by Subtitled. Available free at sxc.hu

It's difficult to pull these off, since genre expectations may have already dictated the ending. If a happy ending is required -- romances, most notoriously -- the crisis is a fake-out. Plain and simple. Everyone knows the couple will overcome whatever personality clash the writer threw out, it's just a question of what contortions they need to go through.

If your genre requires a mass slaughter of the cast -- horror, darker thriller/action stories, etc. -- then the crisis is also something of a fake-out because the question of "Will this work out?" still has its answer. The answer is no.

Since it's easier to point out how things go wrong, some more things to worry about in your plotting:

Bullshit arguments
We've all seen stories where the conflict was based on something that five minutes of real conversation could have cleared up. In a similar vein, sometimes the crisis is invoked by the characters suddenly turning into idiots and misunderstanding, getting angry for poorly defined reasons, or suddenly clamming up.  This makes for a less than convincing "dark night of the soul" because, again, five minutes could clear it up. 

Another situation where this happens is when the writer forgets/overlooks an obvious solution to the supposedly traumatic problem. For example, let me pick on Prometheus for a moment since I've kept mum on my opinions... at one point, Dr. Boyfriend stood there insisting he be set on fire to protect the crew. He could have just taken his helmet off and suffocated in the atmosphere. And then been burned, once dead. But no, we have to go with the horribleness of someone burning to death. 

Legitimate complaints
On the other hand, sometimes the crisis is a result of completely legitimate character conflicts. Then, the problem is getting the relationship back on track without invoking the modern reader's gag reflex.

• Woman deciding she loves this asshole because... well, if he's an asshole, no excuse will do. 
• Guy deciding he loves this bitch because... oh, come on, she's a bitch. Again, no excuse will do.
• The leopard changes his spots at will. This is something that must be earned over the course of the story. It can't be pulled out of a hat. Seriously, did anybody believe that Danny's switcheroo at the end of Grease was going to stick? Or Sandy's, for that matter?

In terms of action/adventure situations, this manifests as the Godzilla vs. Bambi problem. The characters are facing the destruction of the universe with just their moxie and a bent spoon. Either they've been beaten down so hard or the enemy is so well prepared that there's no light at the end of the tunnel. The writer is going to have to:

• Invoke serendipity, which means the characters didn't earn their success.
• Call in the cavalry at the last moment, which the characters might have earned but it's still not their win.
• Make an otherwise competent enemy screw up and ruin himself, which the characters didn't earn.

None of these are good solutions.

Which of these annoys you the most when you see it in a movie or a book?

Plot surgery on the fly

I was going to send my fantasy characters on a hunt. If you've been following my Pinterest picture board, you've seen the handful of hunting-related photos I've been staring at.

Hunts, in stories, are usually where an accident (which always turns out to not be an accident) happens and somebody dies. I wasn't going to do that, but I got to within a couple scenes of sending them out into the woods and... my gut told me we don't need this, it'll only get in the way.

A clean snick of a sword and the hunt didn't happen. On further reflection, here's how I know my gut is right:

Cutting it has zero impact on the plot
Which was a dead give-away that the scenes were useless. They mainly addressed relationship development. And even then...

Cutting it has almost zero impact on the character arcs
Almost zero. There's one relationship that will need more work, as a result of the cut, but it's not my first-person narrator's relationship so it wasn't the main focus in any case. My narrator can see other parts of that relationship happening in other contexts, though. I'm confident I can get it in someplace. But most importantly...

It would've promised something I wasn't going to deliver on
Unlike real life, fiction is supposed to make sense. And as much as I dislike Chekhov's law (because it makes story-telling predictable) everybody knows it on a gut level and readers expect that topics introduced have a reason to be there.

The topic doesn't have to be tied to the plot, but the more time you spend on it the more expectations get attached to it. Just seeing a gun doesn't have to mean someone will get shot. It could be a piece of character history or world-building. Characters could talk about the gun in order to develop that. I would have no problem with the gun then being put on the mantle and never touched again.

But if a character takes it down and loads it, now you're committed to using it. If someone notices it's missing, it had better turn up in a significant way.

My hunting scene would have spent time on something that would not have later turned up in a significant way. I don't intend to be a sloppy writer, so snick. Gone.

What do you think of Chekhov's law?

Where the story begins, part 2

Since I'm a plotter, I sketch out all the plots in a story before I start writing. In each part of Disciple, that includes: the external action, the emotional arcs of Kate and her two co-MCs, and Kate's mastery of her magical ability. All the stories include these, but which one is the primary plot varies from Part to Part.

Humming "Drive" by Incubus. Photo courtesy of sxc.hu

Why do I need to know which is the primary plot? Because it's the one I will use to write my query letter, and it's the one I will base my synopsis on. 

How do I know which plot is the primary driver of the story? Well, because of the overall progress of Disciple, that was easy to pick out in Part IV. But when it's not so easy to tell, the question I ask myself is:  

What's the most important thing that happens in the course of the story?

That's your primary plot. I'm biased toward these being changes in a character, personally, but it can be an external goal. Catching a serial killer, for example.

In my scifi novel, Course Corrections (McBride's Eight? I'm waffling) I had to ask that question, think hard, and then  revise accordingly. The primary plot was:  Maggie McBride becomes a leader.* Therefore, the story began when she decided to do the thing that made her a leader -- to rescue her cousin Neal. I hadn't written that scene in the first draft because I hadn't realized it was the primary out of the handful of plot threads... so I added the scene in revision.

If the plot were: Neal McBride escapes prison, the story probably would start when he was captured, or maybe at his trial and sentencing. 

Where does that primary plot start? What is its inciting incident? Figuring that out is another blog post. But for now, whether you're a plotter figuring this out ahead of time or a pantser hacking your manuscript into shape:  

The story begins when the primary plot begins. 

Everything before that is extraneous, to be brutally honest, and every page you make your readers slog through to get to the story is a risk. A risk that they will put the story down and find something more interesting to do. You can take that risk -- I put about three pages in front of the scene where Maggie makes her choice, and I did it for the purpose of introducing Neal as a sympathetic character who deserves rescuing. (did I succeed?) Or you can jump right into the plot on page one.

How many pages are you willing to read before you know what the plot is? "It depends" -- on what?

*Though having read Ursula LeGuin's recent post, this may be the story, and the plot was how she went about doing that (rescuing her cousin.)

Part 1 is here.

Where the story begins, part 1

I recently began writing Part IV of my fantasy monstrosity, Disciple, and unlike the previous three Parts the beginning of this one was more difficult  to pin down.

Part IV begins -- really begins, and I'll get to how I know that -- about three and a half months after the end of Part III and my narrating character, Kate, pretty much pitched a fit about all the stuff that would be skipped. (Now, I blame this on Kate but honestly, it's my gut talking to me. And I trust my gut, in general. See also: G: Gut.)

I let Kate present the case for all the skipped stuff, which is to say I sketched out everything that happened in those three and a half months in the process of outlining Part IV in general. As things began to come together, I figured out which parts of the skipped stuff would, in fact, be important for the reader to know. These scenes would:

• Introduce characters and situations: One of the scenes was a chance to properly meet a supporting cast character. It also set up a situation that will be used in Part V (though exactly how is a little hazy at the moment.) I should note here that it's always a good idea for more than one thing to be "happening" in a scene. That's a whole 'nother blog post, though.
• Track progress: One of the through-lines of the whole series is Kate's developing magical ability. On the feedback of my betas, I've started writing supplementary scenes that track Kate's progress and help explain the magic system in more detail. What will become of these scenes and how I'll get them to the reader, I'm not sure yet. But they have their uses despite not being integral to the plot.
• Set start parameters for a plot: This was the weakest scene, in many ways, except that it explained the starting situation for the primary plot driving Part IV. That's a useful thing to have, given how Part III ended and the time gap between the two. 

I put my foot down and told Kate no on the scenes that didn't do any of the above. But none of the scenes above contribute directly to the various plots in Part IV, either. Every page you spend not directly developing the plot is a risk -- a risk that the reader will get tired of waiting for something to happen. ESPECIALLY at the beginning.

Being a control-freak writer, I did write the scenes in the bullet list above. I'll decide what to do with them later.

Stay tuned for part 2 on how to figure out which of your story's several plots determines the starting point. Meanwhile: how hard does a scene need to work to be included in your story?

Go to Part 2.

Plotter FAIL!

I generally consider myself a plotter. I don't start writing until I have a beginning-to-end outline that sketches all of the major steps in all of the plots and how they intertwine. Usually I have a good idea what the minor steps are, too.

For Disciple, those plots include: the background action (a war the kingdom is fighting), which my MC might or might not be able to directly affect; my MC's personal progress along two tracks (developing her magical powers and the romance arc); and the progress of the two co-MCs along those same tracks (their part in the war, their own magical development, and their involvement in the romance arc). There are a few secondary characters who warrant mention in the master outline too.

It sounds like a lot when you lay it out that way, but when you braid them together they take up less space... mentally, anyway. And honestly, I need to outline all that because I'm a flake at heart. My characters are constantly distracting me by goofing around, charging off on tangents and mugging for the camera.

From my master outline, I write more outlines on a scene by scene basis. These aren't formal things, they're more like sequential notes: here's where we start, point A, point B, here's where we end. Notes on what people want, what the conflicts are, any important points about the setting and who is there, If a conversation is especially important/complicated, I might have the dialogue sketched.

Scene outlines get shuffled all the time, sometimes on the fly as I'm writing the scene because the characters decide to take a slightly different tack. No big deal. I roll with it.

But I don't usually get to a point, look at the next major point in the master outline and think "Oh crap -- how am I going to do that?"

A little shift here, a little shift there, and eventually the pieces are simply out of place for the next major event in the siege to create the situation in which a very important conversation was supposed to happen. And we've got to have that important conversation before the third (and final, since three is a magic number) disaster so that the right emotions are in play.

So I buckled down for some brainstorming, which meant finding an appropriate soundtrack and juggling chainsaws for a while. I think I've got a reasonable bridge from the second major military disaster to the third, and I'd like to thank Celldweller for being such a reliable inducer of testosterone poisoning.

This playlist induced a lot of snippets of violence: brutal sword fights, cavalry charges down narrow streets, bloody-clawed monsters, trebuchets cranking off shots, stone walls exploding... good times. 

Caution: there's some loud dubstep in here.