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McAnally's (The Community Pub) => Author Craft => Topic started by: teamlash on July 22, 2011, 02:31:00 PM
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So I apologise if this is a repeat thread, and/or is in the wrong place.
Yesterday I used Jims' blog to begin planning a book I've wanted to write for years, and his method is like gold dust!
However I do know that there are a hundred ways to write a book, so I wondered which method everybody used :)
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*blink* Plan?
If I do, I tend to do it the day before. I write for the day, however much I wanted to write, then I stop. Then whenever I have time (in the shower, before bed, at redlights), I daydream about the story. I find a scene that I really want to write, something cool or interesting or heartfelt. I replay the scene in different ways over and over, and then the next day I'm completely psyched to write it.
That's about as close as I get to planning.
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*blink* Plan?
If I do, I tend to do it the day before. I write for the day, however much I wanted to write, then I stop. Then whenever I have time (in the shower, before bed, at redlights), I daydream about the story. I find a scene that I really want to write, something cool or interesting or heartfelt. I replay the scene in different ways over and over, and then the next day I'm completely psyched to write it.
That's about as close as I get to planning.
Me too -- I start with an idea and keep whacking away at it until it done.... :)
Craig
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Oh gosh, I wish I could do that!
My brain is about as disorganised as Harrys' lab though, so I have to have an outline.
How do you hold everything together in your head? :)
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I also used Jims blog to start my story. Most of the time I am just mentally brainstorming away, and I keep a notepad close by. Sometimes the ideas I get are really cool I never forget them, but others that just sort of pop up out of nowhere I write down on the notepad in no particular order.
If you have the beginning on your book then just start typing away. Otherwise just keep taking notes and brainstorming until you feel you have enough of a story skeleton to start writing, and fill in the details later.
I personally use a writing program, which isn't necessary, but it was fairly cheap and it allows me to seperate my chapters and scenes, and has character sheets and notepads and more. It's really helped me organize.
Usually I don't like to write inconsistantly, that is to say write chapter 1 then go to chapter 10 because I know what happens there. I broke that rule a week ago but I had a huge inspiration, plus I was stuck on the next chapter anyways.
Long story short everyone is going to have different ways of doing things. I like to at least have a beginning middle and end before I start writing.
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Author Tim Powers suggests you research until you have twenty too-cool-ideas to not use. If you've got a premise worth gold, research with twenty incredible things to use, characters you've developed that you know won't bore you after two years of working with them, minimum? Then I start Jim's big hairy plot arc with color stickies for subplots.
I used to fly with only mental background, but the agony of getting 1/2 way done (or worse yet complete) and realizing that your premise is so over used that not an agent would read past your opening paragraph of your query? Yeah, not going to do that anymore. Same with the 'voices' of the characters.
Intertwining subplots key as well.
There is a short cut for me, I think, which is working from the villain's POV--so I know intimately what s/he is doing if all went according to plan. Then I add in the protagonist, where the villain is bumped off plan, where the villain bumps the protagonist off plan. I have that pretty well decided now before beginning. I don't crank out chapter by chapter until then,, but I will write out some key scenes in extremelly rough draft to learn/build the characters, the world, the what-ever means test I apply to assure myself that....
Back to beginning, that I've got a premise worth gold--silver won't do, research with twenty incredible things to use--or more, and also characters I've developed that won't bore me after two years--and umpteen drafts.
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I think my best story ideas come from my nightmares. Which is just as well, 'cause nightmares are all I have. I've never had a good dream in my life. My nightmares give me some pretty twisted ideas.
Of course, I'm the sort who likes to read books that have good endings, so it wouldn't make sense for me to write a horror book with a horror ending, which is what might happen if I let the nightmare write the whole book, but which is not the sort of book I have the stomach to read. Therefore, the twisted stuff from my nightmares is best placed at the beginning of the book, leaving me to figure out how to get a good ending out of it while awake.
For the organizing my disorganized thoughts, I find the open source writing program Storybook to be of assistance. http://storybook.intertec.ch/joomla/
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I think my best story ideas come from my nightmares. Which is just as well, 'cause nightmares are all I have. I've never had a good dream in my life. My nightmares give me some pretty twisted ideas.
Of course, I'm the sort who likes to read books that have good endings, so it wouldn't make sense for me to write a horror book with a horror ending, which is what might happen if I let the nightmare write the whole book, but which is not the sort of book I have the stomach to read. Therefore, the twisted stuff from my nightmares is best placed at the beginning of the book, leaving me to figure out how to get a good ending out of it while awake.
For the organizing my disorganized thoughts, I find the open source writing program Storybook to be of assistance. http://storybook.intertec.ch/joomla/
Oh you poor thing *hugs* I hope you have good dreams one day.
And yep, I have storybook :D I love using it to keep my characters in order!
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Experiences also make for good story ideas. Usually, it's the bad experiences that are worth more when articulated in story form. Of course, in many, if not most, cases, you'll want your character to experience worse than you have, for the sake of drama, but you can still wring your experiences for details. Some people who have seen some really, really horrible stuff do the opposite -- that is to say, they tone it down, presumably to make the story more socially acceptable than the reality. I believe Oliver Twist is one example, but usually, it's the other way around.
For example, if you've ever spent even one night outdoors (not recreational camping, but because you had to), in a car, or in a shelter or storage locker, it will be easier to write about a homeless character and add the details that bring the story to life than if the closest you've ever come to even associating with known homeless people was when they begged you for money. However, as it would be foolish to destroy one's financial position for the purpose of gaining inspiration, one might also obtain second hand experience by volunteering at a shelter, drop-in center, or soup kitchen and talking to the homeless and/or the hungry.
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I have an 40/hr a week day job and before that was a full-time student, so I plan my stories a little bit at a time. That is, I will start, "Idea sheets" which are just open office or other word documents that I just add to a little bit each day. Maybe it'll turn into the story bible or maybe it will be just a bunch of thoughts but it's something.
I also (one time at least) make character sheets for characters using FATE system-like Aspects and put them all on a spreadsheet, lined up neatly so that in a cast of characters I get very little overlap and/or characters confused with one another.
Currently I use the most recent version of Final Draft to outline the entire story on notecard view when I sit down and do it for the long haul.
For the actual order of events I use any word program that has the ability to make numbered, ordered lists. I will make lists of arcs, sequences, scenes or even just beats I want in the story. You know, sometimes I want to plan a story around a foot & Motorcycle chase sequence involving a battle tank with a very friendly sounding speaking voice through an idyllic American suburb under a massive dome and sometimes I'll plan a story just so I can have a Red-Haired Irish Catholic Anemic Vampire wrestle some wolf Faerie to the ground in his bloodied (Big Mean and Scary) form saying, "DOn't worry mate, I Got this B&@*!"
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Author Tim Powers suggests you research until you have twenty too-cool-ideas to not use. If you've got a premise worth gold, research with twenty incredible things to use, characters you've developed that you know won't bore you after two years of working with them, minimum? Then I start Jim's big hairy plot arc with color stickies for subplots.
Tim Powers is out on one end of the range of processes, I think; I've read him talking about his process in Locus, and IIRC he plans a story down to exactly who says what in which conversation before writing it.
It's probably worth noting that Steven Brust writes entirely as he goes along, with no advance planning at all, and relies on his subconscious to resolve things for him. (Even things he threw in specifically to test its facilility for doing that, like the goat in Cowboy Feng's.) When he gets stuck he just writes the characters meandering about moaning about being stuck.
Both of these extremes appear to have led to successful and critically acclaimed writing.
I used to fly with only mental background, but the agony of getting 1/2 way done (or worse yet complete) and realizing that your premise is so over used that not an agent would read past your opening paragraph of your query? Yeah, not going to do that anymore. Same with the 'voices' of the characters.
I use a single notes file, which tends to start off with a couple of key points per chapter and to expand to five or six before I get the chapter written. Withe the Book I Want To Be Writing Now, the setting is large enough that I am using more background notes files as well.
There is a short cut for me, I think, which is working from the villain's POV--so I know intimately what s/he is doing if all went according to plan. Then I add in the protagonist, where the villain is bumped off plan, where the villain bumps the protagonist off plan.
Cool.
I think I tend to be bound so tightly to the POV of the person/people from whom I am writing that I can't do that; if I am plausibly to do someone only just noticing what's happened and not knowing what the villain is up to it's easier to get into that headspace if I do not myself at that point know the precise details of what the villain is up to.
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Oh gosh, I wish I could do that!
My brain is about as disorganised as Harrys' lab though, so I have to have an outline.
How do you hold everything together in your head? :)
i don't use mine for anything else so i store random ideas in it.
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Hold all *what* together? ;D Suggesting that I have something to hold together is the equivalent of suggesting I have a plan. Or a plot. I rarely do.
I start out with a cool idea, go to another cool idea, and another cool idea, and so on. Somewhere along the line I start to try to tie my cool ideas together. This is usually where things derail and get difficult, then I have to go back and plant seeds or kill entire scenes. Then I keep going to the next cool idea. Then I decide I should probably think up an ending somewhere around here. Then I make up an ending, and realize I have to go back and plant more seeds and rework scenes. Then I write the ending. Then I go back and really polish to try and make all the seed-planting and scene-changing as invisible as possible.
I'm not saying it's the easy way. I'm not saying it's the hard way. I'm just saying, that's how I work.
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I take a tape recorder with me, when something comes to me, I just tape it and then go from there, that way I never lose any ideas I may come up with.
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Pondering, a tremendous amount of pondering. I like to think of it like assembling a bicycle in my brain. It only works if you put it together one way, and I can put it down and come back to it later in my head. I'll write down names and locations, subplot points, as well as different scenes but most of that is simply bullet points that I use as prompting while I play things out in my head. I like to put characters in scenes that may or may not be canonical, but still reveal something about them if only to me. I guess I could say that I like to build characters and let the characters build the story for me but that isn't entirely true. However, I do like to get an iron tight grip on characters before I ever knuckle down on the story. Tabletop games and my theatrical background are to blame for that, but it works for me so hey, no worries.
It isn't a matter of a brain being disorganized. It is about focusing on a scene and logical progression. Believe me I'm not organized about it in my head but I play a scene back over and over and over until I know it backwards and forwards. From there, I know what the next move is and I organize accordingly based on what is boring or not. Then I go and see if I can find the right words to express it.
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Recent writer workshop weekend:
John Irving begins with a 'crystalizing scene', which is the huge ah ha ending. I found it amusing to hear JB say ghost story was hard because he didn't have that, these are John Irvings words, crystalizing final climax. I'd guess that if I had that super incredible image in your head as my final goal post then I could wing it. Someone on these boards years ago said the same thing and they shared one. Pretty incredible final scene. I still remember it and wonder if the author finished it. Won't share the specifics, but it involved a one legged woman and a shotgun. :-) see? You are drawn to it already, right?
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this will sound weird but i act out scenes of my stories when i am alone, usually in the car on my way to work. i also jot down my insane thoughts in my note books, each story has their own individual journal.
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I usually start with a couple of scenes that do that crystallising thing, but they're not always climactic - the structural pins for me writing the thing, as it were, can often be small asides in the middle of a but where the plot is doing something completely different, though they do generally tend to also include major hinge points in the plot.
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this will sound weird but i act out scenes of my stories when i am alone, usually in the car on my way to work. i also jot down my insane thoughts in my note books, each story has their own individual journal.
*Imagines evil cackling scramble to find the notebook where -exactly- that idea was written*
Hold on
It's here somewhere
I wrote that only the week before last
I know I have it
Yeah, I know the conversation is past it but AHA! here it is!
Well, OK, not quite exactly that idea, but if you squint just right... ;D
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I usually start with a couple of scenes that do that crystallising thing, but they're not always climactic - the structural pins for me writing the thing, as it were, can often be small asides in the middle of a but where the plot is doing something completely different, though they do generally tend to also include major hinge points in the plot.
Longest sentence so far in author craft, I suspect. And yes, it is clear as to your meaning. Hugs!
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Longest sentence so far in author craft, I suspect.
Are you sure you included the ones where neuro did the Dumas pastiche?
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*Imagines evil cackling scramble to find the notebook where -exactly- that idea was written*
Hold on
It's here somewhere
I wrote that only the week before last
I know I have it
Yeah, I know the conversation is past it but AHA! here it is!
Well, OK, not quite exactly that idea, but if you squint just right... ;D
This only works if you let the notebook in question out of your possession.
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I need to have a beginning and an ending before I sit down and start writing. The middle is totally negotiable...
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I find that by default, I come up with a concept and build the story around it. Then when I need characters, I'll figure out what exactly I need them to do, then assign them a passion and a motivation that will put them in the right place at the right time. I'll take that passion and that motivation and build additional character traits around it. Then I drop my character into the world I've got set up, and let them run around. Generally from there they tend to do the rest of the character development for me.
As for story, I'll start setting up a timeline. Once I have a pivotal bad guy or 2, and a pivotal good guy or 2, I start imagining confrontations between them that involve serious consequences. When I have a good idea of what I want these confrontations to be, I'll drop them on the timeline as "checkpoints." Ironically enough, this is an excellent method for wading through the Big Swampy Middle. My only problem is that usually I can't figure out how I want the climax to go. Guess I need to work on that "story question" jim was talkin' about.
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Depends... the first actual "whole" novel I wrote was based on an RPG campaign. It was a lot of adapting, a lot of combining scenes and short stories and finally one summer I took 9 days off of work and sat down, eight hours a day, and wrote to fill the whole thing in.
Novel #2 was a NaNoWriMo novel. Started on Nov 1 with an idea for an opening scene, wrote that up in a couple pages, stopped when I got out what was in my head, and each day I could see/wrote down "a little more" Was able to finish it in the month. Not great art, but it has a plot and a reasonable amount of coherency.
Novel #3 was a 3-day novel (gonna do that again this year), I knew I only had so many hours, so I took time off work, and wrote out an outline beforehand. Made sure I got enough sleep, and wrote ... maybe 10-12 hours (in chunks) each day and did get it done.
So I guess it depends. Whatever way or ways work - go for it. Maybe a few will.
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I am horrible at finding things on big sites like this - can someone point me to the blog mentioned in the first post?
As for my plan, I've adapted it from the various screenwriting books/seminars that I have been to. I have five major "turning points" in the story and know at around what word count they should appear. The rest I've been planning on a very basic level day-to-day by looking at the larger structure, looking at where I am in the word count, and writing what seems the most urgent thing that needs to happen en route to the next turning point.
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I am horrible at finding things on big sites like this - can someone point me to the blog mentioned in the first post?
This is it:
http://jimbutcher.livejournal.com/
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Since I started writing about 9 months ago I've found that planning too much doesn't work for me. I tend to write a scene and as I go the next part of the story follows a logical path. I know the ending I want, and how to get there, but I just recently decided to add a whole new POV character because it fit and let me play more with the world than I could before.
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I get an idea and usually where I want the story to end up.
And then I start writing. I can get tripped up because I don't have my middle fully laid out.
I often have just incidents that I want to incorporate in the middle but not how they need to be strung together.
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I try planning, but it rarely works out. For the most part I just wing it and then come back and do necessary revisions every month or so.
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I've really only worked on one story since I got the idea. The problem is I mostly just have the main events outlined so doing an actual outline helped me flesh out some of the story. The problem after that is that things keep shifting the longer I plan. So I've done lots of different things planning for it... But not a lot of writing to be done because I change things so frequently. The main events that I thought about in the beginning haven't changed but nearly everything else has.
So I guess the answer to the question how do you plan your stories is: Badly and often.
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I recently updated my planning style with more old fashioned story structure. Jim Butcher's LJ posts are neat but that's only one way to do things.
My background is in Film, so I use a variant on Syd Field's Screenwriting Formula along with a few other formula elements.
I further break it down into groups of beats (Action-Reaction) which make up scenes. Multiple scenes which make up sequences and multiple sequences which make up acts.
In regards to the Protagonist, I also write out a model of what's called the Desire Line and the Need Line. The Desire Line being what the Protagonist wants(His/her goal) and the Need Line being how the character needs to change to accomplish that goal(Become braver, more powerful, etc).
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In regards to the Protagonist, I also write out a model of what's called the Desire Line and the Need Line. The Desire Line being what the Protagonist wants(His/her goal) and the Need Line being how the character needs to change to accomplish that goal(Become braver, more powerful, etc).
So you generally write about protags who get to achieve their goals ?
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So you generally write about protags who get to achieve their goals ?
It's not always as simple as "Protag has a goal at the beginning and will resolve it at the story." though reductionist thinking can lead to that conclusion, especially if mixed with a little dose of cynicism.
Over the course of the story, the protagonist's goal or goals can change and the goal that he/she is trying to pursue at the climax of the story may be totally unrelated to the goal he/she had at the beginning of the tale. More than that, the change that occurs may allow the character to achieve one goal but have to sacrifice another goal in return.
Also remember that every Antagonist is just a Protagonist over their own story whose own goals run contrary to the Protagonist's goal. The Antagonist in this case usually loses because he/she is not willing to change but the Protagonist is.
In this formula, a tragedy is a story where the character doesn't achieve his goal because he/she was unwilling to change enough to accomplish the goal.
But to answer the question, yes the stories I have worked on and the ones in the pipeline involve protags accomplishing goals. They just may not be the goals the characters started with. My profs said to us that you need to be able to make scrambled eggs before you can make an omelet. Or something like that. "Master the formula first, then learn how to mess with it." is what they said more like.
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In other words - learn the rules then you can break them.
Often said of and to young artists.
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What is this plan you speak of?
I start with a sentence that springs to mind, usually out of nowhere, and go from there.
Ocassionally if its a bigger work than I'll do some plotting or a brief character sketch, but other than that I usually let the story write itself. It's much easier that way and my characters tend to hate me less if I let them do what they want.