Hi all. So I'm here as a newbie with much hesitation. I say hesitation, because as someone who is not instrinsically a "writer" and just someone stumblingly through the process of trying to get their story down- I seek external guidance to help with the process with the concern of encountering kbow-it-alls with alot of opinions about the rules of writing and criticism. So much so that it'll discourage my own project. Anyway, as my title suggests, I'm trying to write this story but not necessarily sure how to do it well in my own. So far since I've joined at perused the various discussions I get a sense there is a ton of energy being poured into starting with plots first, followed by characters and story, etc. I'm struggling with the opposite- connecting everything into a single free flowing story. Yes, my dream in life would be to actually make this real and in the process make it everything it should be and something that (in my wildest dreams) would be a novel first and adapted for screenplay. That's what I would love to see happen with this. That being said I'm not necessarily moving forward with the goal to finish and sell "my first book" as it seems many are. It appears possible that too much energy is being wasted on following the rules and writing the perfect plots and stuff. I question does a great story necessarily have to follow all the rules like there isn't a "text book" example of a perfectly written book but the story itself is kinda uninspiring and common, kinda thing. My story, so far, as I have tried to work through the intricacies and find the most creative way to piece it together like it can't follow this usual textbook plot structure. Not that I've figured out, so I guess my point is that I'm skeptical to know how to get constructive guidance on here from others with what I'm doing with my story. Does that make sense? One of the reasons why I'm here (as you'll observe from this post, I'm sure) is that I struggle with communicating ideas and thoughts in a succinct way lol So far I've determined with the help of my partner (who is a reader), that my story plot is going to best be presented utilizing a fair amount of back and forth between present and past - and broken into different "books" where possibly the pov changes. I prefer to write in third person... I don't remember specifically which pov version mine classifies as. I know everything though and the characters occasionally do think out loud lol that being said, there's multiple characters and it's a long story where certain things that happen are very important to the story, I just don't want to include everything, chronologically, and this has been my creative process. How do effectively structure my plot to include stuff that happens without needing to dedicate several chapters? Just as an example unrelated to my story-- love story about a girl and soldier -- he goes through alot while away at war, how do you include enough to be able to accurately show readers this without necessarily writing several chapters where you'd have to know details like where he was stationed, what the conditions were, etc have an ongoing plot for all the story stuff that takes place at war. That's where I am. I've successfully been working in ways to inform about one of my characters past before the point in which the story begins without having to start the story at all earlier point and explain all that, how he ends up where he is at the beginning, etc. The story begins kinda at the end but goes back in time and ends up where it started which is where it ends after being given the story... It's a complex story with multiple characters and overlapping lives.
You've got to understand that the basic story is 1) things begin, 2) things happen, 3) things end. All of the different plotting techniques are to control that basic form and give it impact (and for us writers, to guarantee we finish). Many techniques are just rewordings of previous efforts. Sometimes thinking about an issue in a parallel way gives a new solution. That's all plotting is. It controls a standard form and maximizes the impact of each piece. There are many books that don't follow simple structures. The following aren't all of those structures. It's just what I've read lately: Lit-fic often has a de-emphasized plot. Events can be mundane. It's the reaction that's important. (example: Gilead) Existential fiction is more concerned with philosophy and beliefs. (Notes From the Underground, Oblomov) Serialized fiction might have an overarching plot, but it's the rise of action through a chapter that matters most (The Three Musketeers, The Mountains of Madness, Foundation) Composite novels explore a story through related short stories. (Olive Kitteridge, A Visit From the Goon Squad) Picaresques (my favorite) explore life through symbolic scenes. The plot isn't so important. (Don Quixote, Dante's Inferno, A Confederacy of Dunces) I won't say anything about the Rashomons or whatever you call 100 Years of Solitude (a magical-realism vignetted novel?). There are many others that break traditional form. From what I've read above, I think you're about to write a parallel plot structure. I should have put that in the bullet list because it's a major one, maybe the biggest, but I left it until now for drama, haha. I just wanted to point out that there are a lot of respected books that don't follow 3-act structure, so what you're doing isn't wrong, but it's not as if you've come up with something that hasn't been done before either. My advice is to find several examples of parallel structured books and use them as a guide. (This is how it used to be done before people became obsessed with rules and grammar. Writers wrote through imitation.) My personal favorites are All the Light We Cannot See (2 parallel stories), and Cloud Atlas (6 parallel stories). Don't just read them for story. See how they build character arcs over the parallel stories. See how they know when to break from a scene. What I think you will also notice is that each story has its own self-contained structure and that those structures have a beginning/middle/end. So it's as if you're writing multiple novellas that overlap. The bad news is that I think that takes an extreme amount of planning. You have to somehow keep the gears turning to one purpose. If it were me doing this I would: Plot each story scene by scene. (You may dread this, but I'll bet the smaller stories follow a typical structure.) Break each story into logical chapters. Each section should end before it resolves to maintain forward momentum. Chart the chapters out in a grid, tracking how the stories overlap and making adjustments for impact. I don't think you can wing it on the parallel stories. Everything is going to interleave too much and if you don't nail down their purposes, the book will all fall apart. I would guess that somewhere around the one-third/middle mark you will crash. What you're doing is going to be more difficult than a novel because of the interactions between stories, but each story should be easier because they have reduced length. Maybe the best "plotless" approach is to write out a single story first? You have to think about how it will break apart and ensure that it has logical chapter breaks where you will switch storylines in the main novel (and that's actually plotting, but it can be done in your head). The trick is that the other unwritten stories might shape this one too, so you're going to need to have each story's purpose squared away before you begin.
Some people are natural.y pantsers and don't like to plot before they write... I am one such. However writing a very complicated interweaves story like that is much harder I find what works for me is to write one thread of it all the way through then go back and write another editing the first as required and so on. It's much easier to do this in something like scrivener than in one long word document
There are many approaches, and what you describe is just one of them. I do this method - I create a story, and the characters are vehicles to tell the story. However, and we've had this discussion on WF many times, some people create characters, and the story is a vehicle for the character. There's no right way, just whatever suits your particular preference. As a consequence of the way I do things, my characters can often be one-dimensional, or end up having no personality at all. That's less of an issue since I mainly write short stories, but in a longer work, it would be very boring.
I beg your pardon sir, I am not a pantser! I'm a discovery writer. Doesn't that sound a lot better? Especially when you realize what pants means in Britain? Writing 'straight ahead' and discovering the story as I go is my preferred method, but I find I can end up in some weird places that way, so I've been delving into methods of plotting and trying to find an in-between approach. Half-pantsing? Attention shoppers, Dillard's has pants half off for the next hour. Discovery writing allows intuition to do its thing, and I feel like that's necessary or I end up writing things that are too controlled and pat. I just need to find how much to let go and how much control to assert. It's a balancing act.
If this means what I think it does, that's how King Kong is scripted (the original 1933 movie). Each half begins with an ocean voyage to an island, and there are parallel threats and geographic features on each island. The giant serpent Kong fights on Skull Island is paralleled by the elevated train he wrestles on Manhattan, and the pterodactyls attacking him atop the peak of the mountain parallel the fighter planes strafing him at the top of the Empire State. It's also widely considered to be perfectly paced, and I must say I agree. A brilliant piece of early sound filmmaking, especially considering the main attraction is a special effect!
Hello! Thank you for such a thoughtful response. Wow, so much to unpack here so I will do my best to address each of the good points you made. I do need to point out there are probably a lot of literary terms I do not know name or am unfamiliar with since this is my first go and I am just kinda "winging it" and free writing as ideas come to me. So far, and I have not tallied anything in a long time, I probably have hundreds of pages of writing. This project having spanned over a decade and multiple computers on which I was writing, I admit it is a bit of a cluster incident, a mess of duplicate files or documents I edited or reworked or added to other scenes so what I have is everywhere. My boyfriend being an IT guy, several months ago when I started working on the story again he volunteered to go into my old dead laptops and floppy discs to help me recover what I had so that I can put it all in ONE spot. When my old laptop died and the files would not open properly on my new computer without some magic, the tediousness destroyed the ease in which I could just open documents as needed to work on stuff and suffie to say I stopped. It has been my goal since I started again to start actually weaving the story together but I admit I am still struggling, with many things, least of all getting to that stage where I start consolidating everything and answering certain plot questions. [/QUOTE]I just wanted to point out that there are a lot of respected books that don't follow 3-act structure, so what you're doing isn't wrong, but it's not as if you've come up with something that hasn't been done before either.[/QUOTE] Well, I certainly realize I am not the first to do this, in my limited experience with reading (which i force myself to do more of to help get the creative juices flowing) there are definitely interesting ways to tell a story other than that basic once upon a time... thing. When I approached my bf about my project and explained some of my hurdles and the possibilities I have considered on the best way to present the story he was very helpful in suggesting some methods and that is where I am now. I like that you referred to it as a parallel stories. Whether or not that is true, not sure honestly. Without going into a long diatribe explaining the story it may be hard to get the idea across what I am dealing with. So far basically scenes come to me and I write them out. Last night i was up until 6am, I sat down just trying to jot down some ideas I had had and when I can't quite figure out how to convey an idea I start freewriting, just plain old describing it to myself in no way that would be useful to actually include in the story but in the case of last night, the thoughts simply flowed and I ran with it and ended up with a pretty good, important scene. Had NO plan on doing that but there it is! The general structure I have arrived at seems to work best but because it does not follow that 3-act structure as you very concisely worded it, it feels like it will somewhat more challenging seeking help on this. As stated, and without going into TOO much detail, the story opens in present day, goes back in time and runs the course of a relationship and after the culmination of that returns to present day were the next stage of the story takes place when the main character in present day is lead to a large revelation about the character he knew from the past and what had happened to him after they last saw each other years ago. It is a love story between these two characters and the deep bond they form and how, even after it ended and it had a profoundly lasting effect on him that not even those closest to him were ever aware it ever existed nor all the pain and heartbreak he was forced to internalize. We only learn about the other character's past prior to their first meeting- at the end of the story. It is mostly told in 3rd person until present day scenes. The reveal about the other character occurs mostly through his daughter giving the other characters a first person account about him through stories. This is the best I can do in a pinch without giving too much info. I have a lot of scenes depicting either character, whether on their own or together. The hardest part has been trying to find a way to convey the concept of just how bonded these two people are, like soulmates who are connected on an almost clandestine level without actually turning it into a story about reincarnation or soul mates. That they are meant to be together and can't live without one another and will wait until they next life to find each other again has to be implied in some non-fantasy way. The best I have written thus far are a couple drafted scenes how when the one character is in trouble how the other gets these unshakable feelings of impending doom but he doesn't know why. He just attributes it to stress which is justifiable since he has a very stressful life. I haven't thought of how to have these parallel scenes occur simultaneously like in the middle of an emotionally intense scene like let's say for example a character is contemplating and about to commit suicide.. in the middle of describing the moment that character is feeling, you're in the moment with them, I cant just like interrupt in the middle of that to switch back and forth between characters to share that simultaneously the other character has an unflappable feeling there is something terribly wrong or the other character in on their mind and they feel a the sudden impulse to call or something.
Okay. I had assumed you were doing parallel structures, but this sounds more like (if I'm understanding correctly) that you're starting in present day almost as a preface and then going back to the past to properly begin. Then you have another character acting as a narrator who drops in smaller stories to explain motivations. In that case you're doing something like a composite novel (a novel told through short stories) but with a bigger framing device around it, which is your main story. That's more properly called a "framing story." That's a pretty old style too. A Thousand and One Arabian Nights would be an early example. So hearing how you're approaching this more on the fly (by not plotting), I would go find a couple modern stories that use this technique and read them for inspiration. I still feel that's the best thing a writer can do. You're looking for inspiration of structure. You'd be looking at how the smaller stories fit into the larger whole. I can think of a lot of books that do this, but it would be best to try and find one that's close to your genre. For example, from the wrong genre, Fight Club starts in the "present" and then goes back to beginning to show how the relationship formed and details it all through self-contained adventures (similar to short stories). Then it catches up with the present and you understand how the characters got to the mess they're in. Maybe something like Slumdog Millionaire would be closer to your story though. You could also look at composite novels (short story collections that share characters/setting) and just add a framing device around them. Examples: Olive Kitteridge, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Drown by Junot Diaz. What always impressed me about stories like that is how characters from one short story would reappear in the next story and bring along a certain gravity because of what you already know. They would change too so it felt as if the previous stories were still underway. If it were me planning a piece like this, I'd make sure to establish the most colorful characters in the early stories and then keep bringing them back in the later stories.
Well heck! You broke the first rule of Fight Club- which is to NOT talk about fight club! JK lol. I've honestly not read OR seen that but now I will. I had started reading a book called The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo: A Novel that I splurged on purchasing through Kindle recently when I was researching stories that also go back and forth between modern and past and so far I really like it. Not really a similar story to mine but her style of writing is an inspiration to me and her main character is very relatable to my main character's daughter with a similar scene of finding an old photograph of her parents. Not the same circumstances though, but anyway.... thank you for the suggestions for similar reads to mine, I will surely check them out. Unfortunately, my semester begins again on Monday- just in time for getting brow-deep into story land just in time to have NO time again but I will, at least, add them to my list. Can you explain this a little more please? I had only planned to have the daughter tell the stories as part of the character dialogue, from she to the others, and I use a scene where she is sharing a collection of her father's old photographs and memorabilia and stuff with the main character and his daughter. I use that as just one device for including all the stuff about his past that I was not sure how to include in the story but is very important to the character. I wondered a few times if I should switch back and forth between past and present and have the stuff going on in the present unfolding throughout the main part of the story or just wait until the past part ends and come back and pick up where it left off. The daughter who propels things forward at the beginning does appear in the past but not until a bit later, as a baby and young girl. I love this element of the story because I found a way to connect a few very old scene ideas to this new plot in a way that does as you said about knowing the characters from earlier. She meets the other daughter when she is very young but almost too young to really remember it, only until they speak for the first time does she remember that, too, more clearly. All the while it was kind of like this little family that had the potential to happen, had life gone the way the other character dreamed. But Ben (the main character) also has no idea that he ever even had a child until she contacts him, and he especially had no idea that she was the other kid his daughter came home excited talking about after being babysat. He thinks she maybe has a make believe friend, totally unaware that there was another child. I love it. I love this whole story. The more I go at it the better it gets. It's tragic but beautiful. The characters (I include very few, actually. I tend to isolate just the two of them throughout most of the scenes which isn't necessarily bad because their relationship is, for the most part, a very intimate and private thing and I often don't feel there is much of a need to create additional characters because they don't typically have a purpose to drive the story forward and some of the ones who do I treat like it's OK for them to be more like strangers that the other character only encounters briefly since they are a part of the other life he is not involved in. They each have their own life (and that is what pulls them apart as time goes on) and then they have the one with each other- the one where they can seek solace from the demands of their other lives and just exist together in complete tranquility. With only each other are they able to fully be themselves. No pressure. No judgement. Obviously Ben's kids and his "baby mama" are important characters. For the most part, Chris, while having an extensive social circle, like I said, is usually alone when he is with Ben because it is his downtime although he has at least one other friend in his closer circle who I have found to be increasingly valuable, he bridges the gap a little between the two of them. While it is never said there is anything going on between them, he instinctively knows it and keeps it to himself as a bystander. He is the one who keeps Ben somewhat informed later in the story of the bad things that are happening and also is the one who is there when Chris is alone and would need Ben to be there for him and he comes to his rescue. It's all very subtle. There is a lot going on that no one admits to or says anything about. I also meant to add clarification after my previous post regarding the reincarnation/soul mates concept... afterwards I realized I should have specified it is not that I am writing a story about that, but rather both characters easily believe in this about their relationship, that they are old souls. His epitaph is a Latin quote that in the next life and he will wait for him.
I am the elder of what you are, here at the beginning. I tell a story for its own sake, and write vignettes to then puzzle together later. I get inspired by what has come before and I will jump to the top of my current work and write the idea of it immediately. Then I may pursue it then and there or go back to what I was writing. I love this! I find a timeline is the only useful tool for me; spaces in between for next stuff or new stuff and even self-questions about whatever needs resolving (I write all of that constantly in the same document). My timeline is an ever-changing self-interview always open to modification. One thing: You are in draft mode - no editing. Finish it first! Try finishing the timeline with notes and unresolved issues included and then 'interview' yourself frequently. Then write what inspires you in that moment, even just a note. You go between timeline and story and interview and change either at need - Until you write: The End Shoot me a PM with your simplest timeline; a separate line for each change, and I'll be happy to discuss it! (I will insist you post, as eligible, to WorkShop as you progress.)
Ok, well, it looks like only one of us is gonna get responded to. This is the third thread I've spoken to you on, got blown off on every one. Later days.
Sure, when you're using a framing device, the narrator appears in the story as a character, your daughter character in this case. When she tells a story, it completely takes over the narrative. I'm picturing you having the daughter appear and tell these stories about other characters that then explain who they are. When they show up later those characters are already defined. That happens sporadically and the main story takes over when that's not in progress. Maybe she just explains events, but you would be very wise to let side characters move through those events. For examples of this . . . maybe "The Princess Bride" is one you've seen. "The Usual Suspects" also counts. In fact, that one's really good because the stories about Keyser Soze explain the narrator as he walks away at the end and give his exit impact. (I know I've switched to movies from books, but they're obvious choices. I guess The Princess Bride is a book too though. I always think of the movie.) I was speaking about tying all of the stories she tells together. That would make it feel like a composite story, where short stories overlap and share characters. Your characters keep appearing in each story, which changes the old stories while you're telling the new story. And all of it then leads back to the main story, the framing story.
Hello! I do apologize, I did not intentionally ignore any of your comments, I actually just refreshed my page and now see a whole bunch of comments I did not see until now so I am currently working through these! What you describe is actually very much the bulk of what my process has been for years on this. I was elated to have recovered all those old files that I had spent countless hours writing, perfecting... i felt like that was the missing piece to my continuing on like how do I replace so much work I had invested time into? However, I read through some and weren't as great as I had remembered, some downright embarrassing to read again, they almost seem amateurish and the story has morphed enough that a lot of it will probably no longer be relevant. But, like the one scene I mentioned in another comment, I get an idea about a scene and then figure out the narrative and purpose. I borrow from myself a lot. Ok so maybe this takes place here at this time for this reason instead of later at blah blah blah and I add his daughter and combine it with an entirely different scene concept where he babysits his friend's daughter. It works perfectly now that I have added the element to the story where the adult daughters meet which was NOT in the earlier versions of my story so things fall into place, eerily too perfectly at times and the rest works itself out. Idea first and then figure out where and how to use it. Once there is a good structure to the storyline the next question is... how the HELL do I write it so that it is actually what I see in my head? It is helpful to learn all these terms for what I am doing!
Ok, you're forgiven. You might want to go through and at least click the Like button for every response on your thread, so people don't feel ignored. Actually responding is even better.
I can think of the perfect example of what you are trying to do. "Sometimes a Great Notion." Ken Kesey. This is a very ambitious undertaken given the fact that you describe yourself as a newbie. It is one of my favorite books written by an experienced author who at times loses the reader, because the point of view changes so often. The story consists of 7 main characters each telling their side of the same stories from their point of view. The story also starts out as yours, with the ending. I have recommended this book many times, there have been many readers who could not handle the complexity of the storytelling.
I'll add this to my list of books to look for! Given the title is there any connection to the movie from the 70s?
It is a poor adaptation of a great book. His others of note are "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest" which did a much better job in translation. His books reflect the things and experiences he had in real life Worked as a logger, in a mental ward, was a stoner. 'The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test" One of the best examples of being able to take what you know and making it into a credible story.
