Writing Right Out There In Public: Planting the Story Seed

[ecosophia]

Okay, good. Some people have already posted about their experiences with the exercise discussed in the previous post in this sequence, so I'll go on and talk about what I've done, and where to go from the bare situation that you get out of exercises of the kind I sketched out. 

I didn't start out by doing the exercise, as it happens, though I used the same kind of free association that the exercise is meant to encourage you to explore. My starting place was a little different -- an image from a book that was once a favorite of mine, Faeries by Brian Froud and Alan Lee. One of the many paintings of faery folk in that book shows a critter called an urisk -- yes, that's him on the upper left -- a relatively friendly, solitary being found near pools in wild places in the Scottish Highlands. 

When I first read the book and saw the image, my immediate thought was "But that's a faun!" -- and my second thought was "What on earth would make a faun leave the warm Mediterranean shores and hide out in the cold bleak wilds of Scotland?" I knew immediately that there was a story there, but didn't get around to writing it. Fast forward forty years, and that's the story seed that came to mind when I started mulling over this project.

In terms of the exercise; "A faun hiding in exile..." is my first element. The third is "...an ancient and sunlit land." As I brooded over the various possibilities, I sorted through a good ten or twelve verbs before settling on "sets out to return home to..."  Complex, yeah, but the rules nowhere prohibit that. ;-)

So we have a faun, hiding in a bleak windswept place rather like Scotland, longing to go home. That's my story seed. 

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Once you've got a story seed, the next step is to ask yourself as many questions as you can think of. Write down the questions, but don't be too quick to write down answers. The three rules I discussed in the previous post -- give your writing permission to suck, your first thought is probably a cliché, and nothing's set in stone until the first copies come back from the printer -- apply with full force here. So write down questions, and begin thinking about the answers. Some of the obvious questions for my story would be: 

Why is the faun in exile? 
Why did he choose so distant and bleak a place to hide? 
If he's considering going back now, why hasn't he done that already? 
What has his life been like in exile? 
What are his relationships like with the people and other beings in the place where he's hiding? 
What is his more general backstory? 
Etc., etc. 

Again, at this stage of the game, it's more important to ask these questions than to answer them. 

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Now we take it a step closer to story, and think about viewpoints. What does that mean? Simply this: within your fiction, who's telling the story and how? 

There's a lot of rulemongering out there on this subject. You'll hear plenty of people insist that there's only one right viewpoint for fiction -- usually, they're pushing third person subjective single viewpoint, i.e., the reader experiences everything from the perspective of just one character (that's "single viewpoint"), including that character's thoughts and feelings (that's "subjective,") but the character is still "he" or "she" rather than "I" (that's "third person"). Don't believe for a moment that this is the only option. Revisit a dozen of your favorite novels sometime and see how the authors handle viewpoint. Some authors do an omniscient viewpoint, in which the reader knows what's going on in lots of characters' heads at once -- John Crowley's Little, Big, which won the World Fantasy Award, does this. Some authors put their stories in first person, as though the viewpoint character is sitting there talking to you ("And so I climbed aboard the boat," or what have you); Herman Melville's Moby Dick does this. You've got all kinds of options. 

I generally do third person subjective single viewpoint, because I like the effect. (Not always; Star's Reach is first person all the way, and The Fires of Shalsha is in third person multiple viewpoint.) So I have the faun considering his homeward journey. Is he going to be my viewpoint character? No, because I don't want him to become a human being with funny legs. Fauns in Greco-Roman mythology are minor deities, with all the numinous power and difference from the human that this implies, and I want to keep that. So somebody else is going to go with the faun, and that somebody else is going to be the viewpoint character. 

Now things are tightening up. We have a human character, or possibly more than one, who will be traveling with a faun. What kind of human character? Somebody from the bleak, cold, Scotland-like setting of the faun's exile. (It's helpful to give the country a name; since this is going to be a fantasy novel, the name can be made up. The one I settled on is the kingdom of Raithwold.) What kind of Scotsman or Scotswoman goes off with a faun on a journey of a thousand miles to a place he or she has never been? The phrase "no true Scotsman" comes to mind! So we have somebody who's alienated from his or her surroundings, thus potentially up for going somewhere else. 

Another decision interjects itself here. One of my favorite fantasy authors is Patricia McKillip, and one of the things in her fiction that I admire most is the way that she so often uses human relationships other than boy-meets-girl as the mainspring of her plots. Very often it's the love between parent and child that provides the motive force for her stories. That's not done anything like often enough in modern fantasy fiction. The final novel of my series of epic fantasies with tentacles, The Weird of Hali, has already been plotted out, and a very large part of it revolves around the relationship between Owen Merrill, the main character of the first, third, and fifth novels in the series, and his daughter Asenath. Since I don't want to rehash that dynamic in advance in this project, but I'd like to work with a parent-child dynamic, my human viewpoint character is going to be a single mother in her late twenties, and another character will be her eleven-year-old son.I don't want a father in the picture, so the son was born out of wedlock -- remember, she's alienated from her surroundings, and being on the wrong end of the savage moral obsessions of some close equivalent of Scottish Calvinism will do that! 

This also raises the possibility of sexual tension between the viewpoint character and the faun, since fauns traditionally have a rather distinctly un-Calvinistic attitude toward sexuality. Please note: sexual tension. That doesn't mean they go at it starting in chapter two like bunnies in heat. You create sexual tension by having two characters who feel a sexual attraction to each other but, for some plausible reason, don't act on it. There are other kinds of tension, too; any emotional connection between two characters, from awed reverence to murderous rage, can build tension if the characters for some reason can't express it in action. Tension is good in a story, since it builds anticipation and keeps the reader turning the pages, waiting for the moment when whatever it is either happens or definitely isn't going to happen after all. 

So it's back to the questions. I've named the woman Embery and her son Tay, by the way. Therefore: 

What's Embery's backstory? 
What's her relationship with her son? 
What's her relationship with the local community? 
What's her relationship with the civil and religious authorities? 
Where does she live? 
How does she support herself? 
What drives her to the point of being willing to chuck everything she knows and go on a journey to a place she's never been? 
Etc., etc., etc. 

As I mull over these questions, I come closer to the point when I can write a first scene in draft. 

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Your turn. Come up with questions. Use them to build on your initial story seed. Don't settle for the obvious answers, and be willing to take inspiration from authors whose works you admire. 

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Oh, one other thing. I'm not asking for critique. I don't crowdsource my stories; I write what I want to write, the way I want to write it, for those who want to read it, and those who don't approve of this or that aspect of my writing -- why, they're free to go read something else. I've sketched out my thought processes here to show readers how I develop a story seed into a story, not to ask for anybody's approval, and any attempted comment that focuses on critiquing the story framework I've developed here will simply be deleted. Many thanks, and let's get to work writing. 

Comments

[dufu]

JMG, your experiment is great. I did NaNoWriMo twice. The first time I had a magical “gimmick,” fleshed into a story through the snowflake method, but no plot. The second time I had a character and a setting I could picture but nothing exciting for her to do there. Your experiment was well planned because I started out by formulating the following trope as if it were the snowflake method:

“A software engineer with a strong sense of justice finds out that his code is being used to kill people.” (This story is missing the spark that turns it into a real narrative.)

By the end, forced to come up with 9 more subjects, verbs and objects and sort them randomly, I had stuff like this:

“A young girl fleeing a war zone, while waiting for a train, overhears a conversation about Japan.” (!!?!!)
“A college student with little real world experience gets on the wrong side of the law because of a bowl of ramen.”
"Two narcissistic newlyweds on their honeymoon accidentally stumble into Middle Eastern politics.”

Now that’s a story! This next step is making me want to ask each of those characters, “Why?? What’s going on?” But I also want to go back to the randomizer and see if I can add some more characters, until I have found some whom EVERYONE would want to ask “why” about.

[ecosophia]

Excellent! That first one in particular suggests a great historical-thriller novel set somewhere in pre-World War 2 Asia, but all three catch my interest. They're unexpected and they go places.

[(Anonymous)]

I couldn't resist this exercise in writing, so I wrote down story seed ideas following the instructions in your first post, and found they were mostly along the same line of thought, with variations. A lack of imagination on my part, maybe, but here is the story idea I will pursue:

A runaway girl in a city meets an old woman living in poverty, who tells her of a secret passage in a room of an old house she once knew in her past that led to another world. They set out in search of the house with the intention of disappearing to the other world.

Cliché, yes. But...

Does this place actually exist in the story? Or is the old woman trying to teach something to the young girl? What? Why is the girl running away? What happened in the old woman's life that brought her to this poverty level? How did she know of the secret passage and of the other world? What is it about the girl that would induce her to buy the old woman's story? How does the old woman convince the girl of the reality of this place? Why do they need to find this place? Why hasn't the old woman gone searching for it before if her intention is to disappear in the other world? How are they able to get into an old house that doesn't belong to them if they do find the house? And if the place in the other world does exist, what happens to them when they get there, if they get there? What kind of place is it?

I'll keep asking questions without posting them all here.

[ecosophia]

You could make a fine novel out of this. Keep asking those questions, and start thinking about episodes and scenes that appeal to you -- we'll be discussing those next.

From Fuzzy

[(Anonymous)]

When I did the one-sentence description I pulled a bunch of books at random and discovered two things:

1). The more difficult it is to break a story down to one sentence, the less widely read it is. Compare “Band of heroes struggles to save the world” (Lord of the Rings) to “ Well, there are these cockroaches, see, and they worship as gods the people whose houses they infest, and there’s this one who’s roach nobility but he’s gone deaf from living in a grandfather clock, and...”. (The Cockroaches of Stay More, by Donald Harington)

2). Stephen King, for one, must use this technique or one very similar, as he’s repeated a number of “sentences” several times, only varying the details:

Man crippled in accident develops psychic powers.—. The Dead Zone, Duma Key
Vampire, or demon, or aliens, invade(s) small town and reveal(s) its seamy side. —Salem’s Lot, Needful Things, The Tommyknockers, It.

Re: From Fuzzy

[ecosophia]

Yep. One advantage of using the "story seed" approach is that you tend to end up with something that's highly readable.

[(Anonymous)]

The wandering musician who cannot shutup about himself destroys a magnificent light in the sky

The first thing I want to know is what that light in the sky was?
Also, how did this minstril manage to destroy it?
Was the destruction intentional?
Where is the musician?
Where is the musician from, and why did he leave?
Why is he always talking about himself?
What about him self does he feel compeled to share?
Does he support himself with music?

For perspective I struggle with first person, because I get hung up on the question of who the narrator is talkingto and why; though in this case, the character loves to talk about himself, and tell stories. So I am leaning toward making it a first person 'retrospective'; the important thing is that the narrarator has to knows alot more than he did when the events happened. I also like the character beinga wanderer because the story can go anywhere. This leaves a little question hanging, all this time later who is he talking to?

Setting constraints I am very interested in exploring future fiction, and imagine this as beign very distant future fiction; several thousand years. In effect that makes the setting so remote from our era that the bridge can be backgrounded; it is effectivly a fanticy setting with a more of less realism metaphysics to it. Everything that happens in the story has to seem like something that is actually possible to me.

My first thought is that the light in the sky was an airship; but I also feel like it is some kind of religious or artistic object; also I think that the destruction was an intentional act of spite. I am thinking about the trope of an explorer who accidentally commits a sacrelidge, but twisting it, such that the musician knows exactly what he is doing; or at least tells the story as though he knew, or felt, what he was doing. I guess this opens some questions?

Why did he destroy the sky light?
Who is angry about that destruction, and what do they want to do about it?
Is anyone else happy to see it go?
How much trouble is the musician in for doing this, and how does he end up telling the tale years down the road?
How did the musician destroy the sky light?

I am thinking of taking two other prompts from my the last session and setting them up as opposed characters, with the musician being gamed by them both, and turning the tables on them when he can. "The commander of a great army in a feuding era steals from a tent full of foreighners" and "The ambitious radio man who hates tradition memoralizes a crashed airship"

The notion is that the radio man's memorial is the sky light; a big crazy art project in the spirit of Christo Vladimirov Javacheff. The commander is from the a region the musician used to travel in, and is as new to these parts as the musician.

What is the conflict between each pairing of the three?

So on and so on... I think I have enough here to make a chapter, it could be a short story of it could be the sapling of a longer story dpending on whether complications want to spiral outward.

Ray Wharton

[ecosophia]

And then you can ask -- what are the consequences of destroying the light: for the musician, the commander, the other characters, the world? How do those play out in the lives of your characters and in the history of their time? If you want one, there's a novel in there.

[stevewritesstuff]

I like where your story is going.

The Idea I settled on from the last entry was--

"A cop in a space station in the far future inhabited by thousands or millions of sentient species, some of whom eat one another, has to save the web that connects all worlds."

I started writing down my first set of ideas at my new Dreamwidth. Unsurprisingly, a lot of it is cliche. I think I'm going to play "write down questions" one or two more times, each time ignoring the previous round, before I dive into writing the story.

[ecosophia]

A good idea. Don't launch into the story too quickly, either -- I'll have a few tricks to offer in the next post here.

Oh Good

[(Anonymous)]

Because I’m already behind (I will have to do most of this during my long commute).—Fuzzy

Your Viewpoint Remark

[(Anonymous)]

Reminded me that “The Cockroaches of Stay More,” told from the viewpoints of a rotating cast of roaches, works. At least till the author, who evidently was on the outs with some of the local Christians, interjected himself and his grievances, but that didn’t happen till near the end. Unfortunately it caused the story to fall apart. Which I guess is a warning to us all to save the soapbox for letters-to-the-editor.

In one of his “sentence” novels, “Cujo,” —rabies invades a small town and exposes its seamy side—King also used the viewpoints of a rotating cast, including the rabid dog, and did a fine job on it. The dog thinks the way you’d expect a dog to think, e.g. before it goes mad it worries it’s been a BADDOG. I like “A Dog’s Purpose,” it’s a very sweet story, but in this era of furbabies and pet parents the dog does sound awfully human.

Re: Your Viewpoint Remark

[ecosophia]

Multiple third person viewpoint is a good solid way to tell a story, especially if it's too complex a tale to make a single viewpoint work. As for "furbabies" and "pet parents," well, I suppose a society that thrives on excess would pretty much have to take morbid sentimentality to a new level...

Re: Your Viewpoint Remark

[(Anonymous)]

I think it’s tragic. This is not a society that respects motherhood; many women who’d like to have children, have none. Furbabies are the best they can do.

Re: Your Viewpoint Remark

[ecosophia]

My wife and I are also childless, and not by choice. The universe is like that sometimes. A pet is still a pet, and morbid sentimentality is still morbid sentimentality.

Re: Your Viewpoint Remark

[(Anonymous)]

True, but many people don’t have the inner resources to face such harsh reality. More’s the pity.

A cat doesn’t much care what else you do as long as you feed it, keep its box clean, and don’t beat it, but I always hate seeing a canine furbaby. The poor things always look so anxious.

Re: Your Viewpoint Remark

[ecosophia]

Nah, you've got it the wrong way around. It's because they refuse to face harsh realities that they have so few inner resources.

There's a thing called maturity. You get it by dealing with the fact that there are things you want that you'll never have, things you hate that you just have to live with, and the universe isn't your Mommy and won't fix everything for you. The last forty years of pop culture here in the US has been obsessively fixated on encouraging people to avoid those uncomfortable but necessary realizations, which is why we've got a nation full of overgrown toddlers. Pretending that a dog is a baby? That's something that six-year-olds do.

Re: Your Viewpoint Remark

[(Anonymous)]

I never turned it around as you did (“...because they refuse to face harsh realities...”). I must ponder this.

And we have not, as a people, faced REALLY harsh realities yet. I suspect that in a famine a lot of those furbabies would become dinner sooner or later!

Re: Your Viewpoint Remark

[ferngladefarm.blogspot.com.au]

Hi anonymous,

Wow! Children or furbabies, and that is the best choices you can offer? Hmm. Well, I feel that your world view could use a bit of expansion and I'll offer you a third path: Dogs can work for their living as they do on the farm here. And they also have very complex personalities and may even teach you a thing or three. Has it occurred to you that rather than having a one dimensional perspective as to good or bad, mate, sometimes a dog will do as it pleases and they couldn't give a fig for my concerns.

I rarely advise others, but I'll make an exception in your case: to me your pain is clear to other people. As a friendly suggestion I advise you to dwell upon your concerns and try and touch your pain.

Chris

[violetcabra]

This is so much fun! Somehow only 8 seed stories were left when I was done with your highly stimulating exercise for producing story ideas. They seeds are:

1) A wandering lunar devotee protects a rabid drunken mob.

2) The masked god of an opulent city state shoplifts the reflection of the full moon.

3) A sultry harlot who owns a large personal library razes a multiplication table.

4) A fairy trapped in a bottle constructs the secret of endless night.

5) A hardscrabble merchant on the brink of self discovery sails a library of char and ash.

6) a talking statue of a dog sews a manuscript bound in human skin.

7) a bored and cynical demon shatters a glove of perpetual fire.

8) a magician tempted by evil defends a heart of solid gold.

Reading these seeds I see them as all connected thematically. There's magic, otherworldly beings, and a sense of loss in all of them as well as a certain bookishness.

My questions then start to "connect the dots":

Has the wandering lunar devotee just strayed into the opulent city state that is pitch black on the night of the full moon?

Does the sultry harlot procure the manuscript bound in human skin?

What does the hardscrabble merchant deal in? Perhaps bottled fairies?

Are the tempted magician and bored cynical demon on speaking terms? If so what do they talk about?

As the details begin to shake themselves out and the characters enter into relationship and then share their perspective I begin to feel that I'm the threshold of a very interesting story....

[ecosophia]

Oh my. I like this.

[danielsobieraj]

From the first exercise, I got this idea:

A rich prince in an island kingdom suffers a great loss and leads an army to save his family and his people.

What is his great loss?
Why is he needing to save his family? His people?
What is he needing an army for?


I like third person omniscient, so I think that’s where this will be going.



I’ve decided to name the rich prince Linnaeus, and his great loss will be the death of his mother, whom he adored, at the hands of his sister. He needs to save the rest of his family from a war and invasion that was never his to fight. He is leading an army because he has suddenly become king, when he was never in line for the throne to begin with; power is suddenly thrust upon this young teenage playboy prince.

Now more questions…

Why did Linnaeus’ sister kill his mother?
Why is there a war and invasion happening?
Who is doing the invading?
Why has power suddenly been thrust upon him?


I must say that when I think about my writing, I never begin with questions. I just kind of ruminate on some ideas, and then get to writing, with ideas just popping into my head, usually on my daily train commute. That said, asking the right of questions is hard work.

[ecosophia]

There you go. Pick it up and run with it, and see where it takes you.

Yes, asking questions is hard work, but it helps keep you out of those awkward moments when you suddenly realize that the last hundred pages you've written all depend on some bit of plot that just doesn't work!

[(Anonymous)]

Have you run into such a blind ally back when you were learning the ropes?

It occures to me that this is a big problem with screen writting. All the time TV shows establish a detail, and then yay many episodes later they have to cover over the earlier point in order to follow the developing story. Most audiances are willing to shrug and endure it in a minor or tangential case, but sometimes it can really ruin a story.

[ecosophia]

I run into it still. Fortunately, when you're writing a novel, you can always go back and revise -- and I've gotten a lot better at figuring out how to save most of what I've written, while modifying what has to be changed.

[theiambicpen.blogspot.com]

Mine are mostly cliches. As you said, though, this is acceptable for a first attempt. Oddly enough, I came up with a title a couple years ago in a sort of flash of inspiration, and I have been trying to find a story to fit it. Backwards, I suppose most would say.

-A young boy who lives by the sea hears a perilous song.
-A girl in a big house who longs for adventure finds a mysterious cavern beneath the basement.
-A pilot far from home in a carrier in the depths of space wakes up on a windswept crag.
-A knight on his way home from the Crusades finds a lost city in the jungle
-A man fighting his way home to his wife and children cries out and is answered by the wisest of the whales.
-A lonely young man in the big city finds himself in a mist-shrouded forest.
-A soldier out of his element sees a fair maiden wandering among the trenches.
-A boy who loves a girl falls through a portal between worlds.
-A graduate student at an ancient university dives to a sunken treasure ship.
-A hunter from a stone age tribe hunts a mythical beast.

Christopher K.

[kayr]

Here are the questions I could come up with so far.

A solitary salt trader who knows all the back ways to get to a good salt gathering spot. She finds a stranger at her spot.
Who is the salt trader?
Where does she live?
Why is she solitary?
How did she discover this route to the salt place?
What does she do there and why?
How often does she go there?
Who is the stranger?
How did the stranger get there?
Where is the stranger bound?
How does their meeting go?
What happens next?

A group of women in the mountains gathering herbs for medicine. The oldest one has trouble getting up and down the mountainside because she is burdened by a heavy bag she won't abandon, but she is the one teaching the others.
Who are these women?
Where do they live?
Why is the old woman teaching?
Is anyone helping the old woman?
Why won't she give up the heavy bag?
What is in the heavy bag?
Why is it so important to her?
Do the others think the bag/contents is important?
Do they resent the old woman's obsession with her bag?

Refugees have to be accommodated after a civil war in America somewhere. The village mayor decides that with their labor in exchange for accommodations, they can build a better village.
Where are the refugees from?
Where is the civil war?
Why is there a civil war?
How did they arrive in the village?
Why does the mayor think they can help him?
What accommodations are the refugees given?
Are they refugees willing to help with the building project?
How do the village residents feel about the refugees?

A caravansary has been established in the very arid west and there is an inn keeper there who trades space for supplies.
Who is the inn keeper?
How did he get there?
Who are his customers?
Why are they traveling through there?
What do they trade?
What happens if they don't have anything to trade that is wanted?
What is the inn like?
What is the caravansary like?
How many people live there permanently?

Thanks,
Kay

[drhooves]

So I completed the first exercise, with the content here:

https://drhooves.dreamwidth.org/647.html

A couple of comments. Love the "non-thinking" brain dump for generating ideas. I find that about 20% or so has useful content, and flushing the other 80% leaves me fresh for new stuff. Or so it seems.

The other thing is that Rule # 1 is something I had to get used to when writing fiction. With a long technical career behind me, I'd gotten into the habit of simply tweaking list-generated emails, procedures and technical documents. Fiction doesn't get created with nearly the same rigid approach. It's been painful, but I'm learning to "embrace the re-write...."

And now for the questions. I've settled on a tale about a government employee named Benson who snaps, and kills his supervisor. (probably something many of us can relate to - the urge to do that, anyway).

1. What causes Benson to snap? How fast or slow is the process getting to that point?
2. What justifies his action, if anything?
3. What timeframe does the story take place? (near future?)
4. What are Benson's duties?
5. What other characters should be in the story?
6. What's the moral, or arc?
7. Is the supervisor a bad guy, a good guy, or something in between?
8. What other storylines/subplots go along with the story?
9. Is Benson mentally ill, or perfectly lucid? Meds?
10. What is Benson's backstory?

Love this!

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks John. This is a great offering and series.