Writing Report February 27, 2021

There’s no single preferred much less “right” way of writing a story.

Some writers have one set pattern for everything they write, others have as many different methods as they do projects.

It doesn’t matter so long as the work gets done to the best of the writer’s ability.

So this post is of limited application, but since it’ll give an insight into the creative process (well, my creative process), here goes.

My current Work In Process takes place in a medium size town over the course of three months.  I’m literally going through events day by day, with some days packed with many incidents, others just short perfunctory mentions.

Because of the size and scope of the story, it involves a fairly large cast.  There are, without exaggeration, over 100 characters in the story, most having only small parts to play while others weave in and out of the narrative over the 90 some days events unfold.

I got the idea for the story over 13 years ago and have been researching / noodling ideas on it ever since.  My first problem lay in finding an angle of attack:  What triggers the inciting incident and what motivates the characters who do the inciting?

I realized simplistic character types such as “protagonist” and “antagonist” didn’t fully apply here.

I have a focal character, but he is somewhat passive (he has to be, because to become actively involved makes him a jerk).  I have a trickster character but he’s not really an antagonist; for all his flaws you kinda like him in a begrudging manner (and of all the characters in the story, he’s the one who’ll go through the most growth).

The biggest problem lay in that while motivating the inciting incident was tricky enough, finding a way to satisfactorily wrap everything at the end proved far more problematic.

For years I was stuck with an idea for an ending that seemed more and more petty and mean spirited each time I revisited it…

…but I couldn’t think of anything else.

I solved that problem by drawing up a list of things that would be found in this particular town to see if any would spark an idea and sure enough, one did.  When combined with a previously unfocused plot element it provided a big slam bang finale that didn’t violate the tone and spirit of everything that came before it.

(I’ve posted before on tone, and why finding the right one -- especially for a story like this -- is so necessary.  The revised ending preserves my tone without compromising the need for a satisfactory conclusion.)

When I finally began work in earnest on the story January 1st this year, I had the rough outline sketched in:  A beginning, most of a middle, and a firm conclusion for the end.

I also had tons of story points I had no idea how I’d fit into the final work.

Now, for some projects, you want to have a good, firm, well detailed outline:  A mystery or caper thriller, for example.

But this isn’t that kind of a story, and if the town and its citizens were to come to life on the page, they needed freedom to move, freedom to breath, freedom to think.

So I started writing without having the entire 3 month period fully plotted out.

And ya know what?  It works, it works like a charm.

While I ended up jettisoning a lot of ideas, the ones that remained bumped into each other and formed interesting links and possibilities.

Item:
I had some unknown person causing trouble for the trickster and the focal character but no clear idea of who it should be.  My initial idea was someone who resented what they were doing, but that was too vague, too abstract a motive.

Not personal enough.

Then it dawned on me if someone who felt rejected by my focal character decided to get revenge…

…and now I had a personal, emotionally strong reason for the acts to occur.

Item:
I have a throwaway joke about cow tipping early in the book, and sonuvagun, if a certain other character is revealed to be the cow tipper it not only pays off his character arc but completes the joke from earlier.

Item:
I need to get a bunch of people onstage for the big finale (metaphorically) and my original thought was they all happen to show up coincidentally which, while not impossible, certainly stretches credulity.  So then I struggled with ways that all of them would become independently aware of the central plot conceit and be in the right place at the right time but that seemed awfully cumbersome.

Then I remembered my trickster character has an ally, and if the ally were to learn one group would be at the appointed place at the appointed time, why, that would give them every motive in the world to tip off the other groups so they’d be there, too.

This was one of the great things about writing for G.I. Joe and Transformers; we had so many characters that we could do any sort of story we wanted because here was always somebody who’d fit right in perfectly and make it work.

I’m about 60%-70% done with my first draft at this point.  I tend to write expansively in my first drafts, adding more detail than needed, reiterating key plot points and info to make sure it’s covered, writing dialog that tends to be too on the nose and wordy.

Once the first draft is done I’ll let it lay fallow for a few weeks (got another story to work on as soon as I finish this one) then go back for a second draft.

We’ll talk about the differences in first drafts, second drafts, and polishes in the future.

© Buzz Dixon