Plot Construction & Development in Fiction

I think everyone's had that moment where an idea came to them and they said, 'hey, that would be such a great idea for a movie/book.'

Equally, it's probably true that most good works of art, whether they are movies/books/tv-shows/paintings/songs... started out that way--with a basic premise that inspired their creators into action. So when we casually have such an idea, it's quite appealing to believe that those thoughts could be a real and glorious thing just like all of the finished projects out there that we admire. Unfortunately, most of the time, these little kernels never turn into popcorn. With regard to books, since that's the theme of this blog, some people make the effort to sit down and turn their idea into a project and fail. That's because they have no process--no mechanism for developing their idea so that it becomes hundreds of ideas put together under one thematic roof. But this activity, like so many things, is actually a skill that can be practiced, taught, developed... accomplished writers pump out new projects quickly and on demand because they know how to efficiently get from point A ('that would be a great idea for a book') through to point B (the book has a setting/plot/characters/scenes/dialogue/everything else). So let's talk about what their process might look like.

Suppose your idea is: 'A secret agent has to save the world from a mad villain, and the government has given him a license to kill bad guys along the way.' If that's all there is to the premise, the author is going to need to flesh things out a fair bit before it becomes presentable as a James Bond story. It might not be too hard to characterize the main protagonist, main antagonist, people supporting each of those parties, etc. But you'll need to dream up a specific agenda for the villain so that the conflict can kick off from somewhere, then put your protagonist in at a particular chronological point. Complications will need to be added so that it isn't complete plain sailing for him. The events will need to be fed to the audience in such a way that they can follow progress, but other information will need to be withheld from them so that you maintain enough intrigue. There will be a host of little problems to solve along the way, like making the characters and their actions/dialogue believable, keeping everything consistent, making sure the audience can invest themselves emotionally and cerebrally, and so on.

If you're writing according to a formula, or copying your plot ideas from somewhere, it's a bit easier. But lets say you're starting from scratch, because you want the structure of your story to serve the ideas themselves, not the other way around. Here's how I might proceed.

1. You decide on your central idea/premise. Let's say it's: 'During World War 2, a British man becomes a conscientious objector, and avoids joining the army.'
2. The very next step is to identify the central conflict. That shouldn't be too hard: you need a character who represents the main opposing sentiment--someone that wants our protagonist to go to war against his wish. Maybe it's a close friend who has already signed on, or its someone responsible for recruitment. What if it's the guys own wife? That way the conflict isn't just ideological, it would inevitably be quite emotional and convoluted as well. I'll pick that option, bearing in mind that it's not the only choice.
3. The situation our characters are in is going to have to change in order for the plot to work. Perhaps the story starts with him already having joined the army, but he becomes a deserter. Or, he initially avoids conscription, but later chooses to when he comes under pressure from his wife/everyone else. Suppose we go with the second option there.
4. Now we can start looking at where the most important scenes are going to be. There will be one centerpiece of action where he gives in and decides to go to war. We can systematically zoom in on the situation and look at the crucial cause and effect of dialogue and people's resulting feelings. 
5. Having mapped out where the turning points are, we can build other scenes around them that effectively support the story by developing the situations and developing the characters so that the audience has the right expectations going into the pivotal scenes. 
6. This process is like building a house. You start with the fundamental parts of it, then add layers of detail around the central structure of it. You don't put everything together simultaneously, you start at a specific point and attach new things to it one by one. 

Some people really prefer to write spontaneously. That's fine, because it will mean that they are writing at the point in time when they feel most inspired by their ideas. That approach can have its drawbacks though. We sometimes see writers add a lot of filler material while they are working towards an important scene, because they haven't properly decided how to support it. Or, the story is really light on ideas because they only picked one central idea and tried to blow it up like a balloon, instead of using it progenitively to populate the world of the story.

Having a more structured and systematic process can really be useful if you are willing to brainstorm a bit. That way, your good 'starting idea' can slowly but surely be turned into hundreds of other solid ideas that eventually get combined together according to an overall plan and result in an actual finished project.

Publishing vs Self-Publishing

Are you going to publish your book?

As an amateur writer I get asked this all the time by people who aren't writers. It's a harmless question, but the assumption is that after the book is finished, it's just a simple matter of handing a manuscript in to the publisher and then seeing it show up gloriously on the bookstore shelf. I think most people also like to imagine themselves one day writing a novel, and then kicking back after the hard work has been done, while everyone else appreciates them. Also, the very drastic difference between actually having a book published by a publisher, and self-publishing it on your own, is completely lost on a lot of people.

I'll try put it all into better perspective with the following discussion.

"Publishing a book."

This is when an established company known as a publisher decides to invest their money into a manuscript you wrote in order to turn it into one of their products. They then own it and pay you fees known as royalties when it sells. If they want to edit and change it, they will. Usually they'll do a reasonably large print run on it, and perhaps advertise it and distribute it through bookstores and so on. Remember that this is an act of business, not primarily a celebration of your artwork. For that business to publish your manuscript, they will first need to assess the likelihood of making a return on their investment, just like any other business decision. 

Imagine running a publishing company yourself. You have to pay staff wages, offices and equipment, book printing costs, advertising, tax... all the normal business expenditures. You wouldn't want to publish a book that doesn't sell, otherwise you'd go under pretty quick. There are mountains of manuscripts written by thousands of people, but most of them will in fact not sell. That's why it's better to invest in books that aren't so risky: cookbooks, memoirs of celebrities and successful sportspeople, formulaic romance/erotic novels, re-prints of classics, bibles, and so on. Hollywood is basically the same with movies. Aren't most of the ideas invested in nowadays either remakes or continuations of successful franchises? Movie-makers lose millions when a film flops at the box office, but there are a lot of stereotypical films that they know are going to make money no matter how many times they are re-hashed. It's a similar situation with the book publishing industry.

Yes, some creative and inventive fiction sometimes turns into overnight success. But most of it doesn't. The odds aren't much different to that of winning the lottery. Generally, the type of creative writing that makes it through a publisher is usually designed for a particular genre-loving-demographic, and is written by authors who have built up a bit of credibility by slowly publishing short stories in magazines, and doing the hard yards writing material for b-grade television/radio, etcetra.

"Self-Publishing a book."

This is where you as the author do everything yourself. You not only write the book, but you typeset and format it yourself, edit it, design any cover/art, and so on. That's not to say you might not outsource some of those things, but at the end of the day you are individually responsible for getting everything across the finish line, and that includes funding it yourself. If it doesn't sell, the loss of investment is on you, not an external publishing company. By taking this approach, you retain full control of the project, but miss out on any help provided by a publisher's reputation/advertising and of course their financial investment. 

There are local companies that can make a print version of your book. But unless you go with a large run of copies (like 500+), it won't be very cost-efficient at all. And you wouldn't want to print that many books without knowing whether anyone would buy them. On the other hand, there's eBook publishing, which can be done quickly and easily on Amazon and many other sites. It's so easy in fact, that the online market is swamped with titles that are very low quality, and short works are often indistinguishable from long ones. The reviews you will read for self-published e-books are largely written by people within the author's own social network. You could steal your little sister's diary and publish it on Amazon if you wanted to. Hundreds of titles go up every day - it's hard for a serious novel with any decent merit to truly stand out.

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Personally I'm more interested in self-publishing, because the primary goal of my writing is not to sell a product but to enjoy the creative process. I love developing stories and characters, and crafting well-formed sentences. I love learning new words and finding appropriate ways to deploy them. Turning a book into a product that someone else can buy is a secondary objective. In fact, my next novel will be digital only, and completely free.

Creative Writing Projects

It's the first post of a new blog.

About nine months ago I self-published a novel called Zero Anaphora. Since then, I've been doing what I can to promote it within my own network, but I've also moved on to start a new project as well. Quite often, I find myself talking to others about my work, old and new, and it continues to come as a surprise that these projects are difficult for me to explain in terms of their content. If I wrote books that were simple enough to sufficiently summarize in ordinary conversations, there wouldn't be any point writing them in the first place, I feel. But explanations are almost necessary, sometimes. Perhaps a blog is an appropriate way to express them--'oh, what do I write about? Here's a link...'

In taking up creative writing again as a hobby one of the better and more useful experiences has been my involvement with groups like Auckland Writers Meetup. We generally get together at a cafe in Mt Eden, Auckland, a couple of times a month. Most of the people that come along don't actually do any creative writing--they're curious about it and have always wanted to try, but are looking for encouragement. To me, that's great. Writing can be really challenging and lonely at the best of times, so it's really quite therapeutic to just talk to other people about it in a casual environment. A few of us even kicked off an exercise where we're writing a crime fiction story together on Google documents--each person takes a turn to write a few paragraphs, and the plot is constructed in an impromptu fashion. Three chapters into it, we've been having fun, and it's very informative to see just how your own style/voice compares when juxtaposed with others so starkly. We also have a Facebook group, since not everyone is in Auckland. 

A while back I also used to be fairly heavily into Scribophile. It's like a social networking site for writers, you partake in a system that allows you to criticize pieces of writing and be rewarded with points that accumulate on your account. Then you spend those points in order to have your work receive similar criticism from other users. It's not a new or bad idea, but I did find that it really attracted only the absolute beginners of creative writing, people who aren't appreciated by their immediate friends and family when it comes to their efforts. I can completely relate to that type of starting point. Still, after swapping a lot of feedback with scribophile users, I can barely continue to stomach the content I'm required to grind through.

But back to my own books. Zero Anaphora was my first go at publishing something digital, an eBook. There are hundreds of these going up on the internet every day, and in front of a relatively small audience proportional to the audiences for other forms of art or entertainment. In the process of teaching myself the basics of eBook marketing, I was advised by an Indies Unlimited administrator that I should stick to a tried and tested format for writing a blurb for my novel. Originally just had "a young woman gives up her career in order to conduct a social experiment upon an unsuspecting lover." I begrudgingly replaced that with a misleading plot summary. It was for the best, but I couldn't understand the need for the compromise until well after I had committed to it.

Blogging isn't new but it still has some value. My main goals with future posts will be to share some ideas with people in my local writing community, and to help inform people who are following/interested in my writing, and perhaps even to give other people ideas, or to help them understand what amateur writing is all about. At the end of the day it can be a hard thing to promote, but that doesn't make me any less passionate about it at this time. I'm working on a new project right now, which I'm very excited about. I'll of course talk more about it in future posts for this blog.

Luke