Story Ideas
Root 5 - Where I take a break from talking about personal drama and discuss instead a concept well-known to NaNoWriMo writers: plotters and pantsers.
How does one write a compelling story?
Recently, and for the first time in a while, I thought about my first book. I decided I wanted to be an author when I was eight, but eight-year-old me didn’t have the discipline to write a whole story from beginning to end. I had a lot of stories that started strong and went nowhere. But when I was 14, I was struck with inspiration. I worked diligently on my story whenever my parents allowed me to use the family computer. After four years and loads of revisions, I had a complete book, from beginning to end. It was a huge accomplishment.
It was also not a great story. The spark that lit me up was seeing a music video where the lead singer had worn strange contact lenses that made his gaze into something I found disturbing. And so the monsters in my book could suck your soul into their mind and torture you if you met their eyes. At that time I didn’t know about The Dresden Files. Didn’t know that one of the big conceits in that series is that if you met a wizard’s gaze for too long it started a “soul gaze,” and that my idea wasn’t as original as I’d thought. I was also going through puberty, and wrote a lot of awkward scenes heavily influenced by my sexual frustration. (Also not dissimilar to The Dresden Files. Hah.) There was also a bird in the story, which didn’t make any sense other than that I was really into birds at the time that I wrote it.
Have you ever heard about the concept of plotter or pantser? It’s the idea that a writer will probably excel in either one of these two things, and struggle with the other: plotting and outlining their stories on the one side, and coming up with character concepts or worldbuilding ideas on the other.
Silly as this sounds, I used to consider myself a plotter. Even though I struggle with direction in a story. Even though I have these sparks of inspiration and feel almost flooded with connections that fall into place. I said at the beginning that “eight year old me didn’t have the discipline to write a whole story from beginning to end.” The truth is, 31 year old me barely does, either. I knew plotting was essential to not getting in the weeds, and thought my acknowledgement of that made me a plotter. In reality, I was intuitively trying to rectify my own writing deficiencies.
I have had many story and character ideas through the years.
One of my favorite character ideas, which I had when I was quite young, is a dryad who is the spirit of a dandelion instead of the spirit of a tree. Her short, blonde hair poofs up around her head like a ball of fluff. She goes by Andi. If you call her Dandi you’re dead, because she’s a real 90’s punk tough girl. She wears jeans with big holes in the knees, stained with grass. She keeps her arms folded over her chest. Her tough exterior hides a knot of insecurities.
I wrote a cyberpunk that solved for the Fermi Paradox by saying a) our ability to look for and see aliens wasn’t as advanced as we thought and b) there were other places with resources that interested the aliens a lot more than the Solar system. The intergalactic community had collectively taken a look at Earth, shrugged their shoulders, and said, “Meh.” By the time humans learn about this community, we’ve made our planet less optimally habitable through climate change, and there’s an extremist group called Earth First that wants to terraform it back by stealing the more advanced alien’s tech.
I wrote a heroic fantasy about a world where magic is dying and various peoples will stop at nothing to get their hands on the last of it. In the middle of all that is a lost young woman who has stumbled upon some magic, the very thing everyone wants, but all she wants is to find her way home.
It’s hard to know what actual plot should go along with these characters and settings, I just think they’re cool. By far the biggest barrier to continuing on with a story I’ve started is the thought, “Okay, but where do I go with this?”
Similar to how I’m feeling right now, writing this post.
It’s crazy what a bit of revision can do, though. When I wrote the first draft of this post, I read through it, and wrote <non-sequitur> along two paragraph breaks, then left it alone for a while. Coming back to it, I realized if I just moved all that came after the second tag to right before the first tag, it would go together smoothly. My brain had bounced around a bit in talking about story ideas, but it hadn’t gone completely off track.
Similarly, I asked a beta reader to look over Body Swappers 3 before I sent it out. He said he didn’t understand what Maya’s beef with Ruth was, exactly. I added a few paragraphs, and now I think it’s perfectly clear.
Part of what makes for a compelling story are the ideas. Are the characters fun? Is the world rich and interesting? Personally I can’t stand to read a story full of repellent or boring characters. But a huge part of what makes for a compelling story is the structure. Is everything in the most easily digestible order? Are any parts too short or too long? The structure is what I continue to find tricky, even after all these years writing.
What do you think makes for a compelling story? If you write, what parts do you find easy? What parts do you find hard?
I'm in awe of you for writing a book at age 14! Wow! I love your point towards the end about the difficulty and importance of finding the right structure. I don't think it's talked about as much as characters or plot, but sometimes it's the key to unlocking the story. True for non-fiction, too. Thanks for another great issue!