Losing the plot

[louiselux]

Arrgh, my story!

I do not know what is happening next in it, and it's extremely vexing and frightening. I just have to keep on going through this difficult part and hope it comes out right. I just rewrote a huge chunk of it today and don't want to have to backtrack again. I have all these words and I just need to jiggle them around till they make sense. Possibly I should go and do my ironing and not worry about it anymore tonight. *takes a deep breath*

Recently, I was telling emungerethat I never thought about transitions in stories and that they seemed to happen easily. Predictably, transitions are now laughing in my face and refusing to cooperate. How many times can I have a character fall asleep and wake up as a way to move the story forward? So far it's happened about four times. Gahh. Transition-fu, I do not have it.

Comments

[scribblemoose]

God, I know that feeling. Twice now I've decided to get around it by making each chapter exactly a day long. I could fool myself it's Structure, but bollocks is it, I'm just crap at transiting and dealing with the passage of time. And then I wonder why I have three chapters to fill before x happens, because I can't skip a day (sez my own stupid rules).

ArGH!!!!

Time to go look at those screencaps again. ^_^

(ps *pokes* You coming to squeefest, babes?)

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Squeefest, yes!! I need to sort that out. *sorts*

Ahaha, your structure problems sound exactly the same as mine, except I don't think mine is as planned as yours. I wonder why it's taking so long to tell the damn story then I realise I writing a minute by minute account of EVERY DAY.

[scribblemoose]

I wonder sometimes if it comes from the fangirl feelings. Because, honestly, I could spend hours imagining Gojyo and Hakkai doing the shopping together, or making dinner, or Gojyo staring at a bright red label on a coffee jar and trying not to think of his mother. It's that feeling of being with the characters, that's partly the drive to write in the first place.

Or, y'know, OCD. One or the other ;)

*random hug*

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Hee! I think you're right about it being something to do with loving the characters too much and wanting to obsessively watch them for hours and hours.

Hmmm, interesting. I wonder if that would make a good fic challenge idea? Like, writing some action that happens in real time? Or perhaps that is just too hard. Maybe it could be something like focussing on the seemingly boring minutiae of every day and making a story out of it.

[thawrecka]

Transitions are a pain. I start reading things and studying how they did transitions so I can steal their ideas when I have to write something that has a lot of them.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

They are hard. I used to never consider them but now I am not so blithe and carefree. I might copy your example and make a list of really great transitions that I can then steal.

[devikun.livejournal.com]

I'm fully struggling with this myself atm! And in such a small piece, it shouldn't be a problem but it is!

Usually I use thoughts to bridge gaps - the character is thinking something at the end of one section, and in the next is continuing the internal 'conversation' or sees something in current circumstances which link directly into the previous thought or action. But geh! Not this time! That approach is not working at all!

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Ohh, that's a nice technique. *hoards it*

Sometimes having no transition can work too, if you somehow tie it in later to the previous threads. Like, jumping to something apparently completely unrelated.

Hmm, inneresting.

[wedjateye.livejournal.com]

I don't always write in chronological order. Sometimes I skip ahead and write the stuff I know how to write and then come back and fill in gaps. At worst I end up with disconnected bits and no idea how to link them. More usually I find once I have some firm anchor points the rest falls into place.

That's back when I had time and enough sleep to actualy write, so I'm talking hypothetically here...

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, the baby-shaped time vortex

That is a good point actually. Maybe you don't need a smooth transition if the anchor points of the story are in place and are clear. Although now I'm not sure what I mean by anchor points - maybe time and place and strong characterisation?

[wedjateye.livejournal.com]

An anchor point for me is something I can visualise/imagine clearly. It seems to take on a reality of its own, so writing that scene is more like describing it rather than making it up. Hopefully that means that a good sense of time/place and good characterisation result.

Another way of expressing it is that the anchor points feel 'true' to me. I believe in them. So even if point B seems totally disconnected from point A that preceeded it, I know they are both true and it makes it much easier for me to work out how it had to have happened.

Most of my anchoring revolves around emotion - the emotional place the characters end up at. I still feel like a twat talking about something I don't actually do at present but I like talking about writing so I'm telling my inner critic to shove off. I haven't really written anything that revolves around action or, you know, much in the way of actual plot, so possibly I'd find transitions harder there.

And pretty much off topic (except it was obviously something you believed in and that made it work despite its improbability) how did the cow end up in the tree in Over the Moon? I think I meant to ask you in one of your memes and didn't actually get time to type the question. Did you have a back story you made up for that? Was it something you read about somewhere? Were you just comfortable writing it even if it could only be explained in a metaphorical way?

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

An anchor point for me is something I can visualise/imagine clearly. It seems to take on a reality of its own, so writing that scene is more like describing it rather than making it up.

I really like that idea and I've been thinking about it a lot in the last few days, as I'm in the middle of a story and I realised I did not have my anchor points sorted out! There were lots of things that were muddy and unclear, mostly in terms of plot. So maybe anchor points are plot points too.

Talking of which! This totally relates back to the cow in the tree. I think now that the reason it works is because I utterly believed in the cow in the tree and I know exactly how it got there! So there are small things in the story that reference that secret bit of authorial knowledge. Maybe this embedding it in the story is what makes the cow believable?

The cow was left there by a much bigger dragon, on its way to India, possibly to go and live with Kougaiji. It met Jeep and left it there for him, as a token of its affection. So, Jeep does know how it got there and there are small things in the story that suggest this. I did get the idea of an inexplicable cow in the tree first off, as a weird plot, and made the back story up while writing.

[wedjateye.livejournal.com]

Maybe this embedding it in the story is what makes the cow believable?

It almost certainly accounts for at least some of it. There is a different feel reading something improbable when the author believes it, as compared to when it is merely a convenient deus ex machina. That's how I knew you believed in the cow and why I was so curious about whether that belief sprang from backstory or not.

I imagine well written stories as being like an aerial view of mountainous terrain, where the low-lying areas are obscured by fog. The peaks are the anchor points. The back story is in the valleys. Even though the peaks may appear disconnected on cursory inspection, everything works because the author knows the entire landscape intimately.

Not every story is constructed like that, of course, but I prefer stories where not everything is spelled out.

One of the benefits I find in writing non-chronologically and with anchor points in mind, is that foreshadowing and coherency seem to take care of themselves.

[emungere.livejournal.com]

How many times can I have a character fall asleep and wake up as a way to move the story forward?

loll I thought you were doing it on purpose! I'm sorry for your transition woe. *pets*

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

I was so not doing it on purpose. *failz*

He is not falling asleep one single more time. Except after sex with vampire/ghost/something Hakkai. That might be okay.

[ajodasso.livejournal.com]

I hate it when that happens. The one I just recently finished, I ended up having to hack off the entire first scene and had a mild panic attack - thankfully, it all usually gets somewhere :)

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Yes! It's scary to hack up a story, but usually it comes right and parts do get recyled. I do feel like I'm shaking the words around in a big bag at the moment.

[kispexi2.livejournal.com]

It depends entirely on the way you're writing, but sometimes I find a change of POV helps with transitions. You can skip the passage of time without skipping meaning - especially if the change to another POV is meaningful. But I'm sure you know that and possibly aren't as free and easy with POVs as I frequently am. :-)

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Heh, I don't know about that! I do love having multiple and changing POVs, but this particular one is from one POV only. Which you think would be easier but actually is harder than I thought it would be.

[kispexi2.livejournal.com]

I think single POVs can be really hard if you're trying to tell more than one side of a story.

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

Transitions! (Imagine me singing that dramatically, to the tune of "Tradition" from Fiddler on the Roof)

We hates them, we does. In my Remix story I can't believe I wrote:

"Plot point plot point," he said the next day.

ARGH.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

*imagines*

Oh, the next day! Hee. It's a classic, you have to admit. It also means you don't have to painstakingly describe going to bed, pyjamas, dreams, sex, no sex, getting up, washing and dressing or breakfast.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Transitions are a pain.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

They hurt meeeee.

[toscas-kiss.livejournal.com]

I'm of the 'change POV' school too. I find alcohol also helps. :-)

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Like, getting drunk and then writing? GOOD IDEA.

[toscas-kiss.livejournal.com]

Weeeell, maybe not quite getting drunk, but I do find a certain amount of tipsyness makes porn scene writing a little less, erm, inhibited (and a little more giggly).

[new-kate.livejournal.com]

Confession of utter shame:

When I was struggling with a mammoth story I didn't really want to write, I came up with this crazy scheme for non-transitions. All you need for this is two sentences - one kind of relevant but unnesessarily thoughtful, and the other one that makes No Sense at All. Looks like it could mean something, except it doesn't, it's just endlessly mysterious. It could be the lines characters say, could be descriptions of settings, could be just totally random, like an off-hand in-text epigraph. Plonk one in the beginning of the scene and the other one in the end, and voila! They stun the readers and completely distract them from the lack of transition!