Outlining/Planning

[Ophiucha]

I guess the way I look at it is if I have something like "he's going to get deported if he doesn't have a job", it takes away from what I want to focus on, what makes me care at all about this story: him and his life at his job (well, him and his life as a werewolf, really). I feel as though if I add in something about the threat of deportation, it's going to feel very... tossed in at the last minute, for the sake of it. If I make it the focus of my story, then I won't be writing the story I love, and really, I'll probably just bin it after a draft.

Oh, and I don't have any real problem with outlining. I just can't outline what isn't there yet. I always have to do this - eventually I come up with something that can linger safely in the background, accent the characters nicely without making me write about it in much detail, that supports the story enough, and I get by with it.

 

[pskelding]

Conflict is the heart of any story and all stories require it. Yes even those sappy romance novels revolve around conflict, mostly internal conflict but conflict none the less.

Michael Stackpole talks about this in his Secrets podcast and in his ebook 20 Days to a Novel. He uses triangles of conflict and layers them to build conflicts, plots and storylines of epic proportions. I use his method quit a bit and it helps me layer in subplots and involve secondary characters more than just having them "walk on" to do something.

My novel for Nanowrimo has 1 internal conflict for our main protagonist, 2 external conflicts - 1 against the antagonist and the army he is in and 1 against one of his fellow officers. But I've also involved that officer in a conflict with another officer all under a colonel which creates a whole other set of conflicts that show up as subplots and do impact the main protagonist from time to time. Then the men serving under our main protagonist have a set of conflicts with each other and our main protagonist who is their commander. Lots of good conflict to move our "good guys" forward while fighting the "bad guys" and throw in the odd critter and some wizards and I've got a good story to tell.

 

[Ophiucha]

I have read entirely too much pretentious literary fiction, and it makes it hard to write more typical fantasy. I am very fond of episodic stories, for instance, where there is an overlying theme to the novel, and some of the chapters may have their own plots - some may not, as well - but there isn't really a plot overall. And, of course, when it comes to really heavy, literary works, just spending a day in a man's head is enough to hold up a masterpiece. I imagine my problem is that those are the books I ended up really loving, but fantasy is where my thoughts linger. So I end up rewriting One Hundred Years of Solitude, except everyone is an elf.

As we have drifted grossly off-topic, I will include this bit in small text. A rather good example of something I love - not a book, this one, but a manga - is Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. It's about an android of sorts who works in a cafe in a post-apocalyptic, slowly flooding Japan. The story is about her meeting people, running the cafe, going grocery shopping, taking weekend trips to visit friends, and (as the title translates out to) going to Yokohama to shop. There are entire chapters without dialogue, just her putting away groceries. The characters grow - some, the humans, grow old, probably die - but the only thing that really dictates when the story begins or ends is the book ends, the two trips Alpha (the android) takes to Yokohama to go shopping. It's one of my favourite stories - better than many books, movies, and other comics I've read - but plot? Just living, really. They never answer many of the questions, like "what happened to the world that lead to its destruction?" which would be the obvious one. They just show this woman working, shopping, and hanging out with friends, and it is amazing.

Anyway, it's not like there aren't stories without plots, even conflicts, out there. It's just that very few of them are also high fantasy, or written in the past three decades. I imagine for my current project, I will include some sort of "end the world" plot of some sort, since themes of death and rebirth are really calling to me, and I can probably make the main character debate the benefits of ending the world. Maybe have an antagonist who wants to end the world - have the protagonist want to stop him/her - then have them, through their travels, see that the world is worth ending. Not sure what kind of antagonist I'd want, but it'd do for a first draft, I suppose.

 

[JCFarnham]

small update: I've outlined enough for perhaps 14,000 words so far, that's 4 chapters in my current arbitrary layout... soooo 10 more to get through until the 50,000 mark haha

I need to get a move on!