#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.
"Ooh, this could be intriguing... Well, it happens. What is it about now... Ooooh, how about this?... Okay, that happens too! Now what? Uhhh, um, this third thing? Okay, it also happens. Alright, what *is* this story about? This is getting ridiculous..." That kind of thing.
On the other hand, it's one way to produce a fully-fledged plot, of sorts, or easily test and discard stuff that leads nowhere.
@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.