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Jul - General Chat - Writers! How dost thou write? New poll - New thread - New reply
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RahanAkero

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Posted on 05-18-10 09:57:50 AM (last edited by Xkeeper at 05-18-10 12:29 PM) Link | Quote
Hi, everyone. I'm doing a final paper on... well, writing. And it'll be submitted by the time everyone sees this. But, I figured I'd throw out the question for discussion: For those of us who do fiction... how -do-you do it?

As in, when you set out to write a new story, how do you come upon the characters, setting, and story?

INSERT IRC LOG EXPLAINING MY APPROACH HERE:

[06:26] Rahan> yeah, this has stopped being a paper and started being a ramble on how I write.
[06:26] Rahan> but fuck it, I had to read Patricia Hampl ramble on about reading about other people talking to people about how they write.
[06:27] Rahan> I'm just taking three steps out of the equation.
[06:30] Rahan> long story short: Characters spring to mind, and I explore what they're like. Exploring what they're like reveals their world to me, because where you live shapes who you are.
[06:30] Rahan> Once I have a world and characters, I put it down into text and find out wtf happens and how they interact.
[06:39] Rahan> Not even so much as create a character, but create a role. Like... what would it be like to do a noir story with a frail main character?
[06:40] Rahan> With some exploration, you start figuring out what makes him frail -- maybe he's really underweight, and has brittle bones. Great. What does he do for a living? Oh, he's a bartender. Where does he live? ... in the bar's attic. The guy that runs the bar adopted him when he was little, and that's where he's always been.
[06:41] Rahan> (this is actually the evolution of one of my characters from "concept" to "person". :x )
[06:41] Rahan> Once the concept starts flowing rapidly, the ideas start ... creating themselves. Once someone's fleshed-out enough, then you already have a lot of details about the world they live in and what is likely to drive them as a MacGuffin.
[06:43] Rahan> (this might not make sense at all, but it does to me. >>; )

So... what do you guys do? D:

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Miasmir
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Posted on 05-18-10 01:41:48 PM Link | Quote
I suppose since I write mostly speculative fiction, none of this will come as a surprise.

I start with thinking about a world. What makes it different from the one we're familiar with? What are the fundamental changes, and what do those changes imply? Inevitably changes to how a world works affect the relative values of resources. If it's easy for everyone to eat, what do people tend to find important now that survival doesn't depend on the same things? Did the world begin more like ours and change over time, or was it always this way, or something in between?

In a world like this, what kinds of societies would form? How do people interact with each other? What basic roles do people occupy in economic and social terms, and do those necessarily overlap? What are people in this world afraid of? What do people respect, what do they resent, from whence comes their happiness?

The answers to the last few questions vary from person to person, so each splits the vague category of people down into three or more bins. Ask enough questions and you can have hundreds of bins, some much more likely than others. It is from the strange combinations of attributes that the best characters are drawn. That's because it takes a lot more thought to justify why they have the traits that they do; it forces you to discover their backstory, what's important to them, why they do what they do.

When you've had a few characters up to this bare minimum of development, you write scenes for pairs of characters interacting. Let them do what they choose to do, meeting the other person in a variety of settings that make sense in their world. Use this to figure out who would get along with whom, and discover more about what makes your characters tick. This helps a lot in determining the pattern of interactions that makes up the detail of the story.

Only with this much in your arsenal can you begin to consider a plot. The driving force will be from what some characters find to be extremely important, or it will be from some aspect of the world that you had already determined, but now you have to think about how, given the characters you've found in the world you've made, you can get the story from point A to point B. A lot of the time this requires significant changes to point A and maybe even point B, because you can't make your characters do things they don't intend to do. You work backwards as well as forwards; what event could have caused the characters to take the last step to point B, but also, what are their likely responses to what happens at point A? The first few times you build this tree you will miss completely. You just have to try again until some sequence of events makes enough sense that you can start writing the story for real.

But even this much planning is easy for strong characters to defy. Characters will change, and so even when you thought you knew what they were going to do they'll do something else. Whenever this happens, you have to draw some more trees, based on your new knowledge of the character. Sometimes you have to backtrack and jump back dozens of pages to find a point from which it is still possible to reach the ending, and that can be extremely frustrating, but you have to keep at it. If you simply forge ahead with your original plan, the characters will seem thin and fake.

Even if you do all this, all you're guaranteed is a cool world with somewhat real characters and a consistent story. The true genius of storytelling is to make any of this convey emotions, which is all in the details and in which particular story tree you pick. There's not a lot anyone can tell anyone about how to do that.

So, yeah. That's how I do it. Every story so far is stymied at the 'characters change, so revise the plan, so characters change differently, so revise the plan, etc' stage. So take it with a grain of salt, I guess?
Gabu

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Posted on 05-18-10 02:32:52 PM Link | Quote
I just think about the general plot, then after that go deeper into the intricacies and explain why Bill did this while still withholding to the realisticness of the story.

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Taryn

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Posted on 05-18-10 02:33:59 PM (last edited by Terra at 05-18-10 11:34 AM) Link | Quote
I'm a n00b at writing. Usually, I think about characters and setting for a while, recycling and borrowing heavily from old, failed stories. Then, I just let the words flow out.

Of course, I tend to get stuck that way. I can be impatient about the whole thing.

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Posted on 05-18-10 04:05:04 PM Link | Quote
I tend to imagine/daydream more than I actually write.

I draw my inspiration from a few sources: what others have already done (movies, books, etc), the real world (middle ages, war zone, etc), or my dreams.

I normally place myself as the main character in the story. My mood at the time changes what kind of a person the protagonist is. She could either be a strong-willed fighter righting the wrongs of the world, a caring medic who heals the minds and bodies of others, or a wrathful/grieving psychopath who's out for revenge and stops for nothing. I imagine what kind of culture exists in the world, what kind of people I would meet, how they would react to my principles, what kind of trouble I'd get into, how I would get out of it, and so on.

I find it frustrating to write because my mind always races ahead of my fingers, and I find it difficult to draw myself back. I tend to skip large chunks of the story because of this, and only realize what I've failed to transcribe after I've exhausted my attention span.

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Hiryuu

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Posted on 05-18-10 06:12:02 PM Link | Quote
I do.

Dropped my stuff in the Writing forum and the SF forum.
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Posted on 05-18-10 08:27:56 PM Link | Quote
I dunno. I put pencil on paper, finger on keyboard, etc.

Mostly conmes from daydreams because bleh.

I like to draw some things that come to my head, but I never find them good enough to show so you guys will never see them :V

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Jul - General Chat - Writers! How dost thou write? New poll - New thread - New reply


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