Trialectic?

[Mad Swede]

In another thread skip.knox wrote the following:

The thread here reiterates for me the dialectic between discovery and planning. Plot drives setting and setting drives plot, and character informs both and is in turn informed by both. Trialectic?

And this for me raises an interesting question. How do we set up our stories? I suppsoe you could divide this into several sub-questions, along the following lines. Do we use the plot to drive the setting or do we use the setting to start the plot? Or do we start with our characters and an event in their lives, and then use this to kick off both the plot and the setting around it all? Or is it some combination, the trialectic as skip refers to it?

I've never given it much thought when I set out to write a story. I just think the story through then write it down. The combination of characters, setting and plot just seem to be there, without me having to deliberately think about it. This might be because so many of my stories build on things I've seen and done, but then again it might not be.. No, I don't know how it works for me...

But what about the rest of you? How do you set up your stories before (or during) writing them?

 

[Insolent Lad]

I can say I've never come up with a plot without first having a character to build it around. Only then can I figure out something for them to do.

 

[Ban]

I have tried other ways, but when it comes to stories and short stories I've succeeded at finishing, the dynamic between plot and world is like the Caduceus. One snake crawls upward and the other does so in parallel until at the end I have concocted a developed plot mirrored or backed by a developed world. It is all incremental and iterative, and thus rather inefficient and slow. The characters exist somewhere between. Perhaps they are the staff itself. The whole process is one of pantsing, although I do often trace a possible path forward, which a part of me instinctively strives to diverge from the moment it has been laid out.