I finished up my semester last week, and I have two weeks until I have to specifically do anything. At some point in that time, I need to plan for my summer classes, but basically I'm on vacation time, which means I have ample opportunity to get some serious progress done on a writing project or projects. As it happens, the piece that is at the forefront of my mind (which I wrote about last time) seems like the ideal piece to devote about two weeks to.
I think I might actually have a novella on my hands rather than just a short story. I wrote a rough draft last year that was in the ten page range. Then as I reworked it, it expanded, and I didn't finish a second draft because I realized the whole structure and approach needed reworking. So I've been outlining and structuring the whole thing, and I think it's going to be much longer than the initial short story. So I'm close to ready to begin writing what could be considered the third draft of the story or the first draft of the novella.
I've never written a novella before, so I don't know exactly how long it might take, but when I have so much time available to write, I should be able to get a significant amount done each day. The fastest pace I ever achieved was a couple years ago when I wrote a rough draft of a kids book in about three weeks. That was about 60,000 words, which is in the range of a novel rather than a novella. I'm guessing that this novella I'm writing now will be maybe in the 20,000 word range. So if I could write 60,000 words in three weeks, I should be able to write 20,000 in two weeks. That's less than 2,000 words a day, and 2,000 words a day isn't a crazy ambitious goal; I've often kept up that pace. And if I have a solid outline where I know where I'm going and how I want to proceed from sequence to sequence, I think the writing should flow as easily as a rough draft ever tends to flow.
So we'll see how it goes. I feel good about it. I think I might actually manage to produce something solid by the time I go out of town in two weeks.
Showing posts with label structure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label structure. Show all posts
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Structure
I've been working on a story recently and really wrestling with how to put the thing together. I wrote the rough draft nearly a year ago, and I've been playing with a revision for months, but I keep hitting a wall in my progress. The initial inspiration for the story was just a character and a situation, which I let play out in front of me. Then as I rewrote, I figured out more back story, and now I have a lot more material that I want to include, and I think the newer version will be much more interesting and complex than the rough draft where I was just figuring out basic elements of the story. But my current trouble is that I'm not sure how to put all the material into a new draft.
I started rewriting where I began at the same point as last time, just before the big event that sets the present story in action, but as I wrote and wrote, it became obvious that this structure results in a couple of paragraphs followed by pages of flashback before eventually returning to the present story, a structure that doesn't typically work well. Flashbacks are best kept to a minimum.
I could structure the story in the absolute most straightforward way, where I begin with the very first element and then play it out in order. But this would mean starting with the character as a child and then going through years of events until I reach the big scene that was the original inspiration for the story, which also feels like a mistake since it would take pages and pages before reaching the hook, the exciting event that really sets the action in progress.
Another approach would be to start with the hook and then insert mini-flashbacks throughout the whole story, interweaving memories into the present action. But this seems like a set up for a schizophrenic story that fails to ever be quite one thing or another.
Part of the problem is that any of these structures CAN work. Writers have done them well before and will continue to do them well in the future. But they all have drawbacks and weaknesses. And sometimes the pitfalls appear so large that there seems to be almost nowhere safe to step.
So I've been wracking my brain, trying to remember what I learned in grad school about how to find an appropriate structure for a work of fiction, and the sad truth is that I don't think this issue was covered very well. Part of the problem is that the teacher I had for the class that should have covered this material was simply not a good teacher. Instead of learning about structure in the fiction class, I learned about structure in the screenwriting class, and that's now what I'm falling back on.
One major structural point in the screenwriting class was the inciting incident, the action that sets the plot moving, which, in a screenplay with a standard three act structure, comes in the first act, typically fifteen to twenty minutes into the film, after the world of the film has been established. Before the inciting incident occurs, the audience needs to understand the world and who the major character is, so when the inciting incident occurs and the character makes a choice about what is going to happen, we understand what is at stake. I'm not sure a short story necessarily has the exact same structure as a screenplay and whether I can plot out my story in the same exact fashion, but I think this concept of the inciting incident is probably useful to keep in mind.
So the question I've been asking myself is whether the hook, the event I began with as the original idea for the story, is the inciting incident or something else. I tried something to help me sort through the material: I wrote down each separate event, which could be an entire scene or simply a memory that is represented in a single sentence, and I wrote down each one on a note card. Currently, I have forty-two cards. I looked at these events and tried to determine which one has the most potential to be an inciting incident, which one results in the character making a choice that affects his life and sends him down a new path. And I've tentatively concluded that the original spark for the story is actually more of a plot point later. It's a complication from the second act (if I'm thinking of a three act screenplay structure), and the inciting incident is something that occurs much earlier. So what I need to do is not necessarily begin at the very beginning, but begin shortly before the true inciting incident, the action that occurs that sets my protagonist on his path that leads him to where he is when the big event occurs, setting up the final action down the line.
Anyway, I'm still struggling with it. I'm also trying to figure out whether I have a short story on my hands or a novella, so I'll probably write another post here soon where I hash out my ideas on length as I keep working on this.
I started rewriting where I began at the same point as last time, just before the big event that sets the present story in action, but as I wrote and wrote, it became obvious that this structure results in a couple of paragraphs followed by pages of flashback before eventually returning to the present story, a structure that doesn't typically work well. Flashbacks are best kept to a minimum.
I could structure the story in the absolute most straightforward way, where I begin with the very first element and then play it out in order. But this would mean starting with the character as a child and then going through years of events until I reach the big scene that was the original inspiration for the story, which also feels like a mistake since it would take pages and pages before reaching the hook, the exciting event that really sets the action in progress.
Another approach would be to start with the hook and then insert mini-flashbacks throughout the whole story, interweaving memories into the present action. But this seems like a set up for a schizophrenic story that fails to ever be quite one thing or another.
Part of the problem is that any of these structures CAN work. Writers have done them well before and will continue to do them well in the future. But they all have drawbacks and weaknesses. And sometimes the pitfalls appear so large that there seems to be almost nowhere safe to step.
So I've been wracking my brain, trying to remember what I learned in grad school about how to find an appropriate structure for a work of fiction, and the sad truth is that I don't think this issue was covered very well. Part of the problem is that the teacher I had for the class that should have covered this material was simply not a good teacher. Instead of learning about structure in the fiction class, I learned about structure in the screenwriting class, and that's now what I'm falling back on.
One major structural point in the screenwriting class was the inciting incident, the action that sets the plot moving, which, in a screenplay with a standard three act structure, comes in the first act, typically fifteen to twenty minutes into the film, after the world of the film has been established. Before the inciting incident occurs, the audience needs to understand the world and who the major character is, so when the inciting incident occurs and the character makes a choice about what is going to happen, we understand what is at stake. I'm not sure a short story necessarily has the exact same structure as a screenplay and whether I can plot out my story in the same exact fashion, but I think this concept of the inciting incident is probably useful to keep in mind.
So the question I've been asking myself is whether the hook, the event I began with as the original idea for the story, is the inciting incident or something else. I tried something to help me sort through the material: I wrote down each separate event, which could be an entire scene or simply a memory that is represented in a single sentence, and I wrote down each one on a note card. Currently, I have forty-two cards. I looked at these events and tried to determine which one has the most potential to be an inciting incident, which one results in the character making a choice that affects his life and sends him down a new path. And I've tentatively concluded that the original spark for the story is actually more of a plot point later. It's a complication from the second act (if I'm thinking of a three act screenplay structure), and the inciting incident is something that occurs much earlier. So what I need to do is not necessarily begin at the very beginning, but begin shortly before the true inciting incident, the action that occurs that sets my protagonist on his path that leads him to where he is when the big event occurs, setting up the final action down the line.
Anyway, I'm still struggling with it. I'm also trying to figure out whether I have a short story on my hands or a novella, so I'll probably write another post here soon where I hash out my ideas on length as I keep working on this.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)