From idea to story

This sounds like a lot of work and sometimes it is a lot of work, especially if everything gets out of control.

EDIT: A little birdie told me that maybe I should expand this last chapter; I already expanded it in my short shallow way, but there are still things missing; because I wrote this chapter assuming that everybody heard about advices like:

- at the end of every scene we should learn something new about the plot,

- scene’s task is to draw the story forward

- secondary character’s sole purpose is to reveal new fact about the main characters and/or about the plot (on general to draw the plot forward) or to put obstacles on the main hero’s path (helping the antagonist)

- at the end of every scene our hero’s should be in worst state than at the beginning of the scene (I’m always failing with this one),

- …

If somebody wants to learn more about scenes I recommend the book Make a scene by Jordan . There’s some good stuff in the book, like (and I quote):

You want to start each scene by asking yourself the following questions:

Where are my characters in the plot? Where did I leave them and what are they doing now?

What is the most important piece of information that needs to be revealed in this scene?

and

Most important, tension is what keeps a scene form falling flat, and it’s necessary in every scene. To create it you must:

Thwart your protagonist’s goals – delay satisfaction

Include unexpected changes without immediate explanation

Shift power back and forth

Pull the rug out-throw in a piece of plot information that changes or alters your protagonist in some way, …

Also a Scene and Structure isn’t a bad book either (it’s the book that give me the working with notepad suggestion; well he’s talking about the card, but is the same) and also has written some smart things, like (and I quote):

Well-planned scenes end with disasters that tighten the noose around the lead character’s neck; they make things worse, not better; they eliminate hoped-for avenues of progress; they increase the lead character’s worry, sense of possible failure, and desperation – so that in all these ways the main character in a novel of 400 pages will be in far worse shape by page 200 than he seemed to be at the outset.

It’s an axiomatic among professional novelist that when things are going hideously for the lead character, the book is probably going along just wonderfully, thank you.

And there’s more, but for more you have to pick up and read the book/books yourself.

END OF THE EDIT.

So, how do I start? First, there is always an idea, something that excites my mind, that gets me thinking wow there could be something in there. And every idea actually starts with What if. I ask myself questions, what if that would happened or what if I put this character in situation like that, or what if I change his personality a little, would he still react the same way in the situation like that?

Right now I’m with one eye watching some old BBC serial about two neighbours, where one hates the other, because of his success in everything he touches.

I’ll use this as idea: two neighbours, the first hating the second, while the second enjoys in bantering the first.

Lets define more the characters and choose the leading one. So which one do I want to choose as my leading character (if I choose hating one my focus would be on his anger, his short temper, his negative attitude and how his neighbour is driving him crazy (remember, the first one hates the other, so his characteristic has to be negative); and if I choose the second one I would write about how entertain he is by his neighbour, his optimistic look on life and his calmness (I made the contradiction between there, where the first one is lacking, the other one has it and visa verse)? Let’s choose the first one, and actually I think that in the process of choosing I have already roughly defined the characters’ nature. Now I have to decide about their gender.

If I chose for them to be the opposite sex, my main focus can be romance (if I chose for them to be the same gender, I could still have a romance as a main focus, and it would be called slash).

The thing about the romance is that I have to regard the other main character as an antagonist (the main hero in every story has to have opposition, somebody who stamps down hero’s efforts to get what he (the hero) wants.

I think I should probably expand this:

At the beginning of every story we have a hero, hero’s desire and hero’s weakness. And the end of the story the hero is usually changed, he reached his desire or he overcame his weakness, or sometimes even both or sometimes none of that; but the main thing is that he is changed (it can be better or worst, it doesn’t really matter, he was put through something that changed him and that’s that). We also have stories where our hero doesn’t changes or he changes too late and that’s usually called tragedy, but in the moment I’m not interested in that.

For now remember: hero, hero’s desire and hero’s weakness; and that at the beginning we have a hero and at the end we have a ‘changed’ hero (which actually means I have a point A and a point B and that my story is my hero’s journey or path from the point A to point B).

We also need the antagonist, someone who is driving ‘our’ hero crazy, someone who is putting obstacles on ‘our’ hero’s path; it would be pretty boring if my hero goes from point A to B without any troubles (who wants to hear about lovely, nice walk, when stumbling and falling is more interesting and besides all the big lesson that we learned in life we had to learn it the hard way).

When I have a pretty straight story, I have a hero who is trying to achieve something and I have a antagonist who is standing on hero’s path, who wants to achieve the same something as the hero does or just doesn’t want for the hero to achieve his goal (the reason for this can vary from personal reason (he doesn’t like the hero) or something general (threat to antagonist’s way of life); I don’t’ recommend the reason: because he is plain evil).

Now, lets get back to the: The thing about the romance is that I have to regard the other main character as an antagonist (this doesn’t mean that she/he should be considered evil at the beginning, even though the bad impression of the second main character does make story more interesting (I didn’t use that yet, mine second characters are usually more loveable by readers than my heroes)).

Let’s say that the first one is a grumpy, self-absorbed woman in early forty and the second one is an optimistic, twenty-five years old man who’s dying (cancer would be a good choice (I recommend to choose something you know something about) for his disease and let say that he’s the only one that knows that).

I already choose romance, but lets pretend that I didn’t.

If I chose romance, than they have to fall in love. We can have a bitter, sweet love story, where at the end he dies and his death shows the woman how trifled her troubles were and how life can really be magnificent, if you only open your eyes and you let the wonders of life to touch you. This is a developed idea and it’s called premise. If I choose the second character as my lead than I would write about the man’s goodbye to the world, how sweet his last moments are and his hope that at the end he (his love) changed her negative look on the world.

I’m pointing that out to show how your main character’s nature influences the angle of the story.

Observation: If I chose mystery or thriller, then I have to kill somebody, her or his; or kill somebody near by, send them on the goose chase after the killer and maybe make one of them the killer (this is called a twist). I would probably choose one as a hero, the other one as a sidekick (and then we can have a love story here too. YAY for the love stories), throw some misguided soul (just evil doesn’t really work) as a main antagonist, some tough cop as the second antagonist (and they are perfect if we want to have some comic release, do you remember all the shows with cops as the second antagonist), put in some minor characters who would lead our main characters astray, put some false leads in and then after two, three dead ends our main characters stumble over the main evidence and vola the murderer is found. (I’m not good in writing mystery or thriller, never even tried, so this is only a example or something that I would do.)

If I choose drama…well, the good plot would be if she at the end founds out that he is hers biological brother or if I change their years, he can be her long lost father or vice versa. (Oh, there so many possibilities, so many direction in which I could turn.)

A good thing is to have more than just two people in the story; ally, second opponent, fake-ally opponent or fake-opponent ally can drive a story forward and give it some spice. To add more depth to your characters I recommend that you know: their weaknesses, their need, their desire, their values, their power, status and ability and how each faces the central (moral) problem. (I learned about that in the book The anatomy of story by John Truby).

When I have all of my characters (the main ones are the key, the secondary characters can be developed on the way) defined, I develop the first and the last scene.

I ask myself how do I want my story to start (and I should probably also consider the fact that if I want my readers to be hooked on the story I have to start with the action in the first scene (I never do that, that’s probably the reason why my works have just a few readers, well… that and my sloppy writing :).

If I would write the drama or romantic story then the good choice for the first scene would be the meeting between the lead characters or in this case their meeting over the white fence, with her fuming out of anger because of her prized roses which she destroyed when she jumped at his yelled greeting and with him smirking at her.

And the last: here I ask myself what lesson do I want to teach my hero and/or in what way do I want for my hero to change.

My main character here is a grumpy woman, who is always annoyed and doesn’t look positive on life, so the best change for her would be that she changes her look on life… that means that a last scene would be something like: she’s looking out of the window, tears in her eyes, she is for the first time seeing the beauty of the colours in the garden, how vivid is the green on the leaves that are dancing in the light breeze; for the first time hearing the beauty in the sparrow song, etc. With this as a last scene, the scene before the last should be about him on his deathbed, telling her how she is wasting her life and that if not for herself, that she should start to live for him, to experience the things he couldn’t and that he would be watching her if she is respecting his last wish, swearing that he’ll hunt her if she doesn’t; or something similar.

With all that the plotting is almost finished, the only thing I have to do now is to write the steps between the first and the last scene and for that steeps I use little notepads.

Let me see; first I have to make them to fall in love with each other and then I have to get them together; but before they are really together, I should put some obstacles between them (a great way of doing that is to use the minor characters for that and main character’s mind, with that I mean: guilt, self- accusations (I think is called that, but I’m not really sure) and inferior complex (this last one is the best, because we all have it, it just triggered by different things).

So, for the plot important scenes should be:

- Do to the circumstance they spend some time together; it could be that he comes from the chemotherapy, he’s really weak and he faints, which she sees and she takes care of him; and she for the first time really sees him.

- She find out that she is falling in love with him and she tries to fight that, because she is older that he and bla bla bla. She confides this to her older sister, who is a prude and she’s totally against the romance between them. (The obstacles here are her mind and the outsider, her sister.)

- He faces her, he tells her that he has always admired her and liked her, that he knows she is feeling something for him. He is tired of wasting time, so he tells her also that he’s sick and that he would like to die loved by someone. (This I call a pressure or the push in the right direction.)

- After some aghast pondering she relents and appears one evening in his bedroom. (My main character here stands back and reflects over the situation and then a push in the right direction.)

- A few of lovely, sweet scene follows in which they are holding hands, kissing and hugging, in which they are walking in the park or in the store shopping for grocery and he point out to her the smiles on children faces, the butterflies, the roses, … telling her that this are the things that make life special. (Some calm before the storm, so that storm can have a bigger inpackt and working on the lesson she has to learn.)

- He’s getting worst and she hold him in her arms when he’s in pain or when he’s so out (because of the morphine) that he is not aware of anything, her sorrow so overwhelming that she can’t even breathe. (The storm aka the begging of the peak)

- Her sister comes to visit, tells her that she was stupid; that she got what she wanted and that if she expect sympathy from her, she can think twice. (The storm with lightning; because she has to get worst before she gets better.)

- And the last before last scene where he dies is a storm with lighting and thunder and hailstone aka the peak and also the point where she changes.

I write each scene on the notepad (Sometimes I only have a piece of dialogue or just a line or two written down on the notepad), then I usually lay the notepads before me, I play with the scene’s order, add scene, throw the scene away, etc(And I’m still playing, adding, throwing away scenes even when I’m writing (for example) the end of the seventh chapter.). And that’s it. That’s the process of how I plan my stories.

Looks at the long monstrosity….this chapter is really long and the only thing I wanted to say was: that if we have a last scene written at the same time or even before the first, the writing is easier because of the last scene which is a lighthouse, a beacon, which shows us a direction in which we should go; and point out how little notepads can be of great help in the process of filling the gap between the first and the last scene.

I know that everything I wrote about writing is like a little, tiny drop in the ocean, that there’s so much more to tell, so much more to discuss, but.. there’s so many books and essays out there that are more helpful that this one will ever be (you can find the list of them (of the ones that I found) in the link in my userinfo and the books that help me in improving my writing and maybe they can help you in yours are: The anatomy of Story by John Truby (great book; all about plotting the story, adding the depth to it, to your characters; really extensive, just a tad bit boring), Self-editing for fiction writers by Browne & King; Dialogue by Gloria Kemption is also nice as is the Description by Monica wood; Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell; Scene & Structure by Jack ; Make a scene by Jordan E. Rosenfeld and Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint by Nancy Kress (I hope that I could soon add more to my list).

Now the only thing to do is to sit behind the computer (or pick up the pen) and to start writing, cause no advice and no book on writing wont help if we don’t write. So write, write and write, and remember: Practise makes perfect.

And with that my dears I conclude this little essay of mine. I hope there’s at least one writer out there who found this helpful and if so, then I’m satisfied.

Ela