Writing Advice – Craft & Process

Collecting the posts I’ve written about the craft and process of writing

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT PLOT IN 1,069 WORDS OR LESS

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process , , , , ,

Crank up the organ grinder and gather around the popcorn, ’cause we’re almost at the end of the dancing monkey series. For our second-last entry, John Farrell asked:

I have awful problems constructing a plot. How do you do that?

Apparently you folks don’t want to go with the easy questions, huh? This is not a topic where I’m known to be *concise*, so I’m going to set myself a word-budget on this one and send you off into the wide world with some reading homework, ’cause really, plot is big.

Here we go:

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT PLOT IN 1,069 WORDS OR LESS

1. PROTAGONIST, ANTAGONIST – FIGHT!

Most plots hang off a pretty simple dynamic designed drive a story forward. It goes something like this: your protagonist wants something really badly; your antagonist denies your protagonist the thing they really want; delicious, awesome conflict ensues. Take Lord of the Rings as an example – Frodo wants to live a nice, ordinary life in the shire; Sauron will destroy the world if he does that; therefore there is a whole lot of walking and fighting and stuff.

2. CHARACTERS HAVE LAYERS

If you’re reading this you’re probably an SF nerd, which means you read that last example and thought “now, wait, at the start of the story Frodo wants to go off and have adventures like his uncle?” Which is true, for what it’s worth; have yourself a reader cookie.

This is the tricky thing about a well-written character – they tell themselves they want something at the beginning the story, then discover they *really* want something else as a result of the god-awful trauma the narrative puts him through. Really smart writers seed all sorts of clues about “real” want early in the narrative too – for all Frodo’s rhetoric about wanting to be like Bilbo, it takes him *months* to get off his arse and actually go adventuring once the adventuring is required.

In many stories the thing the character *thinks* they want is actually the direct opposite of the thing they *actually* want. Frodo wants adventure, but truly craves peace and quiet in the shire; Luke Skywalker wants to become an imperial fighter pilot, but actually becomes a sword-wielding Jedi; characters in rom-coms think they hate each other, but secretly they’re destined to be all true-love-forever.

3. THE CLIMAX IS A CHOICE

Forget the action – the climax of any plot is when a character makes a choice, and the most powerful climaxes are generally the person making that choice is the protagonist and the choice is profoundly tied to the stories themes. More importantly, those choices are going to change the damn world forever, either metaphorically or literally.

Once again, Star Wars is a great example of this – the entire story builds to the moment that Luke chooses to turn off his damn computer and trust the force. Better yet, it’s accompanied by a particularly likeable secondary character choosing to come back and be a hero instead of a scruffy nerf-herding mercenary, saving Luke from certain death.

It’s that moment that gives the big Death Star explosion sequence that follows its real power and create the very real sense that the Galaxy is Never Going to Be The Same Again. Without them, you’ve essentially just got some special effects. Or, you know, the Prequel Trilogy.

4. YES, BUT WE WERE SPEAKING OF CONSTRUCTING PLOT, NOT CHARACTERS AND CONFLICT

Here’s the dirty secret: characters and conflict are you plot. In the classic three-act structure that’s so beloved of films, theatre, novels, television, and, well, me, getting the conflict and the character’s right pretty much fills in the major tent-poles that keep your plot upright.

For instance, that moment I’m talking about where what your protagonist thinks they want morphs into *what your protagonist really wants? In long-form narrative that’s essentially the middle of your story and represents what we call a mid-point reversal.

That moral choice climax? That’s the thing that takes place late in your third chapter, and once you’ve reached it your job is to get the damn hell out of your story asap ’cause there’s nothing less to be said.

That period where the character says they want something, but subconsciously resist it? That’s your first act, and it ends at the point where dark riders show up in the shire   Uncle Owen and Aunt Bereu are killed by storm-troopers  shit hits the fan and the protagonist can no longer ignore the antagonist and their forces.

Essentially, the classic plot structure is just a convenient pattern of events that can be arranged in such a way as they stretch out the resolution of conflict for as long as possible.

If you want a really detailed discussion of plot structure and you’re in Brisbane, I recommend signing up for one of the QWC’s Toolkit for Writers courses in October since they’ll cover this sort of thing. If you prefer something more book-based, try tracking down copies of things like Robert Ray’s The Weekend Novelist (preferably in its yellow-covered 1st edition, trust me) or Robert McKee’s Story, or even, god help you, Christopher Vogler’s The Writers’ Journey. Or, you know, hit the internet which is full of advice about this sort of thing. All of these will introduce you to the big default three-act structure, and while there are others, the three-acter is a good starting point due to its familiarity.

Really, though, you can get away with an awful lot if you get the conflict, reversal, climax pattern right, even without knowing the bits that go on in-between.

5. SHORT STORIES WILL MESS WITH YOUR MOJO

Short stories are tricky beasts, ’cause they look at the overall plot structure and throw out the bits at the beginning and the bits at the end and spend an awful lot of time *suggesting* the missing bits of the plot have actually taken place. Short Stories are, usually, all second-and-third act.

My advice for short stories: make sure you nail the moral choice part of the climax. Trust me when I tell you it will bring your editors joy, if only ’cause they can identify something that actually looks like an ending.

6. PLOT DOESN’T MEAN SPIT

My final advice about plot is this: stop stressing about it. Lots of writers get hung-up on plotting because they think it’s the most important thing about writing, and in reality it’s one of a handful of skills that make fiction work.

In fact, when you break plot down to its constituent parts, it’s actually kinda…dull. Which is why people telling you about a story is rarely as interesting as actually reading the damn story, where the conflict and the character and the voice are all working in unison. I’m actually a terrible plotter, but I can get by as a writer ’cause I’ve got a bunch of other skills that can be used to patch-up the unsightly holes in my skill-set.

Gaming is not Writing

PETERMBALL Gaming, Writing Advice - Craft & Process ,

Once again, I dance like a monkey for your amusement. This time around my friend Al asked via facebook:

Why should writers never write RPG campaigns as stories, why on earth did you do just that, why isn’t it finished yet?

Okay, we’re going to kick this one off with a list o’ reasons, some of which people are likely to disagree with.

1) EDITORS DON’T LIKE IT

Let’s kick this off with the obvious – the best reason to avoid writing up RPG campaigns as stories is the fact that places that give you money for writing aren’t a big fan of things that are based on RPG campaigns. This warning from Strange Horizon’s List of Stories They See Too Often isn’t exactly uncommon, where they pretty much tell you to avoid anything where:

Story is based in whole or part on a D&D game or world.

a.       A party of D&D characters (usually including a fighter, a magic-user, and a thief, one of whom is a half-elf and one a dwarf) enters a dungeon (or the wilderness, or a town, or a tavern) and fights monsters (usually including orcs).

b.      Story is the origin story of a D&D character, culminating in their hooking up with a party of adventurers.

c.       A group of real-world humans who like roleplaying find themselves transported to D&D world.

They’re not alone. I mean, I can think of at least one other well-paying fantasy magazine that has the same prohibition and I’m willing to bet that a bunch others are just as biased against campaign-oriented fiction without specifically calling it out. Call me crazy (or, you know, mercenary), but writing things you can’t get paid for is generally a bad idea when your goal is to write things for money.

Me, I write for money. Stories are one of those things I exchange for some form of payment. If you can find someone who’ll pay you money for your campaign notes, more power to you. Personally I’m planning on sticking to the things that don’t alienate editors.

2) YOUR CAMPAIGN IS A HORRIBLE STORY

Here’s the thing most people don’t like to admit about gaming – it’s a terrible format for complex storytelling. Instead, gaming is, to borrow a phrase from (I think) Robin Laws, a way of telling a simple story in a complex way.

This isn’t an argument about rules complexity, just a reality of the way RPG’s work. Characters tend to get painted in broad swathes, and even when they’re designed to replicate the kind of internal and external conflict you’ll find in a narrative story, those conflicts lack the depth you’d aim for in fiction. PCs are often defined by singular motivations and short-term goals. Session and campaign goals are externalised and often unrelated to the internal conflict.

More importantly, gaming doesn’t really need to *stretch* against the boundaries of its genre – a great deal of the joy of gaming, when you get down to it, comes from hitting genre sign-posts and inhabiting narrative moments that are recognisable as familiar sign-posts of the genre. GMs frequently look for familiarity because it makes their life easier.

The very nature of a campaign as a collaborative, ongoing thing works against creating a cohesive story as well. In narrative terms your standard gaming group represents an ensemble cast with no clear protagonist, your average campaign is a series of episodic stories connected together without any real clear sense of narrative arc, and the vicissitudes of dice and rules mean that you have no real control over the pace and climax of the action. Think of it like a very uneven TV series where, if you’re lucky, there’s a seasonal arc to hold things together but plenty of stand-alone episodes.

Worse, everything is filtered through multiple creators who may have slightly different ideas of what story you’re telling. A character who sees himself as the embodiment of a particular archetype (hardboiled PI, for example) may enjoy some friendly banter with a character he perceives to be playing the femme-fatale, but his long-term expectation of the two character’s arc can easily be thwarted if the femme-fatale’s player (or the GM) doesn’t recognise that’s what’s going on and agree to it. If you doubt me, try this as an exercise: sit down with your regular gaming group and get people to write down what they perceive to be a “happy ending” for all the other characters. Odds are, the expectations will be wildly different. I’ve never seen a game-group navigate this kind of disconnect perfectly (though some have gotten close).

So, yeah, RPGs are simple stories that are told using enormously complex methods (regardless of system). Once you strip the method out, what you’re left with often feels comparatively hollow and familiar.

3) GMs THINK ABOUT SETTING AND ANTAGONISTS, WRITERS THINK ABOUT CHARACTER

For a couple of years one of the local universities used to bring me in and get me to work with a handful of students from their writing program. It was part of a subject they ran where undergraduates wrote longer works – a suite of poems, a collection of stories, or a novella – and had a writer/editor type critique their work.

I encountered a lot of gamers-turned-writers in those days, primarily ’cause the lecturer in charge would team me with any students of a…well, let’s say geekish persuasion…simply ’cause I knew how to handle the conversations you’d have in the first critique session. Inevitably we’d sit down and talk about the students work, and two things would happen:

1)      The student would rant about the university not understanding their work and the obvious bias their instructors had against genre work.

2)      I’d nod a lot and ask the question “So you’re gamer, right?”, after which the student would express shock that I could tell that simply by reading their work. They were usually just as shocked when I pointed out that I didn’t like their work either, despite being a gamer and knowing where they were coming from.

There’s a bunch of reasons I could pick an GM-turned-Writer just from a handful of sample pages, but primarily it’s ’cause GMs are hardwired to think about stories in a slightly different way than other people. They have great settings, they tend to build towards cool moments in the narrative, and they develop cool antagonists.

What they failed at, generally, was creating a compelling protagonist (or, indeed, identifying a core protagonist among their ensemble), conveying the narrative rules of their world, and hiding the fact that their approach to magic/space-flight/aliens/what-have-you was severely influenced by a particular set of rules.

Also, their action scenes were generally…well, messy.

These aren’t criminal faults in writing. Plenty of GM-turned-writers have overcome them and learned how to make their GM skills interests a strength, and I’ll certainly cop to being a writer who favours “cool genre moments” and writes a particularly mess and ill-paced fight-scene every now and then. Hopefully I’m getting better at that, but odds are it’ll take time and conscious effort and I’ll spend years relying on my circle of beta-readers picking up on the things that are more “game” than “fiction.”

THE WORLD SAYS DON’T DO IT, BUT THEN, I’M AN IDIOT

And yet, despite all this, I started writing a short novel based off a roleplaying game campaign earlier this year. In my defence, it wasn’t my game – it was run by the inimitable Sleech – and it involved a group of people who’d been gaming together for a long time. Unfortunately half the group absconded to Melbourne, including Al, so we pretty much wound down our regular game and got used to doing other things.

I started the novel project for two reasons: I missed the game and the people I gamed with, and it occurred to me that my job at the writer’s centre meant that, for once, I could afford to do some goofy projects that weren’t necessarily about making money in the long-run.

The reason it isn’t finished yet is pretty simple – looming potential unemployment meant I turned my attention to short fiction again, and I ran into all the problems I’ve outlined above when it comes to transforming campaigns to fiction (particularly when it came to disguising the fact that the game we were basing it on has a very distinctive setting).

I haven’t abandoned the problem, and to be honest I think I know how to get around the setting problem, but fixing that sort of thing takes the kind of dedicated writing and research time I don’t really have now I’m working full-time.

Fortunately, working full-time is only a temporary thing, and working itself still up in the air until I get news about if/how my contract will be renewed next year. Should I find myself without a dayjob, odds are the Untitled Victorian Planetary Romance, Pt 1 will make a re-appearance in my writing to-do list. ‘Til then, unfortunately, it’s a project I attempted and failed, and it’ll remain such until I get a chance to take a better run-up.

I Do Believe in Syntax

PETERMBALL Works in Progress, Writing Advice - Craft & Process , , ,

And lo, it is Monday, and we continue the dancing monkey series wherein people ask me questions and I blog long, rambling answers in response. Once more into the breach and all that.

Today, Peter Kerby offered up the following:

Just to stir the pot; English is living language and all living things evolve, so how much licence should be tolerated when it comes to grammar and spelling, or does it depend on the intended audience.

Verily, I am the wrong person to ask this sort of question, ’cause my response is invariably something along the lines of “so long as you can be understood, rock the fucking Kasbah, lolz, peace out, peeps.” Except, you know, not in so many words, and potentially in ways that make me sound less like an idiot and more like I have some understanding of what da kidz are speaking like with their crazy slang these days. I mean, hipsters, man, who gets them? (Hipsters are still a thing, right?)

You want a license? No problem, I hereby give you a license to go forth and fuck up language’s shit as much as you want when it comes to the words themselves.

I’m not a purist when it comes to word. Call it the side-effect of spending years and years and years teaching in a creative writing degree where people were really fond of semiotics. The important part isn’t really the words themselves, it’s making sure there’s a cohesive framework around the words that allows you to understand what’s going on. Words are…well, lets just say they’re meaning is inherently situational, and their meaning is capable of being utterly borked by putting them in the wrong place in a sentence.

Grammar, though, that’s a different story.

I am, by no means, a grammar ninja. I’m fairly slipshod with all sorts of things like apostrophes and deploying the right version of their or there when they need to make an appearance in a sentence. It took my an embaressingly long time to develop the necessary pattern recognition to recognise the difference between a lowercase b and a d as a kid, and my understand of grammar constantly floats somewhere between English and American English conventions as a result of being an Australian who writes, primarily, to sell things into American markets. I developed strong opinions about the Oxford comma primarily to irritate my friend Laura Goodin (who is a grammarian ninja and thus becomes one of those people I consult when I do dumb-ass things like write an entire story where there is dialogue within dialogue every paragraph).

Despite all that, I’m a fucking nutter about learning grammar, ’cause grammar is the toolkit of syntax and syntax is the goddamn glue that keeps the English language together despite its inconsistencies and stupidities. The basic approach to the sentence – doer, doing, done to – is a pretty useful thing and when people start fucking around with syntax too much I find myself reaching for the nearest copy of Strunk and White that I can carve into a prison shiv and go a-hunting.

‘Cause it’s when you start fucking with Syntax – the basic framework wherein a sentence as a subject acting upon something – that language falls apart and I loose interest in trying to decode whatever it is you’ve thrown on the page. When it comes to syntax I lose any pretense of rationality and just start frothing at the mouth.

And, again, this is a side effect of many years working in universities and marking the creative writing assignments of first-year writing students whose approach to grammar and syntax was…well, lets just say that I spent a lot of time resisting the urge to write I WILL CUT YOU, YOU GODDAMN FUCKER in the comments of their essay and short story assignments.

Which is not to say that I’m militant about any of these things – once you know the rules of grammar and syntax, I’m happy enough for you to break them, so long as you know why you’re breaking them and what effect you’re going for. Fucking with the status quo of language, grammar and syntax from a position of knowledge is sexy as hell, and I’m sucker for any author who can do it well.

And you know what? I’m not alone in that. Get together a group of writers and editors, lob in the question “so what do you think of a well-deployed semi-colon?” and watch about half the room melt into a puddle of hormones and desire.

Just be warned that the other half of the room will, of course, turn on you like a pack of rabid dogs for even suggesting such a thing (semi-colons are divisive, man), but to each their own. Both sides are coming from the same position – know your shit – so we’re really all fighting on the same side in the end.

But I’m digressing – I know I’m digressing here – and I’ll get back to the original question. I have no problem with the evolution of language, or even the evolution of syntax, but my level of interest in decoding things evaporates much faster when you fuck around with the structure. I’ll spend days reading, say, A Clockwork Orange and working out what shit means ’cause it’s system is familiar, but if you expect me to learn a whole new system of syntax I’ll generally flail.

As in all things, it’s a pick your audience kind of thing, just as you suggest in the question. People who speak multiple languages probably have a much higher tolerance for syntax hi-jinx than I do, simply ’cause they’ve been forced to learn them as a result of the language studies (except German, maybe, ’cause my dim memory of studying German in high-school suggests its got a similar sentence structure to English). People who were born before the invention of mobile phones may have a much stronger objection to seeing the phrase “lolwt?” in fiction. We all get used to certain structures and accept them as normal, and so long as what we’re reading seems something akin to recognisable we’re generally willing to puzzle shit out.