When I first started writing, I remember remarking to someone that it felt like what I've assumed learning to juggle would feel like. There were all these things to keep track of at once: plot, subplot, character, dialogue, description, showing vs. telling, active voice vs. passive...
As a metaphor, I think that's still pretty accurate (even if I've since realized that you can focus on one of those aspects at a time -- that's part of the point of revisions) but I realized this week that I have another one as well: writing is like assembling a puzzle.
My current project is Karen Miller's fault. I'd written a fanfic, a short story I'd done to satisfy a question I'd long had about a particular situation a man and woman might find themselves in. (In this case, the fandom was secondary to the question of the story.) And after reading it, Karen told me she thought I could/should turn it into a novel.
I'd been assuming I'd write a contemporary novel (the 'write what you read' isn't very helpful for me, since the only genre I don't read is horror) and this would have to be fantasy or historical. I chose fantasy because it was a better fit.
With a fantasy story, which comes first -- the world or the characters? I decided first to focus on the worldbuilding, convinced that whoever the characters turned out to be, they would be heavily influenced by the world they inhabited. (We're heavily influenced by our backgrounds -- why wouldn't fictional characters be?) Building a world that was sufficiently different from the fandom I started out in then took a while.
The heroine fell into place pretty easily, given the overall story idea and the worldbuilding. But the hero has been more of a question. On the plotter/pantzer scale, I'm somewhat of a 'plotzer' -- I start out knowing the characters, how the story begins and ends...and nothing at all of the middle. So I find myself thinking about the hero and realizing that he could go this way, or he could go that way, (in terms of his goals and motivations, and the conflicts that grow out of them) or, possibly, even a third way. And whichever one I choose will drastically affect the story. It will still start the same and end the same, but...different story.
And that's what I was thinking when I realized I was approaching the whole thing as a puzzle. If the hero is like this, it will fit with this piece of the plot in that way; if he's more this other way, it will cause the subplot to go in this direction...
Nothing really earthshaking in any of that from a thoughts-on-writing perspective, though it illustrates, I think, how very different one writer's approach can be to things like plot and characters.
Oh, and I'm getting closer to figuring out who the hero is. I like puzzles -- did I mention that?
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2 comments:
True -- and so frustrating when you're at that stage where you're almost done and you suddenly realise that some of the pieces aren't in the box!
I'm something of a pantster--which, well, sometimes gets weird--who starts out with characters and builds the world around them.
At least, that's what I do now. I have one project in need of heavy revision because I started with the main character for the entire first draft, then improved the characters (and did a dash of worldbuilding) for the second, and now find myself with a world on par with a play's stage. Everything is set up for the NOW of the story, with minimal backstory or even connections to anything else. Ulgh.
I still do some of the puzzle, but in my case, the puzzle is the world, not the characters. Worlds can be retconned by the young 1st person narrator not really knowing what she's talking about. Characters, not so much.
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