Ideas and plot-noodling
Deep Lurker wanted to know what my ideas look like when I come up with them, specifically whether they’re just concepts or whether they have skeletal plots attached. Unsurprisingly, the answer is “It varies.” The slightly longer answer is “It varies A LOT.”
To give you a more specific idea of the range I’m talking about, Talking to Dragons started as just exactly that: the title and nothing else. At the other end, Snow White and Rose Red started with Terri Windling asking for an adult retelling of my favorite fairy tale, and me saying “I want ‘Snow White and Rose Red’ and I’m going to set it in Elizabethan England,” which certainly had a general plot attached (courtesy of the fairy tale and setting).
Every book is different. Every idea is different. Some come with plots attached, some don’t. Some are plots, and need characters and settings generated. It doesn’t really matter; what matters is whether the thing I come up with makes that spider-sense tingle, the one that tells me “I want to know more about this; I want to find out more about these people, this place, why and how this happened, what is going on.” When I say I can come up with five or six ideas in a couple of hours, I mean five or six that I want to write. I can come up with a whole lot more ideas than five or six, but most of them aren’t things I personally am interested in writing about. This is why I like plot-noodling for other people; it lets me generate lots of ideas that I feel no obligation to save or write about myself, that someone else can use.
The hard part is not really generating all this stuff; it’s forcing oneself to take the time to do the generating, and to make sure that what one has come up with is reasonably solid and interesting. Accepting the first character who auditions for the central role in your cool plot, or the first screenplay that comes along for your wonderful characters to play in…well, once in a while it works brilliantly, but you can’t depend on that. Most of the time, the first character who shows up turns out to be rather cardboardy and stereotypical, and the first plot either requires your wonderful characters to do things they simply wouldn’t do, or else is clichéd and doesn’t give them a chance to shine, or is full of holes.
Of course, some writers have a process that requires them to write something about their people or situation or idea in order to get it properly fleshed out. They have to write their way into their ideas, and while they grumble just as much as the rest of us when it all falls apart in the middle, their process almost requires them to write half a book or a hundred-and-fifty-page “draft zero” – it’s how they go about really digging into the idea, the situation, the characters, whatever the story-seed is. Once they’ve done that, then they can sit down and figure out the real story they want to write.
Me, I find it annoying to have to throw away seven or ten chapters and rewrite; I’d rather put the work in up front. How I do the work…well, let me come up with something and show you.
So what I came up with, after a couple of minutes, was “Girl unexpectedly inherits something magical.” The first thing I want to know is, “What is the magical thing?” I start thinking of physical objects: a cauldron of plenty? A cookbook of magical recipes? A magic carpet? A wishing ring? Aladdin’s lamp? Or maybe it’s an animal. Cats are the obvious first choice; too obvious. Dogs…no. Birds…birds? A mynah bird? Or maybe a parrot…African Grays are scarily intelligent even without magic being involved (as far as we know).
Next, who’s the girl? How old? I’m thinking mid-twenties, old enough to be out of college and on her own, and to have elderly relatives who could leave her something interesting without their deaths necessarily being a huge unexpected traumatic event (since that’s not the story I want to write; somebody else might make a different choice). But I feel no particular urge to write contemporary fantasy. So when is this happening? Is it even set in our world? I can see it going two ways: either as a “secret history” story set in real-life past, or in an alternate universe where magic is out in the open. Since I’m not sure which I like better, I’d normally noodle around with both of them for a while until one of them felt more interesting.
In this case, I’m imagining a large Victorian-style house, so I’ll go with AU Victorian-era. That makes me think of Dickens and Oliver Twist, which immediately changes my protagonist to a much younger person, early teens probably. So now I have an impoverished Victorian-era teenaged girl, and a potential plot (I could combine Oliver Twist and Bleak House for the inheritance part). I’m not happy with the Dickensian remake, though, so I look back at the other things I’ve considered. An impoverished Victorian girl inherits a magical African Gray parrot…what can it do for her? Where have I heard that question before? Puss in Boots…and there is the plot I want to start with.
I say “start with” because Puss in Boots will not transplant easily to the Victorian era, plus I don’t think my parrot is going to act quite like Puss. The plot will also change depending on the social setting and the magic, on who the girl inherited the parrot from and why, and a bunch of other things. Also, I can’t imagine that nobody knows the parrot is magical, so there are likely other people who are interested in getting their hands on it. Right now, everything is still pretty flexible – if something comes up that “feels right,” like the Victorian house and Oliver Twist, I’ll happily change everything else to fit, the same way my heroine went from being a post-college mid-twenties young woman to an impoverished young teenager.
All of this took me about half an hour, and it is a good solid story-seed. It still needs a lot of work and development before I’m ready to write – names for characters, more specifics about the background and backstory, more characters (each of whom will alter the potential plot, because each will have his/her own agenda), and a decision about the central story problem (is this fundamentally going to be rags-to-riches, or will it be finding out who killed the person who left her the parrot? And I didn’t know til I wrote that that it was murder, so things are still developing…). (And no, this isn’t what I’m currently working on. Maybe later.)
Coming up with a decent preliminary five-to-ten page plot summary from this will take me somewhere between two or three days and two or three months, depending on how much juice the idea has, how much time I have to really focus on the story and play with different possibilities, and normally I wouldn’t start writing until I have one (there have been exceptions to this – as I said, every book is different).
