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.