plotting

When Your Characters Have Minds of Their Own

February 2, 2019 By Jo Eberhardt 6 Comments

Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.

— Ray Bradbury

You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.

— Joss Whedon

I have a confession to make. I’ve been a geek for much, much longer than it’s been cool.

In fact, I’m a roleplaying game geek from way back.

I cut my storytelling teeth playing MERP, AD&D, Cyberpunk, Amber, World of Darkness, and many, many more games that will likely mean very little to anyone who isn’t also a roleplayer. And the lessons that I learned running and playing those games taught me more about how to tell a story than practically any other experience in my life.

So today I’d like to share with you how some of my roleplaying experiences relate to the interaction between character and plot. [Read more…]

Outlining for Pantsers

August 29, 2017 By Tracy Hahn-Burkett

That title doesn’t appear to make much sense, does it? You might be thinking, do you even know what those words mean? One is either a plotter or a pantser. If you’re a plotter, you outline. You like to know where you’re going before you set out on your novel’s journey. You may choose to turn right where your outline indicates you will turn left, but that will be a conscious diversion. Order. You must have order.

Pantsers, on the other hand, thrive on spontaneity and the unknown. If you’re a pantser, you just get in the car and drive. You introduce yourself to your characters and let them navigate; you allow yourself to become their instrument. Outlines are like nasal-voiced GPS programs constantly chirping reprimands at you each time you deviate from the pre-approved route. SHUT UP, they make you want to shout. Don’t bother me with directions. I will feel where I want to go.

Me? I’m a pantser. When I write, I always hope to find myself in The Zone, that place composed of buzz and bliss where I forget I’m typing and the words surprise me as they appear on the page, outcome unknown. What do you mean it’s 5:00? Wasn’t it just lunchtime? Whoa, did Sage just drop the key to the whole story in her admonishment to her sister? I didn’t know she was going to do that. Did Michael just die in that accident? Where did that come from? That’s not where I thought this was going, but it’s great. I’m going to follow this trail and see where it takes me.

I may sketch out a few guideposts in advance, maybe identify some oncoming trouble points, but overall, this is how I draft new material. When I complete a draft, I follow the advice of wise author and teacher Jenna Blum: I write a chapter-and-scene outline of the completed manuscript.

“But why outline when you’ve already written the book?” This is a valid question. Here’s why I do it: [Read more…]

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Storyboarding with Scrivener (or, A Love Affair with Virtual Index Cards)

July 30, 2017 By Gwen Hernandez

Whether you’re a plotter or a pantser—or neither—at some point in your writing process, you can probably benefit from a visual overview of your story. Scrivener’s Corkboard feature is here to help.

Pack up your paper index cards and colored sticky notes, and let’s go virtual.

Understanding Index Cards in Scrivener

Every file in Scrivener has an associated index card. That index card shows up in the Synopsis section of the Inspector (visible in all but the Snapshots and Comments panes), and on the Corkboard. You can use the index card to make note of anything you want—for example, the timeline, setting, characters—but for storyboarding purposes, it makes sense to include a brief synopsis of the scene.

index card in the inspector (win) — Windows

Viewing the Corkboard

To view the Corkboard in a Scrivener project, select any folder (or a selection of multiple files). If you don’t see index cards representing the documents in that folder, go to View—>Corkboard.

The Corkboard view only displays the top level within each folder, so if you have your scenes organized into chapter folders, all you’ll see when you select Draft is index cards for the chapter folders. There is a way around it, but this is one reason you might want to delay organizing your scenes into chapter folders until you are done with your first draft. For more on that, see this post about organizing your files.

Building Your Story in the Corkboard

Rather than adding new documents in the Binder, you can add them directly in the Corkboard. This allows you to create placeholder cards for each scene, add a synopsis, and then create another until you have your story plotted out.

You can even move cards around in the Corkboard to play with the order of your scenes. Here’s how to add additional cards.

1. Select any card in the Corkboard. (If you don’t have any index cards/documents in the selected folder yet, this will still work. Selecting an existing index card just lets you control placement of the new card.)

2. In the Corkboard footer, click the Add New Text button (see image below), or click the Add button (green + symbol) in the toolbar. A new card appears after the selected card.

A corresponding new document also appears in the Binder.

3. Type the name of the new scene and press Return.

TIP: You can also select a card (single click) and press Return to add a new card after/below it. (This works the same as selecting a document in the Binder and pressing Return.)

Corkboard annotated for adding a new card (mac) — Mac

Corkboard annotated for adding a new card (win) — Windows

Renaming a Document in the Corkboard

Double-click an index card’s title to change it. This changes the document title in the Binder too.

Adding Text to an Index Card

Double-click in the synopsis text area to add text. While the synopsis text section is active, you can use Tab to move through the cards.

TIP: Mac users, to force a new line within the text of the card, use Option+Return. Windows users can just press Enter.

Viewing the Associated Document

To view the document associated with a card, simply double-click the card’s icon (to the left of the title). Scrivener switches to the Editor to view the selected document.

Viewing the Corkboard in Split Screen [Read more…]

Sub-Plots and Story

June 3, 2017 By Jo Eberhardt

As I’ve been working through revision on my manuscript, I’ve been thinking a lot about sub-plots. Do I have enough? Too many? Do they work? Do they serve the story?

In working through the sub-plots in my own manuscript, and comparing them to sub-plots in some of my favourite books, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are three main types of sub-plots:

Character
Intersectional
Thematic

If I’ve missed any, feel free to tell me in the comments. These three, however, serve as a great starting point to determine whether a particular sub-plot serves the story, or whether it’s nothing but filler.

Character Sub-Plots

The purpose of a character sub-plot is to reveal additional information about a major character. Perhaps you’d like to show a different side of a character, or reveal information about their character that is pertinent to the actions they take during the course of the main plot. These sub-plots are the ones that turn the character from what I affectionately call a “character sheet with a gun” (often used amongst my circle of RPG-playing friends to describe a poorly created character) into a well-developed, multi-faceted person.

Let’s say, for example, you have a protagonist who is a hired assassin. He’s hired by an unidentified man to kill someone, but the job goes horribly wrong when it turns out the target is actually a vampire (because, why not?) and he shrugs off the bullet and swears vengeance on the hitman. The protagonist spends the rest of the story alternately fleeing from an angry vampire and trying to find out who hired him and why. In the end, he has to choose between cutting off the vampire’s head (thus completing his job) or letting the vampire live, and…. I don’t know, handing over the person responsible who hired him, or taking a contract on his previous employer, or simply checking himself into a psychiatric hospital in the hopes that the monsters won’t get him.

The point is that, during the course of that plot, we only see one side of the character — and in this case, he really is a “character-sheet with a gun”. Now, that’s all well and good if you’re writing a summer blockbuster where explosions and witty quips are (seemingly) more important than character development, but what if you want to show another side of the action hero?

Perhaps there’s a sub-plot where he promises his niece he’ll take her to her dance recital, but then he can’t make it because a vicious vampire followed him home. The sub-plot where he desperately tries to make it up to his niece, showing up backstage to her final performance, is completely unrelated to the main plotline, but it reveals a lot about who the protagonist is, deep down. And that’s going to make your story stronger.

Intersectional Sub-Plots

[Read more…]

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What Video Games Can Teach You About Storytelling

May 28, 2017 By Guest

Please welcome Fred Johnson as our guest today. Fred is an editor for Standout Books, where he helps authors take their manuscripts from good to perfect. He also writes fiction and poetry. You can follow Standout Books on Twitter.

I’ve long been interested in how video games are maturing as a medium—as a form, games are still very young (having existed for only a few decades) and have long been dismissed as juvenile entertainment. In the past few years though, this has changed—Team Ico paved the way with early PS2 titles Ico and Shadow of the Colossus for an early wave of indie “art games” such as Dear Esther, Braid, and The Stanley Parable. As a student trying to concile my love for books and narrative with my love for wasting time in front of games consoles, art games were the middle ground I’d been begging for. It’s a good time to be into video games: the medium is maturing with its audience, and is becoming more varied in the topics it approaches.

What Video Games Can Teach You About Storytelling

It wasn’t so long ago that the venerable and brilliant film critic Roger Ebert condemned video games as something that could never be art. His reasoning was that video games must be won—they’re competitive, points-based, and are… well, games.

Here, if nowhere else, Ebert was wrong. Games don’t have to be about levelling up, shooting bad guys, or amassing points—sometimes, they’re simply interactive experiences, and can tell incredible stories in a way that no other medium can.

Such games can teach us creatives a thing or two about how great storytelling relies on exploiting the medium you’re working with. Just as games rely on sound, vision, and interactivity, books rely on words arranged in a linear order. Writers don’t often think about how they can get the best from this limited form, but they should.

I’m going to look at three video games released in the past decade that I think have told their stories using innovative, unique, and startlingly effective methods that often rely on the kind of emergent, player-driven storytelling only possible in games. From there, I’m going to extract and distil any lessons that I think writers will find useful in crafting written stories.

So, without further ado:

Dark Souls (2011)

On the surface, Dark Souls looks like any other fantasy role-playing game. There are knights in armour, big monsters, fey women talking about prophecies… But scratch beneath the surface and you’ll uncover a fragmented, vague narrative that must be pieced together by the player. In this sense, the player is more of an archaeologist than a reader, tasked with piecing together clues to learn what your character’s role is in the game’s melancholic world.

As the name suggests, it’s a dark game, but it’s also remarkably intelligent. It explores some heavy themes: human frailty, nihilism, Nietzschean existentialism… and has been read as an allegory for overcoming depression and, conversely, for the futility of human endeavour. How does it manage this?

[Read more…]