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cleolindaCan I just tell you? If you ever have some kind of large, involved project, don't ever, ever assume that you'll remember anything. If what you had for breakfast that morning will ever be necessary to you, write it down. Because I've got all these sketches of plots and conspiracies and I have no idea how the hell they were supposed to work. And they're extremely detailed, very fleshed out, and I'm still sitting here unable to follow half of it.
So that's what I've spent most of the week so far doing--sneaking upstairs whenever the pupses fell asleep, reading my old notes and drafts, and trying to reorient myself. The problem is that I've set up this--well, I was going to say "giant conspiracy," but really, it's not. It only feels like one because I ended up creating it from my heroes' point of view: there are bad people out there doing bad things, and they don't know what they are, and here are cool moments in which they discover things and/or get their asses kicked trying to. You know everything you've ever suspected about Lost, that the writers may not even know where they're going with the whole thing? I mean, I personally think they have an end game in mind, but this is basically how I started creating my "conspiracy": from the inside out, paying more attention to the cool spooky moments than the actual logic of the situation. True confessions: you know the creepy boys who attack West in (I think) chapter two or so? I currently have no idea where they came from or what they're for. I wrote that three years ago, and I still don't know. It was just my intention to have them and figure out where they came from later. Which is great and all, but when you try to move forward, you find yourself extremely confused and scattered. What I neglected to do--and interestingly, have not neglected to do in projects I've started in the three years intervening--is work the "conspiracy" out from ground zero and move outwards. The heroes start from the outskirts and work in, which is not how I should be doing it--I should know where they're going, even if nobody else on God's green earth does. Because that's my job as the creator.*
So here's what the "conspiracy" really is, and I mean that in a non-spoiler sense: there is a character, and he is trying to survive. He's the Big Bad, of course, but I like the idea that villains are simply people whose interests are opposed to the heroes'. A monster, for example, wants to survive; he wants to eat. Unfortunately, he wants to eat you, but if that's inconvenient to you, that's not his problem. Operating off this philosophy keeps you from stereotypical mustache-twirling villains, I feel (and it's probably one of the reasons I love Dead Man's Chest so much, because EVERYONE'S interests are opposed to everyone else's). So there's a character, and he needs food, he needs shelter, he needs money. He starts drawing in other characters as his associates, his henchmen, whatever--through charisma, seduction, blackmail, bribes, or simply common interests, whatever it takes. His survival is contrary to the interests of most of humanity, really, and the more associates he has, the worse it is. West is a sort of bounty hunter, as you can gather from even just the first chapter, and his prey are this character's associates. He doesn't even necessarily know that This Character is the ringleader, but he's heard things, and he's trying to get to the bottom of it. The essential conflict is going to be between West, Rose Hannah, the White Hats, whoever, and This Character and the Black Hats. (Have you heard my new garage band, This Character and the Black Hats?) Really, this is pretty standard stuff. But it probably says a lot about the amount of growth my writing's undergone in three years that it seems "pretty standard" to me now, in the sense that it's one of the first things I'd sit down and figure out after I'd noodled around with an idea or a new character long enough to decide that I wanted to create a full-blown story around them.
So now, in a nutshell, I have to sit down and iron all of this out. And here's where this may become useful for anyone reading now, because you can iron plot tangles out pretty simply. What you do is you make a list of your characters and, under each name, answer the question:
What does he want?
Rose Hannah is particularly interesting to me because I knew from the beginning what she wanted--or rather, that she didn't know what she wanted; she had gotten her medical degree (relatively rare for the period, so clearly she's very self-motivated) but she doesn't know how she wants to use it, if she wants to practice medicine at home, marry someone who's opposed to her working at all, marry someone who's a good friend and would probably respect any decision she made, or go to India and make a grand career of women's medicine where it's desperately needed--but which would probably preclude marriage. She has a lot of options, many of which are discouraged by her social circle, but she's the kind of woman who's willing to risk disapproval. And then, in the middle of this, Something Happens that pretty much erases all of her options. Now all she wants, all she can want, is to cope with Something That Happened, and to survive it if possible. And by the beginning of the second series, there's something new that she'll want; and if I write a third, which I'm mulling over, I've thought of something else for her to want. And from just about the beginning of this project, I've known this. But I've only thought of her antagonists in terms of how they affect her, rather than what they themselves want. And the reason this got in my way, I've come to realize, is that I couldn't muddle out why they were doing the things that affected her. I mean, just to be evil? Because that's what These Characters do? It falls apart if that's all you've got.
What happens when you sit down and ask of each character, each character who has enough face time to be worth the asking, "What does he want?," is that you end up with this network of desires and interests. When you put any two of them in the same room, you automatically have ripples in the water. If you know enough about what each character wants and his general personality--how one would react to anyone else--what happens next happens pretty organically. I realized this when I was looking for something for Amelia Sharpe to do--she had enough spark that I couldn't believe I'd apparently just invented her for a single chapter, or possibly to bring back just to walk through and snipe at Rose Hannah. What if you put her in the same room with This Character? I went back and thought about the one interaction we'd really seen with her--Amelia making a play for Pansy's fiancé, who wasn't someone Amelia knew terribly well, had a history with, or any unrequited love for. She wanted to flirt with him just to show that she could, just for the pleasure of taking something away from another woman. What does she want? Probably to marry well, marry money, but this one random thing I wrote three years ago suggests that she likes having power over other people. I don't mean Moo-Ha-Ha Evil Power, but if someone said, "I could make you the queen of your social circle," she'd probably jump at that, and in fact, her name was meant to evoke the novel Vanity Fair. So if you take characters you've already come up with, characters who are probably names and a couple of traits on a page, and figure out what thing (or two or three things, even) drives them, it's like you've taken a toy top and put a spin on it. And you can send that top out into a room full of spinning tops and watch the fun. There's a character I have planned for the second novelly thing named Emma, and she's extremely attached to This Character. Also, Emma 1) is from a very poor, low-class background, and 2) will cut a bitch. If Amelia goes after This Character, that particular top is absolutely going to go after her. And Amelia, from what I know of her so far, is very likely going to pull out some claws of her own. And keep in mind, these are two fairly minor characters, and they're already off doing things on their own. They can power the various alliances and betrayals and counter-betrayals you might need to keep a plot going, particularly if you bear the saying "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" in mind.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that the whole revision (literally, re-vision) thing is really exciting, and that it's a useful exercise if you get stuck in your own writing.
(Yes, linkspam will come back soon. Right now, I'm just kind of enjoying actually writing entries instead of compiling them.)
Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch,
1. We've just discovered we owe $4000 in back taxes, which is so very, very bad;
2. Shelby's having a hard time eating her Milk Bones, so I think she may be close to losing some baby teeth;
3. I don't have to go to the dentist on Thursday, which thrills my soul;
4. Sister Girl also has her Culinard graduation buffet on Thursday, and I'm digging through my closet for anything remotely nice to wear;
5. And I have some massive bathroom cleaning to do before the Evans air-conditioning tuneup guy comes on Friday. Which sounds like a non sequitur, except that you have to go through the bathroom to get to the attic door. No, I don't know who thought that was a good idea either.
So that's what I've spent most of the week so far doing--sneaking upstairs whenever the pupses fell asleep, reading my old notes and drafts, and trying to reorient myself. The problem is that I've set up this--well, I was going to say "giant conspiracy," but really, it's not. It only feels like one because I ended up creating it from my heroes' point of view: there are bad people out there doing bad things, and they don't know what they are, and here are cool moments in which they discover things and/or get their asses kicked trying to. You know everything you've ever suspected about Lost, that the writers may not even know where they're going with the whole thing? I mean, I personally think they have an end game in mind, but this is basically how I started creating my "conspiracy": from the inside out, paying more attention to the cool spooky moments than the actual logic of the situation. True confessions: you know the creepy boys who attack West in (I think) chapter two or so? I currently have no idea where they came from or what they're for. I wrote that three years ago, and I still don't know. It was just my intention to have them and figure out where they came from later. Which is great and all, but when you try to move forward, you find yourself extremely confused and scattered. What I neglected to do--and interestingly, have not neglected to do in projects I've started in the three years intervening--is work the "conspiracy" out from ground zero and move outwards. The heroes start from the outskirts and work in, which is not how I should be doing it--I should know where they're going, even if nobody else on God's green earth does. Because that's my job as the creator.*
So here's what the "conspiracy" really is, and I mean that in a non-spoiler sense: there is a character, and he is trying to survive. He's the Big Bad, of course, but I like the idea that villains are simply people whose interests are opposed to the heroes'. A monster, for example, wants to survive; he wants to eat. Unfortunately, he wants to eat you, but if that's inconvenient to you, that's not his problem. Operating off this philosophy keeps you from stereotypical mustache-twirling villains, I feel (and it's probably one of the reasons I love Dead Man's Chest so much, because EVERYONE'S interests are opposed to everyone else's). So there's a character, and he needs food, he needs shelter, he needs money. He starts drawing in other characters as his associates, his henchmen, whatever--through charisma, seduction, blackmail, bribes, or simply common interests, whatever it takes. His survival is contrary to the interests of most of humanity, really, and the more associates he has, the worse it is. West is a sort of bounty hunter, as you can gather from even just the first chapter, and his prey are this character's associates. He doesn't even necessarily know that This Character is the ringleader, but he's heard things, and he's trying to get to the bottom of it. The essential conflict is going to be between West, Rose Hannah, the White Hats, whoever, and This Character and the Black Hats. (Have you heard my new garage band, This Character and the Black Hats?) Really, this is pretty standard stuff. But it probably says a lot about the amount of growth my writing's undergone in three years that it seems "pretty standard" to me now, in the sense that it's one of the first things I'd sit down and figure out after I'd noodled around with an idea or a new character long enough to decide that I wanted to create a full-blown story around them.
So now, in a nutshell, I have to sit down and iron all of this out. And here's where this may become useful for anyone reading now, because you can iron plot tangles out pretty simply. What you do is you make a list of your characters and, under each name, answer the question:
What does he want?
Rose Hannah is particularly interesting to me because I knew from the beginning what she wanted--or rather, that she didn't know what she wanted; she had gotten her medical degree (relatively rare for the period, so clearly she's very self-motivated) but she doesn't know how she wants to use it, if she wants to practice medicine at home, marry someone who's opposed to her working at all, marry someone who's a good friend and would probably respect any decision she made, or go to India and make a grand career of women's medicine where it's desperately needed--but which would probably preclude marriage. She has a lot of options, many of which are discouraged by her social circle, but she's the kind of woman who's willing to risk disapproval. And then, in the middle of this, Something Happens that pretty much erases all of her options. Now all she wants, all she can want, is to cope with Something That Happened, and to survive it if possible. And by the beginning of the second series, there's something new that she'll want; and if I write a third, which I'm mulling over, I've thought of something else for her to want. And from just about the beginning of this project, I've known this. But I've only thought of her antagonists in terms of how they affect her, rather than what they themselves want. And the reason this got in my way, I've come to realize, is that I couldn't muddle out why they were doing the things that affected her. I mean, just to be evil? Because that's what These Characters do? It falls apart if that's all you've got.
What happens when you sit down and ask of each character, each character who has enough face time to be worth the asking, "What does he want?," is that you end up with this network of desires and interests. When you put any two of them in the same room, you automatically have ripples in the water. If you know enough about what each character wants and his general personality--how one would react to anyone else--what happens next happens pretty organically. I realized this when I was looking for something for Amelia Sharpe to do--she had enough spark that I couldn't believe I'd apparently just invented her for a single chapter, or possibly to bring back just to walk through and snipe at Rose Hannah. What if you put her in the same room with This Character? I went back and thought about the one interaction we'd really seen with her--Amelia making a play for Pansy's fiancé, who wasn't someone Amelia knew terribly well, had a history with, or any unrequited love for. She wanted to flirt with him just to show that she could, just for the pleasure of taking something away from another woman. What does she want? Probably to marry well, marry money, but this one random thing I wrote three years ago suggests that she likes having power over other people. I don't mean Moo-Ha-Ha Evil Power, but if someone said, "I could make you the queen of your social circle," she'd probably jump at that, and in fact, her name was meant to evoke the novel Vanity Fair. So if you take characters you've already come up with, characters who are probably names and a couple of traits on a page, and figure out what thing (or two or three things, even) drives them, it's like you've taken a toy top and put a spin on it. And you can send that top out into a room full of spinning tops and watch the fun. There's a character I have planned for the second novelly thing named Emma, and she's extremely attached to This Character. Also, Emma 1) is from a very poor, low-class background, and 2) will cut a bitch. If Amelia goes after This Character, that particular top is absolutely going to go after her. And Amelia, from what I know of her so far, is very likely going to pull out some claws of her own. And keep in mind, these are two fairly minor characters, and they're already off doing things on their own. They can power the various alliances and betrayals and counter-betrayals you might need to keep a plot going, particularly if you bear the saying "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" in mind.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that the whole revision (literally, re-vision) thing is really exciting, and that it's a useful exercise if you get stuck in your own writing.
(Yes, linkspam will come back soon. Right now, I'm just kind of enjoying actually writing entries instead of compiling them.)
Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch,
1. We've just discovered we owe $4000 in back taxes, which is so very, very bad;
2. Shelby's having a hard time eating her Milk Bones, so I think she may be close to losing some baby teeth;
3. I don't have to go to the dentist on Thursday, which thrills my soul;
4. Sister Girl also has her Culinard graduation buffet on Thursday, and I'm digging through my closet for anything remotely nice to wear;
5. And I have some massive bathroom cleaning to do before the Evans air-conditioning tuneup guy comes on Friday. Which sounds like a non sequitur, except that you have to go through the bathroom to get to the attic door. No, I don't know who thought that was a good idea either.
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no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 03:07 am (UTC)Hee. I just saw the Seinfeld episode where Jerry's wandering around trying to figure out what supposedly funny thing he wrote down in the middle of the night. That episode taught me to not only write things down, but also legibly.
As for Black Ribbon, this makes me very, very excited to see the finished product.
I'm having the opposite trouble...
Date: 2007-06-13 03:26 am (UTC)If that makes any sense. I've got file cards and note cards with all my references from when I did a year of research...I have my diary (I'm using the year I lived in London as a base of the novel) so it is easy for me to know what was where and when. I just can't figure out how to do more than 1500 words a month. And that's a good month.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 03:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 03:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 11:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 11:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 11:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 03:52 am (UTC)I personally feel like it's OK to just have some cool scenes with no idea of how they string together, and then working them into something. I've done that. They'll undergo some sea changes in the service of the story, but that's OK. Sometimes what happens is as big a surprise to me as it is to the characters (or was in my last effort, anyway), and for me, that's a pretty neat moment.
Just my $.02.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 11:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 03:56 am (UTC)I've had to do that for years at work. I carry a notebook with me everywhere. It's the only way I stay sane, my brain can't hold all that stuff. It leaks.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 11:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 07:39 am (UTC)Anyway, great post as usual. ^^ Just wanted to say.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 11:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 11:28 am (UTC)That's the way I like to go at it, too, because otherwise you really do run the risk of turning them into nothing but caricatures. This way you have to understand them, and a villain who's also a person - or a person who's also a villain - is always far more interesting than, as you say, the mustache-twirling, cape-wearing villain.
It was just my intention to have them and figure out where they came from later.
This reminds me, actually, of a story you may or may not have already heard about Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. There's a scene in there where Marlowe is called by an old friend in the D.A.'s office to go see the site where a car had just been pulled out of the water. It had gone over the night before and there was a man still in it. The people at the crime scene debated whether it was a suicide or a murder, but it seemed most likely a murder; the victim was tied to the larger case because he was the chauffeur for the main family and had run off for no apparent reason with the car which belonged to the eldest daughter. By the end of the novel, Marlowe still doesn't know who killed the guy.
So on the set of the movie some years later, the director wanted to know whodunnit. He asked the scriptwriters, who admitted they didn't know and proceeded to call up Chandler. "So who killed him?" they asked. "Hell if I know," Chandler replied.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 11:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 01:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 01:21 pm (UTC)I've been meaning to read On Writing for a long while now.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 01:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 03:09 pm (UTC)It could be both, even.
I second the recommendation for On Writing. King applies his brutal honesty and humor to both himself and his profession. You'll like it.
Re: Rebecca
I think she almost names the narrator at one point, deep in the book. It may have been unintentional, not naming the character, but I think it works really well (I loved both that book and Hitchcock's film version).
no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 03:14 pm (UTC)There's a point early on where references are made to her name - we're told it's unusual, at least, and that her father chose it - but, if I remember what I read correctly, DuMaurier started that way as an exercise to see how long she could go without actually naming her. It works wonderfully, though, I agree, given the plot. Both the film and the book are some of my favorites.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 01:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 07:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 11:16 pm (UTC)The thing was, I started doing it for fun, particularly in conjunction with the little bells and whistles on the website, as a month-long (five Fridays) serial, as a way of forcing myself to finish it no matter how rough it was. Only I didn't finish it, and it took on a huge life of its own. It's one of those things where I can't even say what I'd do if I could do it all over again; it kind of is what it is now, and I'm revising it so heavily that I'm not worried about the first publication issue (plus, it isn't finished). That said, I would not post a new project online that way. Ideally, I'd have Black Ribbon published and post the Bennet letters as a free website frame story, so that you get some fun, free, interactive content. I keep the parodies that are already online (and new ones occasionally) to build and maintain an audience--partly just because I enjoy dashing them off and posting them, but that's the reason I didn't *stop* posting them: I could have hoarded everything for a book and immediately taken things down, but I felt it was more important to have some content out there for free, since I'm a young writer starting out. So I guess my answer is that I love the idea of free content, but that the main course should probably be saved for publication, if possible.
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Date: 2007-06-13 11:50 pm (UTC)Do you think that restricted content, like a locked LJ entry, would count as "first publication"?
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Date: 2007-06-14 12:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-14 12:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 08:02 pm (UTC)so, basically, i understand where youre coming from. my sympathies.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 09:59 pm (UTC)So, yay, keep up the good work!
opleaseopleaseoplease
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Date: 2007-06-13 11:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 11:50 pm (UTC)I just love this, it's such a fantastic way of looking at villains. I love the way you put it.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-14 05:37 am (UTC)This happens to me *so often*. You have no idea.
What you do is you make a list of your characters and, under each name, answer the question:
What does he want?
It's funny that you mention this right now; just last night, I was thinking over this very question as relates to my unfinished fantasy novel. This started as a Nano, so I never *quite* figured out where the story was going to end up (I assumed, rightly but nonetheless damagingly, that I wasn't going to get that far in a month and so it wouldn't matter). Now I'm about halfway through and it's about time that I figure out where exactly I'm *going*, so I've decided the best way of doing this is to revisit the wants of the characters (and how those wants may or may not have changed from the beginning of the story), and see how those things are going to come in conflict with each other. That seems like it will at the very least bring up some things that *should* happen, even if they weren't necessarily things I thought would happen.
At any rate. I always love your writing meta-posts, and, for the record, would really love to read The Black Ribbon some day. :-)
no subject
Date: 2007-06-14 01:03 pm (UTC)As far as "what does he want" I can't tell you how much my writing improved after taking an in depth objective-oriented acting class. : ) I love how one thing can make you see your other activities more clearly.
Keep at it, and good luck with the plot tangles! : D