Writing fever

Ok, the question of the day is How do you plot out a story? That’s the short version. The longer version is more like How do you plot out a story that contains multiple meaningful strands in such a way that it’ll keep you inspired and amused throughout the long process of actually writing it? But that’s a little messy.

Yesterday I briefly mentioned that finding a plot through the act of writing doesn’t really work. Well, for me anyway. I’ve started lots of stories that went nowhere, then spent days, weeks and months coercing them to go somewhere, anywhere. But those set-ups, no matter how personal and meaningful, simply never amount to anything. This really crushes me because the process is supposed to be quasi-magickal, a journey of narrative discovery. My magick doesn’t work that way. Bummer.

Worse still, the more time I’ve spent imagining ‘better’ plots, the deeper those plots have collapsed into a mire of mediocrity. In fact, as each new ‘improvement’ has popped into my head, I’ve found the original spark gets increasingly diluted to the point where the whole project is meaningless. And my initially-sparkling characters look at me from their initially-sparkling premise and shake their disappointed heads, trapped like General Zod & his gang in Superman II.

We don’t necessarily need to talk about characters now as we try to unravel plotting, but yes we do. In a perfect story, the actual story we all want, the characters and the plot are perfectly entwined. You know what I mean, it’s lesson #1. The events of the plot are there to push the characters’ buttons in ways they need to be pushed. Your characters have buttons, the plot pushes them and the audience (remember them, the point of all this) feels something intense and memorable.

Now, how those buttons get pushed is critical too. The audience is smart. The audience has seen it all before. The audience consists of human beings who know how things really are. Even worse, and this is the one I try to keep foremost in my mind, the audience is bored already. Already! They demand (and deserve) lots of great amazing things right now. There’s a million other things out there demanding your audiences’ attention, just as fervently as they demand yours. Your story needs to be good and different and familiar and astonishing all at once. Maybe that happens when you write totally honestly. Maybe not. I’ll leave that with you for now.

So even our most basic lame structure (Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Girl Is A Vampire) actually needs to be something like A Specific Kind of Guy Meets A Particular Girl in A Surprising and Resonant Incident, Boy Loses Girl Due To An Imaginative and Perfectly Appropriate Flaw, Girl Is Revealed To Be A Vampire In Such A Way That Boy and Audience Are Forever Changed. And that’s still keeping it simple.

So, how do we build one of those? And yes, that’s the original question, still unanswered. Hey, if it was easy I’d be off writing right now …