Self-propelled Stories
May. 12th, 2005 06:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtranI've been thinking a bit lately about different ways of writing stories. There are some stories where you start off with a premise and some characters and basically just let them run. A good metaphor is something like a skyrocket in a fireworks display. As it sits on the ground, all the ingredients are packed inside, and, once you light you fuse, all you can do is stand back and watch. Then there are stories where the path the story takes is determined by external forces. The image here is more like a rubber duck in one of those rubber duck races. You plonk it down in the water and it pretty much goes whereever the river goes, give or take an eddy or two. (From time to time you might have to give it a prod to get it off the bank.) These are stories where there is something else, greater than the characters and the premise shaping events. It could be the author directly, it could be fate or prophecy or genre convention, it could even be larger and unexpected characters (nature, for example, or war).
I've always considered myself a "plan first" sort of writer. I tend to get certain scenes of a story first, often out of order, and then I'll try to find a plot that passes through all of them, preferably landing on a good ending. The thing is, if you want to have the story follow a certain path, you can do it with either the skyrocket or the rubber duck method. With the skyrocket, you need to line things up just so, predict how much powder to pack in, guess the wind, mix your chemicals to get the colours just right, and adjust your timings - then light the fuse and stand back. If you're lucky it will make the trajectory you want. With the rubber duck, you can either shape the river so the duck can only go the right way, or else spend the whole time prodding it whenever it goes of course. (The problem with this method is that, unless you're very subtle about it, either the river or the prodding soon become part of the story itself. Sometimes that's okay, for example if your story is echoing another story, or if the river or the prodding is meant to be part of the story, say because of fate or convention.)
I've realised now that I'm definitely a skyrocket-method writer. In combination with "plan first", that's a tough ask. With The Silver Bowl, a lot of the work in the various revisions has all been about changing the starting conditions - trying to find exactly the right pyrotechnics and the exact launch angle to use in order to get the flightpath I want. In some cases, I've had to move some of the targets because I haven't found a way that I can hit them all. In the other cases, I've abandoned potentially interesting versions because they weren't heading in the right direction. If I didn't have particular scenes in mind, this whole thing might be so much easier - but then it also wouldn't be as fun. Likewise, if I use the river method and force the story to go the way I want it to, it wouldn't satisfy me. It would be like playing mini-golf and digging a trench to guide the ball to the hole. So, now I'm back to mixing up the ingredients again, changing my characters, adjusting their trajectories... I've also got it now to the point where, when the first two characters meet, everything that happens next happens without my intervention.
I've always considered myself a "plan first" sort of writer. I tend to get certain scenes of a story first, often out of order, and then I'll try to find a plot that passes through all of them, preferably landing on a good ending. The thing is, if you want to have the story follow a certain path, you can do it with either the skyrocket or the rubber duck method. With the skyrocket, you need to line things up just so, predict how much powder to pack in, guess the wind, mix your chemicals to get the colours just right, and adjust your timings - then light the fuse and stand back. If you're lucky it will make the trajectory you want. With the rubber duck, you can either shape the river so the duck can only go the right way, or else spend the whole time prodding it whenever it goes of course. (The problem with this method is that, unless you're very subtle about it, either the river or the prodding soon become part of the story itself. Sometimes that's okay, for example if your story is echoing another story, or if the river or the prodding is meant to be part of the story, say because of fate or convention.)
I've realised now that I'm definitely a skyrocket-method writer. In combination with "plan first", that's a tough ask. With The Silver Bowl, a lot of the work in the various revisions has all been about changing the starting conditions - trying to find exactly the right pyrotechnics and the exact launch angle to use in order to get the flightpath I want. In some cases, I've had to move some of the targets because I haven't found a way that I can hit them all. In the other cases, I've abandoned potentially interesting versions because they weren't heading in the right direction. If I didn't have particular scenes in mind, this whole thing might be so much easier - but then it also wouldn't be as fun. Likewise, if I use the river method and force the story to go the way I want it to, it wouldn't satisfy me. It would be like playing mini-golf and digging a trench to guide the ball to the hole. So, now I'm back to mixing up the ingredients again, changing my characters, adjusting their trajectories... I've also got it now to the point where, when the first two characters meet, everything that happens next happens without my intervention.
