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silveradept[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]
Sometimes the way you tell the story is integral to the story itself. Not everything is going to work as a novel-length idea, with multiple chapters of dialogue and exposition and action all neatly arranged. Or disjointed. Or hypertexted, so that you end up with a twisty maze of passages, all alike, such that the way you experience the story has to do with the choices you made on which parts to see first.
Which is to say that structure is an important part of writing. Most of you reading this have probably already been exposed to various writing structures, and maybe you have a few favorites. Structure, as I'm using it here, means both things like limitations on the number and type of words that can be used (sort of like self-imposed challenges) as well as frameworks and templates that a story can be built around that make it recognizably a member of that type of story.
For example, the Choose Your Own Adventure books (now printed from a company called ChooseCo, because we are nothing if on the nose about this) all follow a certain structure that makes them recognizable. CYOA-style books all use second-person narration (because YOU are doing the choosing), a branching plot structure with several different possible endings (only one of which is a complete and good ending in most CYOA-type novels, although there is at least one very famous exception in the canon), and printing the various pieces of the plot on different pages of the book, so that the person reading the book has to go back and forth in the book to get the narrative parts they've chosen (so that someone reading the book isn't spoiled on what they've chosen until they flip to the page and read they've been eaten by a tiger or disintegrated by a laser beam). These books are distinct from other kinds of gamebooks because they usually don't require inventory or statistical management or the use of dice, like, say, the Fighting Fantasy series, which has the same segmented narrative and second-person narration, but also adds various checks that require dice or having obtained various items on the quest to determine the success or the failure of the thing that the reader is trying to do, as well as a combat system where the statistics for the opponents are presented, and the reader is expected to roll combat to see if they are able to defeat the opponent and continue with the adventure. With the advent of digital versions of those gamebooks, the option to press forward in the narrative despite whatever combat the book wants you to complete is sadly taken away, or will be discouraged in some way, shape, or form, which will be frustrating to someone who just wants to get through the narrative without having to stop to roll dice, die, and start over again every time they run into something.
A different example is The Hero's Journey, a specific narrative structure for myths and stories that is widely (mis)applicable to all sorts of works that involve protagonists and antagonists. There are ways to play with the structure, try to skip steps, or omit them entirely, that a book might still be part of the structure even if it doesn't follow all the steps in their exact order. But because there are a lot of stories that follow that structure, there are people who are ready to claim that it's a universal of some sort, and then you get into disagreements.
But structure can also be something as an idea that a work happens in three acts - one to set the stage so everyone is in their place, one to engage the action and reactions, and one to deal with the consequences of what happened. Which might play out over several chapters. Or not.
Fandoms have contributed unique structures to the pool of possibilities, like the Five Times work. A Five Times work can often be boiled down into a sentence: Five Times [CHARACTER(S)] [VERB] [THEME]. "Five Times Darth Vader Almost Renounced The Dark Side." "Five Times Harry Potter Snogged (or Shagged) Draco Malfoy." "Five Dates Cecil used The Weather To Get Out Of". There are endless variations on this idea, and all the structure demands is that you write about five times the character(s) verbed the thematic thing. Long or short, it doesn't matter, so long as there are five of them. Sometimes if you get stuck on an idea, you throw penguins, call it a five times fic, and start the next one of the five.
A common variation of the Five Times fic is a Five Plus One (5+1) fic, where you have Five Times [CHARACTER(S)] [VERB] [THEME], and One Time [they didn't/they did/something completely different that still ties into the theme], which can build some tension into a story just from the structure. "Five Times Batman Almost Caught Catwoman, and One Time He Let Her Go." "Five Times Steven Almost Confessed His Crush On Connie, and The One Time He Actually Managed It." And so on. The possibilities are endless, and this particular structure works well when you have a lot of plots running through your head that all don't want to resolve into full stories on their own, but can be clumped together in their half-finished forms to create a complete work so that they'll just get out of your head for a bit so you can work on the thing you actually are trying to work on. Thematic fragments stitched together with a narrative can create a work.
Structure doesn't have to be big or grandiose, either. Once of the easier-looking but potentially more difficult doing structures is the drabble. 100 words, no more, no less, to create something that will hang on its own. Not quite as restrictive as the six-word story ("For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn." is the usual example) or the methods laid down in how one writes specific verse or polysyllabic poems, but it turns out one hundred words isn't all that much space to write a complete story or scene, if that's what you're looking for. The economy of words needed forces the lens of the story either very close up to something or very far away from it to make it all fit.
That said, a drabble is a great way to dip your toes in and see that you can create something. One hundred words isn't all that much to commit to. Some exchanges are specifically drabble (or double/triple drabble) length, others set their exchange requirements pretty low (300 words) so as to make the bar for creation pretty low and get lots of works popped out regularly. One thousand words seems to have stabilized as a "standard" exchange minimum, which can seem daunting at first, but if you keep turning your dice (a d10 does 1000 words), you'll see the progress as it gets made.
There's also the more daunting challenges - 5k (5000 word minimum) 10k (10,000 words), NaNovel (50,000 words in 30 days), and so forth, which can totally be attempted on a first try if that's what you want to do. Some fic will easily breeze past 100,000 words over the course of its lifetime, and several have made it to the million words department. All from some fairly small beginnings.
As for myself, my works tend to run their course in a pocket of somewhere between 1000 and 7000 words, depending on the idea and the goals of the exchange. I've had some shorter ones that turned out fine, but for the most part, that seems to be about where my brain decides it's had enough and told the story it wanted told. Perhaps for some year, I'll start trying to make something bigger, but right now, I don't feel the great need to write epics. Smaller, more numerous things Seem to be the sorts of things that I'm working on right now. There's always the possibility that something will explode, or an idea will reveal itself to have a lot of depth, but for now, I am where I am. Neither good, nor bad, and the recipients I've had have said they enjoyed the works I've produced. As it turns out, not only are you already good enough, I am, too. And I've been writing a lot of things to keep proving that to myself, in addition to the fun that it is to play in someone else's toybox
alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]Sometimes the way you tell the story is integral to the story itself. Not everything is going to work as a novel-length idea, with multiple chapters of dialogue and exposition and action all neatly arranged. Or disjointed. Or hypertexted, so that you end up with a twisty maze of passages, all alike, such that the way you experience the story has to do with the choices you made on which parts to see first.
Which is to say that structure is an important part of writing. Most of you reading this have probably already been exposed to various writing structures, and maybe you have a few favorites. Structure, as I'm using it here, means both things like limitations on the number and type of words that can be used (sort of like self-imposed challenges) as well as frameworks and templates that a story can be built around that make it recognizably a member of that type of story.
For example, the Choose Your Own Adventure books (now printed from a company called ChooseCo, because we are nothing if on the nose about this) all follow a certain structure that makes them recognizable. CYOA-style books all use second-person narration (because YOU are doing the choosing), a branching plot structure with several different possible endings (only one of which is a complete and good ending in most CYOA-type novels, although there is at least one very famous exception in the canon), and printing the various pieces of the plot on different pages of the book, so that the person reading the book has to go back and forth in the book to get the narrative parts they've chosen (so that someone reading the book isn't spoiled on what they've chosen until they flip to the page and read they've been eaten by a tiger or disintegrated by a laser beam). These books are distinct from other kinds of gamebooks because they usually don't require inventory or statistical management or the use of dice, like, say, the Fighting Fantasy series, which has the same segmented narrative and second-person narration, but also adds various checks that require dice or having obtained various items on the quest to determine the success or the failure of the thing that the reader is trying to do, as well as a combat system where the statistics for the opponents are presented, and the reader is expected to roll combat to see if they are able to defeat the opponent and continue with the adventure. With the advent of digital versions of those gamebooks, the option to press forward in the narrative despite whatever combat the book wants you to complete is sadly taken away, or will be discouraged in some way, shape, or form, which will be frustrating to someone who just wants to get through the narrative without having to stop to roll dice, die, and start over again every time they run into something.
A different example is The Hero's Journey, a specific narrative structure for myths and stories that is widely (mis)applicable to all sorts of works that involve protagonists and antagonists. There are ways to play with the structure, try to skip steps, or omit them entirely, that a book might still be part of the structure even if it doesn't follow all the steps in their exact order. But because there are a lot of stories that follow that structure, there are people who are ready to claim that it's a universal of some sort, and then you get into disagreements.
But structure can also be something as an idea that a work happens in three acts - one to set the stage so everyone is in their place, one to engage the action and reactions, and one to deal with the consequences of what happened. Which might play out over several chapters. Or not.
Fandoms have contributed unique structures to the pool of possibilities, like the Five Times work. A Five Times work can often be boiled down into a sentence: Five Times [CHARACTER(S)] [VERB] [THEME]. "Five Times Darth Vader Almost Renounced The Dark Side." "Five Times Harry Potter Snogged (or Shagged) Draco Malfoy." "Five Dates Cecil used The Weather To Get Out Of". There are endless variations on this idea, and all the structure demands is that you write about five times the character(s) verbed the thematic thing. Long or short, it doesn't matter, so long as there are five of them. Sometimes if you get stuck on an idea, you throw penguins, call it a five times fic, and start the next one of the five.
A common variation of the Five Times fic is a Five Plus One (5+1) fic, where you have Five Times [CHARACTER(S)] [VERB] [THEME], and One Time [they didn't/they did/something completely different that still ties into the theme], which can build some tension into a story just from the structure. "Five Times Batman Almost Caught Catwoman, and One Time He Let Her Go." "Five Times Steven Almost Confessed His Crush On Connie, and The One Time He Actually Managed It." And so on. The possibilities are endless, and this particular structure works well when you have a lot of plots running through your head that all don't want to resolve into full stories on their own, but can be clumped together in their half-finished forms to create a complete work so that they'll just get out of your head for a bit so you can work on the thing you actually are trying to work on. Thematic fragments stitched together with a narrative can create a work.
Structure doesn't have to be big or grandiose, either. Once of the easier-looking but potentially more difficult doing structures is the drabble. 100 words, no more, no less, to create something that will hang on its own. Not quite as restrictive as the six-word story ("For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn." is the usual example) or the methods laid down in how one writes specific verse or polysyllabic poems, but it turns out one hundred words isn't all that much space to write a complete story or scene, if that's what you're looking for. The economy of words needed forces the lens of the story either very close up to something or very far away from it to make it all fit.
That said, a drabble is a great way to dip your toes in and see that you can create something. One hundred words isn't all that much to commit to. Some exchanges are specifically drabble (or double/triple drabble) length, others set their exchange requirements pretty low (300 words) so as to make the bar for creation pretty low and get lots of works popped out regularly. One thousand words seems to have stabilized as a "standard" exchange minimum, which can seem daunting at first, but if you keep turning your dice (a d10 does 1000 words), you'll see the progress as it gets made.
There's also the more daunting challenges - 5k (5000 word minimum) 10k (10,000 words), NaNovel (50,000 words in 30 days), and so forth, which can totally be attempted on a first try if that's what you want to do. Some fic will easily breeze past 100,000 words over the course of its lifetime, and several have made it to the million words department. All from some fairly small beginnings.
As for myself, my works tend to run their course in a pocket of somewhere between 1000 and 7000 words, depending on the idea and the goals of the exchange. I've had some shorter ones that turned out fine, but for the most part, that seems to be about where my brain decides it's had enough and told the story it wanted told. Perhaps for some year, I'll start trying to make something bigger, but right now, I don't feel the great need to write epics. Smaller, more numerous things Seem to be the sorts of things that I'm working on right now. There's always the possibility that something will explode, or an idea will reveal itself to have a lot of depth, but for now, I am where I am. Neither good, nor bad, and the recipients I've had have said they enjoyed the works I've produced. As it turns out, not only are you already good enough, I am, too. And I've been writing a lot of things to keep proving that to myself, in addition to the fun that it is to play in someone else's toybox
