Character Comparison

[Guest Dabeagle]

I hear Camy writes sans pants

[blue]

Character decomposition is another matter altogether. Gotta watch out for those zombies, vampires, werewolves, mummies, daddies, and so on.

[Gee Whillickers]

It's writing by the seat of your pants. You're either a pantser or a plotter, and you seem to be able to do both. Lucky you!

So, then, if I'm writing about a character plotting to pants another character, and I plot that ahead of time, am I plotting a pantsing plot? Or am I pantsing the plot? I'm so confused....

What's worse though is sometimes the stories I've most firmly plotted out are the ones that seem most apt to want to steer me in new directions by the seat of my pants. It's funny too, if people are praising my writing for these "seat of my pants" stories, I find it much harder to accept the compliment. It feels like cheating somehow. Like I should be saying, "Well, thanks, but actually it wasn't me, it was just some entity borrowing my fingers for awhile. But I appreciate the thought and I'll pass it along if I ever figure out who actually wrote that thing."

[colinian]

These are the sort of problems we all worry about all the time. The current story I'm doing goes on a bit before there's any dialog at all, and I don't like writing that way. But it's done for effect. So I worry about it, but do it on purpose. I think we should be aware when we're breaking rules. Aware, but do it if it feels right. Ultimately, we have to let the readers decide if it's any good or not.

I think that if a long narrative includes action or the promise of action, the reader will be willing to read on.

Colin

[The Pecman]

The rules be damned if an author has something to say and knows how to present it in a cohesive manner.

I agree, Chris. To me, at least 50% of the rules are simply, "don't be boring." If the writer succeeds in doing that, that's a big part of the battle. The rest is just technique, surprises, keeping the story moving, and so on.

One of the biggest flaws I see sometimes in online fiction is when you encounter a chapter in which nothing really happens. I think if you can remove (say) chapter 10, and not affect chapters 9 and 11, then you have to consider maybe whether it's really necessary at all. I see a lot of really padded stuff out there -- thee and me excepted -- where I try to read it but find myself yelling, "don't bore us! Get to the chorus!"

What's worse though is sometimes the stories I've most firmly plotted out are the ones that seem most apt to want to steer me in new directions by the seat of my pants.

No less than Stephen King has said that he rarely knows how a story is going to end when he sits down in front of the keyboard. In some cases, he'll get halfway through and then say, "oh, I better put this in chapter 2, or else nobody will understand this," so he'll revise as he goes. But he has the benefit of not allowing anyone to see the work until it's completed. You never know if a story took 5 years or 5 months or 5 weeks to write.

I'm enough of a control freak that I want to have a sense of what the ending is vaguely going to be, along with the title, and then figure out how to get there. I have attempted one novel (Cerulean Project) where I had no idea where anything was going, and that was actually kind of fun. I have only a glimmer of where it might wind up, and there have been times when I couldn't wait to get back to the keyboard just so I could find out what was going to happen yet. When that's working, and you're firing on all cylinders, it's a really exhilarating experience.

[Chris James]

Some really wonderful thoughts here in this thread.

Characters make the story, and so I would like you to consider place as a character. My example would be in the opening chapter of Doing Something by Cole Parker, currently posting. How timely that this is his newest work and so I will not spoil it for those of you have not begun to read, but you really should begin now.

Earlier in the thread Cole mentioned his concerns about boring a reader before getting to the action, but he need not worry. In Doing Something, the first chapter contains a rich development of his main character's thoughts with barely a line of dialogue. But the character is conflicted by events, not the least of which is the new place he finds himself. In this chapter that place has become a benign protagonist, a character if you will, brought to life by the descriptive passages that define the environment for his main, and very human, character.

I can't spoil the read for you, but by the time I was finished with this chapter I felt a certain dread that things were not as they should be. Something was coming but I didn't know what to expect. This is a wonderful example of foreshadowing the coming events in Cole's story.

Sometimes the reader has to bear with the author's method to reach a point of understanding. I've always believed that good stories are like a painting created in layers. So far Cole has painted us a dark and brooding forest of emotion and pain. Now I want to know the creatures that inhabit that darkness. Looking forward to future chapters. Bravo, Cole.

[Cole Parker]

Thanks, Chris. Your story, starting today here, is also very good. I know this story, and it is as professionally crafted and rendered as any you'll read. It gives you the feel while reading it that you're in the hands of an expert.

One thing I hope to have in my stories, and you certainly do in yours, is a feeling the story is simply flowing without any apparent effort by the writer. I can say that Doing Something was a lot of hard work and took me longer than most. I'm sure we all go through this, some stories just writing themselves, and some that are struggles. We don 't want the ones that require lots of really hard work to show that effort. We want it all to look easy.

I will say, the work may be hard but it isn't onerous. It's not exactly fun, but it's rewarding and satisfying. Writing, for me, is a wonderful way to spend my retirement years. Every story is different, every one is challenging, but we do the best we can and can be proud of the accomplishments.

C

[Guest Dabeagle]

[Merkin]

Place is an important element of any story, for just as in real life it colors the actions of all the characters. Whether it can be claimed to be a character in its own right is an interesting question. In some stories it can easily be acknowledged as a character; for examples close at hand I think of your own Woodland House, Chris, or of Graeme's Heart of the Tree. In these instances place is not simply a setting for the story, but makes the story happen. In fact, many of your stories, Chris, revolve around specific important locations, and those locations have a decided impact on how the story unrolls and turns out.

Many of our stories here on AD center on young gay men, often teenagers, and their surroundings. Place becomes an extremely important element within these stories, for writing about teenagers usually means placing them in locations such as home, school, neighborhood, or the mall. Because these characters are teenagers they often have little or no personal control over the settings they find themselves in, and thus place becomes a very important element for these stories, for it affects their lives in a way that is largely out of their control. Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to give locations such as these the status of characters in the effect they have upon the stories being told.

[Chris James]

Aw, James...you figured out my secret. Place is always a character in my stories, and usually the first one I develop. Teenagers or young men, characters often do have such similar traits and it becomes difficult to keep them unique in a story. But put them each in different settings with interesting challenges related to the landscape and you have a means to build an interesting story.

Having travelled extensively in my younger years gives me a long list of places. Can't always do everything from memory but it eases the research. The first thing I look for are the images, in books, online or from my own albums. Male characters have a defined image and I stick with that for inspiration, as I am sure many other writers tend to do. Perhaps one day I will get a decent scanner and can add my personal images to the title page of a story.