I am hella didactic tonight so listen up.

[tocryabout]

Man, this is why left-brained people shouldn't be allowed to do basically anything. Put them all in camps, I say. No, I have not thought this opinion through. That's not how I roll.

I used to believe every word of these methods, because I had no confidence in my own ability to plot. I still don't consider plotting my greatest strength, but I'm better. That's mostly because it has finally gotten through my head that:

(a) rigorous, airtight plotting like this guy promotes is not necessary for every sort of story. Look at motherfucking Hamlet. Is it meticulously plotted? Not really. Will even seems to have forgotten some crucial story details between the first and fifth acts. He certainly could do intricate plotting, as the comedies show. It just wasn't necessary for Hamlet, because the external events are not really why the story is good. So who the fuck cares how Hamlet got back from England? Pirates, what the hell. You know you're still going to stick around to see what this brilliant crazy hot tortured Danish prince is going to do, and more importantly, what he's going to THINK, what he's going to SAY. Plot is not story. Plot is story's bitch.

(b) there are broken stories and then there are BROKEN stories. This physicist nerd rightly points out that you can easily waste tons of time on a meandering draft before you figure out that the story is just fucked. But. There is a point right in the middle of a difficult plot where the thing seems impossibly tangled, and that point is when you really do have to stick it out. Aphanes certainly can't be accused of having a convoluted plot, but in the middle of it I was convinced that I couldn't fix it, couldn't write a convincing ending for it. But the unconscious will work this stuff out, and with a sudden pop everything falls into place and you don't see what was so difficult about it. And your unconscious cannot do this sort of work before you've started the draft. Fuck you, it just can't. Characters act completely different in outlines than they do in drafts. They promise to behave and do logical things and be very respectable, and you're all, "Okay, if you're sure the NYTBR will like you, then I guess we'll do this thing." Then before you know it they're pulling ridiculous shit and you send them to a party with their best friends and they start strangling each other and your outline is useless.

So the upshot of all that is that if you don't start off on the page with the real people and the real story, you don't give your brain a chance to solve those unsolvable problems. I used to reject stories just on the basis of, "Oh, I love this, but I can't make a coherent plot out of it. So I won't start writing it."

Sometimes you do invest the time and you find out that the story really was fucked. I have been writing terminally broken stories since I was 14 so I know whereof I speak. This is just tough titties and you'll have to hope you can reuse the characters/situations/sex scenes in something else. Usually you can.

In summary: plot is for geeks and story is easy. It happens all the time.

Comments

[lux-apollo.livejournal.com]

*applauds*

Oh man, I was reading that and just groaning. I haven't done *anything* creative in a prestructured method like that since I was forced to write five-paragraph essays in Grade 11 and of course the way teachers like to force you to write stories in Grades School. Ugh.

If I ever tried to compose music like that, it would sound like hacked up garbage. It takes away all the spontanaeity, all the joy of letting it unfold naturally...

I agree with you about recalcitrant characters. The one thing I do usually have is character descriptions, but even these get heavily changed as the characters decide to be recalcitrant and do whatever the heck they want instead of what they "should" be doing.

I think that sometimes (or rather, most times) you need to get somewhat stuck on something in the middle of a draft. It forces you to think about *everything* in the story and keep those seemingly irreconcilable threads from being truly irreconcilable.

If Marvel has proved anything beyond a shadow of a doubt, it's that people read for characters more than for plot.

[talktooloose.livejournal.com]

Yay! Inspirational, thank you!

Do you know I had absolutely no idea how Days of Becoming was going to end until last week? And I wasn't really worried. "At least," I told myself, "the journey will be cool even if the ending sucks." But suddenly I see all the threads coming together.

Not only did I not start by tightly plotting, but even now I realize that I can't stare too closely at the light of this new ending, because it's still not ready to be locked down even if I have a glimmer.

One of my favourite, favourite writers is Maureen F. McHugh, author of some of the most meandering SF books I've ever read. And she makes that a strength!

There is a place for tight cohesion (a novel that takes place over 24 hours where everything must be just so), but there is an art to plotting that creates the illusion of spontaneity and reflects the messiness that is life.

Fuck Mr. Snowflake.

[(Anonymous)]

I tend to beat myself up for not being able to come up with nice, coherent plots, bu that might just be years of brainwashing and being told that plot wasn't an aspect of the story, it was the story. The problem with that, of course, is that it keeps you from meandering off into interesting little side avenues where you might find a totally better way to get Character A from Point B to Point C. So, in short, word.

Of course, my outlines, when the exist at all, tend to be the kind of rigid list I learned back in middle school - I, A, i), b).