Writing Advice: Story Question

A few days ago, I posted about Jim Butcher's writing advice. Today's entry is my first experiment in following that advice.


One of the first things he suggests you come up with is a story question. The story question is a concise representation of your basic conflict, and the skeleton of your story. He defines the story question as a sentence with the following format:
*WHEN SOMETHING HAPPENS*, *YOUR PROTAGONIST* *PURSUES A GOAL*. But will he succeed when *ANTAGONIST PROVIDES OPPOSITION*?


pretty simple right? So I took the challenge, and tried to come up with some story questions of my own, for my trilogy in work.
So first, the overall trilogy sentence:
When a lost prophecy surfaces from beneath the sea, our heroes are drawn into a quest for a lost soul. But will they succeed when agents of Chaos call forth Daemons from the deeps?


I'm not sure about the antagonist line in this case, but it's a broad category so I can't really enumerate specific details. 


Dragonmage
For the first novel, I've trimmed down the story question a bit. 
When a hapless college student is thrown in the midst of a epic war, he sets out to find his way home. But will he succeed when faced with betrayal, a devil's bargain, and a race of Demons wielding blades of fire?


For anyone who's read the piece, the betrayal is obvious (though not as emotional as it could be). The devil's bargain is new from my reimagining of the story, now that I've gone through it, and he last is a rewriting of the ending, plus stealing some stuff from the sequel.


Phoenixfire
My story question for the 2nd novel is much weaker:
When a man fall ill to a mysterious illness, his ex is charged with finding the cure. But will she succeed when a dark mage steals an heirloom weapon and throws her into a battle for her life?

The hard part on this one is that I've got a few tendrils of thought that need to go through it. The Illness is one, and that made it into the story question, as did the heirloom weapon. I didn't get to talk about her lost memories, the trip to the daemon realm, or the search for Atlantis, all of which figure into the New and Improved (tm) plot. The 2nd two are also tied into the story question for the whole thing.

Chaosstorm
For the third book, I suffer from much the same issue as the second.
When a mysterious stranger arrives and turns the tide of the war, a band of strangers seek to right the ballance, but will they succeed when even their beneficiaries don't trust them?


At this point, I should be dealing more fully with that lost soul. The setting here is in the aftermath of a war, magic vs tech. The antagonist from the first 2 has come and altered the course of the war in the side of the Mages. However, the protags come in and try and rally support on the tech side. Since the protags are mages, they're untrusted. This sentence also doesn't support the lost soul, nor the daemons from the previous two.

Conclusions
The exercise has helped me focus on the plot, and draw out some of the conflicts. The thing that I'm still mulling over is how to drill down the conflicts into a nice succinct  sentence that details it. However, progress.

Writing Advice: Plotting vs Pantsing

There are many writers in this world. Most of them have, at some point, been asked how they write. Many of them have gone on to get so frustrated with this question that they post advice in many random places on the internet.

I started looking at writing advice after a post on Fangs Fur & Fey on LJ back in April. The topic? Plotting vs Pantsing. Many authors fell on both sides of the spectrum, and this was the first experiment I tried.

Since then, most of the advice I've read have been hardcore in the plotting frame of mind. I'm thinking this works better for me, after trying both on my 2 novels. While Dragonmage wasn't all that great, it was significantly better than the sequel. So let's take a look at some of the different Plotting advice that I've stumbled across.

Jim Butcher (of Dresden Files fame) has a series of posts about writing on his LiveJournal. His advice on plotting might be the piece that speaks to me the most. Funny thing is, I suspect that by the time I get done writing this entry, they'll all be the same. His process is to do beginning, middle, end and then start filling in. Pretty standard. The interesting thing was how he approached filling out scenes. There are two types of chunks: Scenes and Sequels. Scenes are where conflict happens, Sequels are the emotional reactions to Scenes or Sequels. So he has a bulleted list of stuff you fill out for each scene / sequel.

Another alternate is the Snowflake method, which is a fractal-based method around progressive refinement. It's an interesting theory, and I think it dovetails into Butchers' suggestion fairly well, but I don't have as good a handle on it.

Third main one is Holly Lisle. She has this whole site with a free e-mail course (revising is like 80 bucks, but the plotting course is free). She started the plot by listing a few conflicts and then making scenes / ordering them.

Last one I'll talk about tonight, is Chuck Wendig.  Chuck is a character. His approach is basically outline. And outline some more. Not as detailed as the other ones. But he presents a very solid argument as to WHY you should outline.

Writing Advice: Themes and Mood

So I started writing a post on this. I posted it, then relegated it to a draft almost immediately. The written words didn't do the topic justice. So here's take two.

I've been reading a lot about writing advice recently. Ever since I graduated college, I've been revisiting my writing. One of the suggestions that keeps coming up is that you should maintain a theme(s) and a mood for your work.

My first attempt at a novel was bland. The second one was even worse. When I sat down and decided to take another shot at it, a few of my friends convinced me that thinking of a theme / mood would be a good first step.

Theme:

Let's start with theme. How can we choose a theme? Sure, we can think of random phrases that speak to us. "Elephants always eat green onions." Could be a theme. Might even be a good one. But probably isn't. Why? Well, because I'm not convinced it's appropriate. At least not for my work. If it works for you, by all means.

So how do you pick appropriate themes? I have no idea. Still working on that one. I have three that came from the draft, plus a few thoughts on some things I want to change. Another source is genre lists. Still investigating those, haven't found any that jumped out at me as "The list to end all lists." I'm sure they exist. While I read a lot of fantasy, I am horrible at picking out themes in a novel. This is why I'm not an english major.

Mood:

Mood is an interesting beast. When done right, it can send a chill down your spine and send you to tears. When done poorly, you want to throw the book into the trash. Unfortunately I haven't managed to figure out anything about this at all. So I really don't have anything to say.

So while I'm thinking about moods, let's see how it fits into my current projects.

Dragonmage

My first book. Well attempt. As many of you know, I've been working on this story, on and off, since 2002. I just finished the first draft last summer. The story starts out pretty standard, but looses steam and gets pretty confusing. Maybe I'll post a review or something at some point.

I'm currently working on a theme list, for the second draft. Here's what I got so far:

• Order vs Chaos
• Secrets lost in the stream of time
• Magic vs Technology
• Abnormal power must be paid for in blood

That last one was just decided on this morning, and I have yet to figure out what exactly it means. The second one is due to a repurposing of my novel to explore the Atlantis mystery, thanks to Diana Pharaoh Francis' banner on her website.

Phoenixfire

Book 2. I started writing it for NaNoWriMo last year. Total fail, but I kept at it during the summer and finished it right before the start of the semester. At the moment, the plot is a steaming pile of garbage. I know I have a defeatist attitude with respect to my writing, but there are some very serious problems with this. Like the fact that there basically is no plot, just fragments. So currently, the theme is the same as the previous one. Is this appropriate? I don't know. I don't know if they should be the same, or they should be different. I am operating under the assumption that there should at least be some overlap.

Prelude to an Apocalypse

You know, I haven't thought about this piece since I finished writing the first draft. It was a short story (which really should be a novella) for a fiction-writing class. So far, the only pervaling theme is Magic vs Technology. While it might seem to be a common one for me, this one is simply an artifact of what I was trying to do. The prelude is a short novella which takes place in between Phoenixfire and it's unwritten sequel, Chaos Storm. This is why there's overlap on this theme.

The next two items are not novels, but rather RPGs I'm running this semester. If everything goes well, and I think deciding on some themes would go a long way to that, these might both be continued.

Mage: The Awakening

I've been really enjoying White-wolf's Mage setting, and the World of Darkness in general. Due to the large number of requests this semester, I'm running a second game of Mage. Inspired by DaveB's amazing AP threads on RPG.net (Broken Diamond and Soul Cage, Part 2), I'm using Reign of the Exarchs in this setting. Through no fault of my own, my players also selected Washington DC as the setting (same as Broken Diamond). The following themes are what I've selected so far:

• Control - This is the theme of Reign of the Exarchs itself. I'll have to weave my own plot around it and make some changes though.
• Everybody lies

Still working on other ones.

Burning Wheel

This is my main game for the semester, and I have to say I'm stumped. We did a world-building session on sunday. The story of the world is...crazy at best. There are flying humans, sentient fog, snail people, and a huge war between mages and magic-resistant orcs. I have no direction, and tapped out of ideas. No idea what this story will look like.

I think that's all I got in the pipeworks.

State of the Blog

I started this blog way back when, intending to use it for research. A few years later, this is my first actual post. So, obviously that failed. I'm taking a second go at it this year, for some unknown reason.

I intend to be very specific about which topics I cover in this blog. Therefore, I am going to touch on each topic and give a rough sketch of where I am and what I have done in 2009 on each front.

Reading:

One thing I hope to use this blog for is book reviews. I haven't read as many books as I usually do in the past year, but I've read a couple good ones. I'll probably post some first thoughts on some of the more recent books later. I'm currently in the middle of The Magicians by Lev Grossman. It has a rather interesting, if complicated, plot so far, so I am really enjoying it. More to come later.

Writing:

One of the things I set out to do last year was write a few novels. I finished 2, plus a short story for class. I am hoping to do some editing, but I haven't started yet, for this year. Current state: My first piece, Dragonmage, is at least salvageable. The second piece, Phoenixfire, has to mostly be thrown out. What I've gained from writing that draft is a few ideas, but they're small objects that will have to come together differently. In tandem with the reading, I'm hoping to post some small thoughts on what I might have learned about writing from each book I review.

Research:

I thought (and am still thinking) about sketching some thoughts on my current research as I do it in this blog. I'm not sure this is such a good idea because I don't know if any of it is covered by NDA's or anything like that. I'll update once I think more on it.

Hobbies:

I don't really have any hobbies. One of the things I've been hoping to do lately is find one. There are a couple ideas I've bounced back and forth over for the past couple of months, but I can't seem to sit myself down and do any of them. I've thought about wood and leatherworking, chainmail, even knitting. At the moment, I don't have hte skills, funding, or knowledge to really get my foot in the door on any of them, but the ideas are churning around in the back of my mind. Possibly more to come on this front. Robotics interests may occasionally make it onto the blog, since it's the one area that I keep wanting to get into.

Gaming:

The one hobby I do have is that, especially in the last year, I have become an avid tabletop gamer. Since I have mostly departed from D&D, and have been exploring many other game systems. I will be playing in 3 games, and running 2 others. I will be posting some information here, and maintaining a Wiki which I'll probably link to occasionally.

I think that's good enough to get started on for now, don't you think?

Okay, okay, first post...

So I've had this blog account for... years now. I'm thinking that I should finally do something about it.

However, I'm currently held up because of layout issues. I mean, the default layouts are all well and good, but I want to spice it up. However, I'm lacking the basic artistic skills to draw a line, let alone a funky gif for background and cool themes (tm).

Soo you might just be stuck with this. Enjoy?