From Cool Idea to Story: further unpacking

[mrissa]

Okay. So joeboo_k noted, in an entry elsewhere, that the "From Cool Idea to Story: How do you get there from here?" panel didn't actually answer the question very practically. And I think he's right. We talked a lot about what we start with, that sort of thing, and we talked about accreting enough from various sources to have an idea of where things are going. Giving it time to breathe. Composting. That sort of thing.

But I think a lot of the mechanics of it are -- at least for many of those of us who end up with lots of ideas* -- something that gets done on a subconscious level much of the time. Let me try to unpack it a bit. I think most of what the subconscious is doing is what you often do when you're trying to figure out something you don't know: working from what you already know to what you might not know yet.

As I said on the panel, I don't really get story ideas without chunks of prose. They come with voice. Mostly I don't sit down and say, "I should write about alien squid. Now, what about the squid?" But I think some aspects of methodology would work for that type of idea as well. So since this is my journal and I can do stuff like this, I'll give you the chunk of prose that started "Carter Hall Recovers the Puck," since a) it's already published, so we know that at least some people think it went somewhere that made a decent story; b) it's towards the start of the story, so the exposition is in this chunk and not later; and c) I like it. This is what started me, more or less:

We were all glad to see the start of the season. It had been a weird year already, way too cold too early and lots of exhibition games, and then there was that thing with Tam and Janet on Halloween. I was still figuring that out, but Janet and the baby-to-be seemed to be okay, and Tam wasn't sacrificed to the lords of hell, and that's about all I could ask for under the circumstances.

There was one thing that confused me most about it. That game, when Tam had been forced to play for those weird French-Canadian dudes and Janet took him down and saved him, even I could see that there was a lot of big, bad magic going on in that game. I saw the face of that Queen woman -- hell, I checked her into the boards as hard as I've ever done. I know what was in her eyes, and it wasn't human. And I saw what she did to Tam, and that wasn't human, either.

But it wasn't really about the hockey. That's what I don't get. If I've ever believed in magic in my life, it's in the way my skates hiss on fresh ice, the slide of the puck. The way blood bounces: if that's not magic, I don't know what is. And that Queen chick, she used it, but it was just another tool for her.

I kind of thought it should be about the hockey.

Now. This is not, as it stands, a story idea. But it can get you there from here. From this, you know several characters: the narrator, his roommate Tam, Tam's girlfrend Janet, and the Queen of Air and Darkness. You actually know a fair amount about them. They are, with the exception of the Queen, hockey players. They are fairly serious hockey players. The narrator, Carter, is a bit rough around the edges and not particularly reverent. They have also had some experience of magic. They have been through fairly unusual experiences lately, and if their world is not an urban fantasy version of ours, it needs to be signaled fast, because everything in this passage says "mostly our world." There are French-Canadians, for example; there is Halloween. The magic is at least partially from a fairly familiar myth structure.

If you pick and poke at that last line, it tells you where the story is going: these characters are still not completely resolved with the dark side of the Fair Folk, and if this is not a tragedy -- and Carter's voice is not well-suited to tragedy -- the resolution must come on the ice. It has to be about the hockey. And because I write for an audience that is not exclusively composed of hockey fans, it has to be about the hockey in a way that's accessible to people who have never seen a game in their lives, or have never enjoyed it if they have.

So you have the familiar myth structure, and you have hockey, and you sort of toss them around in your head, and then you chuckle to yourself, because what comes out is: Oh, of course. Puck. And another thing that comes out is: Janet is pregnant. This is a story about consequences; this is a story about what happens after. And this is probably the first time in these people's lives that they have that kind of vulnerability to deal with.

And it's being told by a guy who was willing to check the Queen of Air and Darkness into the boards for his friends. So this is maybe not a story about thinking things through very carefully and doing a great deal of research and planning a lot in advance and not taking risks. And so you start to think, well, Carter, what did you say to the Puck that got you in trouble? and Carter says, funny you should ask, and on you go.

Most of that I am not doing consciously. It's a series of clicks, a series of tiny epiphanies; the connection process only makes the conscious level when something is going wrong. For me, of course; I don't say that people can't do all this perfectly consciously and end up with good stories.

It doesn't have to be this sizable a chunk of prose for everybody, obviously. willshetterly said that he used to look for a magic sentence, and many of those can give you things to unpick: what setting does it imply? what characters? what plot structure? what ideas, what attitudes, what voice? But even a simply stated, "I want to write about a generation ship," will do: what kind of generation ship? Is everything going all right mechanically? How about socially? Who's on it? Who sent it? Where's it going? How well do they know where it's going? How have they diverged from the people who sent it? What does it smell like? Is it noisy? What kind of noises? A lot of times I find that I instinctively know the answers to some questions about my story, so that if I talk to someone else and they say, "Oh, and it's malfunctioning and plummeting into a binary star?", I can say, "No, no, that's someone else's." But if you don't know the answers to any of the questions you can think up about your story idea, either you don't have a story idea, or else it's time to make arbitrary choices and see where it takes you, and back up if you choose yourself into a corner, or if things start to fall out as clear and personal, as the story that you can tell differently than anyone else would.

Does any of that make sense?

*This does not necessarily map to writing quality. pameladean has said several times that she is not a writer who gets loads and loads of ideas. Some of my other favorite writers dismiss ideas because they are so chock full of ideas that they can barely move. It's that thing about people varying again; amazing how often that comes up.

Comments

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

"So this is maybe not a story about thinking things through very carefully and doing a great deal of research and planning a lot in advance and not taking risks. And so you start to think, well, Carter, what did you say to the Puck that got you in trouble?"

Ha, that's my favorite part of this whole post, except that since I am a New England Jew, I think: Wow, imagine the kind of person who would just cooly say, "Well, Carter, what did you say to the Puck..."

I mean, obviously it's you, but if I were writing the story it would be someone different. I might consult you as a cultural liason though!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I think -- here we go with the metaphors again -- that I need two points. If I have two points, I have a line connecting them, and off that I can hang a story. But if all I have is "hey, there was that neat thing I read about the Ashanti or whoever it was, so let's say in this society there's a kingspeaker whose job is to repeat everything the king says, because his voice is too pure to be heard by normal people," that's not enough. I had to figure out what being kingspeaker meant to the narrator, which gave me both the arc of the story (it's about her figuring that out for herself) and where it was going in the end, and from that thread I could hang a campaign against a warlord in the western hills, etc.

I can usually tell I'm missing my second point if I write a fun, interesting beginning to a story and then stall out. "The Last Wendy" didn't get past half a scene until I realized I was trying to cram the wrong ending onto it. And that's why I haven't yet attempted to write the John Barleycorn Anglo-Saxon vampire story that mugged me in London; I need something else to go with the Anglo-Saxon vampire thing. Otherwise it's a conceit, not a story.

The aggravating thing is that the acquisition of a second point more often happens by serendipity than conscious effort.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

This is a very nifty post.

And it makes sense to me, for what that's worth in my current bewoozled state.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Or I suppose I could put it in my more usual textile terms: I need both a warp and a weft. If all I've got is a warp, I've got danging strings that don't do much of anything, though they may be fun to bat at.

(Er, the end of that sentence was apparently brought to you by my inner kitten. I think death-marching through this research book is getting to me.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Really? What would you say in that circumstance?

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

Thus far, for me, the process has been different for each story I've written. There are broad categories, but things vary a lot even within them.

I've only once thought, "I should write a story: oh, hello, there is the story and all of its scenes, right there, almost instantly."

When I'm doing stuff toward someone else's theme (which I really enjoy), I tend to fish around in the pile of stuff I already know about and look for a likely spot to make camp. I'll figure out some basic through line that sounds interesting, or a character, or a line of dialogue, or a song lyric that's always made something in my brain go 'ding'. Then I research to fill in gaps and find as much synchronicity as possible. Sometimes I end up with the thing I was thinking of originally, other times it changes a lot during the learning process as I find stuff that does or doesn't fit my idea.

When I'm doing stuff just because I want to, I still pull from the big compost heap of ideas, but the story idea doesn't necessarily manifest before I start. I've written some things where I got to the end before I had an idea of what the story was going to be. In which case, hoo boy. Revision!

Of course it's different with novels. Thus far each one of them is pretty radically different.

I've not tried doing out of sequence yet, mostly because what keeps writing fun for me is that writing is a lot like reading. I write to see the next part.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

For me, the warp/weft or two points thing is where it becomes a story idea in the first place.

markgritter and I were talking about this with Futurama, of all things, yesterday: I think that Futurama succeeds most when it's very clearly doing more than one thing. The Mars University episode, for example, is not just doing Good Will Hunting with over-the-top science fiction tropes or Animal House with over-the-top science fiction tropes. It's doing both at once, in twenty minutes. I mean, that doesn't make it the most brilliant thing in the world, but it makes it work a lot better than if it was just trying to do one thing.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yay, the making of sense!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We've talked about my experience of instant stories, I think.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

It would depend how I knew Carter, I guess, but it would probably start with "Holy shit, dude!"

Or if I came from a different kind of Jewish family it might be, "Carter, what's this your mother's been telling me about your last hockey game, and your grandfather so sick these days, the least you could do is call and let them know you're all right, you know your mother had to hear it from the Rosenblatts at temple, so embarassing for her." (I mean, except OBVIOUSLY Carter's not from that family.)

Or from T.'s family: "Oh yeah?"

Or my friend Lauren: "Wow, you checked her into the boards? Was she a good player?"

And so on.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

This makes sense to me too.

What I start with is often a first paragraph too, though sometimes a poem, in which everything else is implicit.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

There may be another question buried in here, namely, where's your hurdle? For you, getting your two points is where it turns into a story idea, but you still have a lot of development work after that. For me, getting that second point tends to make things fall into place -- not always, but often. So that's the major stage of "idea to story" development in my subconscious.

You're definitely right, though, that doing two things at once generally makes for a better story.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

That's fascinating. In the stories I've written recently, I think what's started me has been an image, and then I had to set up a narrative that let the image exist and make sense--even though oddly sometimes the narrative winds up changing the image.

But the picking and poking, yes. It's reassuring to know that a professional works that way.

But I'd like to hear even more about how you got to the chunk of prose in the first place. Did it just sort of pop into your mind, or did you think Tam Lin, hockey, how can I put those two together?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Heh.

Well, Janet often says things like, "Oh good God, Carter, what did you do this time?" But I am not Janet, and Janet is not me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, the original idea came from me and timprov just hanging around talking, and the question we had was, "What would it be like to be Tam Lin's roommate?" And once the guy's name was Carter Hall (instead of that being a place name), we could immediately agree not only that he was a hockey player but what style/position (big burly bruiser of a defenseman, better scorer than you expect him to be). And the rest came rather quickly.

Statistically, the narrative changing the inspiration-y bit is not odd at all: many of the writers who talked about this stuff this weekend also found that to be the case.

[vcmw]

My math brain is riffing on the two points thing, and here's what it wants to offer: two points do define a unique line, but human drawing skills being fallible it's often nice to have a third point as a check.

That is: if you want to draw a certain line, then two points may define it, but having a few extra points handy makes sketching the right line much much simpler.
In story world I imagine the extra points could be characters or settings or pieces of myth or whatever?

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

Statistically, the narrative changing the inspiration-y bit is not odd at all: many of the writers who talked about this stuff this weekend also found that to be the case.

I've had this happen too, and was fairly weirded out by it.

I normally need two or three images that click together. Then I start with "Well, how do they go together?" and related questions, and my process is rather like what you described.

But when I start with text, it's generally when a) something's been simmering away without my having a clue, and b) I'm most of the way asleep. And so far, when that happens I get a sentence. I can normally tell which sparking-idea it's about, but it's never been how I imagined that story would sound, so far. Then I get another sentence. And I'm a page and a half in before I can risk waking up enough to think about what I've written and feel out where it's going. That feels to me more like lucid dreaming than like writing, and I often don't know how it will play out till I get there.

It's like I have a waking-brain method and a sleeping-brain method. Does that happen to anyone else?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, or from another mathy angle:
Single line stories are rarely interesting.

I was riffing a little bit on character relationships considered as deformations in spacetime, at Fourth Street. And, uh, just about everywhere else. Because it's how I do that part. It's not a Newtonian theory of character....

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I wrote my entire pirate story while asleep. So sometimes I even have this literally.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Would you mind if I potentially send a few Alpans here in late July? My most common new-writer comment is, "Go deeper! What are the implications?" and this is not only a useful way of demonstrating that but a useful way to start stories.

[sensational.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this! It's really neat and useful.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I've figured out that I don't really have a story till I have at least one character. And it has to be a character, not just a role -- those "answer all these questions to build a character" sheets don't work for me. And till I have a character, anything I write is notes -- no matter how carefully planned or polished.

The story I'm currently working on is set in a future where telepathic gadgets (for example, a tea kettle) can be found in thrift shops. It involves synesthesia. But it seems to have decided it's a love story which ends before the two people have met in person.

[elsmi.livejournal.com]

Getting a piece of text is definitely the biggest hurdle for me -- at least in the few things I've written (and more to the point, in the things I haven't figured out how to write yet!). I tend to start with an idea ("Tam Lin has a roommate -- named Carter Hall of course!") or an image (the Queen of Air and Darkness's contorted face looking back as she hits the boards, drops of blood flying to the ice), but what I need is a *voice*. Before I have a voice, I'm flailing; I have these ideas and implications as a rich and tangled clump, but a story is a linear thing and I can't unspool them. After I have a voice, even just a few words, I can ask it -- how would you tell this? -- then give it room and listen. And to guide it along, all the text I've read before and have floating around in my head suddenly becomes useful -- once I see text on the page I can see pacing and tension and incluing and foreshadowing, and a whole toolbox opens up.

I don't have any particularly useful tools for getting that initial voice, though, making that first contact between thought and word -- the joys of complete newbiehood! Anyone out there have tricks they use?

[vcmw]

It's been forever since I actually studied math/science past a high school level... am I following right that the narrative is the spacetime in this image? And that it is shaped by the positioning of the character elements, which sort of have gravity or other properties that pull the narrative around them in certain ways?

I think "character relationships considered as deformations in spacetime" is an absolutely awesome phrase, btw.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well...for me, it's story, rather than narrative, that's the spacetime. Small distinctions. And it's the characters relating to each other that cause motion and action. Sort of like planets in a solar system, really.

But that's my own quirk.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Of course! I can send you a copy of the story to give them, if you like, so they can see the finished version as well as the starting elements.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Glad to be useful!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I let the characters relate to each other. I mean, this is going to start to sound boring from me -- "relationships, relationships, relationships!" -- but it really is how I do things. If I don't know how the story sounds, knowing how the characters sound and act towards each other gives me a good leg up. Or vice versa, when necessary.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, story. I'd be happy to have it, but I'm not giving a formal lecture. I've just been putting a lot of Recommended Reading lists on my critiques for this year ("You! Read Story X in Best of Baen's. It's the same idea, only it works." "Your story reminds me of this novel. Hope you weren't doing anything this week, because your mind will be blown shortly.") and this is... well, like I said, it is both a good way to make a story and a good way to make a story *better*.
I expect I'll point a lot of the Alphans toward the post during the two weeks. Thanks for writing it!

[elsmi.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I shall meditate on this! (I like to read character-driven things, but I do not have a character-driven brain; by default it tends to propose ciphers and symbols instead of personalities.)

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed your contributions to the panels and the blog entries here that I've read. So I've friended you. As have, I assume, roughly 160 other people.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Heh. The post-con friending does seem to be in full swing, doesn't it? I appreciate the people who are introducing themselves.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Do symbols generate voice for you?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, "go find this old issue of On Spec," is probably not very functional advice, so I'll just ship a copy your way in case you decide you want to use it, and if not, no harm done to anybody.

Glad you like the post!

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

I want to see the rest of this hockey story!

[elsmi.livejournal.com]

I was going to say "no, that's the whole problem"; but then, thinking about the things I have managed to write... I guess sometimes I can squeeze a voice out of them. Like... in one story I knew that a theme was estrangement and my character *was* a cipher, which gives the narrative POV -- external, recitative, no opinion to express -- and that also means I have to maintain reader interest in other ways, plus there's a sense of fractured reality to it, so that meant a dense-like-flourless-chocolate-cake voice with skittering rhythms and a ballistic trajectory... and then I knew the first line. But I didn't reason it out like that, of course; it's just later I can pick out pieces of my initial gestalt and see how they made the voice inevitable.

I think part of the problem is that when writing there are a huge number of decisions to be made, and a surprising number of them are implicit in even small fragments of text. I mean, obviously you need to pick a POV and tense before you can write a sentence -- these are local properties -- but a voice also knows something about pacing and length and emotional tone -- global properties of the work. (This I learned from reading Book of the New Sun and There Are Doors in quick succession -- same author, very different styles for different purposes.) Following the math theme, we could call this the Taylor's Theorem of Narrative :-). And if one *hasn't* actually made all those decisions, then the place one stalls out might be in finding the voice.

But building up a bag of tricks for interrogating the subconscious stew is handy, and just because my brain doesn't default to thinking through characters doesn't mean I can't nudge it to do so, or do something like it -- that's what I meant about meditating on your approach.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sure. And if nudging characters doesn't work, switch to the mechanical parts of plot. Or the implications of setting. Or etc. There are all sorts of angles of attack; if you keep circling round, you might find one. (I'd say, "you will find one," but some stories never do get written; sometimes trying another story is also good.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, e-mail me at my gmail account.