In Building Better Plots, Robert Kernen provides a quick quiz to help you decide if your subject matter is strong enough to sustain a novel. I thought these questions would be a good platform to start our discussion.
Does your concept create obstacles that effectively challenge the characters? If so, which specific elements will be the source of that challenge?
Does your concept provide a strong backdrop for exploring the strengths and limitations and psychology of your characters? What specific elements does the plot have that provide vivid comparisons and contrasts that will delineate your character in intriguing ways?
Does your concept provide a strong environment for the messages and themes you want to explore? What metaphors and motifs grown naturally out of that environment will illuminate those themes and messages?
Does your concept provide any realistic hooks that will make it easy for the audience to relate to? What elements will they relate to? Even if you are writing science fiction or fantasy, you will want to give your audience some element to which they can connect their sympathy.
Does your concept provide enough tension to hold the audience’s interest? What are those sources of tension?
As always, any topic that will help us improve our writing is fair game in these discussions, so feel free to bring up any of your writing concerns.
Let's talk.
The group No Whine, Just Champagne will meet here at this article for a live discussion about writing and the writing life on Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 9:00pm ET (8pm CT, 7pm MT, 6pm PT). Hope to see you, but if you can't make it then, the discussion will continue during the days afterward, so please stop by and tell us what you think.
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Comments: 67
It might only be good for a 100 or less flash fiction, maybe a short story, or maybe it will sustain a whole novel.
But, as many other writers have also said (in one way or another), every story will become exactly the length it's meant to be.
I think it bit me.
Enough time and a complete revisit of just what that idea means can bring something much better out of it.
I've found the fizzle ends up being more about me going in the wrong direction initially or just not being all that into the story when I first tried to write it. And some are just not salvageable.
I always write, as you know, romance. And, since I really love challenging my characters I give them huge obstacles to surmount.
One romance of mine, I married the heroine off to a genuinely good man, but he was not her soul mate, and married the hero to another lady, just to throw a huge obstacle there. And, they had to go through a ton of life altering challenges until they could be together in the end
That alone seems like a big obstacle. Many relationships in real life fail because of resentment and family dynamics and resolving that in the story makes it so much more believable to the reader.
I know all too well how it can be easy to think but impossible to explain without the person reading the whole story. And, of course, we don't want to give away our best secrets without making them read the book, lol.
It depends on the story I'm trying to tell. But, all of my stories have one common thread, my heroes have a lot of mental issues to get through before he can even commit to anyone, let alone the heroine.
A lot of the time, my characters have common interests, but yet their attitudes are significantly different. Since I write mainly Regency romance, the males are more arrogant/ domineering
Oh, definitely. Especially with most of my heroines. They are strong, determined and mostly wish to be independent in a time that females were basically treated as property to be bought and sold
Like I said before, I have been very realistic in a few of my Novels in Progress(The Regency romance I write) in the instance that these women were forced to marry those they didn't love, and struggled to deal with that. Most rebelled, some conformed to the times(or at least pretended to)
Did you really ask me that? Ha ha. Of course there is! Tons of it. Tension between hero/heroine, tension due to the situation at hand(Not being able to get out of marriage, being in love with someone who doesn't have a clue, being dismissed, the problems could go on and on)
I just winged it, with no support anywhere, no idea what I was doing, and a lot of doubts.
Years later I discovered the internet. Hell, just getting a computer years later was a huge jump, and that was years before I got internet.
It was a big jump for me to move to an electronic typewriter. I would put in what the limited memory could handle, handwriting the rest, and when I was absolutely sure the typewriter part was perfect I'd print it and move on to the next section in the typewriter, then curse myself for completeley editing the types pages until they were unreadable.
When I got my first computer, the urge was so strong to keep to the old way of spending hours with pen and paper rewriting and rewriting what I could save all those hours doing by just changing it on the computer.
Yes, it is nuts.
But it took years to get over that need to write by hand what I could type and edit much faster on the computer (not even accounting for faster typing speed).