Dynamic - The Forgotten Writing Element

[Devor]

i was just going through my mind about a question I always want to ask people but never have the guts to.

At what point do you know you have a story worth pursuing?

I have a lot of confidence in the quality of the story I'm pursuing right now, and I wanted to answer my own question for a moment, and to figure out where that came from.

It wasn't plot, character, or setting. It's the dynamic. It's how the characters will end up talking to each other. It's a little like banter, but with substance.

Because of the development that's gone into their story - including heavy plotting and worldbuilding - in my mind, I think that I have a dynamic where I can throw just about anything at them, good or bad or ridiculous, and have it bounce around the dynamic to give me something cool.

Dynamic is like a machine that generates compelling moments almost on its own.

Does anyone else feel that way? I'm probably not being clear, but I want to see what others have to say about this.

 

[FifthView]

Lately, my sense of dynamic has shifted into a better direction.

Maybe previously, I focused too much on having characters in an interesting life situation. This situation might include—almost always did—a particular relationship to the world they happened to occupy, but this could mean the society and other characters around them or just the world more generally. The "dynamic" I thought I wanted was this conscious awareness of dislocation, as if some "true" world existed for them elsewhere, a paradigm not yet emergent, and they were the sort of fish out of water still in search of a home lagoon.

I still look for that. But I don't think this is what keeps me writing a particular story. I mean, I've not kept writing so many things even though I have casts of characters and their local worlds accumulated now from many past story concepts still floating around in my head. I still like those so-called "dynamics." But they don't need to be written, not enough for me to actually write them out; at least, they alone are not enough. They can exist in perpetuity within my brain until my brain is dead, and still feel whole, not requiring the writing out.

The new dynamic I've been discovering over the last year may be difficult for me to describe. I can offer a picture of before and a picture of after.

Before, those interesting characters and relationships to the world...just drifted. I could write four or five chapters without much happening, although these chapters were illustrating a character, the character's world, and the character's relationship to that world. Elements of the plot were being introduced, but there wasn't much urgency. It was almost like a still life—but one captured by a running film camera. I found the things I was writing to be interesting but not very moving, even so. Not moving for myself, and I'd bet not moving for anyone reading it, although of course I'd've had to finish writing and hand it off to a reader before I could know that for certain.

I recently began reading something that seemed to encapsulate my own problem. From chapter to chapter to chapter to chapter, a character was having conversations with various individuals—basically, with a new set of individuals for each chapter—and although these conversations illustrated much about the character, other characters, the world and his situation....it was a holding pattern. Not much developed. The character basically moped through the whole thing, reacting to something that happened at the very beginning of the novella, unchanging, and each new conversation was an occasion for this. His situation didn't change much, his mind didn't change much, very little new significant information was offered to me....blah. Yes, there was a plot, I knew, but there was a lack of urgency, an absence of a dynamic situation.

A dynamic situation. Constant changes. A world alive, and a character just as alive—This description might approach that feeling of dynamic I'm now experiencing. The practical difference involves my approach to chapters. I feel a character's whole world and the character himself must be significantly different by the end of a chapter. Every chapter. There has to be some sort of upheaval, some sort of unexpected (for the character) re-orientation, and/or cracks in the universe he inhabits that lets something into the world that alters that world irrevocably. I feel this must be constant.* The dynamic is dynamism. Dynamicism? Dynamics? I don't know the best word or description for it. I only know that, if this doesn't happen by the end of the chapter, then I'm doing the chapter wrong and something necessary is missing.

This has something to do with my formerly loved "dynamic" mentioned at the beginning of this comment. The character, the world, the character's relationship to the world (including, again, various other characters), seem like prerequisites. But there's something more in the relationships between these—and the plot—that is required, and....

Because of the development that's gone into their story - including heavy plotting and worldbuilding - in my mind, I think that I have a dynamic where I can throw just about anything at them, good or bad or ridiculous, and have it bounce around the dynamic to give me something cool.

...this doesn't describe it for me personally. I don't feel I can throw just anything at them. I've tried, hah, so many times, trying to break that still life that I always kept getting and experiencing before. What I throw at them has to trigger upheaval, reorientation, a change in perceptions whether these are negative or positive changes. It has to feel fated per the parameters of the story—but not, obviously, to the characters unless I'm setting up a future shattering of perceptions for the character.

*Edit: And by constant, I mean even throughout the chapter, not only as some sudden shift near the end of the chapter. A character alive within that world that is also alive, altering, shifting, in motion. But one of the better consequences of this new approach for me is a greater focus on things within the chapter: an arrow has been launched with the launch of a new chapter, and it must land by the end of the chapter.

*Edit#2: And so, to more directly address your question,

Q: At what point do you know you have a story worth pursuing?

A: It's when I have that quiver of arrows. I want to shoot each one, I know. I want to watch and develop its arc—write that arc. I want to see it land. When I have those arrows in my quiver, I know I want to write it.

 

[Night Gardener]

At What Point Do I Know I Have a Story Worth Pursuing?.... when it haunts me.

When I'm still thinking about it, even while focusing on other things. When I'm not thinking about my WIP at all, It creeps into focus like a specter.

If I vowed to never put pen to paper again, I could not banish It from my thoughts completely. In that regard, I feel it *must* be written. My subconscious will not let It go. Or It will not let go of my subconscious.

I can't quite articulate Why I think it should be written. These are existential questions I'm asking through the very creation of these characters, and their answers throughout the novel are but a thought-experiment in motion. I don't think my questions to the Universe are even all that original. I hope the answers, however, are.

I think my characters themselves are haunting and terrifying and beautifully complex. I can imagine all of their dreams, nightmares and true intentions. It's a Constellation of thoughts, in a vast cosmos of ideas. The dynamics of their interactions are mercurial. I want readers to keep reading because they keep unraveling their own assumptions and deductions.

It might help to say that my work bends towards intrique, conspiracy. Myth, legends and lies. (And Hitchcock-worthy plot twists, I hope. ) It's dark without pretense. The book will have horrific moments. Terrible revelations. It's by nature, not so much by deliberate design.

I think those dynamics are worth pursuing.

 

[skip.knox]

I've written a bunch of stories. Only one got abandoned, for two reasons. One, I never could get a clear view of what was supposed to happen. All I had was the setting. Two, I had already decided to work on a different story, the one that became Goblins at the Gates, and I made a choice.

As for the others, I don't know about dynamics; I simply had a story idea and wrote it to completion. I couldn't bear the thought of walking away. Was it worth pursuing? You'd have to ask my thirty-seven readers about that!

 

[Miles Lacey]

I know when I have a story worth pursuing the moment the story won't leave me alone no matter what I do. My work in progress has been playing in my head for years now and although I have changed many aspects of it the basics have always remained the same.

 

[skip.knox]

I'll flip the question. How do you know when a story is *not* worth pursuing? When it's worth abandoning? Or, let us be kinder, ought to be set aside?

I note that for all of us, so far, the measure appears to be entirely without objective measure. I'm not sure we absolutely know one way or the other. Maybe we simply give up on the thing, or really do abandon it in favor of some other story that catches our heart.

 

[ravenowl]

For me writing a story always means something is happening. Dialogues can be useful, relationships deepen character but if my characters just kind of hover without getting their skates on to act, there is no story.

I use a very simple 'formula' to test my story (I only write genre, so how or even if this would apply to other types of fiction, no idea). It starts with who is the protagonist and what is the event that kicks her into action and pushes her into making a decision (which leads directly to the story question). But can she achieve her goal when antagonist threatens X? The last bit points at the climax. If I cannot identify all of the elements, protagonist or antagonist, no story question or no climax, then its back to my drawing board because the story is still missing vital components.
(BTW the idea for this comes straight from a book that I can highly recommend, Deborah Chester The Fantasy Fiction Formula, straight to the point, practical and well worth reading).

 

[skip.knox]

True, and Chester's book is a good one. Maybe I'm over-interpreting Devor's original post, but sometimes all those objective elements can be in place, but the author simply isn't feeling the story. That's what happened with Trecastra, my abandoned story. Now, this was years ago and maybe if I took another look I'd be able to identify missing pieces, but memory says not. It's just that it didn't feel like a story, in some ill-defined but undeniable way. Terribly unsatisfactory, I know, but there it is.

And, for me at least, the feeling that the story is worthwhile is absolutely vital to get me through the doldrums, the frustrations, the self-doubt that invariably accompany the work. The mechanics are necessary, but not sufficient.

The tricky bit comes during the doldrums. Am I feeling discouraged, or am I trying to make a story that isn't worth the time? One way to know, I suppose, is to finish a story that turns out not to be worthwhile. Get the thing done, look at it, and know that it can neither be improved nor published--at least not without a complete rewrite, which then make it a different story. If I do that (which I hope I don't!), then maybe I'd be able to give at least one useful reply to Devor's question.

 

[FifthView]

I've written a bunch of stories. Only one got abandoned, for two reasons. One, I never could get a clear view of what was supposed to happen. All I had was the setting. Two, I had already decided to work on a different story, the one that became Goblins at the Gates, and I made a choice.

As for the others, I don't know about dynamics; I simply had a story idea and wrote it to completion. I couldn't bear the thought of walking away.

I'll flip the question. How do you know when a story is *not* worth pursuing? When it's worth abandoning? Or, let us be kinder, ought to be set aside?

In almost all cases for me, I've abandoned a story before even writing one word of the draft. Occasionally, I've written an opening paragraph or four, but this is as good as having never written one word. And these are more the case of "setting aside" than entirely abandoning. There was my last NaNo project, for which I'd written almost 25K words—definitely a case of setting aside, that one.

I've never understood the impulse to write the whole thing out no matter what. At best, I think that may be good advice for the beginner who will learn much from completing bad first attempts—I am one of those beginners, more or less, so this is the sort of thorn that stabs me with every abandonment. But that's a bit of superego interference, since this advice, which I've given to others also, is an outside rule presented objectively. It doesn't actually affect that sense of story-unworthiness.

My mind has been returning to that issue of change, change throughout a story, as a word to describe dynamics, and an old post I made concerning that sense of change, which I cannot now find but remember somewhat. The beginning conceptual phase for a story often involves key features for the world, characters, initial circumstances, and maybe even a final outcome. Perhaps a few key events. A picture of these things. In the conceptual phase, these are unmoving, unchanging things. I have the still life, the picture, and I like what I have.

But we may be afraid to break those things. For me at least, this is the case, or how I feel at the beginning. Okay I have all these things, and I love them. But I can't see them altering—these are the things I love! A story requires change, breakage. And this is where I'll often give up on a story—let's say, set it aside—because although I love these things, I can't see them in a dynamic situation, or being combined in circumstance involving change and alteration. I don't know the parameters for alteration. I can imagine a sort of drift, these characters drifting through this plot in this world; but, something's missing.

It's moving chess pieces about on a board, and ultimately it's boring to me.

Even if I do have a sense of superficial change—these squares on the chessboard allow for movement, whether in the plot or a character arc—I'm not terribly compelled to follow those patterns. I might be very interested in a few major plot points and all the characters as originally conceived; but all that interstitial stuff? If I have no concept of each move leading to those plot points or Significant Events, then I have no interest in them, and because they are a significant portion of the writing I'll be doing...meh. Especially if I suspect—and here, it's a knowing—that a reader reading through whatever I might stitch together will react with as big a Meh, I'm all for abandoning the project or setting it aside.

I have to be as interested in each move as I am in the whole pictures I first conceived, or there's no point in continuing.

 

[FifthView]

Because of the development that's gone into their story - including heavy plotting and worldbuilding - in my mind, I think that I have a dynamic where I can throw just about anything at them, good or bad or ridiculous, and have it bounce around the dynamic to give me something cool.

So to follow up on my comment to skip.knox ... and despite having already written that I disagree somewhat with this statement ,,, I do wonder whether we are on the same page here.

Having all that initial stuff, the plotting and world building, seems like a prerequisite for me even if those things can seem like a still life at first.

Maybe this is a difference between having those ideas in the abstract and having a desire to share those with readers.

In the abstract, I love them when I have them before beginning to write—but do I really love them? Merely filling out the picture for a reader can be terrifying because yanking these abstractions down to the material world, bringing them to life, may appear to threaten a destruction of the purity of those abstractions! If I loved them, then this should be no issue. I'll want to bring them to life for a reader.

In other words, part of the joy I've been experiencing with my new sense of dynamic is this effort to bring those abstractions down to reality for the reader. The world, the characters, the plot are all abstractions at first; but I have the opportunity to materialize them for the reader step-by-step, and if I do that gradually but pointedly—avoiding the straight-up, on-the-nose telling—this forces me to consider ways for doing this. The end result may be, hopefully, a sense of dynamics for the reader who is experiencing these changes in perception as I unfold character, world, plot. And these things do change by necessity as they are brought into friction. They are no longer isolated ideals.

 

[Devor]

So for the article that went live today, when I first outlined it I was planning something a little closer to a listicle (never a true listicle, mind you). When I changed it at the last minute I posted this trying to get my thoughts together. We haven't really discussed dynamics much, at least not from quite the same perspective. Even my thoughts in the article are still a little underdeveloped by my own standards.

I'll have more time tomorrow to continue thinking about all this.

 

[FifthView]

Devor

I would only add something I may have not made clear in my thinking:

The depth of knowledge and understanding we have for those initial things is significant. Sometimes, the broad abstractions are all we have, and so when it comes time to unfold these for a reader and explore them ourselves, we are left with very little. The more we understand these, with depth, the more we have to explore, and this gives us great fodder for all those interstitial steps. So I was thinking along these lines, also, when I said I thought maybe we are on the same page vis-a-vis that bit I quoted. With that much fodder, we can "throw just about anything at them" and still have it work—although for me I think the point is more to throw the right things at them to allow for the unfolding we have in mind.

 

[Devor]

With that much fodder, we can "throw just about anything at them" and still have it work—although for me I think the point is more to throw the right things at them to allow for the unfolding we have in mind.

Ahh, see, part of my discussion here is shaped on fanfiction. There's a lot of short random fanfiction about Ladybug, and the dynamic really does hold up for just about anything, at least for a scene or two. I guess I meant that phrase as a way of testing the dynamic more than I did about saying "We can write a novel where the dynamic never changes and I throw random things at them without thinking about a coherent plot."

 

[FifthView]

Ahh, see, part of my discussion here is shaped on fanfiction. There's a lot of short random fanfiction about Ladybug, and the dynamic really does hold up for just about anything, at least for a scene or two. I guess I meant that phrase as a way of testing the dynamic more than I did about saying "We can write a novel where the dynamic never changes and I throw random things at them without thinking about a coherent plot."

Mostly I wasn't thinking in terms of plot, or not only, but also in terms of how things like character and world elements are presented.

To use an example, early exercises can help us come to understand a character better, and writing random scenes or even using a Q & A process, can allow for testing out the character. This is a lot like throwing just about anything at them. But something like that seems to occur during early drafts, too, at least for me. It's just that a lot of the things I throw at them, in my mind, are ruled out, either almost immediately before writing those things or as I begin to write and see it's just not quite right.*

So when I mentioned "throwing the right things at them to allow for the unfolding we have in mind, " I was thinking that first, I need to have a good idea of what I want to "unfold" for the reader, then I need to have some idea about the best way to create the situation that will allow for this. And I don't think there's always a perfect, ideal, single way to, for example, show that a character is uncomfortable when visiting a foreign place. There are different approaches that might work more or less equally well. But if I already have so much pre-development of character and world in my head, then have sifted through all these understandings to determine what I really nead &/or want in the story—i.e., for the reader—then I have a range of options for doing this that I would not have if I begin the writing process with only vague or limited understandings of world and character.

This process is a little murky, because sometimes I'm trying to show multiple things at once while staying true to character, world, plot, pacing, etc. So I do think that there is a more limited range of what I can throw at the character than "anything goes." While having a range of options, I'm at the same time limited because I'm approaching those things with a goal in mind to unfold certain things for the reader.

I don't know to what degree this consideration addresses dynamic. You have focused on character dynamics, and I'm thinking of things like Star Trek or Bones or various other long-running television shows and movies that are episodic in nature. With a known set of characters, there are prefigured dynamics between characters and/or based on the various known natures of these characters, so lots can be thrown at them over the duration of those series without ruining the dynamic. The example of using fan fiction ties into this sort of dynamic.

But what about creating an entirely new cast of characters, a new world, etc., for a reader?

I think there's something in the dynamic of that world as well as the characters, and the characters' interactions with that world. We see this in those episodic shows also. For instance, the world of Star Trek or of The X-Men is very important to the dynamics of those shows.

I've been using the word "unfolding" because I think that creating an interesting dynamic from the start for an entirely new set of characters in a new world will involve the ways all the elements are unfolded for the reader. An extremely negative example I recently experienced: the pilot episode of the SyFy series Van Helsing. I would rate that episode a 1 out of 10. I forced myself to get through it. Characters in an unknown world who themselves were unknown to me were thrown together and reacted to one another in blunt ways—fire fights, hateful speech, betrayals—and the various situations came out of the blue. None of it had any depth. I could work to ascribe depth—doing the job of the writers and director—but I'd quickly had too much of watching cardboard characters being made "alive" [scare quotes on purpose] via slapped-on conflict and action.

 

[FifthView]

Ah, haha, I'd left an asterisk in that last comment but didn't follow through.

*Sometimes the "not quite right" is due to my own inability to do what I had in mind. I currently have a hard limit on what I'm capable of conveying that I don't discover until I try. [Edit: I mean, not so much what I'm wanting to convey, but how I'm attempting to convey it.] And I don't sweat it too much, usually, but take a different path, given that there might well be a few different ways to achieve what I want to achieve vis-a-vis what I'm trying to "unfold" for the reader concerning the character or the world.

 

[Devor]

Okay, so shelving the fanfiction for a moment, let me talk about my Smughitter WIP that I'm extremely excited about, and how I worked out the dynamics for it, and you can decide how close we are to talking about the same thing.

A while ago I had this notion for a sprite bountyhunter that stripped his targets of pride in exchange for gold... which quickly then became magic. I wrote a few paragraphs, and they didn't work. I shelved the writing and listed it as a column in my excel spark file. Smughitter, sprite turns pride into magic, along with a handful of notes, like names and target ideas.

The dynamic when it was just Haifen and a target wasn't one I could play with. I thought maybe it could be a series of super-short stories where he did funny things to humiliate his victims. I had a list of victims that covered everything from smug knight to ghosts that are immune to a multi-target city council to another sprite. But it ultimately felt like a boring formula, and the "mind of a predator" bounty hunter didn't give me a lot to work with. Maybe somebody could've made it work, but it wasn't me.

After I started writing the Ladybug fanfiction, I knew I wanted a story that came closer to the dynamic between those two characters, in particular where the two characters have this fun romantic banter while they are fighting the villain. So I went back to Smughitter, and I gave him some romantic opposition - Aliffe Vengekeeper, another sprite who's been tasked with stopping him.

So I tinkered with this idea in the back of the mind for a while. It wasn't enough of a dynamic for them to be antagonists who like each other. The badboy romance, outwitting and seducing the dumb cop that can't catch him, that whole thing wouldn't work. He couldn't be the bad boy - he had to have real redeeming qualities. And she couldn't be the dumb cop who fails to catch him - she had to be more than that.

Plus, uhh, I like epic stories.

I knew I had it when a scene came into my head. He's hitting these smug targets to raise magic - what does he need magic for? Returning the sprites who trapped somewhere. Rebuilding their fallen, lost homeland. Opening some kind of a gate. Something like that. So the scene I had imagined:

~~~

During the fight, Haifen uses a fetters jinx to trap Aliffe and approaches while she's unable to move.

Aliffe: You've won, you bastard.

Haifen: I didn't win this. You did. I didn't bring enough magic to finish the curse now that I've jinxed you.

Aliffe: Whatever you're going to do to me, do it quickly.

Haifen: In about two minutes I'll be over there making sure you're safe until the jinx fades. I took a vow to protect our people, and you're just doing your part to do the same. But most of our people are trapped. And with a few more victims I'll have enough magic to bring them back. I can bring you home, Aliffe. Isn't that what you want?

Aliffe: I'm going to stop you, Haifen. I won't let you leave your victims across the city and make these humans afraid of our people. You're going to undo everything I've worked for to bring us peace since our homeland fell, all in a dumb ploy that will never work... I WILL STOP YOU! But if you manage to do the impossible, if you can get the gateway open.... yes, I WANT TO GO HOME!

~~~

This, to me, is a compelling dynamic that can drive the entire story. For the plot and worldbuilding there's so many things to do with it. Like, what part did each of them play when their home fell? And what have they done since then? What happens if the city does start to turn against them? Who are these villains that destroyed their home? How does Haifen pick his smug targets? There's just so much here to play with, coming from the nuances implied in this short little dialogue. But the way the characters will interact with each other, that's where the gold is.

The dynamic here, to me, is just incredibly strong and exciting. It's easy to see how the characters might interact in almost any situation, plot twist, or filler problem. The tension between them, all coming from the plot and the worldbuilding, is just so rich.

That to me is a dynamic. It's this system that you build into the story that just kind of auto-creates the page by page tension as chapter by chapter you toss things at it.

Does that make any sense?

 

[Svrtnsse]

I've started, and given up on, a fair number of stories.
Early on I just started writing, and after a while I discovered the story wasn't going in the direction I wanted, or I got bogged down in details that I couldn't see had anything to do with where I wanted to go.

These days, I'm outlining a lot more, and I've begun giving up on stories at this stage already when I feel they don't work. In recent years, the only story I've given up on after outlining it was the one I begun for NaNo two years ago. That's still a story I'd like to get back to, but I have to figure out what it really is about first.

When to decide I have a story worth pursuing though?
It's difficult to put into words, but at some point in the process the mess of ideas and concepts reaches a critical mass of some kind. It's no longer just a bunch of cool images and interesting situation, but an actual story. It gets real, so to speak.

But that doesn't answer the question? Just because it's a story doesn't mean it's worth pursuing, does it?
Probably not.
It means I'm a lot less likely to give up on it if I start writing it though. That in itself is also worth something.

One thing I learned from writing my first novel was that even if I wasn't overly excited about it when I began writing it, I became very attached to my characters as the story began. This in turn has given me the belief that once I have a proper story, it will be worth telling. Getting to the point where I have a story though, that's... tricky.

 

[FifthView]

Does that make any sense?

That does make sense, and I think we aren't too far off in our sense of dynamic.

For me, there are at least two issues we are considering, roundabout.

First, there is the dynamic we feel inherent in the source material, as writers. This makes the story "worth writing," and/or excites us about the story.

Second, there is the dynamic we can "concretize" or write into a story, for the reader, that the reader will experience. Or so we hope.

On some level, the one affects the other.

For me, having that source material in my head isn't quite enough. I must feel it's translatable, communicable. More than that, I have to feel my exploration of all the bits and pieces of the original source material—the things that, coming together, create that dynamic—will not only be fun for me as I write but can also be compelling for a reader when translated into a story format. Put crudely: The source material is enough to populate a story with compelling scenes and chapters, especially keeping in mind the fact that I'll need to avoid simply quickly telling all these bits and pieces but will have to show them in an organic way.

So there are two considerations that are inseparable for me. I must look forward to miring myself in all the interwoven parts, or else I'm going to find the process of writing the story too damn boring. But I must also feel that this mire isn't going to be boring for the reader; it's not mire but dynamics for the reader. When these two conditions are met, then I feel the story is worth the effort of telling. Lately I'm thinking that this challenge of mucking about in the mire to translate the mire to a dynamic reality is also a part of what gives me motivation on a day by day basis—it's not mucking, really, but exploration, or adventure, on my side of the author-reader equation.

This, to me, is a compelling dynamic that can drive the entire story. For the plot and worldbuilding there's so many things to do with it. Like, what part did each of them play when their home fell? And what have they done since then? What happens if the city does start to turn against them? Who are these villains that destroyed their home? How does Haifen pick his smug targets? There's just so much here to play with, coming from the nuances implied in this short little dialogue. But the way the characters will interact with each other, that's where the gold is.

So all those questions you raise seem to me to be arising from that fertile source material, the mire, that you can explore as you write it. But to me, the dynamic isn't only the way the characters will interact. Or let's put it another way. The world around them, including their history in that world (which is another part of the world building) is a part of that dynamic. To see this clearly, take your two characters and put them in New York City while removing all vestiges of your created world altogether. Does the dynamic still exist between them?

Edit: You kinda addressed that last question already, ah.

The tension between them, all coming from the plot and the worldbuilding, is just so rich.

That to me is a dynamic. It's this system that you build into the story that just kind of auto-creates the page by page tension as chapter by chapter you toss things at it.

So....heh. I guess this is where we basically overlap. I have felt that maybe you tend to focus on the characters and the dynamic between two characters as being The Dynamic (tm), even though here you mention how the plot and world building ..."feed into?" that dynamic. Whereas perhaps I don't see these factors as being separate considerations, really, for conceiving of a dynamic for a story.

 

[Devor]

So .... dynamics are like a system. You add or remove an element - maybe it's a character, maybe it's the "fallen homeland" backstory element in my story, or something else - and the whole system changes to incorporate this new element (you can see from my post above how the dynamics changed with the different elements in my Smughitter concept). The challenge is to kind of add or remove elements until the dynamic works out as something that feels fresh and different. And if you add something that doesn't either bounce on the dynamic (which is what you do with a chapter) or change the dynamic (which is what you do when you design the novel), then it probably doesn't belong.

Does that work as a working definition for discussing dynamics?

I suppose that makes the thread title wrong, as it isn't an element but the interplay between elements.....

... man, I hate when discussions turn mechanical and taxonomic, but sometimes it can't be helped.

 

[FifthView]

So .... dynamics are like a system. You add or remove an element - maybe it's a character, maybe it's the "fallen homeland" backstory element in my story, or something else - and the whole system changes to incorporate this new element (you can see from my post above how the dynamics changed with the different elements in my Smughitter concept). The challenge is to kind of add or remove elements until the dynamic works out as something that feels fresh and different. And if you add something that doesn't either bounce on the dynamic (which is what you do with a chapter) or change the dynamic (which is what you do when you design the novel), then it probably doesn't belong.

Does that work as a working definition for discussing dynamics?

I suppose that makes the thread title wrong, as it isn't an element but the interplay between elements.....

... man, I hate when discussions turn mechanical and taxonomic, but sometimes it can't be helped.

I think that's pretty good.

I have been spending a lot of of words trying to address something of the ... meta? nature, or what I see lurking behind the question, and maybe I've bounced around in unclear ways to get to this point of considering the whole system together.

But I've also been thinking of dynamics in terms of the process of translating that system into a written story, approaches toward bringing the abstract story elements together in a compelling way for readers, and I've been wondering whether these approaches ought to be considered a part of what defines "dynamics," also. Not just the elements of a system, and not even the system considered as a whole in the abstract, but how that system is "unfolded" or presented to the reader.

This turns on that two-part distinction I wrote above. We may have the source material in our heads, but we have to translate that into the parts of a story, and maybe the way we go about doing this will lead to a sense of a dynamic system for a reader or won't.

This may be a much murkier area than what we've hitherto survived during the course of this thread, hah.