Another plot idea
by V.E. on October 10th, 2005
filed under ladyamedeus, nanowrimo, writing
Okay, here is a famous quote the majority of you are all familiar with; “I think therefore I am.”
Your MC ponders this and comes to several conclusions:
1) Death and life do not exist, because they don’t think
2) Physical barriers do not exist because they do not think
3) Other people don’t exist, she had only thought they thought and everything is really just her imagination
Using this, build a plot of her quest through out the world to find something else that thinks and that she doesn’t control. Of course, whether or not she finds something is up to you. But her traveling (airplanes don’t exist, and neither do the pilots) with her new found theory ought to be a good enough plot.
—————————————-
Colin McKenna is afraid. He’s been having the dreams for months, now, where he rides a great black horse named Buchephelias and watches his best friend Hephastition die.
Over and over again.
As Colin tries to go about his normal life, the dreams increase, and the details emerge, until Colin must face the truth.
He is the reincarnation of Alexander the Great.
And he needs his Hephastition (“Fear not, Mother…he too, is Alexander”), before he goes mad.
Because Alexander never finished what he set out to do.
Five thousand years later, Alexander has returned.
To conquer the world…again.
_________________________________________________
You will understand the quote about Hephasition if you’ve read Robin Lane Fox. I did a lot of research on Alexander, and if anyone’s interested in this plot, I’ll be happy to give him/her my results.
PS. I originally intended to write the story under the premise that Alexander and Hephastition are lovers, but if that doesn’t work for you, best friends would probably be fine.
(posted by ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
kelaina in the Adopt-a-Plot section of NaNoWriMo.)
Eve needs…
by V.E. on October 10th, 2005
filed under entertainment, ladyamedeus, quizzes/surveys
Google yourself with “(your name) needs” and write the first page of responses here.
[Since 'Viannah needs' never comes up with anything, I did 'Eve needs']
Eve needs… a man!
Eve needs… you and your pictures, too.
Eve needs… a way to make thieves pay.
Eve needs… to know what Z is.
Eve needs… a battle arena. *HAH. Damn right, I do.*
Eve needs… better quality samples.
Eve needs… to be burned into a spec. *AWW, don’t you love me?*
Eve needs… technical discussion.
Eve needs… to get them to do what she wants.
Eve needs… next year.
Eve needs… to fix the link to the existing document.
Eve needs… about 340282366920938 seconds to try all keys.
Eve needs… to realize that there is a definite problem in the relationship.
[Is that last one trying to tell me something?]
ANYway, I’ve been working on my goals. Check out how I’ve been doing.
NaNoWriMo 2003 stats
by V.E. on October 10th, 2005
filed under fyi, ladyamedeus, nanowrimo, writing
That means if I don’t start, I’ll never finish.
It also means once I start, it becomes progressively easier to finish.
How to Start a Novel
by V.E. on October 10th, 2005
filed under fyi, ladyamedeus, writing
All Rights Reserved
You’ve decided you want to write a book. Terrific. Maybe you’ve
even tried it a few times, but haven’t gotten one all the way to
the finish line. It happens. I had a slew of thirty-page novel starts
before I finally found out how to start a novel that I could finish.
See, that’s the trick. You have to start the novel, but you have
to have planned to finish it before you type the first word on page
one. And that means laying some groundwork. What steps do you need
to take to have the best chance of finishing the book you’re starting
with such enthusiasm?
Here are a list of suggestions that will help you start the novel
in such a way that you can hope to reach the end.
(Linked rules lead to workshops related to the rule. I will eventually
have one for each.)
You might think that I’m off on the wrong track already—that
maybe this first rule is sensible for people who are working on
historical novels or science fiction or round-the-world thrillers,
but that it doesn’t apply to you. After all, you’re planning on
writing a novel set in the town in which you currently live, using
thinly disguised versions of your friends and relatives as the characters,
so you don’t need to research your background.
Yes, you do.
In your town, which streets intersect lanes; in which direction
do the house numbers run; what kind of tree is that monstrous thing
that grows in the library’s side yard; what are the five most common
varieties of birds you’ll find around the bird feeder in January,
or the birdbath in July? What is the family name on that elaborate
tombstone that you notice every time you drive to the grocery store?
What color are the handles on the carts in your grocery store, and
if there’s lettering on them, what does it say? Are the parking
spaces straight in or diagonal? Which families started the town,
and are they still in control of the place? What material has been
used to pave the streets? How old is the oldest house and where
is it? Who built the projects over on the east side?
I could ask a million questions like those—they’re the sort of
questions I always ask myself about any new world I’m creating.
They are small, personal questions, which when answered offer intimate
knowledge of a place. That intimate knowledge is what will make
your book come to life—tiny, perfect details, mentioned so casually
that you might not even realize you have included them.
To get these details you have to look around your world with the
eyes of a stranger before you begin to write. You must become an
innocent, asking silly questions and being willing to make a fool
of yourself. And this is true whether you’re using your home town
or creating a complete world from scratch on the fourth planet out
from an alien sun. You have to name the flowers and the trees and
the grass, the streets and the houses and the stars, the animals
and the rivers and the clouds—even if you don’t intend to use
these names, or this knowledge. Even if you don’t think you’ll need it.
The act of learning these details will make them part of your
thoughts, and your mind will know they exist even if you don’t put
them on the page. And as a result, the book you write will live
within a whole world, and not in a Hollywood set, where if you walked
out in the front door of that beautiful house, nothing would greet
you but the parking lot behind the propped-up set.
Don’t spend half an hour going through your baby name book to
pick out a name for your main character and call that character
creation. You want to have a feel for what your character would
do in most situations (though if you’ve created him well enough,
one of these days you’ll try to plug him into a scene and he’ll
look at you and say “I’m not doing that.”) And even while
you’re angry with him, you’ll be thrilled that he’s real enough
to stand up for himself.
And don’t do a superb job of developing your main character and
ignore everyone else. At barest minimum, you should feel that you
have intimate knowledge of the two or three characters who take
center stage in each of the first three or for scenes you’ve planned.
This should be fairly obvious, but I overlooked it in most of
those thirty-page false starts. Conflict is the engine that drives
any novel, and if you try to write one without first making sure
you have an engine, you’re not going to get far. Write out your
conflict. (Or conflicts.) And don’t go for the big generalities.
“Gerri versus men,” is a conflict, all right, but when you’re stuck
on chapter five and you look at your notes for something that will
help you get back on track, something along the lines of “Gerri’s
hatred of her father drives her to take up with dependent men that
she can then abandon, and the man she has now abandoned intends
to kill her” might actually aim you in the right direction again.
Know whether the story you are writing is about good versus evil,
or about the transcendence of love, or about anything that can go
wrong going wrong. You’ll find additional themes as you’re writing
that will add depth and resonance to your main theme, and sometimes
the main theme will shift focus part way through the book, but if
you don’t know what the theme is to begin with, you won’t have any
control of it when it shifts. And theme more than anything else
is what will unify the beginning of your book with the end.
For salable novels, you need to resign yourself to either first
person (Let me tell you about the time I found a diamond in my soup,
and almost got killed by a hit man.) or third person (The stranger
picked up his spoon and stirred it through his chili. He chuckled
and glanced up at the waitress. “Let me tell you about the time
I found a diamond in by soup, and almost got killed by a hit man.”)
Second person, the voice so popular in those choose-your-own-story
adventure juveniles (You stir your chili with your spoon, then turn
to the waitress and say, “Let me tell you about the time I found…”)
turns off readers so quickly that, unless you’re a screaming genius,
your editor will bounce it back to you unread. It’s ugly and awkward.
So figure out which one it’s going to be. First or third. When
you’re a bit more experienced, it can be both in the same book.
First person is great fun to write, because the narrator will develop
a distinctive voice with shocking ease. Its limitations are that
you can’t know anything except what your main character knows, and,
because the main character is narrating, you’re almost certain she
survives the novel. Agatha Christie did some funky things with this,
but I thought the one where the first-person narrator turned out
to be the killer (surprise!) was kind of gimmicky.
Third person is broader in the scope of what it allows you to
do (multiple points of view, varying emotional distances, shifts
to omniscient viewpoint). It is easier to write a literary novel
in third than in first. There are exceptions. Its drawbacks are
the ease with which you can be drawn off into tangents, the ease
with which you can fall into passive voice (boring) and the way
that characters can proliferate, to the point that you start losing
track of them.
I’ve written books in both, they each have their uses, and you
will discover that one fits what you’re writing better than the
other. Give it some thought.
- Know your genre.
In a perfect world, every book would be equally marketable to
every publisher, and we’d all sell everything we wrote and make
millions doing so. But we haven’t yet reached that perfect world,
so in the meantime, you’re going to need to know what you’re writing
so that you’ll have an idea of who might buy it. It really, really
helps to know this BEFORE you type “The End” and print out your
final copy. Or, worse, get fifty rejection letters from publishers
who tell you they “don’t publish books of this type.”
Genre is: romance, mystery, horror, western, men’s adventure,
science fiction, fantasy, gay/lesbian, religious, historical, mainstream,
etc.. Mainstream can have elements from any or all of the other
genres, but will have some facet that publishers believe will make
it appeal to a wider audience. Walk through a bookstore, and try
to imagine where your book would likely be shelved. That’s your genre.
And be honest with yourself here. If Fabio’s presence on the cover
of your book would, A) be appropriate, and B) increase sales, you
have not written a mainstream novel. Ditto rocket-ships, women in
chainmail bikinis, or guys in cowboy boots and chaps.
- Know your expectations.
If this is the first book you’ve ever written, give yourself a
little slack. Nice as it is to imagine that you’re going to get
a million-dollar advance, a movie deal from Steven Spielberg, and
foreign sales in every language known to humankind, the odds are
against this happening. First advances generally float in the $2,000-$5,000
dollar range, and most first novels sink without so much as leaving
an oil slick on the water to mark their passing.
While having high hopes can keep you going, having high
expectations can paralyze you. After all, if you demand of
yourself that you write the Great American Novel your first time
out, every time you try to type a word on the page, your mental
editor is going to say “No Great American Novel ever included that
word.” And you’ll never get beyond the first thirty pages.
Give yourself room to learn, and to make mistakes.
If you do this ground work before you sit down at the keyboard
and type “Chapter One,” you’ll stand a much better chance of getting
to “The End.” And the coolest thing about starting a novel is having
justified confidence that you’re going to eventually finish it.
Taken from: http://hollylisle.com/fm/Articles/wc2-1.html
Advice from a published writer
by V.E. on October 10th, 2005
filed under fyi, ladyamedeus, writing
One of my books is currently sitting just 2000 words above 50K and I’m nowhere near finished writing it! LOL
Of course, when you ask me how I manage to pull out books ranging between 200-300K words every few years–yes, it does take this long for me to finish–I simply point to the last two decades I spent honing and improving my skills as a writer.
When someone reaches a milestone like 50,000, it’s easy to see why you want to celebrate and feel happy for them: Because it is a first for them, and we should all take a moment to applaud.
However, the trick now is to go beyond 50,000. The next logical number would be 60,000–ten thousand more words than you first started with.
Then 75K. Then 90. Then 100. (I thought 110K was pretty cool back then too. )
But…
When someone is asking how do I reach these numbers without seemingly adding extra words, filler, or whatnot to your story or novel without sounding stupid, the trick is within your growing imagination.
You have it within yourselves to go beyond simple storylines. You should feel confident at this point that you can now begin to tackle complex plots with little or no problem.
This means that your mind is now set up to “compartmentalize” more than one subplot–other than the one that you’ve managed to drag out admirably for the last several years (depending on when you actually began to take your writing seriously), and have all these wonderfully delicious word counts to show as proof.
So now, you can begin handling two or more subplots by having them run parallel to each other within the story or novel itself. This is simply another variation of a good “CSI” episode where there are two murder cases to solve within an hour rather than just one. (As a matter of fact, this is a pretty good extrapolation on what writing is like–CSI-style!)
You have to begin balancing all these subplots within each other, as you chase the main theme of the novel–whatever that is.
So as you progress anew with these multiple subplots coordinated with the main driving one, your word count will begin to explode right away.
You may find that after you’ve passed 50,000 words, you’re still not finished with the book!
Don’t panic then. Just keep in mind that your subplots still need to be resolved.
Example of multiple subplots.
The Starchild
Main plot: A new Starchild of Ancient Lore must be found to defend Earth and the universe against the God of Insanity.
Timing is critical here.
Subplot 1: A treasure hunter finds a mysterious shard while looking for odds and ends to peddle on his daily rounds.
Subplot 2: The main character (Isis McGowan) is sent up to Stratos City to find something of great importance (a shard belonging to the Source of Chaos), but isn’t told about it.
Isis is taken in by a shopkeeper after hearing about what she has to do–out of the kindness of her heart. She meets up with Bayen Yelou again.
Bayen Yelou and Isis McGowan go on a search for whatever Calis had sent Isis up to find.
Both the treasure hunter and the museum curator are killed, drawing in both Isis and Bayen to the scene and the recovery of the shard. Subplot 1 and 2 ends here, but a new one begins as the pair is followed.
Subplot 3: Bayen and Isis return home, only to be confronted with a mystery of their own. Afterwards, they leave for the Arena to go hunt for some answers.
At the Arena, a confrontation leads to a stunning revelation as Isis reveals herself to be the Starchild of Ancient Lore for the first time. But unfortunately, her unknown Chaos ability takes over for a brief time, and endangers everyone involved.
Bayen and Isis are ordered to leave and not come back.
Bayen gives Isis a tour of the space complex, where they eventually run into a gang which had been tracking them from the beginning. Once again, Isis is forced to defend herself and she unconsciously uses the Chaos ability to deal with the situation.
The biker gang gets pounded. Bayen is rescued and Isis has some explaining to do afterwards–from what she can recall.
The Praetorial Guard come into play soon after. Subplot 3 ends here, another subplot begins.
Subplot 4: Having become aware of the Starchild’s existence, Captain Rayna Hastings begins to take drastic steps to capture and interrogate her by using live bait.
This leads to one confrontation after another, where Isis is forced into action as the Starchild by taking on the Praetorial Guard after Bayen’s mom is taken prisoner and Bayen himself is being hounded by the PG as well.
Along the way Isis encounters a couple of mysteries which she shelves aside for later. For right now, she has to deal with Hastings and the Praetorial Guard, which eventually leads to sacrifice and ultimately, escape.
Subplot 4 ends here.
***
Now regardless of this, the book hasn’t ended yet. But it does show that with careful subplotting along the way, you can effectively write a much longer and extensive novel by simply weaving one subplot in after another, while making sure that at some point, one subplot ends and another begins.
Think of each as a mini-story within a story. 4 blocks of plot themes carefully mapped out. Now whether or not you have the capability to meld one or more together to end at once before beginning a new one, is entirely up to you.
But don’t be afraid to experiment. Most importantly–have fun with your writing!
http://www.freewebs.com/starchildalpha1/
