Writing Advice: Scenes and Sequels

So I've talked big for a few weeks, analyzed some books, and gathered advice. Now let's try and put some of this into work eh?

So let's start witht he before. For this exercise, I'm simply looking at the piece I wrote for Fiction Writing last semester. So here are the scenes as written:

1. Cat is learning to cast magic, she fails
2. Cat and Michael are walking home, get confronted by Sam about how they treat non-mages
3. Minister of Technocrats (non-mages) poison's Cat's mom in a meeting
4. She then dies
5. Funeral, Cat follows Sam to a Sim parlor
6. Michael and Cat fight over whether or not to go to war, Cat is banished
7. Cat is now on the mean streets, fights with a street urchin (Finn)
8. Cat's attacked by a technocratic platoon, saved by Michael
9. Michael convinces Cat to lead an attack on generators
10. Adrielle visits, offers living metal
11. Attack, Cat kills Sam (traitor)
12. Cat visit's Adrielle, Living metal in exchange for burning down the city
13. Cat burns down the city

In this story, I tried starting out with the last scene, and then working up to it from a discourse standpoint. This was largely a failure, and just left everyone confused. And because of my lack of sequels, everyone said my characters were a bit weak.

I realize that most of you won't have any idea what's going on here. This peice started out as a short story to set the stage for the 3rd novel in my series. The characters in the world are:

• Caitlin (Cat) Beltane - So I started her out as just a girl, a mage. Somehow during the inception of the story, she turned into a princess. Apparently I have problems with scope. Her power's fire.
• Michael Bordine - Cat's best friend / cousin. When she became a princess, he became a Lord. His power's water.
• Samuel Nits - A rival of Cat's, afaik no relation. His power's Shadow.

A couple minor characters as well. Living metal is this idea I've been playing with of a semi-sentient metal which can change it's shape to match the bearer's need. The idea was brought up in the first book, and during the second book, the antagonist stole it. The antagonist is the character who shows up in the end of the story, Adrielle.

The third novel takes place in a futuristic world, where the world has been torn apart by war. The mages and the mundanes (Technocrats) have been fighting for years, and it shows no sign of abating. The purpose of this short story was to set up this war. By giving the Mages the living metal, Adrielle has tipped the balance of the war, and the third novel will be, in part, about setting it right.

Sequels

So let's start by describing Sequels. A sequel is a chance for a character to react to the last Conflict (scene). According to Jim Butcher, a Sequel has 4 basic parts: 

1. Emotional Reaction - The character needs to react to what happened
2. Review, Logic, and Reason - The character reviews facts and works through to a conclusion
3. Anticipation - The character starts to think about their next step
4. Choice - The character chooses his next action, and this sets up the next scene

Scenes offer emotions to your story, add color, and affect the pacing of your story. Longer scenes, shorter sequels = action story. Adding in micro-sequels can warm up the tone of your novel (more emotional), in cool (e.g. classical PI novels), no emotions are shown outside of sequels. But they're always present. 

Scenes

So I haven't spoken about Scenes at all. We all have a basic idea of what a scene is. I've actually been trying to define them more solidly for my research. On one hand, you have a certain amount of locality, in terms of time, space, characters. I'll admit, this is what I thought going into Butcher's article on scenes. So I was wrong. Very wrong. Scenes are not just about locality, they're about conflict. A scene is where you challenge your character, while they try and get something they want.

A scene has 3 major components, though Butcher lists 4. The first, Point of View Character (POVC) is important, but I don't see it as a component so much as something to make note of.

The 3 components are:

1. Goal - Your POVC wants something.
2. Conflict (Scene Question) - Another character wants to deny POVC what he wants. While in lit classes, we learn that there are many types of conflict, Butcher maintains there's only 1, between characters. Man vs Nature or w/e is bunk.
3. Setback - POVC doesn't get what he wants. More particularly, there are 4 answers
1. Yes - Character gets what he wants. This can get boring
2. Yes... But - Character gets what he wants, but something goes wrong. Much more interesting.
3. No - Solid denial, also can be boring, but better than Yes
4. No, and Furthermore - He claims this is the most interesting. I might agree. Character doesn't get what he wants, and manages to mess things up for himself more.

Conclusions

So I've given a pre, and a segment about Scenes and Sequels. I intended to start the replotting process, but that'll have to wait for another time.

Writing Advice: Characters

While plot is an important piece of a story, many would argue that the characters are even more so. The biggest complaint about both my first novel and my piece for the fiction writing class was that my characters are weak, so how can I strengthen them up?

A couple things have been bouncing around in my head, but we'll get to that later. First let's see what some more successful people than me have to say about it.

Chuck Wendig
So I've talked about Chuck before. He's not a famous novelist, but he's published short stories and does a lot of work with White-Wolf (the people who make Mage, the game I'm so enamored with).

His advice on character building starts with a concept sentence. A sentence or 3 that boils down the characters to their essential purpose. His second big piece is a story arc for that character. How does she evolve or change over the course of the story? Then you list a bunch of surface details, what's the person's life like. Then you go deeper, and talk about why they are the way they are.

Jim Butcher
Jim Butcher takes a much more simplistic view for building characters, though he argues for interesting characters just as hard as Chuck. He argues for the inclusion of 4 simple pieces.

•  Exaggeration - The character has to have something that makes them more interesting than the average person. Shakespeare was also a huge fan of this one, from what I remember of HS English.
• Exotic Position - In addition to being out of the ordinary, your character should be in an exotic position. One of the examples included a young woman in a high orbit shuttle, or Mr Incredible working in the insurance company.
• Introduction - The character should be introduced in a manner which completely typifies who he is. This establishes the charcters personality right off the bat.
• Verisimilitude - They should act believably. This one isn't really a surprise, but he goes into more details about how this can be achieved.
•  Emotion - Reaction - Decision. - The character should excibit all three of these throughout the story
• Tags  & Traits - Tags are words that are only used to describe that character, and traits are characteristics, could be props or features, manarisms, anything. 
• Empathy - No real tips on how to get this one, but the hope is that if you hit the other 4, you have a shot at this one.

He argues that most of this work happens in Sequels (which are not just 2nd, 3rd, etc. books, but also the reaction to a scene (where conflict happens)).

Kelley Armstrong

I mentioned that I found her posts online, but this is the first one I've had a chance to write about. In her post Outlining 102b, she gives her own approach to making characters.

1. The first step is a variation on a Psychological model I'll talk about in a bit. A character needs 4 things:
1. Goal - What are they trying to accomplish?
2. Motivation - Why do they want it?
3. Conflict - What's stopping them?
4. Stakes - What happens if they Fail.
2. GMCS should also have internal/external manifestations. 
3. Rather than make exhaustive lists, she likes to just include a paragraph about what the person's like
4. Last step, take the plot and tell it from the POV of each of your major characters. Not the whole novel, just a quick synopsis. 

Other Models

There are lots of place to take other ideas. One of the ones I've been looking at recently, given my hobbies, is Tabletop Role-Playing games. While traditional games involve very external stats (strength, intelligence, etc.) some of the newer story-intesnive games have been trying to add mechanicial benefits for looking deeper into your character. 

(new) World of Darkness rpgs include Virtue and Vice as part of the character creation. The virtue is one of the 7 heavenly virtues that your character aspires to, and Vice is one of the 7 deadly sins that holds your character back. Doesn't mean you can't use all of them, just which typifies your reactions. In addition, merits and flaws let you state mechanicially how your character is different from the norm, very similar to tags & traits from Jim Butcher's work.

Burning Wheel is another game I've been investigating recently. This one attributes 3 beliefs and 3 instincts to your character. Beliefs can range from concrete goals to ideals. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the mechanics, but they're there.

The Savage Worlds system, in particular the Deadlands setting, ask you to list your characters worst fear.

There are many others that I just haven't played, so I can't comment much. 

Another option is to look at psychological literature. One of the models that shows up in psychology, computer science (especially embodied agents research), is a simple 3-part model: Beliefs, Desires and Intentions. This is very similar to the Goal / Motivation / Conflict model. Beliefs and Desires affect the goals, and Intentions describe the rankings of beliefs and desires, to handle the case when two of them are in conflict. 

One of my friends,Kim, has mentioned that she likes to talk about her characters fears, and what happens when they are pushed to the extreme. This hits bits and pieces of what has been listed before, but in different ways. 

My fiction writing class talked about using two types of descriptions: Physical and Personal. Physical descriptions are external, and Personal describes different pieces of their personality, as expected. I'm looking back over my decisions there and realized that I didn't actually use any of them. Not a single thing came into my story.

Conclusions

So those are the pieces of advice that I've collected over the past couple months. The funny thing is none of these are mutually exclusive. Taking bits and pieces of each one might make for a very complete character portrait.

Now that I've talked a little bit about different types of advice, I think it's time to put my nose to the grindstone and actually try some of these planning activities. Look for it in the next week or so.

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.