Writing - answers for puddingcat

[louiselux]

For puddingcat - and others, if interested, answers to your questions about how I write. I hope they're useful.

This describes how I think about story structure and also has some ideas about ways to practise writing, based on my own experience.



I don't know how to write; GCSE English was pretty basic really. And I have all these ideas in my head, backing up like a blocked toilet, and no idea how to do them justice! "Just write" doesn't help, because it feels like being told "just draw" - and results ar so much better when you know the general rules for sketching and composition and detail.

It's just a suggestion, but it might help to set yourself some achievable writing practise goals, such as writing flashfic or writing to the clock, to practise. I wrote a lot like that when I was first starting to write and I found it really useful and good experience. There was a community called contrelamontre which gave out a prompt and also specified the time allowed to write, anything from 20 mins to 2 hours. The first half of Ne Me Quitte Pas was actually written for that community, about three years ago, and then sat until I got round to finishing it. It's just a thought, but maybe we could set up some sort of Saiyuki-based community that gives out timed challenges like this? I’d quite like that. Would that be useful for you?

The annoying thing about writing is you have to do it a lot to get better. The more you write, the more you develop your techniques, until something that troubled you two years or a year ago is something you no longer even have to worry about because you can do it with ease. However, there will always be something new to struggle with. For instance, thinking of a plot to fill a 10,000 word story is now relatively easy for me, whereas three years ago I would’ve had very great trouble, and five years ago the notion was utterly beyond me and seemed impossible. I’m more assured in knowing how to introduce plot elements and also how to flesh out characters and give them depth. The things I struggle with now are, to give a few of examples, making the plot interesting and also improving my technical skill to be able to play around with viewpoint effectively.

Betaing for daegaer has taught me a lot, because pondering deeply on someone else's writing and, importantly, trying to explain what you liked and didn't, can sometimes hand you the tiny golden key to understanding. In her story, Bright with his Splendour, which I betaed, I had to have it pointed out that she'd used a certain structure based on threes and sevens. It opened my mind to possiblities in structure I hadn't previously considered and it's stuck with me years later.

So. How do *you* go about turning an idea into a story? Whatever you do works beautifully well :) What's the framework you use? Do you have an idea of what goes into each part before you start, or just a vague outline in ur hed, makin u cakll

I have read books and articles on how to plot, using various techniques, and have absorbed some ideas and the following is very loosely based on them. It can be useful to think of your story as having four stages:

Setup – setting the scene, introducing the characters. Often, I find myself going into the minutiae of every day life right at the beginning of a story and this really helps me focus and get a feel for the story, while bringing out details that start to build plot and set the tone.

Introduction of the problem – the ‘problem’ can be anything – and I define it as ‘what is going to be solved or is going to change by the end of the story?’ In Over the Moon there are two problems, introduced part way in: Gojyo wants Hakkai but doesn’t know what to do about it, and later, the cow in the tree and Hakkai kissing him. The cow in the tree is a superficial device that is intended to point the reader towards the deeper things going on between Gojyo and Hakkai. At least I hope it does. I don’t know why I chose a mystery falling cow. It just seemed right.

Action - where the protagonist battles to solve the problem. Using Over the Moon again (because I reread it only last night), this would be the section where Gojyo a) gets Jeep’s help and gives the cow a semi-decent burial in a ditch and b) later on gets drunk, which solves the immediate problem of Hakkai being missing and strangeness of the day.

Resolution – using Over the Moon again. the resolution involves tiddlywinks, Hakkai’s story and the eventual falling into bed together for sex that lasts approximately a minute. And I wish I'd thought of a better title for that story. Sigh.

So, this is one way to look at how stories work, and is a tool for analysis and planning, but I should confess it’s not something I generally use or think about when I’m in the middle of writing. The exception to this was Cupidity, which was denser and more complex and needed a lot of planning. My actual mental framework for a story is a lot less structured and more intuitive. In my mental map, stories generally exist as a whole, rather than me breaking them down into sections.

It's a process that could be compared to holding up a piece of knitting and looking for holes or lumps. Or perhaps feeling the knitting is a better analogy. For example, I might feel there's a hole in the story at a certain point, like some event needs to happen or we need to see an extra bit of internal thought from someone, or there is too much description and not enough dialogue. It's more about the texture of the story than anything else.

Stories generally start from a small idea or even a fragment of conversation. In Over the Moon the cow was in the tree and the rest of the story grew from thinking why it was there and what it might mean. I almost never have a full plot or an ending at the point of beginning writing. It helps me to get started by focussing on a small detail or scene. This is actually my usual method of beginning something, as if I can’t plunge into the main story until I’ve described what they’ve had for breakfast or what underpants they have on (underpants are important).

Or, in a less egocentric frame of mind, what sets the tone of a story? Do you decide ahead of writing that, for example Ne me quitte pas is going to be really, *really* intense and the-good-sort-of-painful, or was that an effect of the subject matter? Does humour insert itself regardless of your plans?

I got the initial idea for Ne me quitte pas and then, at the start of writing it, I knew the story would be very intense to write. I wanted to see what would happen when I took the characters that far. It was a very testing story to construct, because it had some important scenes that needed to work well, such as Hakkai’s return, and there was also the added problem of writing a Gojyo who is lonely and grieving.

The subject matter doesn’t necessarily inform the tone, though. My favourite writers reflect the fact that humour crops up everywhere, even in the darkest subject matter. However, consistant tone is important, I think. It helps the reader sink into a story.

Comments

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Ah, I'm glad you thought it was a good title. I always worry the my titles are terrible - sometimes naming something is the hardest part.

I'm glad you found it interesting - I don't talk or contemplate very often about my writing techniques, so it was quite useful to think it though.