#writing #writingadvice #narrative
Since a few months ago, I've been subscribed to George Saunders' "Story Club" substack. As well as being very warm, affable and enthisiastic about the craft of writing, he's also responsible for a nugget of advice I can't dislodge from my mind.
In paraphrase, the strategy boils down to regularly short-circuiting your story's intitially-conceived climax/mystery/big reveal.
It goes like this: a reasonably self-aware writer would know what sorts of questions their story asks--rather what questions the reader asks of the story--as they spin it out.
Sometimes these questions run the risk of stumping the writer, or discouraging them with how banal and/or frivolous they come out from under their fingers. Or the other way around, they feel so mysterious and Important™ that the writer doesn't know or feel ready to tackle them.
One way is to take a different tack: rewrite. Or cut. Or push through a vaguely-defined--or completely unknown "middle"--to get to Big Thing.
But another might be to simply have it happen, and quickly. The climax occurs, the mystery is solved, the reveal is unveiled.
*Now* what is the story about? Does it still interest you? Maybe it shifts your interest elsewhere?
This carries its own risks: Caterwauling through a number of such iterations in a single story, right down to a farcical plot.
@Scriv This reminds me of a cooperative storytelling game, where the focus of play is on a timeline and players take turns adding increasingly finer grained events. The timeline doesn't grow forward or backward; we start with delimiting events, and then fill out the space inbetween. I've never played it myself though, so e.g. don't know how often people write themselves into a plothole/deus ex machine in that game.
@Scriv That depends on the initial setup, no? It will certainly be world-building if the initial setup is something like extinction of dragons, but if the initial setup is e.g. rise to power of a family, then I would expect it to be generate a plot. Would you?
@robryk
Haven't played it and I read the rules a while ago, so I don't remember if you're supposed to focus on plot at some point. But the start doesn't stipulate a plot, I don't think...
Also, it's plots I have 99% of my problems with, and they're severe enough to make latch onto every possible tool to overcome them, haha.
@robryk
Microscope, yeah, I know it :)) Though it's less a plot-based game than world-building one.