This article is going to provide solutions to three of the specific types of writer’s block identified in the first part of this series:
- Conceptual Writer’s Block, when you trouble breaking an overall story idea down into a detailed plot outline,
- Specific-Scene Writer’s Block, which is a difficulty in taking that detailed plot and putting the key plot points into the best narrative sequence for telling the overall story, and
- Story Setting Writer’s Block, which deals in the difficulty of deciding in what location a specific plot event should take place.
Conceptual Problems
So you have a general plot idea, perhaps know exactly what the situation is at the start of a story or chapter and where the story is supposed to be at the end with a vague idea of what is to happen in between. (If you don’t even have that vague idea, use one of the eleven cures that I offered for that problem in part one of the series). Some of the solutions that I have for this problem are specifically-suited to RPGs, while others are more suited to fiction or are universally suited.
By way of example, the most recent chapter of the Orcs & Elves Series had a general outline that read, “Priest awakened, reveals prophecy that explains why the Clan Wars are happening. Oracle of Gottskragg (Dwarven name) prophecy that connect the Clan Wars to the founding of Tajik’s Misfits” – where ‘Tajik’s Misfits’ is the name chosen by the adventuring band that is led by the PCs of the campaign. So this chapter exists to explain the reason that the entire Clan Wars plot thread is in the Orcs & Elves story at all.
Prior to this chapter, it might be presumed that its the social impact on the Orcs (one of the PCs is an Orc) or because of the involvement of the Huyundaltha (who were the ‘quest object’ within the game for another of the PCs), or simply because it gave the first hints that an Elf and a Drow could find enough common ground to unite behind a single cause – which is another key ingredient of that adventuring band. In fact, all of those elements are relevant, and that was important because it hid that plot twist – revelation, if you prefer the term – until I was ready to reveal it.
When I broke this down into specific plot points, the list read something like this:
- Re-establish Clan-Chief’s Orcish Personality
- Priest awakened – how?
- The coincidence of timing
- Discovery of the Oracle of Gottskragg
- The Prophecy of the Oracle – significance of the clan wars
It’s getting ahead of myself somewhat, but while this example is fresh in the mind of the reader, I thought it worth expanding on the writing process itself, and how this breakdown was influenced by it (because I knew I had this article coming up, I made a few notes). I always break down the plot of a big story a few chapters in advance, if I can, so that if there’s anything I need to introduce, I can do so.
So here are those notes, matched in order to the above breakdown:
- Re-establish Clan-Chief’s Orcish Personality – Earlier events needed the clan-chief to be intelligent, reasoning, civilized, so much so that he was more like a human king than an Orc. He also turned out rather noble and likeable. I found myself having to continually dumb his dialogue down slightly to more accurately reflect the primitiveness of his culture as I was writing previous chapters. As soon as I could permit him to stop being so reasonable, I needed to re-establish him as an Orc and a relative barbarian. This was an addition that was made to the breakdown while working on previous chapters, and not part of the original plan.
- Priest awakened – how? – When I started plotting this three-chapter burst, of which this was the third chapter, this is what description I had for this plot point. A lot of thinking about it led me to the realization that if all the priests were out of action, I needed the healing to be performed by a non-priest. I thought about having the Drow Ambassador provide the solution, I thought about a bargain between the Orcs and Lolth for a cure, and I thought about the possibility of the Elves providing the answer. But I realized that an unresolved accusation had been made against the “All-mother” of the Orcs, Luthic, Goddess of Healing (and various other things), and that by having an Orc provide the solution I could resolve that dangling plot point – and that led me to introduce a new participant in the chapter previous to this one as a plot mechanic to solve the problem of achieving this plot point.
- The coincidence of timing – Originally, my thought was that the Priest would raise this point, but that just didn’t work, it made the Priest too omniscient, too much of deus-ex-machina. So I rewrote it as a conversation between The Drow Ambassador and the Elves, and moved it to occur before the Priest was awakened. This also reinforced the first plot point – the clan-chief expresses his irritability and frustration at doing nothing, and then there’s a lot of (relevant) discussion – and no action! The reader identifies with his expressed emotions, and he comes to represent them in the story.
- Given that the first plot point was an addition to the outline, that the second was just a vague indication, and that the third was changed in both timing and delivery, its worth noting that this plot point was executed exactly the way I envisaged, breaking down the social unity that the Orcs seemed to have in the plot arc so far by showing the Priests keeping secrets from the leadership.
- It’s a lot easier to write an accurate prophecy after the events have been described in the story than to get it right in advance. The trick was making it obscure enough that the Priests could not have interpreted it while keeping it clear enough to be understood in hindsight.
- I also needed to tone down the clan-chief’s reaction – I had a big chunk of reaction to the revelation that the Priests had been keeping secrets that had been incorporated into the prophecy section, but it did nothing but get in the way of what was important about the chapter, and bog the plot down. So it got chopped.
- Finally, when I plotted the chapters that are still to come, I added a couple of additional plot points and incorporated them as a lead-in to the discussion of The coincidence of timing. The first read, Perfect Planning? – mention: what would have happened if the attack on the city had succeeded?, and the second was Elvish fatalism, Enemy Opportunism, reaction – mention: right choice of action at wrong time is just as bad as a wrong choice. These lay the groundwork for the next chapter, and were taken out of that chapter’s outline, where they didn’t fit. This was a chapter of discussion and context, the next are to be about designing a plan and putting it into action.
This sort of plot breakdown is like putting up a set of signposts that lead from the situation before the chapter or adventure to the situation after. It’s a breakdown of the events within the overall plot, giving a structure and sequence to the story.
In a work of fiction, you have more options than you usually have when constructing an adventure for an RPG. Flashbacks, Flash-forwards, Framing Dialogue, showing events that the protagonists could not possibly know at the time – you have a lot of literary devices at your disposal, and can pick and choose whatever works best for the story. They also have to be more self-contained; if there is a mystery, readers expect it to be solved, if there is a relationship in transition readers expect it to be resolved, etc.
RPGs tend to need to be more linear in structure, and also tend to avoid giving the players knowledge that their characters don’t have – and if not everything gets explained or revealed in the end, so be it. Maybe a subsequent adventure can impart the missing information.
Here’s a little secret: you can still employ all those literary devices in a game context, you just need to do a little more work to implement or justify them. I’ve used them all before, when I found it to be indispensible to the need to make the story accessible to the players, or to rouse the interest in what would otherwise be a slow beginning. Here’s another secret: I usually place a couple of unreliable NPCs in a campaign, that can show up when I need them to and be unavailable the rest of the time, who can deliver obscure information, unexpected prophecies, and visions. The “Oracle of Gottskragg” is just such a plot device – it permits me to deliver prophecies as and when I need them, and keep them absent the rest of the time.
So this type of writer’s block occurs when you have a broad plot but are having trouble breaking it down into discrete events and components, into – as I said a couple of paragraphs ago – structure and sequence.
Cure #1: What haven’t you done?
This solution is a bit of a chameleon, meaning different things at different times and under different circumstances.
Quite often, you just need to get started. “Blank Page Syndrome” can strike anywhere in a story – one reason why I don’t write using a word processor that breaks the text up into discrete “virtual pages”, I worry about such formatting after I’ve got the story written.
When it’s a “where do I begin” problem, I try to think of a way to start the adventure or story that I haven’t used before, then see if it fits the plotline. If it doesn’t fit, or I later swap it out for something more effective, I add it to a list of unused ideas that I keep handy for the next time I run into this problem. Your primary goal at the start of a story is to establish the situation, establish where the characters are and what they are doing, establish a starting point, but sometimes that is the worst possible place for you to start from a creativity perspective. This is especially the case when you know that subsequent events will make where the characters happen to be at the start of the story critical to the story – starting your writing in a strictly linear fashion in this circumstance is definitely counterproductive.
Cure #1 Variation
If you’ve already made a start in your breakdown, there are times when you reach an impasse, where you know something needs to happen but you haven’t got the faintest idea what that should be.
When that happens, it’s time to pause and take stock.
- What has happened that you haven’t explained?
- What is going to happen that can be explained in advance?
- Is there a context to events that hasn’t been revealed?
- Is there something that you can foreshadow – perhaps from a future complication or even targeting a future adventure?
- Is it realistic at this point in the story to serve up a piece of the everyday lives of the protagonists? Or, perhaps, of the antagonists?
- Is a relationship particularly important to the plot? – perhaps it’s time to check in on that relationship if you haven’t done so in a while.
That list isn’t comprehensive, it’s just a set of examples, but they all can be summed up in one: What haven’t you done that you need to do before the end of the story?
Make a checklist, if you can, then check off the items that are definitely dealt with by subsequent items on your plot breakdown. What’s left? If there are too many items, check off any of the remainder that you might be able to deal with in conjunction with future events. If you’re still looking at too many items – or if you’ve ticked off everything – try one of the other solutions in this section.
Cure #2: Go to context
If you’re really stuck, try going over old ground from a different perspective, and explaining what is going on, and why, to yourself. It might break the mental block, and if it really is redundant information, you can always delete it once you figure out where to go from here. It’s a simple trick, but it often works.
That simplicity, and the fact that this works as often as it does, are the reasons why this is my #2 cure that I try.
Cure #3: Go to a mood
Sometimes, the problem is that the mood that you’ve established at this point in the story is so at odds with the events that are to follow that your mind insists that there is something missing. And, in a way, it’s right, because either you revamp the most recent scene to create the correct mood, or you need to add another scene specifically to set the mood that you need – whether that be creepy, dramatic, affectionate, romantic, or whatever.
The reason why this particular cure is so high on the list is that if this is the problem, you can work through every other cure on offer and still be just as stuck, so it’s best to rule it out right away.
Even if this isn’t the problem, it can be useful to go to a different mood for a moment just to contrast with the prevailing tone. Some of the funniest or most rousing moments have come in otherwise dark moments – everything from “Snakes, why did it have to be snakes?” in Indiana Jones to “Get your hands off her you Bitch!” in Aliens.
Cure #4: Go to an explanation
If you have tried coming at things from the standpoint of logic (cure #1) and coming at the problem from a different perspective (cure #2) and ruled out a severe mismatch between events and mood, there are a number of cures that sometimes work and sometimes don’t.
The first is to explain something about the story that isn’t already explained, and that isn’t “what is happening and why”. It might be the personality of a character, it might be some piece of past history, it might be the significance of a costume or a location, it might be why someone who should logically be involved isn’t, or why someone who should know about events doesn’t. It might be the inner workings of a period weapon or piece of technology. The trick is that this explanation either has to be relevant, or has to be related to a reaction to something that is relevant, or has to be something that you can make relevant. While that rules out an awful lot of ground, it still leaves plenty of scope, and it boosts the chances of getting something useful out the other end.
You might not keep the results where you are right now in the plotline – if this gives you a connection to the story or the current circumstance within the story that enables you to see where you should actually go next, that’s fine. But don’t throw this work away, put it somewhere else in the plotline if you can – because you’ve already made sure that it’s a relevant key to understanding the events within the story.
Cure #5: Examine a personality
Sometimes, especially after a dramatic action sequence or ending on a cliffhanger, it is the best time to get inside the head of a key character within the story, or expand on their personality. It gives the reader/player a chance to come down from the adrenalin high and punctuates that action sequence; if you immediately throw to another action sequence, the lines between the two can blur. Sometimes, that’s what you want to happen, but a lot of the time, you’re far better off doing something introspective if you get stuck at such a point.
Television shows use this solution a lot. It’s probably described on TV Tropes somewhere, if you looked hard enough. You have some dramatic revelation or an action sequence, and the next scene shows two of the characters in earnest, quiet, conversation; or shows the antagonist in his natural setting; or shows two relevant characters living their lives or expressing their personalities. If the feature villain isn’t the recurring antagonist, you might cut to a scene in which that recurring antagonist learns of what is going on and reacts to it, or just does something villainous, or simply does something to show off his personality or circumstances – just to remind the audience that he exists, if for no other reason.
It’s done so often that it’s something of a cliché, but the reason it’s a cliche is that it works. And if it’s something that you want to include anyway, this is a great time to go to it, taking advantage of the punctuation effect.
The roleplaying equivalent is to do something with another of the PCs, but that doesn’t limit your options – because it suited the story and the character at the time, I once had a PC deduce almost the entire backstory of a villain at the appropriate time (which just happened to be at this particular time). Or daydream about the recurring villain’s reaction. Or simply show that life outside of the key events has continued.
Cure #6: Be predictable
Writer’s Block can occur under these circumstances because you’re trying too hard to do something different from your usual style or from what you (and everyone else) expects at this point. When you absolutely have to, be predictable, then proceed from there.
Variation on Cure #6: Be Predictable, then do the exact opposite
Something that sometimes works is to decide what you would normally expect to do at this point in the story, then deliberately don’t do it. This works by showing you why that particular style or technique is your predictable go-to in this situation. Once you have that reason, you can find a new way of “skinning the cat” knowing what you want to achieve at this particular point – or you might find that “the exact opposite” works in this particular case, adding a new string to your repertoiry bow.
Cure #7: Go to a twist
When the status quo has you stuck, it can sometimes be a great time to throw everything up in the air and let the pieces fall back down into a new shape – in other words, to introduce a twist. An ally opposes the protagonists unexpectedly, even if it is the wrong thing to do; all you have to do is expand their personality or backstory to explain why. An enemy comes to the protagonist’s aid – for their own reasons; all you have to do is work out how they intend to profit from this action.
When you’ve written yourself into a corner, apply a little high explosive. So long as you don’t fundamentally change anything at the end of the story, you have nothing to lose, and the potential to gain more rounded characters makes the attempt definitely worthwhile.
Cure #8: Go to a lie
Tell a lie about the current situation, or about one of the characters involved. Then decide who, in the game world, or in the story world, would have that opinion. Have them express that opinion in some way, or react accordingly. Or perhaps it’s a flawed theory on the part of a protagonist. Going to something you know to be untrue, but which may sound plausible – especially on limited information – can be a great way to transition from one scene to another. And sometimes, the lie will reveal some new nuance or context about the character doing the lying, or the character being lied about, or about the circumstances or event.
I do this sparingly, especially in an RPG, because it has the potential to really complicate a plotline. But sometimes, it can lead you to a plotting solution to an otherwise impassable boundary.
Cure #9: Identify and attack assumptions
If you reach the point where this is the only solution left, you are obviously getting desperate – and that’s not a good place to be. It’s time to try and pin down exactly why you’re blocked at this point. Perhaps events have forced a character to stray too far from their normal personality, and you need to get back in touch with that normal persona (or have someone call attention to that). Or perhaps your intended events and/or solution rest on an assumption that you’re having trouble swallowing. Or perhaps your protagonists have stumbled down a blind alley and can’t find their way out – or even your antagonist.
You might be assuming that the motives you have assigned someone for acting the way they have, or the way they are about to act, are the real motives. You might be assuming that a character is exactly who or what they appear to be. You might be assuming that physics works a particular way, or that a particular metaphor or analogy is the best way of explaining the way something works or the way something has happened. Identify as many of the assumptions you have made as possible, then – for each – ask yourself “what if that is not true?”
This is a great way to come up with clever plot twists relating to character objectives of the sort that makes the “Die Hard” movies so interesting – what the villains seem to want and what they really want can be two separate things. If you’ve written the first half with the notion that what they seem to want is their real objective, then the deception should be pretty convincing – it fooled you, didn’t it? There may be times where you have to go back and tweak what you have already written to get it to accommodate the new perspective, though, and when you are publishing in a serialized format, or playing an RPG, that’s not always possible.
If you run out of your personal assumptions, try attacking the assumptions of the protagonists (or, in an RPG, those of the players). Once again, this has happened on the various seasons of “24” that it has become a cliché, but when the original first aired, they were jaw-dropping plot twists.
Once you have run through all the protagonist assumptions that you can make, turn your attention to the implications and consequences, and attack those. Is that really how group “X” will react? This can lead you to identify a hole that you can fill (breaking through the writer’s block in the process), or it can cause you to reevaluate what you have already plotted, in such a way that you can bypass the block.
Cure #10: Research
When I get really desperate, I try to pick the primary plot elements that I have decided on and do some research on them. It might be how a particular piece of tech works, or who invented it, or how a physical law works, or what its like on a fishing trawler, or what a fishing trawler actually looks like, or the actual layout of a Boeing 747, or any of a thousand other things. Researching a relevant subject can sometimes throw up an insight that you can insert to get you past the block.
Above All
Never, Ever, simply sit and wait for inspiration to strike. It hardly ever does in these situations, and even more rarely happens on cue. You are far better off doing something else; a solution may come to you while you sleep, or in the shower, or in a chance remark.
When you sit and wait for inspiration, what you are really doing is waiting for your intuition to solve a problem that has proven too difficult for your entire rational mind to solve – especially if you have tried these cures for the writer’s block that has you bamboozled and come up empty. What makes you think your intuition is up to the job?
Specific-Scene Problems
This type of writer’s block occurs when you have all the pieces but aren’t sure of the right order in which to string them. Or perhaps that should read “the best order”, there are often no right or wrong answers in this respect.
Unfortunately, there is also no universal cure to this problem, only some sage advice (Nevertheless, I have outlined a procedure to provide a guideline, and called it a cure).
Nor am I going to spend a lot of space giving further description of the problem, or an example, because I’ve already done that in the sidebar to the example offered for the previous section.
Cure #1: Is It a higher-level problem?
Before embarking on any more comprehensive effort on this problem, try assuming that the reason you are having problems is that something is missing from your outline, and apply the many cures to that problem outlined in the previous section. Look, in particular, for scenes in which you have been too general or have several scenes lumped into a single entry; break these up and you may find the solution you’re seeking by intercutting between two different broad scenes.
Cure #2: Map the action
This is the one and only real cure offered to this problem, and it’s more of a process than it is a quick and simple solution.
Step One: Set Your Priorities
Your primary goal must always be clear communication. Artistic touches that detract from this clarity must always be subjected to a simply cost-benefit solution. In particular, any deviation from the most straightforward sequencing of events is, by definition, less clear to the reader/player than that straightforward linearity of plot, and must have a substantial payoff in meaning and richness of story to justify itself. It isn’t enough for it to create a potential benefit, the means of capitalizing on that potential must be obvious and explicitly defined in order to justify that deviation.
In particular, this gives a tool for solving the sub-problem of a scene that tries to do too much. When layering complications into the structure, starting with the most linear model possible and applying your ‘artistic re-sequencings’ one at a time in order of priority can reveal the complication that is ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’.
So the first step is to decide what is most important to the overall story – after ‘clarity’, which is always number one. You don’t have to write these down (though that can be helpful), just bear them in mind. Once that is done, it’s time to construct that ‘most straightforward sequencing of events’, so we’ll start doing that in step 2.
Step 2: Find the cause for each effect
Every action or decision made by the characters in the plot is an effect, they all have some cause. Some of those causes may be implicit in the personality of the character or the backstory that precedes the current narrative, but they all have a cause of some sort.
In some form of tabular document – a sheet of paper with two columns, a spreadsheet, whatever – list the effects on the right-hand side and the events of the plot on the left-hand side. Then number them. One cause may have multiple effects, but each effect has just a single cause in the context of circumstances at the time that the cause has its impact on the plot. If you find yourself wanting to link two causes to the one effect, it’s a sign that you have confused that context for a cause, and that one of those two causes needs a separate effect that precedes the other and shapes the circumstances.
This actually brings to mind some of the problems that robotics researchers have had in creating robots to mimic simple human activities; what may initially seem to be a single, simple action (“bring me the red hat”), when you break it down into single discrete steps understandable by a machine turns out to involve dozens or hundreds of smaller actions, each of which can be inordinately difficult to achieve. Thankfully, you won’t have to break events down to that level of detail, but not breaking them down far enough can confuse the reader/player when a narrative is executed, and the writer in the course of that execution.
Every effect has one cause and one cause only. Break up your compounding complications until you achieve this level of simplicity.
This alone might be enough to solve the problem if the real problem was that your plot was so complicated that you were confusing yourself; but, assuming that this isn’t enough, it’s time to move on to the next step.
Step 3: Tear up any railroad tracks
Every decision implies an alternative choice, a road not taken. Where the plotting has broken down might be a case where the choice you have the characters making is not as logical, from their point of view and what they know, as that alternative road. The illogic can be hidden from your conscious view until you reach the point of plotting the story, when it manifests as a mental block at that point of the story. Before the decision will make sense, you have to at least have the character examine the road not taken; and it may be necessary to insert a new cause-and-effect sequence that alters the background to that decision enough to rule out the more logical choice of action.
Similarly, an action can be sensible, but so totally out-of-character that the plotting completely breaks down. Characters don’t make out-of-character decisions unless they are forced into them by circumstances; and if your circumstances aren’t forcing the character to make that choice, if the situation isn’t sufficiently desperate, then you need to worsen the circumstances.
Improbable choices are railroad tracks that lead to the plot assuming the shape you want it to take regardless of what the characters might want. In an RPG, these are intensely frowned apon, with good reason – but that’s a whole separate discussion. Suffice it to say that you can lead a PC to a decision point, but can’t make it choose the action you want. They are somewhat more tolerable in other forms of literature, but still to be avoided as the struggle to decide is the human drama that readers/viewers will identify with. Choices are what define a character to the reader/viewer, and every choice has to make sense in terms of both logic and personality, because the readers/viewers will assume that it does.
This is usually the problem that some writers are encountering when they say “their characters are refusing to cooperate.” The plot requires one choice, but the established personalities and internal logic mandate another. You can either abandon the plot (and perhaps end up writing yourself into a corner), or you can insert circumstances to make the plot-required choice the correct one – and then make the difficulty of that choice explicit in a scene.
Step 4: Link other effects & consequences to the single cause
No cause has just one effect. Even with the smallest plot development, there will always at least two characters affected – the character making the choice and the character forcing him or her to have a choice to make. There may well be more, if the event is a big one. Now is an opportune moment to check each of your causes and ask yourself if anyone else would logically be affected in some way. Sure, this can complicate your plot even more – but it makes it more robust and believable, binding the narrative environment to the events.
Step 5: Prioritize subtexts
Unless your story is to be as dry and un-engaging as a police report (“Just the facts, ma’am”) it will have subtexts. There will be human (and/or non-human) stories and emotions overlaid over the facts. You can’t focus on everyone’s reaction to an event at the same time, can’t have the reader identify with everyone at once. That means that you will have to prioritize which ones you concentrate on, usually choosing the strongest ones for the emotional impact, but sometimes choosing another because it can be encapsulated in the next cause-effect sequence that matters to the plot. Then have the characters at the heart of the chosen subtext observe the others, and react to them.
An excellent example of this is the impatience and frustration of the clan-chief in the earlier example. I could have focused on that, but instead I simply mentioned it and then focused on the debate between the Drow Ambassador and the leader of the Elves, knowing full well that after many, many pages of dialogue between the two, the readers would empathize with the clan-chief while still being interested in what the two were saying. So the highest priority was clarity – delivered by focusing on the discussion, which will become important, as suggested in my notes on the scene (also presented above); and the second priority was the clan-chief’s emotional state; and the third priority was the implied descriptions of aspects of the societies of the three characters. Everyone else involved in the chapter was left as virtually a cipher, with very little expressed personality.
A break of some sort in the narrative is necessary whenever you want to change this order of priority. It might be that what you are viewing as one chapter should be two, or a simple scene break might do the job, or you may be able to manage a seamless transition by switching point-of-view to somewhere else briefly.
Another way of phrasing this step is to decide what, in addition to the plot itself, you need to communicate to the reader/player/audience.
Step 6: Link causes
Next, connect each effect to the events that result. In other words, having drawn or indicated a lot of connections from the left column to the right, now it’s time to connect the right-hand-side with the left.
Each cause group forms a subplot within the chapter.
If your organization has been sloppy, these will be all over the place. If you have the causes in logical sequence, and have grouped the effects next to the causes, the result will be relatively orderly – at least in theory.
Step 7: Summarize each effect-to-cause relationship
I do this by numbering each of the right-to-left connections. Numbers may not repeat, they always increment – 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. The first cause gets the lowest numbers, and the direct effects of that cause get the following numbers. Since all the direct consequences can be considered to be essentially simultaneous, I will add an alphabetic code after the number – so I might get 1a, 2a, 3a, 4b, 5b, 6c or whatever. The “a” means that I can shuffle those three events in order within the narrative – it groups them together.
I then write these on index cards or lines of text, one to a number.
Most people think of the events in their stories as cause-then-effect. This breaks the scenes into effect-and-reaction, which is what we actually write when the time comes. By focusing on these connections, it makes the logical sequence of events within the narrative much clearer. This altered perspective can be enough to break the logjam, but if it’s not, don’t fret, we aren’t done yet.
Step 8: Arrange
Using select-and-drag (in a text document) or placing the index cards into a left-to-right tree formation in ascending numeric sequence, then tweaking elements within the alphabetic groups, you automatically achieve the arrangement of greatest clarity.
Step 9: Filter/rearrange
Using the priorities you have already assigned, and the principle of punctuating one tone or mood with another, you can then rearrange the sequence of events, layering one subtext after another. Save after each one (or renumber, if using index cards) so that you can go back to that arrangement if your changes make the plot unclear.
Once you have them in order, renumber them.
Step 9a: Rearrange again
It can often be helpful to re-arrange the cards/entries at this point, keeping the numbers unchanged, to reflect the order in which the protagonists become aware of each event. This is especially valuable in writing first-person stories and RPGs.
Step 10: Apply artistic touches
Finally, rearrange once again, building in any final artistic flourishes, the same as I did with the additional plot points in the example (described by note 6). You might want to resolve a subplot completely, even though it is out of strict chronological sequence, then step back in time to start following a chain of narrative or subplot that is, technically, concurrent with that resolved subplot. By ensuring that clarity is dominant, and that subtexts have been integrated in order of priority without having too many, before reaching this point, you automatically arrange the entries in your breakdown synopsis in the optimum order for telling your story, and you can immediately see when an artistic flourish is a step too far in terms of compromising that clarity.
Step 11:The final breakdown
The end result is the plot breakdown, in a step-by-step sequence – “write this, then this, then this, then this, then this, and finally (eventually) this”. If this has not solved your problem, and you have already ruled out a higher-order form of writer’s block, then it is practically certain that the problem is actually a lesser-order problem – the location may be wrong (or you haven’t been able to decide on one), for example, and that is why you are having trouble with the plotting.
This is the plot roadmap, reduced to a set of travel directions as straightforward as “East on Wilber Road to Montague, North on Montague to Dandelion, West on Dandelion to the highway, travel 120 miles, look for the farmhouse on the left.”
The joy of exploration
No plan, it is said, survives contact with the enemy. The writer’s equivalent might be “no plot breakdown survives the actual writing”. Don’t be surprised to find yourself tweaking this order of events even further in the course of the actual writing. A single plot point might take a page of content, or three lines – if the latter, you might not want it to exist in isolation, and it is surely worth considering moving it and wrapping up a subplot ‘early’.
It’s also, perhaps, worth noting that at least 9 times out of ten (if not 99 times out of 100), plot breakdowns and their structure can be done almost instinctively. Don’t waste time being meticulous and systematic like this unless its necessary because you’ve struck a problem.
When you DO strike trouble, you almost always have to retreat a step and incorporate something you’ve already done into your planning. Starting at the point of trouble will usually get you nowhere, because what you need is a path from what lies before the trouble point to what lies after it. Plot trouble always happens for a reason; investigate that reason or it may recur several times in each project.
Setting/Location Problems
Every event needs somewhere to happen. Deciding where something happens is a perennial problem for all writers. Let’s say that your plot breakdown requires a conversation – where does it happen? Why there? “When” is a sub-element within this question – a location at sunset is different from that same location in the early morning.
“Location,” in fact, embraces everything concerning the conditions, the environment, the lighting, the atmosphere, the sights, sounds, and smells, the context, the connotations, the timing and the incidental actions that are occupying the participants at the time of the event. It’s not just a city, it’s a place within that city at a particular time of day. It’s not just a home, it’s a particular room at a particular time, and the relationship between these specifics and the individuals.
Novice writers can take a full page or more describing a location. They are something that can be researched, and there is then a compulsion to put all of that research onto the page. The greater the skill, facility with language, and experience of the writer, the more they learn to compress this information into the minimum essentials; if you have to, in most writing disciplines, you can add additional details as the scene plays out, dressing up the dialogue with extra location details that keep it from being a static environment. This not only makes the location easier to picture for the reader, it helps with the dialogue.
Take the council chambers in which the scene with the Orc Clan-chief takes place. I have a firm idea of what they look like, but that isn’t all that essential to the story, so I haven’t bothered describing them. If I were to polish the Orcs & Elves series into a full novel, that wouldn’t fly. As a result, I would expect to spend text space conveying my vision for the council chamber, and would add to it throughout the scenes which take place there. This would not only make the reader’s vision of the place accord more strongly with my own, it would break up the monolithic blocks of dialogue which at the moment consume entire chapters. You can only say “X replied” or “Y said” so many times in a row without it becoming wearing.
Those writing scripts for plays, television, or movies, have a different obligation – they need to identify the location without superfluous description, and then describe everything that’s absolutely necessary to the plot and nothing more; this ensures that the set designers and lighting and props departments have the essential requirements and as much artistic and budgetary latitude as possible outside of those requirements.
I could write an entire article on location description techniques – maybe I will, one of these days† – but this section of this article is about making the decision about where the event is to occur, not about the language and techniques for describing a location once one has been selected.
†In fact, I did write such an article for Roleplaying Tips many years ago, but not only could I now do a better job of writing ir, but I would now have better material to include.
RPGs fall somewhere in between these two extremes; you have a full range of language tools to work with, but have to describe everything significant about a location with them, as succinctly as possible; you can’t drip the description out through the entire scene. In other words, they have the problems and requirements of both forms of descriptive writing.
Choosing A Location
Quite often, the location for an event is – to some extent, at least – already defined for you. You wouldn’t take a story that’s set entirely within a particular house and throw in a gratuitous hot dog stand as the location for a scene. If it’s absolutely necessary, you might have a hot dog vendor drive down the street and be seen through the window, though. If the protagonists of a scene are travelling from A to B, a scene involving those protagonists will occur either at A, at B, or at some point in between. If you’ve established that a character is in a particular location and can’t leave for some reason, any scene involving that character would take place at that location – unless there is a form of communications involved that permits the other participant to be elsewhere, in which case that can be the location.
Solution #1: Is there a logical location?
So some locations make more sense than others. This is the first thing I look for when choosing a location for a scene in a game or in a piece of text.
Solution #2: Is there a contributing location?
A location can enhance a mood or subtext by contributing to the appropriate tone and mood, or by offering a counterpoint that makes the dominant tone or mood more poignant by association or more intense by comparison. Can I think of a location that will achieve one or more of these effects without being clichéd? It’s like setting a scene in a horror story in a cemetery – something you have consider.
Solution #3: Is there an apt location?
Some locations have associations that can add a new overtone or subtext. A kitchen speaks of domesticity, security, and shelter. A bedroom hints at eroticism. A sporting field carries with the connotations of rivalry and competition. If nowhere is especially logical (or I have a short-list to choose from), and none (or several) choices can contribute to the scene equally well, this is the next quality that I look for.
Solution #4: Is there an interesting location?
Is there somewhere that I can make “visually” interesting? I once had a scene take place at a waterfall because I could have a thermal layer from the elemental plane of Cold (there was such a thing in this particular setting) that could freeze the water droplets part way down – it was a “snow-falls”, and the lake at its foot was so cold that it steamed – all of which was very interesting in a tropical location.
Another time, I needed an unusual rock formation in a desert environment. I did some trawling on the internet and found some pictures of a bird’s feather under a microscope, then described that. It worked well.
Solution #5: Is there a location that enables me to kill two birds with one narrative ‘stone’?
There might not be anything occurring at the location during this scene – but is there a subsequent scene at the same location (wherever it happens to be) or that can be set at that location which can be enhanced by the choice of location? In some ways, writing can be like a chess game, getting your pieces into place early can pay big dividends later on.
The problem of choice
The more choices you have, the less these guidelines help. Two antagonists snarling threats at each other? Where does that happen? It could be anywhere. A cheap-ass film crew fakes a zombie invasion because its cheaper to film the real police, fire crews, etc, than it is to do it on sets, with actors, lighting, etc? Could happen in just about any city or small town, anywhere in the world. A greedy mogul is gloating over his last business deal when he gets some bad news by mobile phone? Could happen anywhere, though perhaps on board some personal transport is one of the most likely options – right after his home base. A character receives an unwelcome phone call? Again, could be just about anywhere – the supermarket, a coffee shop, a butcher, a train, a bus, a living room.
If you have too many choices, you can find it so hard to pick one that your conscious mind can’t think of any – believe it or not. And, if there’s no tonal context to be conveyed in order to shape your decision and provide a spark of inspiration, where do you start? When I’m really, really, stuck, there are five go-to solutions that I consider.
Solution #6: Common ground for the participants
Is there some location that can be considered home ground or common ground for all the participants in the scene? This can sometimes be enough to narrow the options to a manageable number. Next, I look at whether or not there is a sub-location that hasn’t been used for a while (if ever) within that overall choice; and muse about whether or not the character whose circumstances least permits them to move around has a preferred location where they are more likely to be found; and other such options. Once you have the choices down to a manageable number, all the tools described in solutions 1 to 4 are at your disposal to narrow the choices still further until you get a result.
This solution is at its best when we’re talking about a scene between allied characters.
Solution #7: A Position Of Strength
Does one of the participants have a location which will reflect their being in a position of strength, power, authority, or dominance? If, for example, one of the participants is a King, the throne room has to be choice given serious consideration. If one is the President of the United States, the Oval Office has to be considered. If a scientist, their lab.
This solution is most useful when one of the characters is a neutral non-protagonist; it is their position of strength or authority that should be chosen. But it can also be used to illustrate the power and strength of the antagonist when dealing with a rival or a pawn.
Solution #8: Home turf for the weaker participant
Of course, if you want your antagonist to really show his confidence, you can have him show up on the home turf of the weaker participant of the scene – and still exert his authority. But if your villain is so tough and so self-confident that they are unconcerned about conceding the home ground advantage, be very careful about wimping them out later in the plot; by doing this, you are making a promise to your readers / players, and you have to keep that promise. The antagonist arrogant enough to do this has to be scary.
Solution #9: Emotional Translations
If there is no mood or tone to be reinforced in the scene in question by the location, try considering the tones of the scenes to either side of it. The last thing you want is for any two consecutive locations of these three to feel like their are the same place dressed differently. Sometimes, the lack of an enforced tone can be a gift that you should take full advantage of.
Solution #10: Iconic Locations
In every genre, every style of story, there are certain locations that are iconic. They are always considered iconic for a reason; if more specific requirements let me down, I always look to those iconic locations as a last resort. This could be higher on the list of solutions, but I always try to be original, and to serve the needs of the story ahead of the opportunities of the genre.
A final word on locations
The right location enhances your writing. A poor choice can inhibit or even detract from your writing. In between there are a lot of choices that are nothing options – they neither add nor subtract. Avoid the poor choices like the plague, covet the great choices when they come to you, and settle for a neutral choice only when you have to.
Next Time: In part 3, I tackle the remaining Primary types of writer’s block: Action, Persona, Dialogue, and Narrative..
