My post apocalypse story is the question asked by a farmer getting a startup: "I have all the tools and resources I need to cultivate something great, but no plot." I've been so busy world building that I haven't the slightest clue of what to do in the means of a story; I have the way it starts but no way how it goes and ends. "A man who falls inside an experimental untested fridge accidentally gets bludgeoned by a metal ice tray on the top shelf of the fridge and after going through a pseudo cryo-stasis wakes up in the post-apocalypse," now what? I've been through two drafts of this already and am considering giving up on the second to start anew, just so I can chart a reasonable plot.
The hardest part about writing a long story is that each chapter introduces constraints in the form of facts that may contradict other facts. Like puzzle pieces that don't fit anywhere and breaks off when you try to force them in. Maybe your character needed a friend for an important part of the story but you gave him a mother instead that won't go to the concert. These choices have a big impact on which kind of stories can be told. Tell as little as possible when making your first draft so that you can focus on what's actually presented (characters and plot). You won't be tempted to over-explain the background nor edit as you go if the world is wiped clean and full of curiosity. A single page of notes listing characters and such is enough at first. You just need to keep track on the number of active sub-plots and side-characters to avoid confusion. Then write the second draft without reading the first draft to remove things that not even the author can remember. Logical chains of events are easier to remember and drives the story forward effectively. When each plot point makes a steady progress, you can slow down the pace with more time in each location to increase immersion without feeling that the story is standing still. Remember to write things in order, because your personas will have emotions that are very difficult to get into out of context. A full rewrite is where a scene can be added or removed without making the prose seem off with irrational behavior. Every edit usually calls for two new edits when more contradictions appear.
Have you ever tried writing backwards? Think of how you want things to end, not how they start. It could be something cool, or a turning point with your characters, or the world itself (not necessarily the ENTIRE world, but a town within it, say) And then think of how things could get to that state from the place you just built your world, and then make interesting characters that could fulfill the roles of how it ends up like that. I do this, and find it is a great way to make plots that have good reveals. Because then you KNOW how things are going to end, so can then have characters guilty of things that they can hide from people, and you hide from the reader when they start the book. A red-herring and misdirection utopia.
Any good setting is as full of stories as gardens are full of vegetables. If you've constructed a detailed setting, take any element and ask yourself why it's there. Then tell the story that results in that answer. This is somewhat akin to @Steve Rivers comment above. Can you provide an elevator pitch for your setting? A broad-brush-stroke description?
But you don't. You have no tools or resources, at least in this post. You have half an opening scene. The other half would be some hint of what the story was going to be about. I think (for what it's worth) you should put this idea aside and start exploring what post-apocalypse stories interest you. Maybe read more, see more movies, dig into your soul for the story you want to write about.
I have to say, I never start with a world and build a story to fit it. I always start with a story idea and at least the outline of a plot and build a world to suit it. A world is a device that serves your story, not the other way around.
Exactly, although I do use the world over if I like it. I have an entire mega-series of novels that all take place in the same universe, even though the individual stories and series have nothing to do with each other.
I think it can be approached either way, depending on the creative mind doing the work. Some people (myself included) really enjoy worldbuilding. I enjoy it for itself, but also enjoy putting stories in the world. Some people don't care about the stories and just enjoy crafting the environments. It's all writing at the end of the day.
Once I tried writing an homage to Maybe, I'm Amazed by the Beatles and ended up with a really ripping recipe for lentil soup. Worlds are built out of stories. A sequence of events had to occur for the world to get to the way it is. Pick one of those stories, build upon it, and go.
If you have all the tools you want your character to use, perhaps whats missing is a different perspective. Try looking at the opposite of what you have. Look at each thing your wanting to use, and figure out what the opposite of that is. Then populate the world with a surplus of that opposite materal and go from there. I know this is vague, however, you've offered up none of the mechanics you want to use in order for more pointed ideas to be submitted.
An exercise I've found useful is to start writing about characters that might live in that world. Don't worry about the plot. Instead, write about their lives, the problems they face, the things that irritate them. Write about things that bore them, what they do for fun. Now write about other people in that world and make sure you have a broad spectrum across all classes, races, and ideologies. Now write some scenes where these people interact with each other. I've found this to be a good source of conflict that can be the seeds of a plot. Even if you don't use the characters you have created so far, they will have served their purpose.
Forget the plot, this bit concerns me already. You've clearly condensed the premise and out of context like this it's maybe unfair to judge, but on paper it sounds preposterous.
I don't prefer that order of development because it's rare that a few characters would have such a pivotal role in the timeline of the world that you can write them first before the setting, unless you're writing about gods or politicians. The world can exist without the main characters, but the main characters cannot exist without the world, so I would create the world first. If there's enough interesting culture and happenings in the world you've created, the stories should come naturally. Imagine that you're a journalist documenting life in this post-apocalyptic world, whether it be of child soldiers of a religious prepper commune born to repopulate the earth or the remnants of old world governments trying to bring order to the wastes.
I don't create characters first. I create the plot first, because that defines what characters are needed in the story, then the world comes afterwards. There's no point in creating characters if you have no idea what you want them to do - such as in the OP's outline. And a world is of limited use if you don't have a story to tell.
In that case, it depends on whether you want to use characters as a means to explore the world or the world as a means to explore the characters. Both are valid, but I think they have their own advantages and disadvantages: Developing the world first +there's less holes in the setting's construction; cultures, economies, and technology are unaffected by the needs of the plot +the plot is exclusive to the setting, not something that works regardless of if you slap a fantasy or cyberpunk background onto it +you can use the world for multiple stories with meaningful overlap Developing the plot first +you can easily choose what themes to write about +you won't have to invest as much time into worldbuilding minutia that ultimately won't affect the outcome of the story
Disagree. IMO, developing the plot first is what will make the plot exclusive to the setting. If I want to write a story about robots on a distant planet, slapping a fantasy setting on it isn't going to work. If you don't have a plot, everything else is window dressing. And there's absolutely no reason why you can't reuse a world that's been designed for a particular story.
When the writers of Deadwood first pitched the idea to HBO, it was set in ancient Rome. HBO said, "Story sounds great, but we already have a Rome thing in production." So the writers took the basic story, set it in Deadwood, gave it an historical pastiche, and voila, three seasons of a wildly popular show.
He: 1. Tries to survive in the post-Apocalypse world. (by befriending other characters or building a survival toolkit) 2. He doesn't survive in the post-Apocalypse world and his journey is resumed by someone else. I think the first place to start is to explain what caused the post-Apocalypse? This will be a major driver for your story.
It doesn't apply to all plots, but with some work, anything can be adapted. Asimov based his Foundation series on the fall of Rome. With some work, you could easily set LOTR in space.
A fantasy re-skin could be about earth elementals in a distant dimension. Or something like that. There's alternate-genre analogs for a lot of things until you get into the nitty gritty details of the setting's mechanics and technology, which affect its culture, economies, and politics. The advantages I listed aren't absolute, but I think they are true to an extent because the first thing you choose to develop is the independent variable of the story. You can work on it as much as you want without worrying about internal inconsistencies between setting, plot, and characters. If you choose the setting first, it will be the strongest element. Likewise with plot. I don't discount the superhero genre for its success, but I dislike it for being a prime example of not developing the setting before anything else. DC and Marvel universes are frankensteined settings of all the origin stories of different superheroes that somehow remain unique despite having technology or magic that can be transferred to each other and don't have such an impact on the world with their superpowers that Earth is still recognizable.
That's not what the first thing I develop. If you're claiming that any plot could be reskinned to fit any setting, then any setting can be reskinned to fit any plot.
Deadwood, not Deadpool. Deadwood is a Western, set in Deadwood, South Dakota, and starts shortly after it was founded.
