Ten Plots Generated from Other People's Problems

I’ve been teaching an advanced workshop that’s been a lot of fun. I gave them one of my favorite texts, an issue of Swamp Thing by Alan Moore called “Pog.” You might want to read it before proceeding on to the discussion of it. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

I picked that text because it has a high degree of emotional impact. It was a great starting point for talking about how to create that in a piece of fiction. In discussing how Moore achieved that, we realized that it is primarily constructed through the characters. While it’s nice to see the images, they are not the primary source of the impact.

Here are the five ways that impact is created:

1. The characters are in a problematic situation with which we, the reader, can identify. While we have never rocketed through space in a ship shaped like a turtle shell, we do know the feeling of exile. We know what it is like to lose a home, and despair of finding a new one.
2. The characters are acting to solve their problem, even in the face of growing despair. Accordingly, we root for them and their valiant effort.
3. We see the characters caring for each other, taking care of each other in a way that is loving and endearing.
4. The characters are freaking adorable. Seriously cute. How can we not love them? I’m reminded of the Aeslin mice Seanan McGuire uses in her urban fantasy series or the fuzzies in H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy series (free on the Kindle!) (also rebooted by John Scalzi). They speak in a way that is absolutely charming and full of wordplay.
5. And one can’t underestimate the glow of nostalgia that this comic holds for those who loved the original Pogo strip by Walt Kelly.

So what takeaways for character building can one draw from this? Are there axioms that can be applied in one’s own writing? Of course there are, and here’s the list:

1. Give your characters a real problem. More than one. The shittier you are to your characters, the more people can identify with them.
2. Make characters act. They don’t need to make the right decision, but they do need to make one, and experience its results. Characters that are simply floating through the story being buffeted by forces outside their control are a stretch to identify with.
3. Give us something to love about the character, even when they’re unsympathetic.
4. Don’t be afraid to be a little sentimental. I know the more cynical among you will flinch at that advice, and I’m not fond of very sappy stuff, but in my experience, the stories that lean hard towards the sentimental often do much better than those that do not.
5. As to whether or not one should rely on paying tribute to other loved texts as an overall narrative strategy, that’s up to you. But one of the important things about such a strategy is that you must allow for the reader who does not know the original text. What you produce must be entertaining to them even without that overlay.

What strategies have I overlooked? Characters are pretty central to stories, and strong, clearly delineated characters will serve you well.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

This was a really useful article. Some highlights:

“Every writing session after this realization, I dedicated five minutes (sometimes more, never less) and wrote out a quick description of what I was going to write. Sometimes it wasn’t even a paragraph, just a list of this happens then this then this. This simple change, these five stupid minutes, boosted my wordcount enormously. I went from writing 2k a day to writing 5k a day within a week…”

“…my productivity was at its highest when I was in a place other than my home. That is to say, a place without internet. The afternoons I wrote at the coffee shop with no wireless were twice as productive as the mornings I wrote at home. I also saw that, while butt in chair time is the root of all writing, not all butt in chair time is equal.”

“Those days I broke 10k were the days I was writing scenes I’d been dying to write since I planned the book. They were the candy bar scenes, the scenes I wrote all that other stuff to get to. By contrast, my slow days (days where I was struggling to break 5k) corresponded to the scenes I wasn’t that crazy about.”

I’m going to try to do more coffee shop writing in the next couple of weeks as well as put more time into planning (I just outlined the story I want to write today, for example, scene by scene) and see what effect it has.

Pretentious Title: How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day

How I Went From Writing 2000 Words a Day to 10000 Words a Day. When I started writing The Spirit War (Eli novel #4), I had a bit of a problem. I had a brand new baby and my life (like every new mother…

Enjoy this writing advice and want more like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Perefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.