The Place For My Writers Notes

Original posting 9 August 2009

This is not likely to be terribly organized. Some of Anthony's recent postings got me to thinking about outlining and discovery writing, or plotting and panting -- er, make that writing by the seat of your pants.

One thing I realized is that many of the little tech pieces I've done, and quite a few of the books and articles, are from the outlining or plotting side of the field. Aside from books like Writing the Natural Way, most people seem to focus on structured approaches. Then I got to thinking about it and realized that it is a lot easier to discuss or summarize plotting approaches. Describing outlining is reasonably straightforward, because the outlines or character sheets or plot frameworks are explicit external things that you can point to.

Trying to help people do discovery writing... it's a little bit like helping someone ride a bike? You can do a little bit, but most of it they have to do themselves.

The important question is what helps you to organize your writing. If filling out the "standard" forms and sheets, planning the story in a somewhat abstract form, before you start writing words makes it easier for you, do it. If you prefer to improvise, try this, try that, and then shape things, do that. Or maybe some mixture works for you? There are many people who combine approaches, laying out a plan and improvising. Or improvising a little, planning a little, and mixing things up that way. Whatever works for you, for this story.

http://madgeniusclub.blogspot.com/2009/08/care-and-feeding-of-plots.html

The interesting thing about this blog posting for me was the suggestion that plots are some sort of saturation or crystallization phenomenon. Immerse yourself in a bath of stimulation, reading this and that, going to the museum, listening to people talk -- and at some point, crystals of plot start forming. I think this is more of a discovery writer approach to putting together a story, with a strong dash of random stimulation and neural connections spicing.

Or perhaps take a look at the idea net. This is from How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy by Orson Scott Card. But I think storytellers in any genre use the idea net. As Card points out, it's really four questions: "Why?" "How?" and "What results?" Now before you tell me that that's really only three, why gets asked two different ways. Why in the chain of actions sense simply asks what action led to this action -- and you can keep backing up along the chain. Why in the sense of intention or purpose asks what the intended result of this action was. What's the motivation? Two very different questions, even though they both look like "Why?" How is much simpler, what's the procedure, technology, Rube Goldberg device -- the policeman's method. And what results -- what happens next? Both intended and unintended results, and those unintended spinoffs are sometimes the most interesting ones.

Anyway, as we're doing discovery writing, questions like this can be helpful in thinking it through. You've just written the character into an alley, where he picks up a stone and breaks a window in a car. Why? You know the events that led up to this, but why would our hero decide to break a window in a car? What's he thinking about? How in this case is pretty simple. Although it might be worth thinking about why he didn't use the gun in his shoulder holster? And then there's the what results question. What happens when you break a window in a car? Most modern cars, the burglar alarm goes off. Which means people are going to be looking. So when the bad guys come racing around the corner, the hero now has an audience.

I'm going to try to remember to include some ramblings about discovery writing when I'm doing the various tech pieces and such. I'm pretty sure I'll forget, so remind me. But it seems to me that taking a look at how to write from those two stances is worthwhile. Sure, outlining and character sheets and all of that are perhaps easier to describe and provide the obsessive compulsive among us with security, but... there are also times to write boldly into the darkness, to let the words take you where they will.

[General Motors Car? What?]

A few days ago, someone on another list mentioned being a pantser. Since I hadn't heard the term in a while, I went ahead and looked up "plotter pantser" on Google. Plotters are the people who pre-plan their work -- outlines and so forth. Pantsers write by the seat-of-their-pants. Not that everyone buys these, nor does everyone fit completely into one or the other side, but generally, there are those who work it out largely in abstract form ahead of time and then write almost mechanically and those who are improvising as they write, boldly forging ahead.

But I don't really want to get into the discussion about which approach is better. Plotters and pantsers have pros and cons, and most of us will try both roads at different times and find out which one seems to work best for us. However, in the various links, I glanced at this one http://www.hodrw.com/ppii.htm and happened to get caught on an acronym. GMC charts? What are they talking about?

A bit of poking around revealed that Goals, Motivations, and Conflicts have been reduced to an acronym. Where is the character headed? Why do they want to get there? And what problems crop up to block them from just doing it?

So, for the nanowrimowers, let me suggest -- even while grinding out the daily quota, take time to think about your characters. What are their GMCs? Then bang them into each other, and let the words flow.

tink
[counting down to November . . .]