Plot: some stuff that totally might not work for you.

[mrissa]

Over on FB, one of you--under their legal name, so I will not cross-identify--was talking about having difficulty finding plot for ideas for which they had world and character. I offered to make a helpy post about plot. And awhile ago I gave another of you--in a locked post, so again, won't say who--a series of questions to try to spark plot ideas from what that person said was world ideas. So I'm putting some of those here and also some additional ones.

Here's the thing: all happy writers plot alike, but--wait, no. Even happy writers plot differently. Some achieve plot. Some have plot thrust upon them. So if you run across things that are meant to spark plot, and you want to run screaming from those questions or ideas, that's good! It tells you something useful about yourself! It tells you: holy crap, don't do it that way. Because seriously, there is no reason you should do it that way. This is all conscious-brain trouble-shooting. This is totally not how I even do it. This is just how I attempt to help someone who says, "Hey, I am having a problem." Some brains take this approach to this kind of problem and want to curl up and gibber. I have one of those kind of brains! I keep it in the basement in the timprov. So seriously, if all of this sounds hideous to you and like the least fun and functional way of plotting ever, put your trouble-shotting plot methods in the comments, or commiserate in the comments, and maybe that'll help somebody too.

1. Even if the world is neat, someone is usually unhappy there. Who? Why? Are they convinced they would have been better off in a past era, a different country, an alternate way of doing things not yet achieved? Or are they focused on what's wrong with their milieu and not on the alternatives?

2. What has changed for the world or characters recently? What is hard about this for the people living there or living with each other?

3. What can't be sustained about the situation? What is hard about this?

4. Who is considered very odd within this setting? Who is the absolute rock of the [village, city, school of marine biologists, whatever]? How does this setting allow them to interact/prevent them from interacting, and do they balk at the usual things and make their own stuff work for themselves as individuals or is their relationship typical of their roles?

5. Of the characters you have, who thinks that what they really want is not achievable, and what are they going to settle for instead? Are they right? Are they constructive/destructive/something else?

6. What stuff is cool stuff that you like? This could be "love triangles" (oh please do not let it be love triangles, I am so very tired) or "giant squids" or "the bit where a crucial piece of a mystery becomes clear to somebody." Sometimes if you don't have a plot, seeing how you can combine the things you already have (story elements or nouns or verbs, whatever, I'm not picky) can result in one. "I like screwball comedies, I could do one of those," you might say, or else, "Well, if I don't have a mystery, I'm going to have to do some pretty crazy things to have a batty old lady who solves mysteries...hmm," or, "If there is going to be wombat research, it should probably be plot-relevant wombat research somehow or the reader will waste a lot of time trying to figure out what it has to do with anything. Unless I have made it Deeply Symbolickal, and managing that is its own special trick."

Anybody else?

Comments

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Triangle Man, Triangle Man, Triangle Man is terribly sad because you have stomped upon his hopes for romantic fulfillment.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Okay, the terrible plot where the Heroine Must Choose Between Two Dudes And One Conveniently Dies is hereby taken out of retirement if the Two Dudes are John and John.

But only if the correct John dies.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure myself how I'm going to get more plot. Mine was Boy Meets Boy, Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Boy, Other Boy Meets Girl, Brief Angst Resolves Into Joyous Poly Triad. All against a background of a pre-existing war which gave me sufficient excuse to move them in and out of proximity to each other and to have other things to think about.

Historical romance is handy that way.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Pre-existing war! Pre-existing war can totally be part of worldbuilding and part of plot.

Worldbuilding does not hold still. Is the thing about worldbuilding.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

And pre-existing war has dates and places I can LOOK UP instead of invent, which makes me have to fashion my plot around them, which inspires creative solutions. Plus? VERY PRETTY UNIFORMS. I am in favor of bright colors and gold lace.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

What would force this character to deal with something outside their comfort zone? What would force this character to change? These are my guesses as to what Bujold asks, even though she claims to ask "What's the worst thing that could happen to this character?" Because that question actually gets you less interesting plots, and more depressing ones.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Right, there are all sorts of things that could happen to Lois's characters that are worse than what actually happens in her books, but it would be less interesting. And less...novel-encapsulated.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Even if you're inventing the dates and places, once you've invented them you're stuck with them. Or once you've moved them around once to be convenient for one thing, they're not always convenient for another aspect of the same plot or characters. So while there are more movable parameters in speculative than in historical wars, the parameters you set can still come back and bite you.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

But as with her definition of specfic as fantasy of political agency, I learned more by trying to figure out what similar-but-not-identical claim actually made sense to me than I normally do from nodding along with other authors.

[aliseadae]

With characters but no plot, I've been re-reading Diana Wynne Jones again and I've noticed that one of the things she does is give each character more than one identity ( being both someone's father or grandmother or aunt and also some essential powerful thing that doesn't get revealed until the end, or maybe doesn't get connected until the end.) Pieces of the plot connect themselves to each person/ their identities and as these various characters become woven together, the plot unfolds. Not sure if that is useful, and I haven't tried it myself, but it was what I've been thinking about while rereading lots of DWJ.

Thanks mrissa, for this post! I'll have to think on all of it!

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I love having dates that are set for me! Even better is when I research down to the level of schedules for mail coaches. Having to work around a coach that only arrived at quarter past six AM and PM made me come up with some very evocative stuff to write about.

Of course, knowing the schedule of the Royal Mail between London and Portsmouth in the early 19th century is only of limited use, but the paragraph I got out of it was awesome.

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

I am bookmarking this thread and watching it with Great Interest, though my problem isn't plot but character.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

But I don't want either John to die!

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

If you're me, you ask questions like, "Okay, what horrible thing will this perfectly nice* person have to do even though they don't want to, and why?" and work backwards from there.

(*: Values of 'perfectly nice' may vary from 'actually quite pleasant' to 'not actively malevolent, except when you piss them off'. But you know. Alec stories.)

[aliseadae]

Mine too. Sort of plot, because I can see ways that plot comes from characters (which I don't have or don't know the details of their lives enough to work them in to the plot.) But setting? I've got setting. Though /that/ also ends up sort of vague. Maybe I just have a detail problem.

[aliseadae]

Agreed!

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

My characters stay vague no matter how much detail I have-- I can worldbuild just fine, I can find the interesting niches in the setting, place people in them in interesting situations, figure out motivations and histories and encumbrances for them, and devise plots involving them, but I can't get from any of that to any of the hooks that actually make me care about a character-- no scenes, no fragments of dialog, no images, nothing that gives me an in. It's just cardboard people, and I don't give enough damns to write about them.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

They wouldn't actually die, just fictionally die. And what has Flansburgh done for you lately?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think even more than two can be useful. Yes.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Right, if you don't have detail, all the tricks with which you can leverage worldbuilding to get plot are going to be difficult. Or at least many of them are.

[aliseadae]

I'm not entirely certain how to trick my brain into providing me more detail. Maybe more walks would help. More walks are always good, and then I can look at pretty trees.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Okay, taking this on from a less self-focused angle than before:

At the risk of being obvious, I feel like there are two general directions from which one can approach the question of plot, or character, or whatever. One can start with details or images or feelings and try to work outward from there, to make your starting point more concrete and then flesh out the surrounding canvas bit by bit. This is basically the method E. L. Doctorow described as, "driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

The other approach is more top-down and directed, rather than purely exploratory. You can still start from details, but instead of proceeding onward to more details, you start filling the larger shapes of the canvas. Instead of thinking about what sort of buttons are on the character's coat, you think about the level of industrialization that allowed their coat to be mass-produced. Actually, that's kind of in-between the local detail - wooden buttons mixed in with sections of animal horn with holes bored in them - and a really top-down sort of approach - okay, so I want to have a continent-spanning war ala WW I, which implies some kind of industrialization, which implies advanced logistics via railroad or equivalent, and power sources ala the steam engine, and factory towns, and eventually you get back down to the garment industry and coats...

While I tend to describe my process as very top-down, even I don't actually take a purely command-driven approach. What generally happens is I'll ask myself something like, "What would [blah] look like?" where [blah] = 'World War I fought between the Seelie and Unseelie courts'. And that question immediately makes me free-associate through a series of vivid images relating to World War I and faerie, and I latch onto a few of those and start extrapolating from them on both the macro and micro scales at once. At the same time, the stuff I'm thinking about is sparking other images and scenes and characters, as I think things like, "Whoa wouldn't it be awful to grow up there?" and "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if X had a sister? Hmm, what kind of supernatural powers would she need to survive the war? And wouldn't she kind of resent Y for stealing her brother from her?"

As I agree with Mris that everyone needs to work out what works for them, I'm trying to be descriptive rather than prescriptive here, but I will note that an important development in my process was to learn to free-associate in a way that gives me both micro-level and macro-level details to work with very quickly. I'm not entirely sure how it happened, other than reading a lot and writing a lot and having to constantly make up details on the fly while running RPGs. That said, I'm pretty certain it's a skill, rather than an inborn talent (albeit a skill that can be honed to the point where it eventually becomes second nature).

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I both hate and love having dates that are set for me. It made me tear my hair out a few times while working on the Onyx Court books, but it also dropped awesome coincidences into my lap and/or made me (as you say) get more creative.

But yes, as a general thing, constraints am good.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of what I think of as a characterization issue, but is also a plot one: what levers does this character have that I can use to force them into motion? (e.g. "family has fallen on hard times and character is expected to marry money to save them." Apart from plot about the character trying to find some money to marry, there can also be plot about the way that interferes with other things they want to do -- including but not remotely limited to living happily ever after with somebody unsuitable.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I do a great deal of 6, I think, usually with worldbuilding details. To pick a short story I've been thinking about trying to actually write: I read a cool thing at one point (which may or may not be true for the real world, but that hardly matters when I'm ripping it off for a fantasy setting) about how the Maya had a way of ritually "decommissioning" temples when they abandoned the place, so they wouldn't leave an untended conduit to the spirit world behind them.

So when you're me, you go "that's awesome, I want to tell a story about a temple that didn't get decommissioned properly," and then you have to come up with a plot that will justify talking about this concept. As it happens, I have a pre-existing setting (http://www.swantower.com/stories/other/amof.html) I can slot it into, so now I start asking myself, who might stumble across this kind of thing, and why? I'm thinking an ocelotlacatl (one of the jaguar-people) because they're tough and warriors and might have reason to be out in an uninhabited stretch of jungle, like they're chasing somebody or on their way to another city or whatever, and also I haven't really written much about them yet. But they're generally so good with spiritual stuff, so okay, that's a problem; I either need a way for this jaguar-person (I'm inclined to make her female, just 'cause) to figure out how to shut down a temple on her own, or else I need a reason for somebody more spiritually savvy to be there. And maybe that has something to do with with the reason ocelotlacatl is there? But what would that be?

Dunno. I haven't actually worked out the plot for this one yet. But that's a snapshot of where my brain is, and how I go about working it through. I definitely started from "here is cool thing X; now let's make up a plot excuse to talk about cool thing X," though.