I usually start with a protagonist. Then, I’ve got to find a conflict and an anagonist for her. (Published by Currier and Ives, New York, 1874, via Wikimedia Commons)
This blog post was inspired by a conversation over on Jennifer Crusie’s Argh Ink blog about thinking in story. Just where does that creative fuel come from?
I’m still working on becoming a published writer, but I’ve made a few leaps in my development – things that really helped me start to turn my scribblings into story.
The first step was several years ago when I realized that something had to happen – preferably in the first scene. I used to write some lovely sketches where women friends in the far future would talk about their free gyms, and the stationery bikes that helped power the living areas, and about making popcorn on a space station. I had such fun writing the things, but I’m sure they were a chore to read because nothing happened.
This was the beginning of my work with The Goal – instead of diddling around in their idyllic lives, I gave them a goal – such as making root beer from scratch. (Spoiler: there is an explosion at the end, so it’s a little more exciting than it sounds – still, it was a beginning.) My stories stopped petering out around page 10, and managed to come to a conclusion.
The next big breakthrough was thinking about the villain or antagonist. OK, something happens. Let’s make the antagonist a little more organized than carbonating yeasts. Let’s make it a supernatural invasion!! With lots of fancy magic lighting up the inner eye!
That was a huge discovery for me – you need conflict to help push your worthy characters into situations where they can grow and shine. There’s really nothing like a living antagonist with needs, wants and goals of his/her/its own to provide more fodder for the story engine. I think it’s possible to write a one-character story but even then, it only works if the character splits into a lazy, give-up self and a survival self, IMO. Once I had figured out the role of the antagonist, I was able to write longer than I ever had before – although my first long work had about 10 or 15 very loosely related antagonists popping up along the way. Still, overkill is better than fizzling out at page 30. The work I’m dealing with now only has one or maybe two antagonists, so I’m making progress.
What discoveries helped you write longer and more complicated works?
