An Awesome Awesome list
Feb. 21st, 2013 04:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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mag7wrimoA friend of mine posted this to me and while I don't agree with the order that it's in, I think it's a fantastic list of things that we need to consider when writing anything: "This is Not a Checklist: How to Write a Story".
I especially love:
"12. Come to grips with that fact the plot is your characters’, not yours.
Plot isn’t a line your story follows, it’s a chart of your characters’ decisions. And it’s only ever seen in the rearview mirror. Your job as the writer isn’t to plot three steps ahead, it’s to dream up a gripping situation and real people in a real place then stage some kind of catalyst. Then just put your characters in enough bad and revealing situations that the decisions they make continually surprise you—if there’s no surprise for you in the writing, do you think there can really be any for the reader? "
OMG - yes. Very much so. I know I've lamented enough that once I figure out the story, I can't write it because I'm bored with it. Well - here's why. And the key point, and how many times have we all bitched about it? It's not my story, it's the boys' story! How would *they* react, which goes back to the whole issue of how close we try to get them to canon!
"8. Be evil to your characters.
We all know that the stories that engage us are in hell, never in heaven—in hell there’s obstacles, there’s fraught decisions, the characters are in such extreme circumstances that we see them as they really are, undisguised—but we still have that instinct to coddle our characters through our stories. Not just because we’ve come to care about them, but because of the simple fact that we kind of need them to survive, or else the story’s over. Never mind that this character is secretly your brother, that one your little sister. You’ve got to drive spikes through their eyes, and take away the things they care about. " - "Obsession", anyone? "The Trial"? Didn't the writers do that for us on the show? Granted, we don't want to do *too* much damage to the boys, but yes, we do love to hurt them and to have them comforted.
"7. Start the clock ticking.
Every story needs to have some time-constraint on it. Some kind of countdown to give the reader a sense of immediacy, of impending doom, of a giant stone ball rolling up behind them, and fast. It can be a nuclear device set to go off at the eclipse or it can be how many minutes before a spouse gets home from work, so long as it’s something. Where the story starts is with the catalyst, with that initial perturbation of the world, of the day, and where it ends is with that imbalance either being righted or magnified. Another way to look at this is that you, the writer, always have to be able to answer this about your story: Why today? " That may be the best question I've heard in a while, especially for a plotted story. Why today, what makes it special? And of course, when I do, I think immediately of Zeke's "Clear Blue Sky" which is unquestionably a 'why today?' story.
"1. It’s paramount that, if at all possible, you rig your story such that it all happens in the actual present of the story.
What this allows is a clean dramatic line, for things to go from a definite A—a dead body—to a definite B: the killer dealt with. Granted, the detective, in order to be interesting, will need to have some depth, which, while expressed through nuance and decision, will still be trucking some backstory on-page, or trying to. What you do here, though, is paraphrase as much of that as you can, and then distribute it out across the story." This sort of goes back to the info-dump post from the day before yesterday. If you have to do it, be frugal with it and make it make sense. Oh, and well, yeah, you're going to have to do it.
The others of the 12 are also very good, some of them more obvious than others, but it's a great list and a great reminder of many of them.
I especially love:
"12. Come to grips with that fact the plot is your characters’, not yours.
Plot isn’t a line your story follows, it’s a chart of your characters’ decisions. And it’s only ever seen in the rearview mirror. Your job as the writer isn’t to plot three steps ahead, it’s to dream up a gripping situation and real people in a real place then stage some kind of catalyst. Then just put your characters in enough bad and revealing situations that the decisions they make continually surprise you—if there’s no surprise for you in the writing, do you think there can really be any for the reader? "
OMG - yes. Very much so. I know I've lamented enough that once I figure out the story, I can't write it because I'm bored with it. Well - here's why. And the key point, and how many times have we all bitched about it? It's not my story, it's the boys' story! How would *they* react, which goes back to the whole issue of how close we try to get them to canon!
"8. Be evil to your characters.
We all know that the stories that engage us are in hell, never in heaven—in hell there’s obstacles, there’s fraught decisions, the characters are in such extreme circumstances that we see them as they really are, undisguised—but we still have that instinct to coddle our characters through our stories. Not just because we’ve come to care about them, but because of the simple fact that we kind of need them to survive, or else the story’s over. Never mind that this character is secretly your brother, that one your little sister. You’ve got to drive spikes through their eyes, and take away the things they care about. " - "Obsession", anyone? "The Trial"? Didn't the writers do that for us on the show? Granted, we don't want to do *too* much damage to the boys, but yes, we do love to hurt them and to have them comforted.
"7. Start the clock ticking.
Every story needs to have some time-constraint on it. Some kind of countdown to give the reader a sense of immediacy, of impending doom, of a giant stone ball rolling up behind them, and fast. It can be a nuclear device set to go off at the eclipse or it can be how many minutes before a spouse gets home from work, so long as it’s something. Where the story starts is with the catalyst, with that initial perturbation of the world, of the day, and where it ends is with that imbalance either being righted or magnified. Another way to look at this is that you, the writer, always have to be able to answer this about your story: Why today? " That may be the best question I've heard in a while, especially for a plotted story. Why today, what makes it special? And of course, when I do, I think immediately of Zeke's "Clear Blue Sky" which is unquestionably a 'why today?' story.
"1. It’s paramount that, if at all possible, you rig your story such that it all happens in the actual present of the story.
What this allows is a clean dramatic line, for things to go from a definite A—a dead body—to a definite B: the killer dealt with. Granted, the detective, in order to be interesting, will need to have some depth, which, while expressed through nuance and decision, will still be trucking some backstory on-page, or trying to. What you do here, though, is paraphrase as much of that as you can, and then distribute it out across the story." This sort of goes back to the info-dump post from the day before yesterday. If you have to do it, be frugal with it and make it make sense. Oh, and well, yeah, you're going to have to do it.
The others of the 12 are also very good, some of them more obvious than others, but it's a great list and a great reminder of many of them.