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plotting stories

Ten More Plots Taken From Other People's Problems

Again taken from helpineedhelp.com:

  1. I don’t know what the back of my head looks like.
  2. I’m a peeping tom.
  3. I don’t know what fork to use.
  4. I forgot my password.
  5. I need a dream recommendation.
  6. I forgot someone’s name.
  7. I want to buy help elsewhere.
  8. I want a patdown but am not flying anywhere.
  9. I don’t know what soda to drink.
  10. I have no purpose.

#SFWAPRO

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Ten Plots Generated from Other People's Problems

Abstract image to accompany a blog post from speculative fiction writer Cat Rambo.All taken from http://www.helpineedhelp.com/#/

  1. I don’t like my eyebrows.
  2. I’ve never been kissed.
  3. I don’t want to clean up my mess.
  4. I’m involved in a gang.
  5. I don’t know if I’m gay.
  6. I want my cat to be a cover model.
  7. I don’t know if I’m depressed/colorblind.
  8. I’m racist.
  9. I’m overstimulated.
  10. I have ghosts.
  11. I’m always wrong.

Enjoy these story prompts and want more content like this? 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.

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About Writing: Coaxing a Seed into a Story

Photograph of a diagram showing the different kinds of starting points for a story.
This is a photograph of one sheet of notes from planning the class. Often stories are planned this way as well. I'll jot down what I know so far about it and begin using that information to generate other pieces, such as character wants and the sources of conflict.
Last night we had the final session of the Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction class, which is the session where we talk about everything except writing: stuff like going to conventions, and how to submit stories, and how to treat editors and what about audio markets and all that sort of thing. And I’d meant to include a section about plotting stories, because I’d taught a new class the day before, the Moving Your Story From Idea to Finished Draft class, and as often happens had come up with some new things to say about stories from thinking about one specific aspect, but there just wasn’t enough time. So I want to talk a little bit about it in a blog post.

As always, everyone’s writing process is different and the only one I can speak with authority about is my own. So perhaps this will click for you and perhaps it won’t. I hope it does.

Certainly, there are stories that arrive complete. They appear in my head and all I have to do is write them down. This is most likely to occur during the night, meaning I can rise, go to the keyboard, and bang it all out quickly. For example, “Pippa’s Smiles” arrived complete and ready to go, though it had its roots in some thoughts I had been mulling over about gendered narratives. Unfortunately, though, that’s not usually how it works.

For me, stories can start in a number of ways.

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Writing and the Human Condition

Not particularly informative illustration
Someday I hope to have my students greet me with tiny classroom dioramas too. Perhaps not as many dinosaurs as Connie merits.
Gads, that sounds like a pompous start to pontification. But I wanted to talk about something that I often say in class. It’s something Connie Willis told my Clarion West class, and which I repeat, but don’t explain as thoroughly as I should, because it’s so clear in my head.

But words are imprecise things, and so I’m a-gonna do what we used to call “unpacking” back in grad school and even provide some useful examples.

What did Connie say? She said, “Good fiction teaches us what it means to be human.” As good f&sf writers, I would argue that we might change “human” to “self-aware being,” but that is picking nits.

So what does that mean? It means we’re all faced with this common problem: life. And we want to know what we’re supposed to do, and what we can get away with, and what to do about all that hardcoded primate behavior that keeps popping up from time to time, and stuff like that. Sometimes the message features a universal human, sometimes it is a human shaped by particular circumstances, such as race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, etc. It’s why we like to read fiction. It’s why we like gossip. We want to know what other human beings do.

And here’s why this is important: Sometimes thinking about what a story is trying to say is a good way to complete, rewrite, or sharpen it. Doing this at one of those stages can move a story from good to excellent. Do I start a story knowing the message? Hell no. It emerges (hopefully). Sometimes I have to coax it out of its hiding place in the prose. Sometimes I have to go in with a club.

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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

~K. Richardson
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