Actually, I’ve been thinking about this and I think I can be a little more helpful than I was in the above post. Let’s take an actual example: Curiosity Killed The Reporter.
My B-Plot: I had wanted for some time to deal with the issue of how Clark might have dealt with Lois’ death the way Lois had to deal with Clark’s death in That Old Gang of Mine.
How to get there:
When I started writing, I only knew two things. 1/ That I was going to start from Honeymoon in Metropolis and 2/ That Lois was going to get shot when she started investigating what was happening in the room across from hers at the Lexor.
So I started writing. I started with the beginning of Honeymoon in Metropolis so that I could end up with Lois in the Honeymoon suite. When I’d finished that, I had to make a decision. I could use the A-Plot from Honeymoon In Metropolis or I could come up with my own A-Plot. Now using the A-Plot from the series is sort of boring for the reader (since he or she knows what’s coming) and it tends to get boring for me as the writer. So when I got to the point where Lois is looking out the window of the Honeymoon suite, I had to decide what she sees.
So I decided she’d see something different. I’d keep Harrington there. I’d put in a character that looked like Rorke. But this time, I decided to add some beautiful women and then have Lois see the character that we know as Rorke shoot one of the women in front of Harrington. Then they leave the suite and Lois goes to find out if the woman is still alive and gets shot herself.
Okay, so once that was finished, I didn’t have a clue where to go. Who was my bad guy? Why had the woman been shot? What was Harrington’s role in all this? What was the motivation of the shooter? I knew none of this.
So what to do? I gave the investigation to Clark and had him ask questions. I asked myself: what would Clark do? What questions might he ask? What might people have seen or heard? What information might be given to him? And then I let Clark investigate and as he investigated, I learned the A-Plot and as I learned the A-Plot, so did the reader.
Now, at that point did I know if Lois was alive or dead? I had a sneaking suspicion about that
. But, what I didn’t know was: if she was alive, why wasn’t she contacting anyone? And how did she survive? Those were ideas that developed over time while I dealt with my motivation in writing the story: how Clark might react if he came to believe that Lois was dead?
That doesn’t mean it all came together the first time. I had to go back and rewrite things as new ideas would come to me. I had to constantly be thinking, considering all the possible scenarios.
It’s certainly not a simple way of writing. Using an outline is certainly more efficient. Working out the details of the A-Plot before putting pen to paper (so to speak) certainly takes less time in the long run. But if I know too many details of my A-Plot before I begin writing, I tend to get bored. And then the story ends up sitting on my hard drive unfinished. I write stories to find out what will happen. But that’s the way it works for me (at least so far).
Hope that is of some help.
ML
