Saturday I workshopped with another friend. We didn’t discuss a draft. We discussed a general writing project.
She’s planning to write a murder mystery, has an excellent idea for an opening scene and a good general sense of what she wants to do, but was having trouble working out some of the basics of her plot and characters. Our conversation hovered around these questions:
• Which real people can lend life to the main characters?
• Where may her characters live, and where may the story take place?
• How can other people’s plots be used to guide her through the story line and help her find a motive?
• How can predictable elements be turned into red herrings and plot complications?
• What secondary characters can people the story and stand in as suspects?
We didn’t get very far with this last because she needed time to think through some of the other things, and it struck me that my own writing process is characterized by fits and starts, periods of thinking and reading alternated by periods of taking notes, focused free writing, and actual drafting. For me personally, knowing when to interrupt the writing to reflect is a vital part of the process though I do admit that sometimes I spend too much time mulling and not enough time writing.
Another thing I noticed was that, for my friend, as for me, plots seem to grow around a basic number of characters–the two, three, or four people essential to making something happen or someone discover. Other characters are added as props or simple plot agents, what one of my professors calls window dressing, and sometimes one of those props becomes real, occasionally jockeying an essential character out of the way.
As my friend and I talked, she said something about how helpful it was to talk to people about the story, and I agree. Part of the benefit is the workshop aspect: it helps to bounce ideas off of and get suggestions from other writers, but another equally important aspect is that talking about the craft makes it more real, easier to hang on to through work, bills, and tax preparation (yes, it is that time of year).
As of our conversation, I’ve decided to work on my extraterrestrial story a little everyday, without waiting for the muse or preparing elaborately in any way. So far, I’ve managed to work on it only once this week. I do have the excuses of taxes to prepare and my circadian rhythm to get under control, so I may not get much done this week, but I’m hoping that next week will go better.
Puntitas reads _The Haunting of Hill House_ by S. Jackson.
