Masterpiecing 7: And Now, Why?
Posted by The Unemployed Writer on February 5th, 2007
I had a dream once after working on a story for a couple hours before bed. My characters were all there, talking to each other, throwing around a football, eating chips and salsa, reading the newspaper….having a normal Sunday afternoon. I woke up and realized that I had no idea what I was going to do with all these interesting, yet wholly bored individuals. I had bored my characters to the point of harassing my dreams with their dull as dirt days. They weren’t boring. I’d seen to that. Each one had a nice little back story, likes, dislikes, allergies, childhood trauma. They were real people to me, with real problems (they weren’t really real people to me…let’s go ahead and clarify).
But, they were fully developed enough that I didn’t feel like I could write them into a situation that I didn’t know what they’d do. No situations though. So, what next? Write up some crazy shit for them to do.
The next step in the long and wondrous journey is to write up an outline for your story and your plot. Story and plot? Yes, they are entirely different. The story is what actually happens to your characters. Jimmy went to an island and got stranded. He was eaten by a tiger. The plot is the sequence of events with which you show what happened. Jimmy is a naturalist doing a fly by of an island just discovered near Africa. He jumps from the plane to reach the island. A tiger seeks his food in the jungle. Jimmy realizes he’s lost and seeks his own food. The tiger finds his food.
The rescue teams wonder how a tiger got on the island.
Jimmy’s in a tiger’s belly in both, but you actually described how it was shown in one, and why Jimmy was there. Plot throws in the motivation and the cause and effect relationships as you describe them in your story. If you’re not planning on ever mentioning that Jimmy was a TV naturalist, it’s not part of the plot, but if you casually allude to it at some point, it is. You’ll want to start with the story, which at this point you should already have a pretty good idea of.
What will your characters do? Now, what happens after they do it? Simple right. Ask the basic questions?
Who - You’ve done who. Your characters are fleshed out, dancing around in your dreams, reading the paper and drinking lemonade, waiting for your lazy ass to figure out the rest.
What - What’s going on? What are they doing in the story? Are they Ninjas or housewives? This is the story.
When, Where - Same question, pretty basic. Setting and timeline are usually built into your brainstorming early. You might decide to start messing with time though as you write the story, telling things out of sequence or flashbacking. Know this early, or you’ll confuse yourself.
Why - And this is your plot. Once you know everything else, who you’re working with, what they’re doing and when and where they’ll do it, you can start filling in the things that really matter like motivation and fallout. What happens to make Jimmy go to that island? Why is the tiger there? Why does Jimmy go into the jungle right away for food? These are questions that you’ll answer in your story, so they become part of the plot.
When you sit down to outline, start from the outside and work your way in. Work out a basic idea of what’s going on and then start filling in the details. it makes the process easier and usually helps to fill in and huge, monstrous plot holes that arise from writing straight through and forgetting that character X was in fact shot in chapter 2 and should still be in the hospital, but now he needs to be in Place Y and you don’t know how to get him there.