The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: plot

  • Dreams: The Free-loading Bitches Who Won’t Help Me Write

    For whatever reason, my dreams refuse to be helpful.

    I know there are some authors who claim they get brilliant ideas from dreams. I don’t necessarily hate those people, but I haven’t met them in person either, so I’m not prepared to say we’d be friends.

    I’ve also read at least one article that recommended sleeping as a way to work through your plotting problems. The idea was that you should think about your story, specifically focusing on those areas that were causing you trouble, as you were lying in bed at night. Presumably, you’d eventually fall asleep (after you finally got over the agony of being stuck on a scene that clearly just wanted to be an asshole), and your brain would continue to search for solutions while your body got the rest it needed.

    Then, at some point, either by dream or some early morning/late night revelation, you’d experience a breakthrough. You would have the answers you so desperately needed, and you and your story would live happily ever after, or at least experience some mild feelings of contentment until the next time it decided to dig in its heels and act like a fuckhead.

    That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? To be able to lay your head down on the pillow and then wake up in the morning with fresh ideas and a clear outline of your plot. It would be like some awesome version of the tooth fairy. One whose visit didn’t require a painful, bloody sacrifice followed by the inevitable letdown when you realize her cheap ass is on a one-quarter-per-tooth kind of budget.

    I’d love to be wired that way. But I’m not. My dreams are lazy, free-loading bitches who contribute almost nothing to my fiction.

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  • Lead and I Will Follow; Meander and I Will Say F*@k Off

    My family and I recently relocated to Virginia, and as a result, we’re working through a lot of necessary changes. One of those is the search for a local writing/critique group, so I don’t go crazy from lack of human contact.

    (I work from home and easily lose track of time. So unless I have regularly scheduled events that take me outside, I’m going days without feeling the sun on my skin. It seems like this fact should bring me some level of shame, but honestly, it doesn’t. I am who I am.)

    Anyway … as the search for local writers continues, I find myself dropping in on meetings and sitting in on critique groups to evaluate chapter 28 of some random person’s novel. This ongoing experience has really crystalized a couple things for me:

    1. I really miss the writing group I had before the move. I knew I was lucky to have them; I just didn’t realize how lucky.
    2. It’s a lot easier to figure out what keeps a reader turning the page when you’ve been reading things that make you want to stop doing so.

    It probably goes without saying, but the search isn’t going well.

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  • Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

    One of the annoying aspects of writing for a government is that usually there are plots, but no characters, main or otherwise. In fact, there are often no subjects in the sentences. Things happen, events unfold spontaneously. Objects are acted upon by mysterious forces, perhaps deployed by black helicopters. The passive voice is used excessively. Government has agencies, but no apparent agents.

    Passive voice is constructed by literally removing the subject from the sentence. Compare and contrast:

    “I swung my vorpal blade in a powerful snicker-snack, and left the Jabberwock for dead.

    “The vorpal blade was swung in a powerful snicker-snack, and the Jabberwock was left for dead.”

    Who killed the Jabberwock, again? What was his name? What color is his hair? Could you pick him out of a crowd? Can we give him a medal, or cite him for cruelty to Jabberwocks? Who is to take credit? Who is to take blame?

    Passive voice removes the humanity from writing, which is why it should never ever be used, and why it will never be eradicated. It’s the “I didn’t do it,” of literary convention, which is why it probably crept into the government styleguide, there to spread as inexorably as kudzu, and as difficult to eradicate.

    Do yourself a favor. Don’t ever use passive voice. It’s a bad habit, like picking your toes in a good restaurant.

  • Which is more important to you: plot or character?

    I can barely separate and prioritize plot/character when I write, as they are so closely intertwined in fiction. Nevertheless, I consider the prime purpose of writing fiction to be storytelling, so “plot” gets the nod, followed by character and then setting, also vitally important to fiction.

    By definition, a piece of fiction (novel or short story) moves one or more characters through settings. Ideally, the character undergoes conflicts at various points in the plot until s/he must conform to the various pressures – i. e., change – and then move on through life. This process is essentially the same in a novel or short story, although by definition (again) a short story revolves around only one main character who learns one truth about life (at the climax), whereas a novel involves several major characters who may experience a number of “a-HA!” moments when learning various truths about life.

    A character’s personality, therefore, depends up on what happens to him/her and how he reacts as the plot progresses, although a character can certainly influence the progression of the story.

    Nevertheless, without plot a story is not a story; without character it is a description of setting; and in essence character and plot must combine to produce a story which takes place in a setting.

    Complicated, yes – but so is life, and since Poe allegedly invented the short story, the process has worked, and the two fictional forms of novel and short story have entertained readers well.

  • Plot vs. Character: Save the eggs; torch my metaphor

    “If your story was a house on fire, what would you run in and save?”

    Brad Bird ~ Writer/Director

    (Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Mission Impossible – Ghost Patrol)

    Plot vs. Character? No doubt in my mind, I’d save the characters.  Here’s why:  character drives plot.  The “stuff” of story, the desire that drives choices and actions made under the pressure of dilemma, are all expressed through character.  If you don’t have them, you don’t have plot, and ultimately, no story.  Characters are the eggs, if you will; plots are the chickens they hatch. (Which came first is another post, but it’s the egg per my high school zoology teacher, Mr. Highfill, an amazing character in his own right, so I’m going with egg.)

    But I digress.  Yes, I’m giving the edge to the egg, but what about that chicken? Is it just crowing in the morning, pecking at the ground, taking a nap, running around the barnyard, going to sleep, and doing it all over again the next day?   This is not plot, this is not story.  This is activity not action.  The chicken that comes out of that egg has got to be top notch, too, or no one is going to hang out in the barnyard to see what happens.

    To put it all together, your eggs need to have Grade A burning desires, inner and outer conflicts that create dilemmas, through which they make choices to try to reach their goal, and thus, advance the story.  These choices and their results create the chicken, which in turn acts on the characters (eggs) and so on to the last action in the series, the end of the road.  Perhaps just before Sunday dinner when the horse, who, against all odds, has fallen in love with the chicken, kicks the axe out of the farmer’s hands, and, together, horse and chicken ride off into the sunset.

    So, to take this horrible pun to the end: go lay some fresh eggs; the chickens will be tasty.

     

  • A Comfortable Blend (Except When It’s Not)

    I think that when we first conceive a story we all probably start with one or the other: a plot or a character. It doesn’t really matter so much as blending the two by the time you hit your final draft. I usually have a character, and sometimes a vague concept. Almost never a detailed plot. My examples:

    When I wrote my first novel, I wanted to write about a punk stuck with a blind kid while trying to find the kid’s foster mother. The plot from there just happened as I interconnected the other characters. That novel is awful.

    When I started my second novel I had a concept: a cyberpunk retelling of Sleeping Beauty, as told from the perspective of a character who wasn’t the Prince Charming analog. I followed that pretty strictly even when my characters started to deviate. By the second draft I had to pull back on that concept as the characters took the forefront. The undertones are still there, but it’s a lot less overt.

    From this I gather that for me, crafting a novel has to be a balance of the character and plot or it just sort of falls apart.

    What I find interesting is that not all stories and writers need that balance to rock an amazing story. There are stories where the characters are just a means for exploring the world and moving the plot, and stories where the plot is just a means of moving the characters together and solving their nonsense. The difference seems to be largely a matter a genre.

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  • Characters occupy plot

    Last fall, when thousands of protesters descended on town squares and public spaces, was it the zeitgeist? Were we all zombies, drawn into this massive, not-well-publicized-enough plot? Or did each character individually have her own motives for participating?  Did the arc towards justice  articulate each of us within the plot of the year, or did we each sit down and say, hey, today is the day that I’m going to participate in an international movement for economic equality?  What’s more interesting–the fact that a big movement happened and is happening, or each individual’s motivations for participating in it, each person’s story, each soul’s hope for results?

    A relative focus on character or plot leads not only to quite different fictional stories, but also vastly different reporting and non-fiction writing.  As I move my writing more in the direction of non-fiction, I realize that the concerns are not so very different.  Will a vicious new law outrage people in its very existence, or is it better to vocalize the law’s effects through a sympathetic person of interest in the case?  Which is more accurate, more moral?  When it comes to something like Occupy Wall Street, does a focus on the individual add to or detract from the overall plot?  What about something more sinister, like horrific shootings–better to parse the reasons for a violent society, or consider the motives and mental imbalances of the individual with the gun?

    As a writer I emphasize plot.  After all, each character is just one of many affected characters, and appropriating another’s life feels exploitative, taking someone else’ story and using it to communicate my ends.  It’s also an appeal to pathos instead of logos, which is not my nature.  Worse, I do see a focus on character as upholding a more individualistic view of society as opposed to the collective, solidarity-building approaches towards which I work.

    And yet…

    Nobody ever made me cry more than Tess Durbeyfield.  And not so much because of the plot surrounding her, but because of her bravery, her fidelity, her perseverance in hopeless circumstances, all without having a conniving bone in her body. I remember characters; she has become part of me, in a way that Neal Stephenson’s gloriously plot-driven fellows have not.  Plot convinces, plot recollects experience and provides a new experience to the reader, but finely etched characters stick in the mind and the bones.

  • Plot > Character (But both matter. A lot.)

    Plot is more important to me than character. Without a plot, there is no story. Without a story, what the heck are we doing? Character sketches are well and good, but I’m more interested in the voyage, not the people traveling with me.

    That said, terrible characters can ruin a good plot, while interesting characters can totally save a horrible plot. You definitely need a good mix of both to have a successful story.

    As a SF guy, I’m probably more tolerant of plot-driven, character-poor stories. If the story uses lots of
    whiz-bang technology that bends (or breaks) the laws of physics, and those plot points are illustrated to me, the reader, via wooden, two-dimensional characters…I’ll still probably dig it. I’m in it for the pseudo-science as much as anything else. Other genres may not allow for the level of forgiveness I sometimes mete out to the books I read.

    That said, the truly memorable, interesting, recommend-to-everyone-you-know stories are the ones
    with whiz-bang technology wielded by kick-ass characters. So, Permutation City by Greg Egan manages to bend my noodle with its technology, but its characters are only “meh.” On the other hand, Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan manages to wed far-future tech with a hard-as-nails detective Takeshi Kovacs, and the combination results in a story I’ve shared with anyone that’ll listen. Likewise, John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War combines neato tech with a fascinating set of characters, and the final product is nearly perfect.

    So, Plot comes first for me. But Character is almost as important, especially when you want to elevate a good story into a great story.

  • Character and Plot: A Healthy Codependence

    Hypothetical: Someone walks up to you on the street and says, “Character or plot driven?”

    Let’s go ahead and assume they’re not wearing their favorite shade of inmate orange.  Oh, and they don’t have on one of those snazzy jackets with the sleeves that latch together at the back.  Aside from slowly backing away while using your peripheral vision to scan for cops, what do you do?

    For my money, the only correct way to answer that question is “yes.”

    Like most things in life, the discussion of plot versus character driven fiction is a slippery one.  It’s not black and white, and anyone who says otherwise is either too inexperienced or too myopic to realize that all the fun debates are taking place in the gray areas.

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