Plotting via Spreadsheets – Don’t Be Trapped in the Box

Last week, we talked about How We’d Spend A Day With One of Our Characters, but this week’s entry in our How I Write series, takes a closer look at our planning process. So, since we’re all writers, we’re focusing on plotting, which inevitably leads to the question: Plotter vs Pantser or some weird mix?

Plotting Via Spreadsheets

Hi. My name is Kristen and I’m a spreadsheet addict.

There. I said it. Now, I love me some colored index cards and other office supplies, too. They have their uses, but they also get scattered and lost. I’ve also been known to scribble mind-maps and notes on loose paper, but I do much better if when I’m satisfied with the basics, I transfer everything into Word or Excel. Sometimes both.

I also have a love of puzzles that captured my attention in my college economics courses and led me to double major in it alongside business administration. You probably think I LOVED my accounting classes too, but you’d be wrong. There’s a huge gap between intriguing puzzles and busy work. I see plots more as complex puzzles that I haven’t quite worked out the rules behind.

I’ve looked at many different plotting methods to build my outlines, Snowflake Method, 3-Act Structure, Save The Cat, The Blob, Hero’s Journey, Emotional Structure, Billy Mernit’s 7 Steps of Romantic Comedy. You name it, I’ve probably tried it. Even on the same manuscript.

You see, I also have another problem. I over think things. Yes, I can admit it, but that’s easier than avoiding doing so. I like to look at things from different angles. I want to make sure what I’m building will make sense when it’s complete. I like looking at things through different lenses and not just for photography. This is why I don’t think I could pants a story to save my life. It only takes me so far and I’ve lost sight of where I was going and end up circling in confusion and walk away from it.

With spreadsheets, you can keep all your thoughts and notes in one place. Using different worksheets in the same file or even different columns on the same one, you can apply different lenses (plotting methods) to the same plot outline. Is it effective? I don’t know. I think it works for me in the long run. I think of and see different things as I approach the problem from different angles. Does it help keep me on track and get the project finished? Probably not, but it does help me explore and think about the story and the characters so I know them before I sit down to work.

Linear vs Non-Linear Writing

If you’ve read any of my previous posts on writing or plotting, you know I strongly believe I need a road map to get from the beginning of a story through to “The End”. I may sound like an extreme plotter who plans everything down to the most miniscule detail, but I really do enjoy having my characters surprise me along the way.

I could never write out of order because of that though. Things change wildly enough sometimes without jumbling things out of order and requiring major surgery to stitch everything into place before it can be considered done.

One of the methods I found and liked, but which drives my DH insane when I mention it, is called a Phase Outline. It’s a very detailed outline, where you describe what needs to happen on each page in a line or two. “Why write the story twice,” he asks. It doesn’t feel that way to me. I try to leave it lose enough that the characters can move outside the confines of the box and become who they need to be, but it’s still structured enough that I’m comfortable in knowing where we’re all going, and that we’ll get there on the right page.

Escape From the Box

So, you probably now have an image of me as a control freak. You wouldn’t be wrong.

You might also picture me as indecisive, insecure and unable to commit to a single method and stick with it. I prefer to think of it as thorough, but you might have something there.

So, how do I know when I have a plot that I can work with? Gooooood question. Sometimes it takes working through it and see if the pieces fit together.

Wait?! Didn’t I just say that was the exact opposite of how I saw my self working? Probably, but I’ve found that when my characters surprise me by doing something that’s not planned, it’s better for the story. I know a lot of pantsers say they run everything through in their head several times before committing it to paper. I suspect many hardcore plotters do the same thing, they just commit all their iterations to paper along the way.

As far as knowing when something’s ready to go out into the world? It should resemble the working outline, but doens’t have to exactly. The highlights of the journey must be hit, and I often can’t see that for all the details along the way. Once I have a draft or two on a manuscript, it has to be sent to a couple of readers to see if I managed to get the story in my head onto the page.

I’ve only reached that point with one manuscript and only sent that to one agent because my confidence having done that isn’t as high as I’d like it to be. That’s definitely one of my goals for next year. Deconstructing the puzzle and putting it back together again. Each iteration gets better, but I fear I’ve left a string of characters still trapped in their boxes along the way.

I’m determined not to sit complacently with them though, I will find my way out of this self-made maze.


When I first conceived of this post, I had the idea of a mime trapped in a box, which was really a cell in an excel file. But this morning as I got thinking about taking my laptop with me on a field trip to the car dealership, I was thinking how similar it was to the portable writing desks people carried (lugged?) with them during the Regency Era. So, as a special treat, here’s a photo of one. I think I’ll keep my laptop with Word and Excel for everyday use, but one of these to go with my antique lady’s secretary would be nice too.

A Regency era mahogany and inlaid writing box, circa 1810.
A Regency Tunbridgeware mahogany and inlaid writing box by Dunnett's of London, circa 1810. The cover inset with a painted panel of Venus and Cupid, the border of chequered form, the compartmented interior with green paper lining and label inscribed 'Dunnetts Toy & Tunbridge Ware REPOSITORY No.3 Cheapside, London' 14 in. (36 cm.) wide

YOUR TURN: Are you a macro or micro manager? Do you plan everything down to the most minute details or do you get a vague idea in your head and take off running? Do unfinished projects haunt you? How do you know when your project is complete?

And if you’d like to read about deal with plotting and knowing when a manuscript is ready to go out, you can find their blogs here:

* Alexia Reed * Kimberly Farris *
* Danie Ford * Emma G. Delaney * Angeleque Ford *

Eureka!

The resulting sparks, smell and bright light make for a dramatic demonstration of a direct reduction of iron oxide with carbon.My word count for this folktale-based story is currently sitting at 2,914. It’s scary to realize that is 500 more words than my first draft of Revealed, which laid out an entire plot line.

The past couple days felt like I was pulling teeth again for each word. I think I finally figured out why I couldn’t get into the story. The opening pages were very dense. No white space. The words “was” and “had” could have propped the pages up on their own. My characters were isolated in many ways. They might not have always been alone, but there were no conversational openings in their current situations.

This should have been setting off warning bells in my head. Did I notice? No way, I was too busy trying to get any kind of word count in before the timer was up in the challenges. What a painful way to go about it. I spent much of today fiddling with what I’d already written. Tightening up phrasing and looking closely at the pacing. It was still dense and very quiet when I left it to pick up the kids from school.

When I came back, I decided I needed to pick up where I’d left off. Fortunately, that point was the first line of dialogue between the hero and heroine.

“Easy, Miss. Put that away before someone gets hurt. Namely me.”

Yeah. She surprised the hell out of me too, pulling a pistol on him like that. But you know what it provided? Instant chemistry and sparks!

After that point, my word count quickly jumped by another thousand words. Maybe I should go back and reread Nancy Kress’ Beginnings, Middles & Ends. Finding that sweet spot to begin and get rolling is all about experimenting.

What sets off your red flags and warning bells?

Work In Progress!

Work In Progress

My WIP saw actual progress over the last two days. It’s Spring Break here for the kids and they were already crying they were bored by lunchtime yesterday. Today, I further taxed their powers of self-entertainment by taking them with me to get the tires on the van looked at. The guy told me, “I don’t usually say this to customers, but that’s a really dangerous tire to be driving on. Good thing you came in when you did.” Yeah, duly chastised and a thousand bucks poorer thanks to extended warranties, new shocks & struts and there better be some gold plating under there too! Noted. I’ll be back every 3-5 months to get them rotated and aligned now. Aye-aye.

Anyway, I managed to fill out my outline spreadsheet based on Dunne’s Emotional Structure and Vogler’s take on the Hero’s Journey, as well as a few other things I’ve tossed in by now. I finished Act I and Act II’s outline yesterday and finished up Act III today at the tire place. If they’d had a decent table to work on and I hadn’t had the kids, I might have been REALLY productive during the three hours we were there.

I also worked a bit brainstorming on names for characters and the like that I’ll need before I can really sit down and write this thing, but I’m so close that I’m starting to feel annoyed when I can’t take a chunk of time and devote to it and get it out of my system. This is a good thing. There’s a sense of urgency that I need to work on this and get the story told. I’d missed that feeling lately.

All I have to do now is strap myself into my chair and get writing! I’m sure I’ll become a regular feature in the RD chat room again. (Sorry Bria, no nifty anaolgies today. I’m too braindead from smelling the rubber in the showroom/waiting room and a FOXNEWS overload.)

Thanks and Possible Breakthrough

FirstShabu Shabu set, link to wikipedia article off, I want to thank everyone for their birthday wishes yesterday!

I had a great day and we went out for Japanese for dinner for something different that the kids and I’d never had before: Shabu Shabu, which is named for the “swish” sound the meat makes when you drag it through the boiling water.

So what’s this have to do with a breakthrough? Not much, really. Except that I’ve been looking at this story as a single big chunk of meat plopped down on the counter. Wrong. It needs to be sliced thinly to bring out the marbling, the texture and flavor. It needs a variety of veggies on the side to season it. And most importantly, it needs that pot of boiling water to steep in, to meld everything together into something tasty and new.

Dare I hope that by forcing myself to face this story head-on this week (see boiling pot reference), I’ve managed to push through past the stale synopsis on Wikipedia to something interesting, fun, and that will qualify as a romance (see the something tasty and new reference)?

What I realized is that everything I’ve done so far has been solely for my benefit. The majority of what I’ve cluttered up my brain, blog and hard drive with regarding this story so far will never see the page in the final story. I don’t consider it wasted time at all because I had to know it and work through it to find the story that was hiding underneath.

Unfortunately, what I did realize is that I’ve mostly abandoned the approach I was trying to take. I still think it’s very puzzle-like in trying to determine what goes where, what A means for B, and why C has to happen before D can. But thinking about the “layout” and who and what need to populate the story have been pushed aside in my quest to find the story I want to write itself.

Now that I have an overview of what I want to do (and it might not look like it contains all the same plot points as before, but they’re still bouncing around my head and woven in and around what is there. The original folktale seems to be mostly backstory and supporting details for the hero’s storyline, but the heroine is taking over the show and what the story is about has changed because of the decisions I’ve forced the characters to make and the histories I’ve given them.

So, back to swishing these poor characters around. Mmm… it’s starting to look like soup… I mean a story! What do you think?

Alexander can’t help helping others and when he learns a woman has been kidnapped from the old gypsy woman he rescued from a ditch, things start to go wrong. He finds the woman, but Anthea refuses to leave before she can recover the key to her father’s breeding program that was stolen by her “captives”. Meanwhile, the matriarch plans to force Anthea into marriage with her eldest son because of her own impeccable bloodline. Eventually, Alex figures out that he needs a little outside help in order to help solve Anthea’s problems and that he likes her as she is. Alex and Anthea manage to escape with the key but the family pursues them. Will society’s notions of propriety trap her forever or will true love free her to be her self.

Oh, and you can expect to hear a lot more about a couple of my presents in the future: DH got me Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting and my mom got me a copy of Nancy Kress’s Beginnings, Middles & Ends.

KISS

I have been working on the Flower Queen’s Daughter story. I decided I needed to dig deeper and figure out the heroine’s storyline and what her own journey looks like. So far, I detailed conflicts and beats for the first four scenes. My real issue is with keeping things simple and preventing them from becoming overcomplicated.

Anthea is a bit of a tomboy, filling the role of the son her parents never had. She’s horse-mad and her mother is not pleased. Our heroine promised her father on his deathbed to oversee the family stables and continue his work on the breeding line.

Her mother wishes her daughter settled in a comfortable marriage, not dirty and smelling of horse. She doesn’t know about the promise and tries to forbid Anthea from spending her time in the stable.

While working with the steward, Anthea discovers one of their mares was pregnant when she was sold and this foal turns out to be a key part of the breeding program and must be recovered if her father’s goals are to be achieved.

Her mother is overjoyed by Anthea’s invitation to the Dragon Family’s House Party. Anthea agrees to go, but for much different reasons, she tracked the sale of the pregnant mare to them. However, neither realizes why Dragon Mother extended the invite.

Unfortunately, that’s as far as I’ve gotten. This week’s plan is to sit down and hammer on the heroine’s storyline some more. The general idea of where I want to take her exists, but I need to weave it into the original hero’s story.

I think my new mantra needs to be K.I.S.S. Keep it simple, stupid. Everything keeps getting tangled up and I end up chasing down rabbit holes after complications that are in most cases unnecessary. I rarely attempt to write short and don’t think I would be able to do so without problems. I read a couple articles on the topic, but my brain doesn’t understand the difference between dilemma and major conflict.

The ability to estimate word counts is currently beyond me. If someone asks how long a story will be, you got me. Not a clue. If I consider my difficulties in finishing what I start, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.

So here’s what I have for the heroine’s story so far:

Flora wants her daughter, Anthea, to be more ladylike because she knows a hoyden won’t land a suitable husband. However, on his deathbed, Anthea promised her father to carry on his breeding program at the family stables.

Anthea and the steward discover Dragon family stole foal when they bought a mare last season. She realizes this foal holds the key to her father’s breeding plan and vows to get it back.

Anthea wants to make her mother happy but can’t seem to do it when her mother asks for her promise not to search out the stolen foal and to think about her future.

She receives invitation to Dragon’s house party and sees it as a way to keep promise to both parents. Little does Anthea realize, she has been invited because the Dragon Mother wants to compromise her into marrying her eldest son.

Ker-Snap!


Amazing book! Romance Writing How To written by Leigh Michaels

I mentioned in a comment of my previous post on trying to figure out how to structure a new romance story that I’d just purchased two craft books and experienced one of those Aha! moments while reading the first one: On Writing Romance: How to Craft a Novel That Sells by Leigh Michaels.

I shall now go bang my head against my desk.

Ok. Still here? I can’t believe I’ve been sitting here since August and I haven’t read this book yet. To say, “It’s what I’ve been looking for,” is an understatement. Either that, or the time was finally right for me to find it. It’s not a magic formula book by any means, but Chapter Three (Essential Elements) floored me. It wasn’t the following sentence:

A romance novel is the story of a man and a woman who, while they’re solving a problem that threatens to keep them apart, discover that the love they feel for each other is the sort that comes along only once in a lifetime; this discover leads to a permanent commitment and a happy ending.

Leigh Michaels, On Writing Romance, p. 39

No, that was familiar enough and I’ve read it enough times in the last eight months or so. No, what floored me was the diagram on the next page, complete with its cute little heart. Lemme see if I can do it any kind of justice.

HERO <cute little heart> HEROINE
Pulled together by a PROBLEM, which is the story’s conflict.
ONCE-IN-A-
LIFETIME-LOVE
develops, but will the conflict permit it to blossom?
ACTION (the plot) develops and continues.
The conflict is resolved realistically. The HAPPY ENDING leaves the reader satisfied.

Leigh Michaels, On Writing Romance, p. 40

You’ll have to imagine some lines on your own. One line connects Hero and Heroine to the heart, from there a single line drops to the problem box, then it splits to the Love story and the Action plot to converge again at the Happy Ending. I don’t feel like I’ve done it any justice at all. However, the important thing is that I felt a shift in my thinking. Then as I read through Chapter Five, which is all about the Conflict in a romance novel, I felt things shift again. Getting them up in trees and throwing rocks at them apparently isn’t enough.

Simply giving your characters a problem doesn’t automatically create conflict. Only when the problem involves both of them and creates tension between them do you have conflict.

Leigh Michaels, On Writing Romance, p. 62

The inside of my head must have looked like the bank of paparazzi along the red carpet when a car door opens.

You have to get them up in the SAME tree and it can’t be just any old rocks, they have to be tailor made for them and their internal issues.

No wonder the Snowbound story didn’t really work. It’s also why my masquerade story isn’t quite clicking yet. Barrington cares, but he’s not really affected by her problems. I could go on, but the energy would be better spent fixing the problems.

She goes on to explain about Short Term (External) and Long Term (Internal) Problems that the hero and heroine must face. Pretty standard fare there and made sense as she described how they fit together and gave some strategies for creating them.

Then, I turned the page again and WHAM!

Leigh Michaels deserves a spot on the Jedi Council for her explanation of The Force and how you have to use it in conjunction with the Short Term and Long Term Problems, otherwise your Hero and Heroine, smart and reasonable as you’ve constructed them, will simply walk away. What keeps them together? They have to need each other so badly they don’t want to walk away, one has a good reason for forcing the other into this predicament, or there are outside influences keeping them in close proximity.

I’ve read most of the rest of the book (there’s some awesome stuff in Section Three: Writing Your Book) but I think I need to go reread the first eighty pages again to make sure it’s imprinted on my brain. There are summary questions at the end of each section that are helpful in illustrating the point. It’s not very workbook-like, but if that’s your thing, you can make it so. Or not. Her use of published examples and off-the-cuff throw-away ideas were extremely helpful to me.

So, it’s back to the drawing board for me, but if you’re finding that what you’re writing isn’t living up to what you’re reading, this book may help provide insight on what’s missing and it doesn’t come down on either side of the whole pantser/plotter debate.

Fitting Pieces Back Together

This is still really rough, but I spent a large chunk of today working on turning my worksheet of scenes with their info and list of beats to be hit into a genuine stab at a blurb and synopsis. I realize that it’s still needs a lot of work and many of the details have either not floated to the surface of my brain or not made it to the page. I’m not particularly tied to the names for the Hero and Heroine, but there is a reason for them.

This step pretty much correlates to writing out all the steps for the big quest in the area or zone if I were designing a game area.

Questions, comments, and critiques all welcome.

The Blurb

When an accommodating miller’s son stops to help a gypsy woman shunned by the rest of his village, he learns the daughter of one noble family has been kidnapped by another and must decide if he can give up the potential riches to be gained by working in the second household to steal away with his newfound love.

The Synopsis

Alex Miller can’t seem to help himself. He always lends a helping hand to those in need around him but his father refuses to see how his son’s altruism will be an advantage when Alex won’t ask for assistance he so readily gives to others.

Returning from the village to replace a broken gear for the mill, Alex comes across a wagon stuck in the ditch. An old Gypsy woman complains no one has bothered to stop all day and rewards Alex’s kindness with news of Anthea’s kidnapping and gives him a magic bell she claims will aid his rescue of this beautiful young debutante. He remains unconvinced of the bell’s usefulness, but unwilling to insult her, he tucks it away before heading home.

His father is furious with how long it has taken Alex to travel to the village, pick up the part and return. They argue over why it matters if Alex takes the time to help others when working the mill is a sure-fire way to get no where fast. His father proclaims he will never amount to much and Alex storms upstairs to pack his bag. He’s got a noblewoman to rescue.

Alex is anxious to complete his quest, but he is unable to ignore the pleas of three young men of consequence when his help and ingenuity is required to get them out of their predicaments. When the four stop for the night at an unsavory tavern, they overhear rumors of a woman being held prisoner on a nearby estate by a wealthy and powerful family. In the morning, Alex slips away, but finds his friends have followed him for lack of better entertainment.

His hopes for proving his worthiness, and the worth of helping others, to his father die when the butler slams the door in their face. They return to the tavern to plot a way into the household in order to rescue Anthea.

One of his friends uses his influence to convince the Matriarch of the family, a nasty, old dragon of a woman to hire Alex as a groom. She is flattered by their false praises for her lost beauty and agrees, placing Alex personally in charge of her eldest son’s prized mare.

The horse proves fractious and escapes from Alex. In desperation, he pulls out the small bell given to him by the gypsy and sounds it. The animal is found by one of his friends and Alex’s position is safe. He denies having any problems and the Matriarch rewards him with new copper-colored finery and invites him to join the family for dinner.

At the ball, he meets the kidnapped noblewoman and learns of her unhappiness. The Matriarch is holding her captive until her eldest son returns from wherever the hell he is hiding. He promises to find a way to rescue her.

The next time he is sent to exercise the mare, she once again escapes. He searches where she was found before to no avail. He gives in and rings the bell. Another of his friends locates and returns the horse, saving Alex’s hide. His reward is silver-colored finery and an invitation to an intimate dinner party hosted by the Matriarch, who then treats him more as a guest than a servant.

One evening, he finds Anthea alone in the garden and she confesses her wish to marry for love not duty, nor political or financial gain. He relates the plans for escape that he and his friends have devised, but she advises him to ask the Matriarch for a useful reward such the mare’s foal instead of accepting cast-off clothing and ignoring how the family laughs at him behind his back.

The next day, he’s sent to exercise the prize mare and he relaxes his guard when she behaves for him. She slips away while he daydreams. He searches the locations in which she was previously found but resorts to ringing the bell in desperation. He returns to the stables only to meet his third friend returning from the river where the mare had been grazing. The Matriarch is impressed he has done so well given the horse’s mischievous streak. Alex boldly requests ownership of the mare’s foal before she can offer him more clothing. She laughs and pleased by his confidence, she gifts him with a splendid outfit of golden finery and invites him to a ball that night as well.

Instead, Alex and the noblewoman sneak off to the stables where she locates the foal – a finely grown gelding. They hide when a groom doing his final round surprises the couple and then flee on horseback to meet up with his trio of allies at the tavern.

Their escape is soon noticed and the family’s younger sons, sent to retrieve the bride the Matriarch had picked out for her eldest son, pursue them across the fields. The brothers’ relentless pursuit means Alex and his friends must rely on the noblewoman’s knowledge of the area and trust her judgment.

After a harrowing night, Anthea guides everyone safely to her mother’s house where Alex’s worth is questioned and she defends his actions and decisions. He admits he requires assistance to defeat the Matriarch’s younger sons and guarantee Anthea’s safety. A few favors are called in and the enemy is routed for good.

Her mother wants to ensure her daughter’s happiness and can’t imagine she’ll be happy as a miller’s son living so far away. Alex assures her that he won’t be continuing in the family business and intends to build a home of his own. Anthea declares she will never love another but they can visit every year during the winter holidays. His father is summoned for the wedding.

Logic Puzzles

I hate the ones like on the SAT where they’re not much more than busy work.

You know. Lots of irrelevant information thrown at you about what the weather was like when Mrs. So-n-So’s 3rd grade class went to this specific zoo and saw a group of monkeys, so many males and so many females all eating fruit with even more irrelevant details thrown in. Then you’re supposed to figure out which monkey’s name, their favorite fruit and where they liked to eat it by the set of clues about their likes and dislikes.

They always involve setting up a table and filling in the blanks given the information in the clues. I hate when the kids bring these types of problems home because they refuse to see the pattern and get stuck in the irrelevant details. It’s all about focus, pattern matching and sifting through the information given to find the useful nuggets.

I feel like I’ve been working on a giant one of these this week. I’ve got a list of 22 scenes (so far) with various columns regarding what should be happening in each one. I’m not sure I have it slimmed down to the relevant info yet, but it’s coming along and seems to flow from one to the next.

The trickiest part has been stepping back and looking at each scene as a collection of beats like in a screenplay and making sure the final action leads to the next scene while at the same time making sure the scenes also progress through a story arc and also allow the hero and heroine to make their romance work. I suspect this one might fall under “with romantic elements” but I think that can be shifted a bit more to the 75% romance instead of 67% that it’s currently at.

Did I mention that I have trouble thinking short and simple?

I have all but the last 5 scenes sketched out. I think I still need to go back and look through them for how the characters are feeling at these points in the story, but once the timeline and what needs to happen is set out, I can get down to the business of writing this thing down.

I’ve tried to stick with a plotline that would be similar to the type I’d done for the game, and it’s interesting to see the parallels as well as where the way I think about it has to diverge from tried and true patterns. I actually have to go through the process of “playing through the quest” and figuring out what makes it interesting to watch from the outside instead of just experience on a personal level. Screw-ups are only interesting if they teach the hero something useful about himself that will eventually affect his overall success.

I still have doubts about the saleability of this idea, but I’m not going to worry about that for now. First, I have to get the first draft down.

I did find an interesting article over on Michelle Willingham’s site about how someone can go from hate to love in 11 steps. Definitely something I’ve seen repeatedly in my reading, but never really thought about as outline points.

So, what do you compare your writing process to? What have you experienced “Aha!” moments over?

Puzzling It Out

So, I’ve been fiddling with a new idea to go with this game-like approach I’ve been thinking about (I haven’t forgotten, Jodi!) while being offline most of last week to spend time with my mom, her friend, and the kids who were out of school.

I found a great resource Folktexts where they have collected a ton of Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts. I spent a lot of time looking at folktales Wikipedia as well. The English Wiz site also has a very cool section on The Etymology of First Names.

So… I decided I wanted to try to write something around “The Flower Queen’s Daughter”. I don’t know how it’ll turn out, but it’ll be an interesting excercise. DH said it sounded long, but that was probably just my mangling of telling him too many details along the way.

So, yesterday while the kids were in martial arts class, I sat down with my clipboard and started planning. I’ve gone over the story several times to get a feel for what all needs to be included, but beyond the plot sequence, I hadn’t done much else with it yet.

If I was truly going to turn this into a section for a game, I’d need to go into much more detail in mapping out where all the different settings were located and deciding what connected them together that could be interesting or at the least useful. Instead, I came up with 8 locations that can be used and reused during the story.

The Flower Queen’s House
The Hero’s House (more likely his father’s)
The Ditch along the Road
The Road where he’s searching (generalized location here)
The Dragon’s House
Salon/Receiving room
Ball Room
Stables
Meadow
Garden

The characters required seems a large and unwieldy list just now. And they’re not going to be literal representations of how they’re referred to in the book. I was thinking of having the animals/flowers/etc represented in their coats of arms/crests and let it be more metaphorical.

Hero – Alexander
Heroine – Anthea
The Flower Queen/Gyspy — Flora, I’m conflating these two characters
The Dragon Mother — Rosalind
King of Eagles — Arnold
King of Foxes — Todd
King of Fishes — Dylan, Marvin, Morgan, or Meredith
The Dragon’s brothers —
The Dragon — Drake
Hero’s Father —

There are also some items that play roles in the story that will need to be mentioned: a bell, a mare and her foal, and three cloaks (copper, silver, and golden).

I’ve already worked out which characters/items/locations are needed for which of the 16 plot points I pulled directly from the synopsis so far. My next plan is to take those note cards and write Dunne’s Story points on the reverse. I think I’ll also need a few more scenes so that this isn’t completely in the hero’s POV. The heroine needs some reason why she’s just going to waltz off with a man she barely knows instead of staying in what appears to be a cushy place.

So my next step is to lay out the plot points on my handy plot diagram and see where they fall and where I still need answers and ideas.

Puzzle Pieces

I’m a sucker for puzzles. Nothing makes me happier than finding a solution. Must. Solve. Puzzle. Nearly any type of puzzle, as long as a bit of challenge exists, will keep me amused for quite a while. The sense of accomplishment is one of the reasons I like learning new things and coding (which involves figuring out how to turn what you want to do into terms the computer can understand and execute).

I was struck the other day by how similar writing is to a jigsaw puzzle. The only problem is instead of getting a box with a photo containing another copy mounted on cardboard cut into interesting little shapes, you construct your own box, draw your own pictures and cut out your own pieces, all while blindfolded and wearing gloves.

Or is that just me?

I may appear to be on a quest to find The Magic Formula<tm>. It’s not that cut and dried. Instead, I prefer to think I’m seeking a magic process. What if you simply made a slight twist and popped out a couple of pieces and switched ’em like when you got super-frustrated with a Rubik’s Cube? Although, that might suit if a scene is misplaced, but unless you started with 6 sides of colored squares you’ll have a big mess.Must. Solve. Puzzle.

First, I need to remember the rules of the game are to be learned. Practice on easier levels should come before trying to master the expert ones. (Yeah, I hated training wheels too.)

So, viewing a story as a puzzle requiring clues, set-ups and pay-offs to get the rewards helps me understand why I came back to writing and why, this time, I’m sticking with it much longer than before when I ignored the mechanics.

The other thing I’ve been ignoring my background of building stories in a radically different medium. I wrote, scripted and coded for a text-MUD for over a decade.

I think if I consider a story to be the equivalent of an area (i.e. a section of the game based on a single theme such as “Arabian Nights” or “Victorian London”). I need to block in the rooms (theme/premise), figure out all quests belong (plot), decide on the list of mobs (characters and their stories) and which kinds of props and window dressing are necessary objects (scenes and sequels).

The advantage building an area had over writing a story was the interactive and emergent aspects which covered a multitude of sins. I’m also unsure of my ability to work in a non-linear fashion. Thinking of the process in familiar terms might help, but I suspect the pieces aren’t lined up in quite the correct order yet.

Hmmm. Perhaps I should try writing a story set within one of the areas I designed. I could also take one of my characters and try to write their quest steps. Can’t hurt, right?

Must. Solve. Puzzle.