Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related Figuring out plot in a story

(1) I always find myself with great story ideas. They seem to come easily but once I try to develop them I fail miserably.

How do you do it?

What process do you have?

Do you know of any writing books that might help?

(2) I can never seem to understand my villains’ motivations.

How would you define your villains?

Why they do what they do?

(3) That tender balance between A-Plot and B-Plot.

How do you choose which part of your story should fall in A or B Plot lines?

How often should these two worlds meet?


TLAT

Hey

Yes, A-plots are sometimes vital to your story (depending on what sort of story you're writing). Yes, they can be difficult to manage. When I started writing, they had me scared stiff

I usually start with the result I want and work backwards. Okay, I want Lois thrown out of a plane -- how can I do that?

I think your points (1) and (2) are very closely connected. You *have* to understand your bad guy. Give them a motivation, and give them a goal. Those two things help tremendously when you're wondering what they'd do next.

Motivations don't have to be very complex. Trask's motivation is he hates/fears aliens, and wants to know how to control/destroy Superman.

Goals need to be more specific. Trask wants to discover if Lois Lane can contact Superman, and he doesn't care if she dies in the process.

Then once you have the goal, you have to figure out the method. *How* does Trask figure out what he wants to know? Maybe he'll put the theory to a test. What kind of test? Something where Lois has time and motivation to scream for help -- throwing her out of a plane might work.

You really have to get inside your bad guy's head to some degree -- their actions ought to seem logical and reasonable to them. The reader has to be able to see *why* a character would do something (which doesn't have to be explained up front, but it's got to come into the story somewhere).

The A-plot/B-plot balance varies by story. I personally like a lot of B-plot, and tend to view my A-plots as a means to an end. You don't have to spend a lot of time on them, but if you've got an A-plot at all it ought to make sense.

There are a lot of good books out there about writing; I sort of collect them. One I'd recommend for you is The Plot Thickens by Noah Lukeman. Have you got a public library? They probably have a section on fiction writing.

Hope this helps.

PJ

oooo.......that list names a number of my evil difficulties as well. <insert gremlin that is scared stiff here>.

for coming up with a basic story idea, that's pretty easy for me. all of my hobbies and habits (drawing, embroidery, etc), one way or another, feed my one major addiction---writing. the embroidery is something for my fingers to do that doesn't require much assistance from the brain, so my brain can go off and play with its mental blocks.

Plots, though..... I've always found plots to be very difficult. They are that magical thing that happens to OTHER writers, never me. usually it's a situation where one scene comes to me crystal clear, and I'm forced to construct a story around them (in and around cast members stealing scripts and monkeying with them. I won't name names *cough*clarkandbruce*cough*).

villains......oi. impossible. can't give you any help there. i SUK at villains. what I usually end up doing is a situation becomes the villain, for the most part. To give an example, a volcano going off and word gets to the daily planet. there's no person who's the bad guy----it's plate techtonics at action, there. to give another off-genre example, I'm working on a monster long fic where bruce wayne is forced to pull off the mask, and several months later, someone manages to pick him off. who did this? a kid who was part of a gang that had been taken apart. who took it apart? batman, helping a cop who was undercover in the gang. so the kid (ok, he's more like 22, 23, or 24 yrs old) is furious that Batman took away his "family". the drug money was his sole income, so of course he's angry. then he finds out who the man behind the mask is (along with the rest of the world), and it happens to be someone exceedingly wealthy. heaps upon heaps of fury there. solution? kill him. I echo pam's thoughts---hard though it is, you gotta get inside the baddie's head. take away your compassionate, understanding, wise heart and put yourself in your baddie's situation. what would you do, if you wanted something and didn't care about stepping on people to do it? better yet, switch your good guy to the position of your bad guy, and say, "hm... what would Superman do if he were on the baddie's side? he'd freeze them (the good guys) to the ground with his breath! um... my baddie can't do that. hmmmm.... I know! Liquid nitrogen! got a tank right here!"

A versus B plot..... ok, i'll use the story I mentioned above. you get glimpses of this kid through the story, and although he ends up being a major player in that he's the one who kills BW (pretty much shoots him in broad daylight, reagan-style), you actually don't spend a lot of time with him. so is this really the A plot? or is the A plot following BW around in the weeks following his revelation and watching his personality slowly rot from BW over to Batman, snarling at people at his business, punching a wall, not giving a rip if good people walk off the job because they can't deal with this monster anymore, and making overly paranoid plans to fend off takeovers that, realistically speaking, probably won't happen? tough to tell. my advice----don't be too worried about precisely constructing A and B plots. if they happen, fine. they might even intertwine, and merge at the end! or maybe the plot started out merged and then split partway through into an A and B. (and then, just for fun, come together in a big party at the end!).

me and my long posts.... if this board collapses one day, it will be from the weight of my fingers.....

better idea.

would you consider posting a story idea, like a sentence or so, and let us help you, give you pointers and general ideas? would you feel comfy doing this? it's so much easier to learn by doing and to be able to talk about concrete things. both pam and I have resorted to specifics in our posts (her with tossing Lois out a plane and me with my Batman story), and that's because it's hard to help when it's only abstract, generic ideas being tossed around.

Maybe books would help, and maybe it would help to take a couple of your ideas and develop them--two different methods of solving the problem, there. which one would ya like?

I have seldom worked out my A-Plot when I start writing. So... I just start writing and then something inevitably happens . Someone gets shot (like Lois in Curiosity Killed the Reporter) or some sourse has a great tip about corruption in the government (like in The Other Woman). So I follow it while I consciously work on the B-Plot that was my motivation for writing the story.

In a story that I just finished a couple days ago, I got about a hundred pages into the story when I realized that I had a dozen different threads with no real idea as to how they all joined together. It is one of the few stories where that has happened to me. So I had to stop writing, send my story to Gerry and Carol and say: 'hey, guys, who's my bad guy?'

And then, after they gave me lots of great ideas, I chose a bad guy. Of course, that meant I had to go back and make some changes since until then, my bad guy hadn't even been in the story . But in the end, it all seemed to come together.

So I say: 'Just play - have fun and see how things go. You might be surprised as to where your story ends up.' Of course, others work from an outline and that seems to work for them. So it's really an individual thing (I think). I do know that I do a LOT of rewrites - which is one of the reasons I don't normally post in parts. Until I type 'The End', I usually don't know what the end is going to be. If I do figure it out too soon, I tend to lose interest in the story and go on to do something else.

I guess that's not really a whole lot of help

ML

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

Thanks guys this all really does help. I've been trying to figure out everything before really writing the story problem with that is my muse is easily side tracked. She likes to jump from idea to idea which works to my detriment because it usually sparks a new idea that involves the same episode I was trying to focus on. Case in point I have at least four that revolve around HoL. Ideas some with substance others without but none can be combined to further one good story.

ML I like your approach to writing. I loved Curiosity I, II and wondered how you did that. How you made your audience worry and wonder about Lois what happened to her why she was not in contact if she could be? By approaching the story in that way you created tension, which is something I was always jealous of. I will try this method because I really hate outlines.

Sileas your idea of submitting a story that others can help with is a good one. I thought through my ideas and picked one that has some details be really has not entered the actual writing stage. Thought it best to avoid my already bad habits. I will submit this at a later date. The story is not on my computer and needs to be narrowed to bare facts.


PJ this helps a lot my mother says that I tend to over complicate things. It helps to remember that sometimes a bad guy just likes to be bad, no real reason for this.

(Not, oh, he was frightened as a child and ever since fears anything that flies. So superman being the biggest living flying bird in the world is a huge threat.