Something else that happened when I got caught up in getting the plot finished was that I neglected the world I was building. I left a lot of questions unanswered that, according to OSC, have the ability to shape and enhance the plot. In his book Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, he recommends asking "what if" questions, which will lead to other questions, until you have established firm rules for your world.
That was one of the things my plot critiquers mentioned- they got confused about the rules of my world. When I looked at the questions they were asking, I realized that they were confused because I didn't know the answers. So I started asking what if, and focused on writing an explanation of the rules of my world instead of a plot. After a week, I had four and a half pages of explanation, and there were still some questions left to answer!
The fun part was that some of the answers to "what if" that I came up with really did open up the plot. Some of my characters changed dramatically, which led to new possibilities for the plot. Certain aspects of the world I built made plot twists possible that hadn't been there before. Now I'm really looking forward to working on the plot- I'm no longer constrained by what I don't know.
Labels: revision
So the question at the end of the last post was, is it worth it to revise the fairy tale?
The answer turned out to be yes and no. See, by the time I finished writing the story I had originally planned, I had a million other ideas for the world I was creating. I wanted to include them in the revision, but I couldn't tell if it should be a whole separate story. I loved those ideas, and found them way more interesting than what I'd already written, but I didn't want to have wasted *eight months* of work.
So I sat down with Lajos Egri's The Art of Dramatic Writing. I decided to try to identify a premise for both stories, and see which one was stronger. Egri points out why a premise is so important, and how strange it is that not all written work has one, with the following example:
A man rushes down the street, panting for breath. You intercept him and ask where he is going. He gasps: "How should I know where I'm going? I am on my way."
Egri says that a good premise is made up of three parts: Character, conflict and where the story is going. For example, he identifies the premise of Macbeth as "Ruthless ambition leads to its own destruction." Character is identified in the phrase "ruthless ambition", one can easily see how that character trait would lead to conflict, and the end of the play is suggested by "its own destruction".
In the end, I couldn't come up with a premise for the story I had already written, because there wasn't any conflict. I decided I would do a major rework of the plot, but keep the main characters, which would make me feel less like I had wasted all that time. And although my story is nothing like Macbeth, I have chosen to get started using that premise: "Ruthless ambition leads to its own destruction". Hopefully as I work out the plot and further develop the characters, I will be able to refine that basic premise into something uniquely mine.
