Chip at this a little at a time, I guess. Even if it's a good idea to take intrinsic motivation and make it extrinsic, there's gotta be a better way than a writing blog, for one who is not a pantser. Maybe a blog that says, hey guys I wrote something, but I'm not telling you what? For pantsers, it's as perfect a format as any: Andy Weir wrote The Martian as a series of blog posts, which was collected into an e-book, became a best-seller, bought by Houghton-Mifflin to distribute, became a best-seller, turned into a Ridley Scott film, became a blockbuster.
Because Andy Weir is a pantser. He loved getting Watney into trouble he didn't think anyone would have been able to get out of, and then, with the trouble already established and his readers awaiting the consummation of the cliffhanger, he was forced to come up with something awesome and clever for Watney to do to get out of it. The perfect format for this kind of thing: nobody really ever doubts Watney's ability to survive, but read on to discover how.
hybrid gardeners
Officer Moone has a supernatural gift to escape danger, so he's like Mark Watney, but not on Mars, and magical instead. Mark Watney gets into trouble because fate hates him; Finn Moone gets into trouble for the same reasons, but supernaturally. So really the difference is, I'm an architect instead of a gardener. And the whole genre, and stuff, but. Same archetypal character, some plucky loser who always finds a way to save his own neck. The stories don't need to be written pantsed, I mean... can you imagine if Indiana Jones was filmed without a script? Those movies are pastiches of old serials, of course, which is what the Martian was as well (a serial,) but it's just that the structure of serial lends itself to that kind of cliffhanger-resolution-cliffhanger-resolution storytelling, and it's totally possible to plan that kind of structure from the get-go (what is a get-go anyway?...) But I'm acting like it's impossible to hybridize the two.
I've got book 1 plotted out, with plenty of try/fail cycle built in, and book 3 plotted out, with plenty of room to integrate a try/fail cliffhanger/resolution cycle. Book 1's plot involves a compelling in-universe magical reason why Finny wouldn't get periodically jumped all the time, shapeshifting his own Boon to cover up his Bane as he goes on the lam. So that's covered. Book 3 has nonesuch tideshifting, but the plot as outlined is largely periodically-getting-jumped free, free of basically any action sequences. Those can be pantsed in as I'm writing that...? Not that crazy an idea.
a history of pantsing
I'm an outliner, to be sure, but of the major let's-get-this-thing-written projects I've engaged in, no time to plot beyond a start point and an end point, I found pantsing pretty fun and surprising, with definite twists and wrinkles coming up... Specifically I'm referring to high school, writing The Persistence of Memory with Kevin, us having an outline for our story but being unsure which of us should author the text itself. We split up, had a deadline for ourselves and a scene picked out for us to write, independently, split up and see what would happen. What happened in mine was what we'd planned out to happen, but also an entire conversation (including grammar discussion!) played out using nothing but facial expressions and particularly emotive eyebrows, and loads of UST. We went with Kevin as the writer, in the end, but it showed me something about my own writing, and the way my pantsing goes. I do, do pantsing basically every day, blogging, and though that's a nonfiction context what happened is still on display, with the tangential paths that some posts can travel down.
how that applies to book 2
So. Here's the thing, then, though. Book 2, I've got plotted out, not at all. It looks like I'm going for some sort of, plot very carefully the structure of the book beforehand, then pants it as Finn gets attacked, sort of thing, and see what that ruckus does to my beautiful elegant structure. Cool. Book 2 not having any plot laid out besides some very loose plot points that set up things in Book 3 and all that, that's fine. Because it's in Book 2 that Finn meets his Cambion son (cambion=offspring of a succubus,) a son who's cursed with the exact same Bane as his father, and thus, in their team-up, their Banes are compounded. It's probably going to be nuts? If I can survive writing it.
And I don't want to start writing book one until the whole trilogy's plotted out... and the only way to "plot out" book 2 is actually writing it. Woot.
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