No matter what you do, you cannot avoid making a choice. Even making no choice is a choice. Opting out, while not cool, is a legitimate decision. However, there are points at which it is best to make a decision for or against. Major life choices like marriage should not be entered into by opting out of making a decision. Either you're for it or against it, not following along with the stream of what someone else wants. Just one of those moments when having a strong opinion should be par for the course.
How does this affect your story? Well, say your protagonist is a princess with an arranged marriage hanging over her head. There are two possible choices here: duty or self. If she sides with duty, then this arranged marriage will cause little major stir in her world and she will acquiesce to it without serious complaint. On the other side, there is self or any of the myriad reasons she might say no to such a proposition. Sure, you could go with the not so opinionated option of 'meh' and have her be pushed along by circumstances, but then she fails as a protagonist because as Writing Excuses says, Protagonists protag. To make that a little longer and maybe a mite clearer, protagonists do proactive things. They make choices. They don't opt out because that is rarely the stuff of a good story. When people tell stories, people do things. Doing things requires making choices. See the correlation: person + choices + actions = story. Put a bunch of this together and you might even weave that little thing called a plot into the whole thing.
Back to your princess's upcoming nuptials. Suppose the proposing prince-guy is a douchenozzle. Maybe that will promote a stronger sense of whether or not our princess needs to take a stand for or against this marriage. Now we're dealing with more than one person and more than one set of choices and actions, but the formula still stands. Person plus choices plus actions = story. So what choices does the prince-guy make? Maybe he's a douche with a heart of gold. (Not quite sure how that would work but go with me here.) All he needs is the proper love and affection to bring out the best in him. Thus our princess's actions have every chance of influencing the decisions the prince-guy makes regarding how to go about this.
As you can see, the simple way of looking at things sometimes is all you need. If you want to tell a story, you start with someone making a decision to do something or not to do something or to do nothing at all. All choices. All options. All well and good. Just make sure if you're going to have a protag, they do protaggy things. Same thing for your antag. They need to do antaggy things like get in the way and have differing viewpoints. But I suppose that's a discussion for another day. Ciao!
Showing posts with label Writing Excuses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Writing Excuses. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Monday, August 4, 2014
Pre-writing
Catching up on my podcasts, if you don't know Writing Excuses you should, and came across this one about pre-writing.
According to the podcast, pre-writing is all the before writing writing that is done on a manuscript. In my particular case as part outliner/part discovery writer, it means looking back at my outline and then brainstorming neat things to happen to my characters on their way to the plot point I'm looking at for the day. However, what struck me as interesting about this podcast is that it also notes things about tone text and music as a way to get into a specific headspace.
Music to get into the right headspace is something I've explored previously, however, I've never made it as narrow as is suggested. Instead, I tend to think in terms of entire albums. The idea of parsing that down to one or two songs, or even a single youtube video is almost mindblowingly simple. Something I will definitely be trying out to see if it cuts down on the amount of time it takes to get into a specific mind frame.
The other thing they discussed was tone text. I suppose this could be done using your own text by simply reading back over it before beginning with anything new for the day, but they discussed using an outside text (such as Jane Austen) in order to preserve the sound of the writing as you are working your way forward on a manuscript.
I will admit, none of this is groundbreaking, and perhaps if I took more creative writing courses it would seem less interesting to me, but I found this interesting and thought it would be good to share.
If you haven't already, check out the Writing Excuses podcast. It's well worth the 20 minutes or so a week.
In other news, I'm reaching the end of "Winning his Kingdom", She Becomes Death book 3. It's a bittersweet nearness for me seeing as I've been in this world with these characters for the better part of three years now. Yet, somehow, I've got to tag a 'The End' onto this story and let them go on to whatever fate may hold for them. Plus, I can always come back to the world if the need strikes and maybe it will.
According to the podcast, pre-writing is all the before writing writing that is done on a manuscript. In my particular case as part outliner/part discovery writer, it means looking back at my outline and then brainstorming neat things to happen to my characters on their way to the plot point I'm looking at for the day. However, what struck me as interesting about this podcast is that it also notes things about tone text and music as a way to get into a specific headspace.
Music to get into the right headspace is something I've explored previously, however, I've never made it as narrow as is suggested. Instead, I tend to think in terms of entire albums. The idea of parsing that down to one or two songs, or even a single youtube video is almost mindblowingly simple. Something I will definitely be trying out to see if it cuts down on the amount of time it takes to get into a specific mind frame.
The other thing they discussed was tone text. I suppose this could be done using your own text by simply reading back over it before beginning with anything new for the day, but they discussed using an outside text (such as Jane Austen) in order to preserve the sound of the writing as you are working your way forward on a manuscript.
I will admit, none of this is groundbreaking, and perhaps if I took more creative writing courses it would seem less interesting to me, but I found this interesting and thought it would be good to share.
If you haven't already, check out the Writing Excuses podcast. It's well worth the 20 minutes or so a week.
In other news, I'm reaching the end of "Winning his Kingdom", She Becomes Death book 3. It's a bittersweet nearness for me seeing as I've been in this world with these characters for the better part of three years now. Yet, somehow, I've got to tag a 'The End' onto this story and let them go on to whatever fate may hold for them. Plus, I can always come back to the world if the need strikes and maybe it will.
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