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writing-in-the-tiny-house · 3 years

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Plotting, but Upside Down

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The following is a transcription to this episode. The complete transcription is on the show’s website.

Devin Davis: Do you have the most awesome character in all of fiction and you have wonderful plans for this character, but you just don't dare to put those plans into action? Well, I am here to tell you to dare to dream. Well, in ways. Today on Writing in the Tiny House. Hello, hello, hello! And welcome back to the show. Welcome back to Writing in the Tiny House. I am your host Devin Davis, and we are here together for another wonderful episode of writing in the tiny house. I am the guy living in a tiny house in Northern Utah, who is here to show you how to fit in writing a book, even in the most busy of schedules. So that's what we're doing.

[00:01:09] That's what we do here. Sometimes we have interviews of professionals in the field. Sometimes we have me talking about different writing advice. Last week, we talked about plotting from the inside out, from finding an event that would happen in your plot and in your book and finding ways to entangle that with all of the different subplots and then working backward so that you can find out how everybody got there.

[00:01:41] This week, we are going to be talking about characters and the awesome things we want them to do. So this is still plotting. This is still doing the plot structure stuff. But I warn you: what I'm about to talk about can be dangerous. But first I want to do a quick shout out. You know, that in these episodes I sometimes have announcements.

[00:02:06] One of the podcasts that I just stumbled upon is called Writing Roots by Aspen House Publishing. They release episodes twice a week and they are great. And I highly recommend that you guys search them out and have a good time with that. It's been fun exploring some of these other writing podcasts and just building a community like that.

[00:02:27] So that's it for announcements. Let's just get in to the nitty gritty of this. Let me first share with you the warning. Let me first set the stage. This stage is: you have this wonderful character, and because I am a fantasy genre author, we're going to keep things kind of fantasy.

[00:02:50] If you do any other type of fiction though, this totally applies. So with fantasy, anything can happen. There's magic. I appreciate a really good magic system. I appreciate believable characters. I appreciate human characters that I can relate too. So we have this character who is becoming more and more powerful in magic, and we imagine this wonderful big finale or this wonderful big spell or this wonderful big situation that this character really should be put into.

[00:03:31] If the character were in that situation, the entire plot would be more exciting. And that particular scene that you are imagining would be fun to write. It would be fun to envision. It is fun to daydream about. If it were a movie, you know all of the camera angles, you know all of the pictures, you know all of the special effects that it would have.

[00:03:54] And so we get to ask ourselves, "How did we get our character to do that? How do we get our character to get there?" We need to include these exciting moments because it's fun. And that's what makes some of this literature really fun is really big magic, really big high stakes things.

[00:04:18] We like the fights. We like the battles, at least in fantasy we usually do. And so it's important to include those things. However, when it comes to this specific character, doing this specific thing or developing in this specific way or having this or that specific backstory, it is important to step back and ask yourself why.

[00:04:49]And this is the reason why I say things like this. If you do not step back and ask yourself why it can lead to problems with your writing. It can lead to problems with your story. When you have a character who needs, in your opinion-- and it truly is in your opinion, none of this is real. And so you are in charge of everything in this writing process. But if you have this woman who needs to learn a specific spell or needs to do a specific fight, then you need to find a believable way to get her there. It is important to write down the different things that you want this character to have, and that you want this character to do.

[00:05:42] It's important to write all those things down for all of the main characters. But, you need to cross reference all of that with the previous stuff that I said in the previous episode. You need to make sure that you're getting your character from this stage to this other stage in a believable way. It needs to be something that is organic.

[00:06:10] It needs to be something that is real. It needs to be something that we can believe. And so what the pitfall is, is plot devices. Sometimes plot armor. If you're familiar with that term, that is when the character doesn't die or doesn't really get hurt just because they are the main character.

[00:06:32] Not because they are otherwise special in any other way. But just because they're the main character we protect them, or we have our main character or our main crew of characters, and we need to get them from here to there, but we have written them into this corner. And so how do we get them out of this corner?

[00:06:53] Well, the problem is the unbelievable solution or the convenient thing that comes by. I spoke about plot conveniences earlier when I spoke about Santa Claus showing up in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in the Chronicles of Narnia and Santa Claus brought deadly weapons, which the children would be needing at the end of the book, and that is all very convenient. And this way of plotting can lead to these plot conveniences. However, I'm going to tell you that if your character absolutely needs to do a specific thing, what I invite you to do is write down what that specific thing is, and then sit on it for a while.

[00:07:42]Have it in the back of your mind. If everything in the story already makes sense and leads up to that, and this would be just a natural progression along the way, then absolutely stick it into your story. If not, pay attention to your gut feeling. If it ends up being extra or stupid, or unbelievable, or just too much, or it ends up affecting the pacing-- like things get really slow and boring now that we have this thing in there-- then I invite you to step back and to perhaps revisit it or to throw it away entirely. There have been many wonderful ideas that I have thought of in my own stories that simply did not survive just because there was no organic way to include them in the story.

[00:08:40] So in instances like this, sometimes sometimes, and I absolutely give you every excuse to do this if you feel you need to. Sometimes you simply must sit down and write it anyway, knowing that it is going to be modified later. And you could write thousands of words just because you need to write that. You need this particular scene or event to exist for you, for you as the storyteller. In writing that scene, it brings you a little bit closer to your character. It lets you get to know the character and the dynamics of the environment that they're in, the stakes that they have and many more things. But it is okay to then turn around and rip it out of your manuscript.

[00:09:36]If you are the type of person who has heart failure over deleting things in their manuscript, it's okay to cut them from the manuscript that you are working on and paste them into another file that you can title your graveyard and to have those ideas continue on in the graveyard for either further inspiration or just reminiscing about what might've been. When I wrote my first book As Magic Shifts, the prologue was the longest chapter in the entire book by far, and it was the prologue. And if you do any type of Googling or just a quick search in YouTube, you can discover that prologues are kind of on the hot plate right now.

[00:10:34] They're kind of a debatable subject. Do you need a prologue? Do you not need a prologue? And there are a million different things to say about that subject. But in my book As Magic Shifts, when I wrote that 13 years ago, I simply needed to write this battle scene. And in the prologue, I wrote the battle scene from start to finish.

[00:11:00] It was the entire battle. And it had characters in it that had not been introduced in any other aspect. It had events in it that were confusing. It had multiple points of view. It was a mess. It was also 45 pages long. Which is too long for a prologue. You want your prologue to be shorter than the average length of your chapters.

[00:11:26] And so it was a problem and I sat back and I recognize that. And so what I did instead was after I wrote the entire prologue, I took just a single scene from it, the most important scene, and I made that become the prologue. And had I not done it that way, at least that's how it became for the second draft.

[00:11:52] Had I not done it that way-- had I not sat down and written out this entire battle-- I wouldn't have arrived at that scene that worked for the second draft. And that's okay. What I did later was I had a way to understand the characters backstory, and as a way to understand just some of the magic and some of the effects that were happening in a really negative way. I had flashbacks of sorts to that war, to that battle that happened years and years ago, as a way to explain to the reader and to actually some of the other characters, what was actually going on and why it was happening in this way. And so I never forgot that battle.

[00:12:45]Again, this is the thing. If you have main characters that you really, really, really want them to do specific things or act in a specific way, make sure you reference your overall story and pay attention to your gut. It has also been my experience that if I let things marinate for long enough, I will be able to come to a very logical conclusion about those things, whether or not to put them in the book. Or I can find the absolute perfect way to include them. And sometimes that takes time. Sometimes that just takes that patience, that ability to sit back and allow the forces at work to just kind of figure out this aspect of the story that you didn't understand before.

[00:13:45] For me, I daydream about my books all day, every day. And so sometimes I get fixated on the really exciting things on the good things that I find in the storyline. And because I'm the storyteller and because I'm the author, they all make perfect sense to me. And then sometimes when I draft, I don't see that they don't make sense yet, or that they need more or that it's too much, whatever.

[00:14:15]But in the times that I do see that this doesn't work right now, or that this character doesn't get to act in this way right now, or this event doesn't get to happen right now, but I still allow myself to daydream and I still allow myself to think about it, I have found that for the really important events in my entire overall story, even though some of the context might change, I have found there is always a creative and beautiful way to approach those events every time. And that moment is so exciting when, when I come to realize, oh, it gets to happen this way. So the event is still there! And I still get to be excited about what is about to happen and the magic and the action, and you know, what the characters are going to learn and grow from or whatever, if that's even in the scene.

[00:15:17] And even though the context may be different and sometimes the secondary characters might be different or the setting might be a little different. I have found that there are creative ways to find the perfect place for those exciting moments. And for those important moments, sometimes it requires a bit of ju from your manuscript, but it can happen.

[00:15:42] Sometimes you get to be prepared to put them on the back burner so that you can give it more time to marinate and let your creative brain find the most perfect way to include that important scene.

[00:15:58] So that is it for today. Thank you so much for joining me. And a special thanks to my patrons: without my patrons, this podcast would not be possible. If you are interested in joining the patron gang, go to patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse. You would be getting early access to these episodes. You would be getting an additional episode every month and an opportunity to spend private time with me.

[00:16:24] So again, that is patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse. Also be sure to follow me on Instagram. My handle is @authordevindavis and on Twitter my handle is @authordevind. Again, thank you so much for joining me today and have fun writing. We will see you next time.

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jam2289 · 4 years

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An Email About Writing, and a Reply

A friend sent me an email recently asking some pertinent questions about writing.

Here is part of the email from Sharon.

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Have you ever coached a fantasy writer? How silly do you consider this genre?

I have this dream to finish my story before I die and that’s not looking as good as it used to! Years go by really fast as it turns out.

What’s a good first step for this process? Or, do you have a series of essays on how to get off your butt and just write?

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Those are good questions, and hard to answer questions. Here is my response.

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I quite like fantasy.

My writing coaching has just been on the skill rather than on projects, so I've mostly played with tiny little stories that we make up at the time.

There is no correct process for writing, and no correct writing time frames. Patrick Rothfuss worked on his first book for 14 years before it came out. Stephen King took 30 years to finish the Dark Tower series. J. K. Rowling had all seven books planned in detail before she began the first. Her planning took 5 years by itself. C. S. Lewis just did it one book at a time. George R. R. Martin has a general idea of where he's going, but no detail.

Writing only requires writing. So it's whatever works for you. I only really make progress when I'm doing articles for the blog where I'm going to publicly post them soon. I just happen to like that. If you can block out a certain time to write, do that. If you can set a goal of writing a certain number of words a day, do that. None of that works for me, my conscientiousness scores are just too low to handle it. But, writing in little bursts of inspiration has worked for many people as well.

It's whatever gets you going. If you feel like writing detailed plans and that will get you putting things on paper or screen, then do that. If there's a scene you're excited about, then write that. Gabaldon writes her books completely out of order just based on what she feels like doing at the time, and then arranges the scenes later. Robert Louis Stevenson made a list of chapters and then wrote Treasure Island chapter by chapter, and read each to his family by the fire that same night. When he wrote Jekyll and Hyde his wife awoke him in the middle of an inspiring nightmare and he wrote it in three days. When she didn't like it he burnt it and rewrote the entire thing again, all while being on doctor prescribed bedrest.

As for fantasy being silly, it is no more silly than any other genre. A western can be silly or serious. Fantasies are communicating personal and collective archetypes, patterns of interpreting and acting within the world, just as all narratives are. The Emperor Has No Clothes is an important work detailing deception, self-deception, authority, social structures, the value of innocence, fraud, and more. The Chronicles of Narnia is a Protestant religious work, and The Lord of the Rings a Catholic one. Harry Potter has an almost unlimited number of important subjects, not the least of which is the exploration of the good and evil that divides us all within ourselves, how the evil within being incorporated into us protects us from the evil without, and how by dying unto self we may be reborn. So, fantasy is not so silly. It allows us to have fun while confronting subjects of the utmost importance, and maintaining enough distance to allow us a less reactive perspective on emotionally engaging topics.

Finally, writing does require a leap of faith. That's why it's an adventure in itself.

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Letter writing is a lost art. But I like it. I'm reading the letters exchanged between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson right now, along with the letters between John Adams and Abigail Adams. They offer some of the best insights into history, and into people, that I know of. And, fictional letter writing as in Johan Wolfgang von Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther" and Ovid's "Heroides" give you a different feel than that of other literary works. (Technically that's its own field of study called epistolary writing.)

Emails are not letters. But sometimes they start to feel like that, and it feels good. Here is a slightly edited reply from Sharon.

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Wow Jeff this is such a great email, you should post this to your blog as is! It’s very motivating just reading about how other authors work. I usually imagine them as tirelessly holed up in book laden studies writing away for endless days.

I know it took Tolkien about 20 years to finish LOTR etc. and I often think maybe that is why it is so good.

The thing that has gotten me writing finally is that I just tell myself no one will ever see this...

Constructive criticism I take VERY well but someone saying “wow this is just a piece of garbage” I’d have a hard time with.

And everyone knows that “no filter” is sort of the new norm.

Thanks social media.

I guess I will just jump in and do whatever and see where it goes.

How are you enjoying isolation?

Feels pretty normal to me, I kind of live in a pumpkin anyway!

Have you written a book yet? Or mostly essays?

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She has a lot of good points in this email. I've had the same concerns.

I wrote an article about other writer's writing processes a couple of years ago called "The Write Process", and it did help give me a well-rounded perspective on the reality of writing. There are many interesting ones that could be added to the list, like Michael Crichton writing scenes on 3x5 cards until he had a shoebox full, but just knowing that a dozen famous writers all disagree on almost every aspect of writing is quite helpful mentally and emotionally. Here's that article: http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2018/01/the-write-process.html

Then there's the whole can of worms on being on both ends of creating and criticizing. One important realization is that critics and creators aren't writing to each other or for each other, they are writing for a public, otherwise it would be in private correspondence. I wrote about that idea more in "Critics and Creators": http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2019/02/critics-and-creators.html

My last response reflects some of those ideas.

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Lol. I was thinking the same thing about making that an article.

I agree that it's very motivating to see how other authors do it, and to realize that they all completely disagree. For instance, Shonda Rhimes is a prolific television writer known for Grey's Anatomy. She says that if you write every day you're a writer, if you don't you're not. Her favorite writer is Aaron Sorkin. He wrote The West Wing and various movies. He says that 90 percent of a writer's time is not writing. When he's writing a movie he usually thinks about it for about 18 months and then writes it in 6. So, by her definition Shonda Rhimes' favorite writer isn't a writer.

If keeping your writing close to the chest works for you, do that. Social media is crazy. I've even gotten some death threats for my political article on Antifa. I've had a number of insults for my writings on grief, where I'm developing an original theory. But, I've also had a lot of good compliments and people sharing my work. I'm certain that by this time my article on suicide has saved a few lives because of the circles that it's been shared in.

Isolation isn't too big of a deal for me. I teach English online and spend most of the rest of my time reading, writing, watching, and meditating.

I've written over 300 articles. Which would come to over 2,000 pages in a book, but no book yet. I'll probably make some article collections this year.

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In addition to the over 300 articles I also have notes for more than 200 additional articles. I'll never run out of things to write, I'm guessing that the more I write the more I'll fall behind in comparison to the ideas that I have yet to write. I've been urged to write books about my adventure traveling out west mountain climbing, and my couple month road trip, and my near-death misadventure in Africa. Those would all be interesting, but I lived them, so it's not that adventurous for me to write about them. I do have some major works that I want to tackle in this lifetime though.

Out of all of the projects that I have started and have in mind there are two that would compromise major life works. One is a philosophical work creating a new structure connecting epistemology, ethics and morality, and political economics in a better way. The other is a literary work to compliment "Prometheus Bound" by Aeschylus. I do not know if I can accomplish either of those in this lifetime, they both still feel a little out of my reach in terms of mental insight and writing skill. But, there are other projects that have been growing which are unique and could contribute quite a lot to society, such as my original theory of grief, a new literary analysis method, work showing the emergent nature of morality in art, the historical pattern of abolition, my unique experiences and insights into meditation, and some of my current work in applied politics. So, my work has just begun.

Whenever we set out on a new venture doubts and concerns spring to the fore. Those are the things that make us stronger in overcoming them. And throughout history, letters have contributed to the overcoming of many such obstacles. Just maybe, it's helped in this case too.

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To read more from Jeff go to JeffThinks.com or JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com

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