Dancing Monkey Posts

A Call for Reader Questions: Dancing Monkey 2013

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If you fire up the time-machine and travel back to August of 2012, you’ll notice that about this time of year my life gets increasingly hectic. Weekends that used to be free for writing and bloggery get siphoned up by Writers Festivals, Conferences, and other work-related things. I start spending more time in airports than usual. Projects that have been ignored for a little too long start lurching their way to the top of the to-do list.My brain, known to be unreliable at the best of time, starts misfiring like you wouldn’t believe.

I’ve discovered, from hard experience, that it’s best not to set my own topics in this period. No-one is particularly interested in reading an endless cycle of well, guess how I fucked up today and seriously, me and airports, it’s like I’m cursed; I’m not particularly interested those posts either, but I know I will if I find myself ready to blog and unable to think of something.

Which brings us to this post: the beginning of the second ever Dancing Monkey Post Extravaganza series. 

Once again I’m throwing open the doors of Man Versus Bear and crowd-sourcing topics you’d like to see me tackle in the coming weeks. Give me topics. Set me challenges. Fire away with single words that can be used as a writing prompt, if you want, and I’ll store them in a file and use them to fill the empty hours when the writer-brain is willing but the thinky-brain is weak.

If you’re interested in seeing the type of things we covered in last year’s series, you can find them archived here. I’ll note that the response to John’s question about plot is still among the most visited posts I’ve ever written; I may be brain-dead for these, but I do try not to half-arse things.

So, pitch away, people. Drop you questions, words, and ideas into the comments and I’ll get things rolling in the coming weeks.

I’m Far To Easily Amused By The Phrase “ENGAGE KRESS PROTOCOL”

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So my friend Nic, who scribbles a bit but doesn’t have a website, snuck a final question in on the end of the dancing monkey series:

What do you do with an idea or story that just runs out of steam far too early?

(Say many thousands of words short of what it needs)

Well, much as I’d like to say I’ve experienced this one, I’m generally an up-against-the-word-limits-can-I-have-a-few-thousand-more-please-gov’ner kind of writer. I spend half my structural redrafts trying to cut things out of my manuscripts, so should a story come in several thousand words under my approach I’d probably sing hallelujahs and weep with goddamn joy. Writing shorter is one of my goals, not a problem.

Assuming for the sake of argument (and blog post) that I did suddenly run into such a problem – say for whatever unlikely reason an editor really needed a 10k gap in an anthology filled and my pinch-hitting story only came in at 7k – I can think of a handful of things I’d try.

1) ENGAGE KRESS PROTOCOL

Named for SF writer Nancy Kress, who first described this process on her blog back in 2011. Basically she was writing a story that didn’t quite work, so her method of coming up with an alternative ending went thusly:

1) Go back to the last place you’re excited about the story (in this case, 2/3 of the way through) and toss out everything after that.

2) Think of a different, but still logical, way for a secondary character to act. Secondary characters are, by definition, not as completely delineated as the point-of-view character and so the author has some wiggle room as to how they might behave. Change something major here.

3) Return to your protagonist — how does he react to this change of behaviour in someone important to him? If nothing sparks for you, try different behaviour from the secondary character, or perhaps a different character.

I figure this works because the loss of energy in a story usually has a lot to do with writers making character choices that are sub-optimal for reasons of originality, conflict-escalation, or simply not quite living up to the story the writer is imagining.

2) THREE ACT STRUCTURE FTW

It’s rather badly maligned by writers, but the narrative architecture of the three-act structure is actually a pretty bitching blue-print for figuring out where a story has run out of energy.  When a story doesn’t work (whether it’s mine or I’m critting) I generally break out a list of key beats in every structure and map out the story accordingly.

This’ll generally reveal one of the following problems:

  • One of the steps has been ignored (IE jumping straight from the end of the second act to the climax)
  • A beat is occurring out of sequence.
  • The story is trying to go back to an earlier narrative beat after hitting it.

After that, I re-sequence the narrative and patch as necessary.

3) SUB-PLOT AUDIT

If I’m really desperate for wordcount, I’d do a sub-plot audit. Which means I’d go through every character in my story, work out what their various sub-plots are, and map them onto the beats of the handy three-act structure I’ve still got kicking around from the last step. Then I go through the MS and make sure the audience has a very clear idea of how every character is changed by their arc over the course of the story, which will usually involve adding some extra scenes.

You can get a lot of mileage out of this because, realistically, the main difference between your protagonist and every other character is that you chose to tell the protagonist’s story. Conventional writing wisdom says that your villain should think they’re the hero of their own story – it’s how you justify their villainy – but the same applies to all the side-kicks, love-interests, best friends, parents, background characters, etc.

The movie Whip It is a near-perfect example of this – there’s not a character in the entire film who doesn’t have a narrative arc at some point. For some of the character’s that arc gets a lot of screen-time – the protag, the antags, the protags parents, etc – but even seemingly throw-away characters like the Bliss-the-protags arch-rival at Beauty Pageants has an arc that’s built up from exactly 4 damn scenes in the film.

For bonus points, each of those arcs is woven in so its key scenes coincide with another characters – the scene where Bliss-the-Protagonist’s mother comes to accept her daughter isn’t destined to be a pageant star largely coincides with Bliss’s and her arch-rival making peace through the loan of a gown (and the rival achieving a level of success on the circuit).

4) SUCK IT UP AND WRITE

This is, of course, the time-honoured means of getting more words. If your story has run out of steam and you absolutely must have additional words, put on your grown-up pants and add more words.

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And with that we’re done with the Dancing Monkey posts, as I’m out of questions and back into a steady run of free weekends that’ll allow me the free-time to write blog posts once more. Thanks to everyone who threw in their 2c and asked me stuff – with luck we’ll try this again next year when the day-job gets crazy (though, next time, I’ll prep it all a little bit earlier).

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT PLOT IN 1,069 WORDS OR LESS

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Crank up the organ grinder and gather around the popcorn, ’cause we’re almost at the end of the dancing monkey series. For our second-last entry, John Farrell asked:

I have awful problems constructing a plot. How do you do that?

Apparently you folks don’t want to go with the easy questions, huh? This is not a topic where I’m known to be *concise*, so I’m going to set myself a word-budget on this one and send you off into the wide world with some reading homework, ’cause really, plot is big.

Here we go:

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT PLOT IN 1,069 WORDS OR LESS

1. PROTAGONIST, ANTAGONIST – FIGHT!

Most plots hang off a pretty simple dynamic designed drive a story forward. It goes something like this: your protagonist wants something really badly; your antagonist denies your protagonist the thing they really want; delicious, awesome conflict ensues. Take Lord of the Rings as an example – Frodo wants to live a nice, ordinary life in the shire; Sauron will destroy the world if he does that; therefore there is a whole lot of walking and fighting and stuff.

2. CHARACTERS HAVE LAYERS

If you’re reading this you’re probably an SF nerd, which means you read that last example and thought “now, wait, at the start of the story Frodo wants to go off and have adventures like his uncle?” Which is true, for what it’s worth; have yourself a reader cookie.

This is the tricky thing about a well-written character – they tell themselves they want something at the beginning the story, then discover they *really* want something else as a result of the god-awful trauma the narrative puts him through. Really smart writers seed all sorts of clues about “real” want early in the narrative too – for all Frodo’s rhetoric about wanting to be like Bilbo, it takes him *months* to get off his arse and actually go adventuring once the adventuring is required.

In many stories the thing the character *thinks* they want is actually the direct opposite of the thing they *actually* want. Frodo wants adventure, but truly craves peace and quiet in the shire; Luke Skywalker wants to become an imperial fighter pilot, but actually becomes a sword-wielding Jedi; characters in rom-coms think they hate each other, but secretly they’re destined to be all true-love-forever.

3. THE CLIMAX IS A CHOICE

Forget the action – the climax of any plot is when a character makes a choice, and the most powerful climaxes are generally the person making that choice is the protagonist and the choice is profoundly tied to the stories themes. More importantly, those choices are going to change the damn world forever, either metaphorically or literally.

Once again, Star Wars is a great example of this – the entire story builds to the moment that Luke chooses to turn off his damn computer and trust the force. Better yet, it’s accompanied by a particularly likeable secondary character choosing to come back and be a hero instead of a scruffy nerf-herding mercenary, saving Luke from certain death.

It’s that moment that gives the big Death Star explosion sequence that follows its real power and create the very real sense that the Galaxy is Never Going to Be The Same Again. Without them, you’ve essentially just got some special effects. Or, you know, the Prequel Trilogy.

4. YES, BUT WE WERE SPEAKING OF CONSTRUCTING PLOT, NOT CHARACTERS AND CONFLICT

Here’s the dirty secret: characters and conflict are you plot. In the classic three-act structure that’s so beloved of films, theatre, novels, television, and, well, me, getting the conflict and the character’s right pretty much fills in the major tent-poles that keep your plot upright.

For instance, that moment I’m talking about where what your protagonist thinks they want morphs into *what your protagonist really wants? In long-form narrative that’s essentially the middle of your story and represents what we call a mid-point reversal.

That moral choice climax? That’s the thing that takes place late in your third chapter, and once you’ve reached it your job is to get the damn hell out of your story asap ’cause there’s nothing less to be said.

That period where the character says they want something, but subconsciously resist it? That’s your first act, and it ends at the point where dark riders show up in the shire   Uncle Owen and Aunt Bereu are killed by storm-troopers  shit hits the fan and the protagonist can no longer ignore the antagonist and their forces.

Essentially, the classic plot structure is just a convenient pattern of events that can be arranged in such a way as they stretch out the resolution of conflict for as long as possible.

If you want a really detailed discussion of plot structure and you’re in Brisbane, I recommend signing up for one of the QWC’s Toolkit for Writers courses in October since they’ll cover this sort of thing. If you prefer something more book-based, try tracking down copies of things like Robert Ray’s The Weekend Novelist (preferably in its yellow-covered 1st edition, trust me) or Robert McKee’s Story, or even, god help you, Christopher Vogler’s The Writers’ Journey. Or, you know, hit the internet which is full of advice about this sort of thing. All of these will introduce you to the big default three-act structure, and while there are others, the three-acter is a good starting point due to its familiarity.

Really, though, you can get away with an awful lot if you get the conflict, reversal, climax pattern right, even without knowing the bits that go on in-between.

5. SHORT STORIES WILL MESS WITH YOUR MOJO

Short stories are tricky beasts, ’cause they look at the overall plot structure and throw out the bits at the beginning and the bits at the end and spend an awful lot of time *suggesting* the missing bits of the plot have actually taken place. Short Stories are, usually, all second-and-third act.

My advice for short stories: make sure you nail the moral choice part of the climax. Trust me when I tell you it will bring your editors joy, if only ’cause they can identify something that actually looks like an ending.

6. PLOT DOESN’T MEAN SPIT

My final advice about plot is this: stop stressing about it. Lots of writers get hung-up on plotting because they think it’s the most important thing about writing, and in reality it’s one of a handful of skills that make fiction work.

In fact, when you break plot down to its constituent parts, it’s actually kinda…dull. Which is why people telling you about a story is rarely as interesting as actually reading the damn story, where the conflict and the character and the voice are all working in unison. I’m actually a terrible plotter, but I can get by as a writer ’cause I’ve got a bunch of other skills that can be used to patch-up the unsightly holes in my skill-set.