Feralpaules - Farrell Paules, Feral Writer

Writing from Scratch #9

Complex Plots, Part 2: Modifying Plots

The second way we’ll try complicating a plot is through plot modifiers. This happens when a try-fail cycle not only furthers the solution of one plot-problem but spawns a new plot-problem. What these plots actually modify are the stakes. They can give far-off worst-case scenarios more immediacy, which is what the plot analysis we’ll be getting into today does. Or they can show clear examples of what’s at stake for more abstract cases (think of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings clarifies our fears for what could happen to Frodo).

How does this work? Let’s look back at the plot analysis I did for The Expanse, Season 1 Episode 2, “The Big Empty.” A brief recap:

The Background: The Knight, a small, rickety life-boat sized spaceship with 5 survivors is all that’s left of the Canterbury after an attack on the larger vessel.

The Problem: The Knight’s radio is dead.

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On Creating Odious Characters

On Creating Odious Characters

[For those who care, I’m sorry I haven’t been writing as much.  Two novels (one in edits, one in first draft stages) and two plays (one as an actress, one as a director) plus this blog are rather difficult to balance.] Actors never lie.  It’s one of our major tenets.  When an actor lies on stage, the audience can tell, the audience feels cheated.  By “lie,” of course, I mean “not fully commit or…

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Quick Plotting Tip: Write Your Story Backwards

If you have a difficult time plotting, try writing or outlining your story backwards—from the end to the beginning. Writers who have a difficult time outlining, plotting, and planning their stories often benefit from this technique. You’ll need a general idea of what your story is about for this to work, and of course you need to know the ending, but you might be amazed how helpful this trick can be.

Why is writing backwards easier? Basically, instead of answering the question “this happened… now what comes next?,” you’ll be answering the question “this happened… so what would come right before that?” which narrows the possibilities for your next move and can help keep your story on track. (Incidentally, it’s also the way Joseph Gordan-Levitt’s character comes out on top in the film The Lookout.)

Writing backwards can also help you more tightly weave together your subplots, themes, and character relationships, and keep you from going too far down any irrelevant rabbit holes.

If you don’t want to write or outline completely backwards, remember that you’re free to jump around! If you’re feeling stuck in your story or novel, jump to the middle or end and write a few scenes. Many writers get stuck because they feel they have to write their story linearly from beginning to end, which results in an overdeveloped (and often irrelevant) beginning and an underdeveloped ending.

So go work on that ending! It’s much more likely that you will need to change your beginning to fit your ending than the other way around, so spend time on your ending sooner rather than later!

Writing from Scratch #7: The Event Plot

The Event Plot

The problem of an Event plot is a disruption to the status quo. The solution comes either from setting everything right again or adapting to the change. The Event plot is probably what most people think of when they think “what is a plot?” Any story that deals with a life-changing or world-changing event is an Event.

The first plot I analyzed, from The Expanse television series, is an Event plot. Let’s look at another: The Princess Diaries. As we did with Lord of the Rings, we’ll look at the movie rather than books because more people will be familiar with the movie (which is a damn shame).

The Event: Mia Thermopolis’s grandmother tells Mia that she is the princess of small European kingdom Genovia, and she must take the throne.

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Writing from Scratch #8

Now that we have gone over the four simple plot-problems (1, 2, 3, 4) and how they are solved through try-fail cycles, we’ll take a look at how to make complex, compound, and compound-complex plots through the same devices as sentence creation.

The first way we’ll try complicating a plot is by making the solution of the first noted plot-problem dependent on the solution of a second plot-problem, which stands in for easy solution prevention. We’re typically going to use dependent plots to strengthen audience satisfaction when the character is finally able to succeed. Or, like in the case-study we’ll look at today, they can be used to draw what appeared to be disparate plots together in longer works.

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My 90yr old Irish Catholic grandpa doesn’t miss with my gender. He’s never gotten my name wrong, or my pronouns, never even faltered over it.

It’s all so natural too: son, big man, young man…

We’ve never talked about it. He’s the only one who hasn’t pushed for details. He just accepted it and carried on because it’s not a huge deal.

It’s so comforting.

Writing from Scratch #12: Compound Plots, Part 2

Compound Plots, Part 2: Parallel Plots

Parallel plots share a lot in common with subordinate plots. As with subordinate plots, parallel plots occur simultaneously – the individual problems and their solutions should be introduced and resolved at roughly the same time. However, parallel plots can be divided from each other and stand on their own, unlike with a subordinate plot which is dependent on the principle plot for its try-fail cycles.

“Parallel plots” is a bit of a misnomer. “Parallel” comes from the idea of parallelism in sentence construction because parallel plots often act as mirrors to one another or two sides of the same coin; they often work on each other indirectly to strengthen or emphasize the Thought of the story. What we don’t want to do is fall into the trap of thinking that the plots cannot intersect; although you should be able to separate them into their own stories, in a single story, they are meant to work together.

Superhero stories have parallel plots a plenty with the main character dealing with a plot-problem as their civilian identity and dealing with a different plot-problem as their superhero identity. We’ll look at one of these examples, Spiderman: Homecoming. Peter Parker is dealing with a Character plot in overcoming his lack of confidence to ask Liz out on a date; meanwhile Spiderman is dealing with an Inquiry plot involving the sale of alien tech weaponry on the streets. These do have points of overlap – they should for effective storytelling. However, if you take the Inquiry plot out of the story, you have a rom-com/coming-of-age story with a complete plot of no confidence to ask Liz out to yes confidence to ask Liz out. If you take the Character plot out of the story, you still have Spiderman investigating the origin of the alien tech weaponry.

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Writing from Scratch #1

Welcome to Writing from Scratch!

I’ve been writing a long time, and sometimes it feels like I lose the trees for the forest. Writing from Scratch is a chance for me (and you!) to get back to the basics of storytelling.

If you’ve never written a story before, if you’ve never felt like you could come up with one that would be worth writing, my hope is that if you follow along with me here, you will have the confidence and know-how to come up with an idea, build it into a story, and share it with the world.

These posts will be little, easy-to-digest nuggets. At the end of every post, look for a prompt and share your response in the comments!

What Is a Story?

A story can be defined by what it contains: at least one plot, character, and setting, and a style through which it is told.

Story Bits

To begin, let’s take a look at the second smallest unit of a story – the sentence. A sentence is a set of words that conveys a complete thought. And communication is fractal, meaning each part shares the same pattern as the whole. A story and its components, therefore, will also convey a Complete Thought.

A simple sentence is an independent clause, containing a subject and a predicate. It may have any number of phrases attached to it, but in its simplest form, a sentence can be as short as two words.

A complex sentence is a sentence containing an independent clause and at least one dependent or subordinate clause (a set of words containing a subject and predicate but that is dependent on another clause for a complete understanding of its meaning).

A compound sentence is a sentence containing at least two independent clauses.

And a compound-complex sentence is a sentence containing at least two independent clauses and at least one dependent or subordinate clause.

Plots are exactly the same as sentences. A simple plot can be broken into two parts, a subject and a predicate, or, better, a problem and a solution. It can then be complicated or compounded with additional plots.

Next week, we’ll look at what exactly we’re talking about when we’re talking about plots.

Share in the comments:

How else have you heard “story” defined? What aspects of storytelling are you most interested in? What makes a story worthwhile to you?

If you want to read more, you can check out the over 80 posts on my website, theferalcollection.com

So sometimes I see bros on the internet talk about how women couldn’t have worn armor historically, because it was too heavy for them.

Here is a picture of me wearing armor when I was a nerdy 14-year-old girl who was about 5 feet tall and weighed less than 95 pounds. I sometimes wore it for 6 hours straight in summer heat, and I would run and turn summersaults in it for fun.

And before you start asking: this was authentic full steel plate with a padded arming doublet underneath. It weighed so much that I couldn’t carry the plastic tub it was stored in on my own. It was heavy. But once I was wearing it I just felt like I was being hugged or wrapped up in a really heavy blanket. That’s how armor works. The whole point is that the weight is distributed across your whole body, and your whole body can lift a huge amount. It has nothing to do with how strong you are or how much you can bench.

So if you think women are too weak to wear armor, you are wrong on so many levels. It does not even matter if you believe in your little misogynistic heart that all women are defined by their physical inferiority when compared to men, because you are also just wrong about how armor works. Even skinny teen girls can wear armor just fine. Everyone can wear armor.

Are you a “can’t write dialogue” writer or a “can’t describe anything” writer