jbrentonparker

[jbrentonparker]

Plotting Method #7: Stream of Consciousness

Okay. Full disclosure. This is how I plot, and it’s a mess--but a lot of fun, in my opinion; and if you have a lot of thoughts all at once that aren’t necessarily coming out in a logical order, it may be the method for you.

This method doesn’t really have coherent steps, because it’s just based on the natural flow of your own thoughts.

Where to Start

Start with whatever you have. For the examples here, I’m going to make something up as a I go along, exactly as I would if I were doing this in real life.

Maybe you have an idea for a character, or a scene, or a concept. Start there by just writing it down. I write it as if I’m talking to myself, in full sentences, but may you’ll do bullet points, or a mind map, or some other method.

EXAMPLE: “Story idea: a story where a guy is on the run from death. Death is looking for him for some reason, and he’s trying not to be found.”

Expanding Upon the Idea

Okay, so now you have... something. And you don’t really know where to go with it. So start asking yourself questions, and try to answer them. They don’t have to be good answers, and you don’t have to use any of what you write. You’re just brainstorming until something clicks.

EXAMPLE: “So why is death after him??? Maybe he was supposed to die but found a way not to? May he was sick, knew he was dying, and somehow found a way to hide from Death (who is like an actual being in this world). Or maybe he died in some accident and made a deal with Death to get a little more time, and now Death is here to collect after the time runs out, but in the meantime the guy has found out a way to hide from Death? I think I like the first idea better though.”

Bouncing Around

One thing that is nice about this method is that you don’t need to work chronologically. You can bounce around as ideas come to you, and then go back and rework what you’ve come up with so far to fit in with the new ideas.

EXAMPLES: “I have this image in my head of a scene where the guy has finally been caught by Death, and is standing in like this... in-between, limbo world or something. Death is all pleased he’s finally caught up with the guy, but then the guy whips out this item, like a coin, that buys his way out of death. And maybe that’s how he does it, there are these special coins that can “buy” your freedom from death, and he has some way of finding them, over and over again, and always has at least one when Death shows up to collect the next time. And maybe he keeps dying over and over again in ridiculous ways, like eagles dropping turtles on his head and having sinkholes open up under his feet, as Death keeps trying to take him by surprise.”

Give Yourself a Goal

Once you have something to work off, start asking yourself questions about the conflict, climax, character goals, etc etc. Start working on getting your plot some direction, goals, and structure.

EXAMPLE: “So I know the conflict is this guy running from and outwitting Death, but what’s the climax? Where does that lead? Maybe he has to work WITH Death for some reason? Maybe he meets someone who needs to die by the end of the story? I feel like I want the main character to have to die in the end, but he has accepted it, and is ready to let it happen. Oh, maybe he meets someone who is going to die for some untimely reason, like they weren’t supposed to, and he has to give that person his coin to save them? Like, maybe he meets this woman, and while he’s in Limbo with Death, handing over his coin and getting out of dying for the millionth time, Death suddenly feels... like, a disturbance in the force. Something has happened that wasn’t supposed to, someone’s fate has been changed. Maybe Death pulls out this hourglass and sees that someone’s hourglass has suddenly lost a huge amount of sand at once--not supposed to happen. Death go,es there, bring MC for some reason? MC meets the woman, maybe she’s a Queen or leader of a group or country, and someone is planning to assassinate her. Death has a lot of work to do obviously, but can’t have this kind of reality-altering nonsense going on, so partly out of spite, he tells the MC to fix whatever has gone wrong and protect this woman, and he (Death) will stop trying to kill MC all the time. So then it becomes this political intrigue thing.”

Inevitable Changes

Do you see what happened up there in my example? Originally, I’d started out with an idea that the main conflict was between the Main Character (MC) and Death, and that the main antagonist was, more or less, Death. But now I have this completely different main antagonist, some shadowy assassin, and Death and my MC are forced to become allies. Things change as you work and come up with new ideas--and sometimes, you might follow a thread of an idea to the end, and find out it doesn’t work after all. You may have to throw it out and start over, possibly more than once. But it also helps you avoid plot holes later, by working through them in the planning stages.

Keeping Track of it All

The biggest challenge with this method is ending up with twenty pages of rambling plot, half of which you changed or didn’t use or is just you asking yourself questions.

How I combat this is by liberal use of my word processor’s highlighter. Once I feel like I’ve hit on something I’ll use, I’ll highlight it in the document, usually according to some kind of color-coded system (e.g. yellow for plot points, orange for actual scene ideas, blue for character ideas/background/development, green for lines of dialogue I’ve just thought of, etc).

Then, once I’ve plotted out as much as I can, I’ll go back through the document, pull those highlighted bits, and put them all in their own document--et viola, I have an outline.

The beauty of this method is it allows you to plot as minimally or extensively as you like. You can use it just to get a general sense of your overall plot, or keep drilling down until you end up with a chapter-by-chapter outline.

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If more structured plotting methods feel too restrictive or cookie-cutter, this could be a good alternative. If you’re transitioning from pantser to planner, it could be a good method to ease yourself into the new writing style. If you struggle with writing yourself into plot holes, this method could allow you to pursue plot threads in more depth before you write them, allowing you to spot pitfalls earlier on and avoid them later. Or if you find yourself just coming up with too many ideas all at once and struggle to get the first ones written down without forgetting the later ones, this method could allow you to just get all those ideas down and worry about stringing them together later.

[jbrentonparker]

Plotting Method #6: Beginning, End, and Nothing Else

I have been absent from Tumblr for a while now, but some of these plotting method posts have been shared around, so I figured I ought to finish it up!

If you’ve ever participated in NaNoWriMo, you’ll have heard of “Planners” and “Pantsers”.

A Planner is someone who sits down and plots out their story to at least some meaningful degree. It might just be a rough outline hitting major plot points, or it could be a detailed, 30 page scene-by-scene, line-by-line outline.

Pantsers, on the other hand, are those brave souls that board that rickety ship held together with spit and prayers and strike out for uncharted territory, with no idea of where they are headed except a single scene, or a group of characters, or a loose concept.

I’ve been both of these people through my life, and--and this is going to upset a lot of people--and being a Planner is objectively easier. I know, I know. All you Pantsers out there are feeling personally attacked. I always felt personally attacked too when someone said that in my presence. But when I was a Pantser, I had... no finished stories. Not a single one. I had about a thousand started stories; a few chapters of a dozen different ideas that all fizzled out partway through with no real direction. Eventually, when I did follow one through to the end, the entire thing was a pretty big mess full of  pointless filler and plot holes, and required extensive rewrites I’m still working on to this day--despite the fact that I started it in 2009. Planner really does make the writing process so much easier, both to simply follow through, and to end up with a first draft you can actually work with without being intimidated by the amount of editing you’ll have to do later.

But, you say, planning a story out in detail takes all the fun out of it! All the mystery and excitement and the ability to let your world and characters develop organically without being shoehorned into pre-determined roles! 

Aaaand that’s where this plotting method comes in.

If you find yourself struggling to finish stories, or you end up with a big mushy mess full of tangent and plot holes, but you don’t want to over-plot all the fun out of the writing process, this may be a good way to strike a balance that gives your story a goal and a little more structure without boring yourself by writing what you already know is going to happen.

THE BEGINNING

You start here, obviously. This part of the story’s plotting could take form as any level of pre-planning. It could be as minimal as a single character, or you could have the entire beginning up to the inciting incident planned out. All you really have to have is somewhere to start: some characters, and a setting to let them roam in. Try to make choices you can work with later, and try to foresee elements that could leave you writing yourself into a corner later. For example, if you end up choosing a real-world historical setting, keep in mind you may end up doing a lot of research. If you start with a cast of fifteen characters, keep in mind that keeping track of that many characters can be challenging. If you have a magic system, FIGURE THAT OUT IN DETAIL. Know exactly how it works, even if it’s the softest of systems, and write the rules down, otherwise you could end up with huge plot holes later in the book that readers will 100% notice.

THE END

This is the most important part of this method. You don’t need anything else figured out going in--but you need to know how it ends, or at least where you characters end up at the climax. You need to know who or what antagonist they will be facing. It might be nice to know where the climax will take place, or why these characters end up being the ones who have to deal with it, but at minimum, you need to know the antagonist and what the antagonist is trying to do. 

An example: let’s say you’re plotting “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”. You might start with something like this:

THE BEGINNING: Four children travel through a wardrobe to a magical other land.

THE END: The climax is children with a evil witch who wants to control the magical land in a huge battle.

From there, you can fill the rest in as you write--but you know where you need to end up. You know, as you write, you need to introduce this evil witch. You need to give your characters a reason to want to fight against her, and a way to get involved with the side characters who can give them the knowledge and tools to do so. You don’t know HOW that’s going to happen, you can figure that out as you write; but you have a direction. You have a goal. You don’t even have to know how things end after the climax, you just need an ultimate location to drive your characters toward.

Just adding this single element makes a huge difference for those of you who struggle to finish what you start. Every time you reach a point where you don’t know where to do next, don’t know what your characters should do now, you can reorient yourself by your climax. “Okay,” you can say, “This is where I have them now. What is something else I need to do to make sure my characters get to this specific climax?”

Again using “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” as an example, let’s say you’ve written it through Susan, Edmund, and Lucy meeting the Beavers. Now they’ve all learned some more about the White Witch, but you’re stuck on what they should do next. 

Well, you know the ultimate goal is to get your characters in a huge battle against the witch to reclaim Narnia. So you might think, “My characters have learned about the conflict. Now I need to get them to a place where they can actually do something about it. I know--I’ll have them go to a special meeting place, and they can face all kinds of dangers getting there. And when they are there, they will meet with someone [Aslan] who can help them gather an army to battle the White Witch with.” 

And now you have somewhere for your characters to go, something for them to do, all based on knowing where they’ll need to be by the end.

And there you go, a plotting method that involves minimal plotting, but helps keep your story from becoming a rambling mess while you hope to stumble upon a conflict as you go.

[jbrentonparker]

Writing Prompt

Your main character learns they have magical abilities and has been accepted into a school for magic they didn't even know existed. They are over the moon, expecting it to be wonderful and full of adventure like a certain famous book series. When they arrive, they find they couldn't have been more wrong.

[jbrentonparker]

Plotting Method #5: The Hero’s Journey

Uuuugh I’ve put off doing a write about about this one because it’s long and I’m lazy. But one of my new year’s resolutions is to quit being such a lazy ass, so here I am. Lucky you.

Okay, THE HERO’S JOURNEY. Hero myths can be found in mythology in virtually every culture, throughout human history.Many, many many many, of these hero tales follow similar structures and deal with similar themes; so much so that Joseph Campbell eventually described the hero myth pattern in his 1949 work “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, outline the steps that are so often seen repeated in the Hero’s Journey across time and cultures.

Of course, The Hero’s Journey isn’t some universal standard for hero myths, and there are many myths that don’t follow the pattern at all, or that only encompass a few of the “steps”, or incorporate the steps in different orders. It is just that Campbell and other historians and anthropologists noticed broad degrees of similarity in themes and narrative structure that often crop up in epic tales involving heros and the supernatural.

Similar plot structures are very popular in certain genres of fiction: modern myth (obviously; though inverting the structure and themes is just as popular as following them); epic fantasy; sword-and-sorcery fantasy; some high fantasy; space operas (Star Wars is a classic example); and epic sci-fi. It also pops up in quite a bit of classic literature. Think “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens, or “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë, which involve characters suffering in a way that inspires goals and motivation, eventually going off on wild journeys where they face temptations that they must resist in order to achieve those goals; facing the “Dark Night of the Soul” where all seems lost; and finally achieving those goals and completing the hero cycle.

No quick rundown today, I’ll be jumping right into a detailed overview since there is so much to cover. You’ll notice many parallels to the Freytag pyramid, as the subject of most Greek plays are hero myths, and to the 3 Act Structure, which is itself as adaption of Freytag’s pyramid. The Hero’s Journey, however, is the most complex and detailed of the narrative structures, with seventeen (!!) parts in Campbell’s version (less in other version of the same concept, but I’ll be basing this off Campbell’s work, and leave the option to scale back, rearrange, and cut down to you). So buckle up, it’s going to be a long ride.

The Hero’s Journey

ACT I: DEPARTURE Five major plot point are found in Act 1. They are as follows: The Call to Adventure: The hero begins in a state of everyday normalcy, but receives information that calls them into the unknown. The call itself can take a while to manifest. Frodo isn’t compelled to leave the shire until almost seventy pages into the “The Fellowship of the Rings”. Other times, it can happen fairly quickly. In “The Hobbit” (which is a children’s book, while The Lord of the Rings is not), Bilbo receives his call to adventure about ten pages in. On the other hand, in Beowulf, we receive a few lines about who Beowulf is, and then the story shifts almost immediately to the situation with Grendel and Hrothgar. We, the reader (listener originally, but few people are introduced to Beowulf orally these days) travel with Hrothgar to find Beowulf and to present him with the Call, rather than the narrative starting with our hero as is the custom with many Greek Myths. The Refusal of the Call: In many (not all) hero myths, once the hero has been presented with the call, the resist. They don’t want to abandon everything and go on some crazy adventure, they are content the way things are (Bilbo). Or, perhaps, they are too frightened (Frodo), or they feel obligated to remain where they are out of duty (Luke Skywalker). Again, these plot points aren’t set in stone. Beowulf does not refuse the call when Hrothgar begs him for assistance in defeating the monster Grendel. It does, however, add interesting characterization and depth to motivations when your hero is forced into a situation they don’t want to be in. How a character deals with a situation they’ve been thrust into against their will will speak volumes on its own. Meeting the Mentor: Once the hero is embroiled in the quest, by choice or against their will, the wise, often magical, mentor will appear to help guide the hero along the way. The mentor will often give the hero tools or talismans that will aid them on their quest. This step is where you find the most variation in the ordering of these plot points. In Sailor Moon, Luna’s appearance combines “Meeting the Mentor” and “Call to Adventure” into one event. As does The Hobbit with Gandalf. In The Lord of the Rings, you could make a strong argument that Lady Galadriel serves as the Mentor if you look at the trilogy as a whole, giving the hobbits sage advice, firming their resolve to pursue the quest, and providing them with magical gifts that save their lives on more than one occasion. And she doesn’t appear until the very end of Fellowship, after Gandalf (unquestionably the Mentor in The Hobbit) has been lost. In Star Wars, Luke meets Obi Wan and receives with “magic talisman” (his lightsaber) after his Call to Adventure, but before his Refusal of the Call. The order laid out by Campbells is more often followed in classic Greek myths than in modern version of the hero’s journey, wherein the hero, such as Perseus, have already accepted and set out on their quests before their Mentor, often gods such as Hermes and Athena in the Perseus myth, makes an appearance and provide their magical gifts. Crossing the First Threshold: The hero finally leaves the world he knew before completely and utterly. He has officially left his old life behind in pursuit of his quest and, this is important, stepped into the unknown. For Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, this is when they leave Bree with Stryder (Aragorn). They’ve well and truly left the world of Hobbits behind, from that point on, no one they encounter has ever even heard of hobbits before. From that point on, the dangers they face become much more serious. Oh sure, the Black Riders pursued them in the Old Forest, but at Weathertop, their attack leaves Frodo mortally wounded. When they make it to Rivendell, it is a place of the utmost difference to the sleepy little world of the Shire they left behind. For Luke Skywalker, he gets into a spaceship and leaves his actual, physical world behind. You can’t get much more literal than that. The hero has left, the dangers are more serious than ever before, and usually, going back isn’t an option. Belly of the Whale: And this is the moment, right after Crossing the First Threshold, where things usually go tits up for the first time. If Crossing the Threshold for Frodo is leaving Bree, the Belly of the Whale is getting stabbed on Weathertop by the Nazgûl. This is the hero’s first test, their first trial. Instead of leaving their old life behind with their held held high and full of pluck, they are immediately knocked down. This is when their commitment to their quest is seriously tested for the first time, and they are forced to show their willingness to transform, change, and overcome their own weaknesses to pursue their goals. They are metaphorically “killed” by this challenge; but are reborn when they get back up, more determined to complete their quest. It is right around this point that the hero begins collecting allies (see: Han Solo and Chewbacca).

ACT II: INITIATION Act 2 has six parts. There are as follows: The Road of Trials: Of course, the hero isn’t done facing trials yet. And the Belly of the Whale is only a trial of conviction. For the rest the hero will face, they will have to be an active agent. The hero needs to change, but in order to begin their transformation from Zero to Hero (see: my second favorite song in Disney’s Hercules), they need to face a series of trials that puts them to the test, physically and emotionally. More often than not, these come in threes, and they fail one or all of them. During these trials, the hero continues collecting allies (see: Princess Leia). This takes up most of the story. Now, this is where things get weird/confusing depending on what version of the Hero’s Journey you are looking at.  Campbell’s version continues on with Meeting with the Goddess, which is like reiteration of the Mentor: a wise, powerful, often female character appears, bearing more gifts to help the hero on their way. If you look at “The Fellowship of the Ring” on it’s own (rather than as part of a whole with the next two books), this would be the meeting with Galadriel. Next, for Campbell, comes Woman as Temptress, in which a character, often female in true myths, uses lust to try to sway the hero from his quest. See Circe, who keeps Odysseus and his men on her island for years, and later, in a similar vein, the Lotus Eaters who do the same. In modern hero’s journey stories, the same idea of temptation to abandon the quest frequently appears, though at what point in the narrative varies greatly. For Frodo, it’s when he arrives as Rivendell, and the burden of the Ring is technically off his shoulders. For poor Sailor Moon, it’s literally every single time a monster appear and she just wants to abandon her duty and go back to a normal, peaceful life as a carefree teenager. For Luke, he’s briefly tempted by the power of the darkside Campbell follows with Atonement of the Father/the Abyss, which is the moment the hero must confront the thing which holds the most control or power over his life at the moment (usually facing the conflict). They must face it head on (though usually in a metaphorical way, as a lead up to preparing to confront it physically in the climax). This moment is famously represented when Luke literally gains atonement for his father and the antagonist, Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker, calling him back from the darkside. Next comes Apotheosis, the moment the hero reaches a state of clarity. The ultimate challenge is coming up, and the hero knows what they must do. They have a greater understanding of the situation and of themselves. They have been made wiser by their experiences, and now, finally, they know how to use that wisdom to their advantage. This is the moment after the beloved sidekick dies tragically in the main characters arms, when the main character lies their friend gently on the ground and then rises to their feet, steely eyes with  fists clenched after shedding a single tear, and you know some serious ass is about to be kicked. See pretty much any episode of Dragon Ball Z. And now we finally have our Ultimate Boon! This is the achievement of the quest, usually in the form of a success after a dramatic climax. The antagonist is overcome, the macguffin is claimed, the throne is won, the Death Star is destroyed, the Ring is cast into the fires of Mt. Doom. And here’s the most important part of all of this, every step listed above: every single step is vital in preparing the hero for this moment. Without the challenges, successes, and failures that the hero faced before, they would not be ready or able to achieve their goal. They have learned something, gained something, or released something in every step that has shaped them into what they are by the end of their quest and made them capable of seeing it through to the end.

Now, here’s the dealio. Campbell’s “Temptress, Atonement, Apotheosis, Boon” stages are classic, but really focused on actual real mythologic heroic epics. They are based off common themes in stories that are thousands of years old, from cultures whose value and views don’t always aligned with contemporary ones. And most modern epics tend to stray pretty far from these steps, as they just don’t quite apply so neatly in our modern narratives. So if “Atonement of the Father” just doesn’t make sense in the context of your story, dont’ worry about it, here are the modern equivalents, listed by Christopher Vogler in 2007:

Tests, Allies, and Enemies: The equivalent of “The Road of Trials”. The same thing, essentially. The hero gains new allies, meets their enemies for the first time face to face, and must face a series of tests which they usually fail to “forge them in the heat of battle”, if you will. Approach to the Innermost Cave: The Hero must approach and enter the place of danger. Luke, Han, Chewbacca, and Obi Wan must sneak into the Death Star to rescue Leia. Sam and Frodo must make their way into the heart of Mordor with Golem’s aid. Sailor Moon and the Sailor Scouts must face Queen Beryl in her own lair. Beowulf descends in the lair of Grendel’s mother. And this is the key: the hero isn’t playing on their own home turf. The antagonist has the upperhand, this is their realm. The Ordeal: Usually the climax. The Hero must face a final, and ultimate test. They must rely on the skills and knowledge they have gained through the rest of their journey to see them through, and to achieve their quest. This is the struggle itself, Frodo being overcome by the ring on the edge of Mt. Doom; the actual process of rescuing Leia and the challenges they face in doing so; The Battle of the Five Armies. Reward/Seizing the Sword: Now we come back around to “The Ultimate Boon”. This is the hero’s moment of success. Luke, Chewy, and Han flee with Leia. The ring is cast into the mountain and Sauron is toppled. The Sorcerer’s stone is saved, Garfield gets his lasagna. The goal of the quest is achieved.

Back to Campbell’s version. Now comes: ACT III: THE RETURN The third and final act has six parts. There are as follows: The Refusal of the Return: The Hero is enlightened. He has found success, even fame. He’s a big fish now, and his old life, his old world, seems like a very small pond. Sometimes, the hero will not want to return to the way things were, and to bring his wisdom back to those he left behind. You see this most often in YA contemporary urban fantasy, in which a teenage girl is swept up in a world of magic and adventure, and, when given the option to return to her old ordinary, non-magical life at the end, she refuses, unwilling to go back. This does not always manifest. The Magic Flight: Sometimes, the moment the prize is won is a moment of extreme danger. Sometimes the hero must flee immediately, lest they be killed by an antagonist who has not been defeated. Perseus beheads Medusa, but he quite literally take a magic flight away with his boon (Medusa’s head) using the winged shoes given to him by Hermes as Medusa’s gorgon sisters come after him. Again, this scene is not present in every hero’s journey. Rescue from Without: Sometimes, the hero is in such a state that they cannot return to their old world on their own. Outside help need to come to their aid, to get them back to the world they knew. Return of the King is a great example of this. Frodo and Sam lay, exhausted and dying, on a rock surrounded by lava flow after destroying the ring. They need to be rescued by the eagles to return to a state of safety. The Crossing of the Return Threshold: But no matter how they do it, unwillingly, in a madcap flight, or with outside help, the hero must return from the world of adventure, to the everyday world. They don’t necessarily need to return to their original starting point, but they need to step out of the state of “quest”. The most important point here is that when they return, they return with all the knowledge and wisdom they have gained on their journey. At this point, they should be qualified to be the Mentor in the quest of the next generation. They should be able to become a part of ordinary life again, and maybe share their wisdom with others. The Master of Two Worlds: This is the hero actually doing just that. They have seen so much, done so much. They have lived in an ordinary, mundane world, and they have lived in one full of magic and adventure and danger. Ideally, by the end of their journey, they feel comfortable and confident in both. A young hero returns to a village where he was once an outcast, but now feels no reason to fear his old bullies as he had grown stronger and wiser. Bilbo Baggins returns to the Shire laden with treasure and bitten by the adventure bug, but lives quite comfortably in his hobbit hole writing his book in between the travels he makes. This isn’t just in reference to their physical state, thought. The hero also strikes a balance between the inner world, and the outer world. The material world, and the spiritual one. The hero is at peace with themself, is confident in themself and their abilities and knowledge. They are no longer plagued by fear, self doubt, uncertainty, even the fear of death, which they have faced and conquered. They are in control of their physical world, and their inner one. Freedom to Live: The hero has faced death. They have lost those close to them. They have nearly lost themselves. They have had to accept the fact that they may die, that they probably will die, and yet they have chosen to go forward anyways, to pursue their goals or die trying. They no longer fear death, and in that freedom of one of the most basic and deepest mortal fears, they have gained the freedom to truly live, unfettered by “what ifs”. They’ve already seen the worst, and it didn’t keep them down.

Vogler has a slightly different version of “The Return”, which includes only three steps: The Road Back: The hero starts his journey back home. Something usually stops him or prevents him--there is one more thing that must be done. The Resurrection: The hero is reborn in some way. They find the strength to make one final push, to believe in themself, to believe in the force, or the Schwartz, or whatever. Speaking of the Schwartz, this is the scene where Lone Starr gets his money and leaves Princess Vespa on Druidia, only to find out that he is actually a prince and can marry her after all, pulling the Winnebago around with his confidence regained for a zero-hour confession of love. The Return with the Elixir: The hero had achieves the goal of the quest and has the thing that was needed to save the day (or in the case of LotR, got rid of the thing). Luke returns after blowing up the Death Star with the knowledge that the rebels will continue fighting. Conan the Barbarian probably brought some magic sword back to his kingdom or something in one of his many movies that made him a stronger king. Bilbo returns with his 1/14th of the treasure. The quest is well and truly completed.

[jbrentonparker]

When driving at night

If you start to feel drowsy it’s best to find a motel and sleep. But keep your eyes down.

Before picking up a hitchhiker check to see if they’re wearing shoes.

Occasionally you’ll stumble across strange radio channels. Don’t listen to anything they say.

Disregard what might appear in your mirrors.

If your car is suddenly low on gas exit the vehicle immediately.

If you see someone trying to fix their car on the side of the road get out and help. But don’t ask any questions.

The contents of your trunk may vary.

If a strange fog suddenly rolls in turn on your air conditioner. It’s looking for warm objects.

You may hear strange things from your radio. Remember that you do not have a radio.

When ordering fast food always avoid the drive-through.

Sometimes people appear in your backseat. Make idle conversation and don’t antagonize them. They’re just wondering.

Focus on your lane.

Check through your phone camera if the traffic light has really turned green; spirits like to deceive you.

Never turn on the windshield wipers. Get out and clean the window manually if needed.

It is perfectly acceptable to sometimes take strange dirt roads claiming to be shortcuts. Enjoy those routes. They’re never there for long.

More guides

How to talk to the wind

Cool DIY Projects that aren’t Illegal Yet! 

[jbrentonparker]

Be an unstoppable force. Write with an imaginary machete strapped to your thigh. This is not wishy-washy, polite, drinking-tea-with-your-pinkie-sticking-out stuff. It's who you want to be, your most powerful self. Write your books. Finish them, then make them better. Find the way. No one will make this dream come true for you but you.

Laini Taylor

[jbrentonparker]

People like to joke about English Lit teachers being like “The blue curtains represent the protagonist’s SADNESS!!1!!!”, while they’re thinking “why can’t the curtains just be blue?”

But if you, as an author, are going to use up valuable words describing the colors of the curtains, you better have a good reason for doing so. Okay, maybe the curtains aren’t esoteric symbols of the characters innermost emotional turmoil; but maybe the bright blue curtains were picked out by their ex-girlfriend, and they haven’t been able to find the willpower to take them down yet, signaling that they have a difficult time letting go of things emotionally. Or if the curtains are indigo blue velvet with gold braided tassels, that speaks pretty clearly to the character’s economic status, and/or their general personality. If you’re talking about blue curtains in your writing, you’d better have a good reason to be.

man tumblr loves to joke about how english lit analysis of symbolism is meaningless but like, when i took film class (from a filmmaker), my teacher told us,

there is no neutral or innocent choice in art

that is to say, as a writer or artist or filmmaker, you should be considering the meaning of everything you choose to include or exclude.  is there a water glass in the foreground of your shot? why?  you are creating a story from scratch, which means you are defining it by every choice you make, not just the major plot points.

especially in fiction writing or poetry, the author chose to write every single word.  nothing is there “on accident”.  if an author uses a color, they had to choose the color – and they had to choose to tell you the color at all, because they weren’t required to!  when i describe a color of something in my writing, i always think about the choice.  it’s never “just red”.

can analysis sometimes yield things the author didn’t intend? sure.  but (a) the point isn’t about trying to read the author’s mind, so who cares what they intended? and (b) sometimes the author actually does subconsciously weave symbolism into things.

i mean hell i had a fanfic commenter point out something that i hadn’t actually done intentionally and i was like, “wow, yes.  500% valid.”  if a reader can find resonance or symbolism in something, it’s not wrong or stupid or bad.

[jbrentonparker]

“A Wish” (A Fairy Tale Retold)

He went up the hill to the cliff overlooking the roiling sea with the intention of throwing himself off of it, but when he arrived, someone else was already there.

He stopped in his tracks, his arms full of crumpled letters, dog-eared books, and a pair of white cotton socks that the wild wind was threatening to tear from his grasp, and stared at the silhouetted figure that stood motionless at the cliff's edge. It was a woman, standing alone in the sea of heather that blanketed the rocky hillside for miles. Her hair whipped about her head in a tangled mass of gold, her dress straining and billowing against her legs like a sail about to catch the wind. She faced away from him, out over the ocean, and was so still and isolated that he might have thought her a specter if he had seen her in the gloom of night rather than the full light of day.

First incredulity, then hot anger rose in his chest, and his face flushed. Wrenches were thrown into plans he had spent the entire morning crafting, and he spluttered and swore to himself until he overcame his shock. With narrowed eyes and squared shoulders, he continued to wade through the dense heather up toward the woman, crushing the hardy little flowers underfoot.

The passion of the moment was somewhat spoiled when a crumpled sheet of hand written poetry escaped his grasp and was caught on the wind, tumbling end over end in mad cartwheels. With another oath, he chased it down, running awkwardly through knee high shrubs and struggling not to drop any of the other mementos he held. Finally, his heart pounding and his ears aching from the cold bite of the roaring wind, he pinned the paper beneath one foot and was able to squat down so he could just barely grab the edge of it with two fingers. Sweaty, red faced, and quite out of breath, he looked up and saw that his mad dash had brought him nearly back at the bottom of the hill―as opposed to at the bottom of the sea, which is where he had planned to be by now.

The passion and spontaneity of the thing had been thoroughly lost, and for a brief moment his determination wavered. He hadn't really thought much about the bottom of the ocean.

But the fire of pride wasn't so quick to burn out. He clung fiercely to that, and with grim determination to give that woman, whoever she was, a piece of his mind, he struggled all the way back up the hill for a second time.

"What,” he panted when he finally trudged up behind her, too short of breath to sound as fierce as he had intended, “are you doing here?”

The woman hadn't seemed to notice his approach until he spoke. She slowly turned her head toward him, as if reluctant to look away from the view of the endless, gray sea. She didn't seem startled to see him there, and only glanced at him briefly with pale eyes before turning back to the water.

“I'm going to jump into the sea,” she said in a soft, almost dreamy voice.

“You can't!” he snapped at her. 

Now she did turn to look at him properly, her brow furrowing. “What? Why not?”

“Because, I'm jumping off the cliff today!” And he stomped his foot as he said it.

“Why?” the woman asked.

He swelled a little, adjusting his grip on the bundles of papers, books, and socks. “My lover left me.”

“So you're going to throw yourself off a cliff?”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Do you see these here?” he said, jerking his chin at the treasures he clutched to his chest. “These are all the letters she wrote me, all the poems and songs and tender words that she put down on paper in her own hand for me to cherish. These are the books she used to read, the words of the authors she loved to quote, as if she understood what they meant. These are the socks she left behind that once covered the feet I would have dropped to my knees and kissed if she'd asked me to. These are the letters I wrote to her after she left, beseeching her to come back; begging to know why she did it; groveling and pleading and abandoning every scrap of dignity and self respect I ever had for myself because I couldn't stand to be without her. I never even sent them to her. I couldn't have if I wanted to. She's gone, and she took the man I used to be with her. I don't just have nothing left, I am nothing. I opened myself up to her in ways I didn't even know I was capable of, I laid myself naked and bare and exposed at her feet, and then she spit on me while I was down there. And now,” he drew himself up a little taller, his expression grew a little stonier, “I'm going to take all of these, everything that she has touched, every lovely lie she told me, and I'm going to let the sea take them, and me.”

“For a woman?”

His mouth dropped open, but he could only manage a few incoherent sputters. “I--you don't...” He trembled with barely suppressed emotion. “You don't understand! You don't know what it's like, to have everything taken away from you!”

“And this is her punishment, then?”

He didn't answer her.

“Would you rather she'd have stayed, even if it made her miserable? Even if it made you miserable? Would you have kept her forever, because she owed you, no matter what it cost you both?”

He only glared, but the woman wasn't looking at him any longer. The ocean below was gray and heaving, waves crashing with bone breaking force into the rocks that jutted out of the water like broken teeth.

“Why are you here?” he eventually asked her again.

“I told you,” she replied.

“No, I mean why are you going to kill yourself?”

“That is a sad story,” she said, the air wistfulness falling back over her. She fell quiet then, and he waited for her to continue.

A full minute passed, and then another. He gathered that she had no intention of elaborating, and with a huff of impotent frustration, he made to push past her for the edge of the cliff. 

Then, quite abruptly, she began to tell him her story.

Our parents died when we were still quite young. My father was a fisherman, and one day the sea claimed him. My mother began to fade away after his death, as if she had lost her will to exist without him, until one day she was gone too and my brother and I were left alone in the world. As the eldest, it was my responsibility to look after my brother, but we struggled to feed ourselves from day to day. So my brother became a fisherman, like our father before him, and we were able to keep ourselves from starving. We were not prosperous. We were rarely even comfortable. But we got by. For years, we got by.

One day, my brother was fishing in his little boat on a part of the coast he had never been to before. He came by a small cove, hidden along the cliff side. It was difficult to get to, the waters were treacherous and full of crumbling rocks that threatened to dash his boat to pieces upon them. But what he found there was worth the danger, for though there were few fish, no other fishermen had discovered this hidden place, and the cove and tide pools on the shore were rich in the bounty of the sea. Almost every day he was able to bring back clams and mussels, eels, barnacles, sea cucumbers, crabs as big as your head, shrimp and scallops and star fish and once, even an octopus. It was thriving with life, and for the first time since our parents died, we did not go hungry, not even for one night.

Then, one day, he caught something different.

He was hauling up his net, and found it was heavier than it had ever been before. It was all he could do to keep the rope from being wrenched from his grasp and lost in the water. Inch by inch, he dragged it up, expecting to find the largest sea creature he had ever seen. But when he was finally able to haul it up over the side of the boat, all he saw was one solitary fish, no larger than a sea bass.

It was clear as soon as he laid eyes upon it that it was anything but ordinary, however. The fish glittered and gleamed in the sunlight, with scales of pure gold and eyes of silver. The weight of the thing threatened to capsize his boat as it flopped about, desperately caught up in the net. He stared at it in wonder, and realized he could sell a fish like that for enough money that he and I could live in comfort for the rest of our lives. But then, to his even greater surprise, it spoke to him.

“Please, dear fisherman,” it begged. “Please release me! I am an extraordinary fish, and if you do, I will grant you any wish you desire. The sun, the moon, the stars, they could all be yours, if you would but set me free.”

“Any wish?” my brother asked. “Wealth? Power? Happiness? You could grant me all that?”

“All that and more, good fisherman,” said the golden fish. “The only domain I have no power over is death, but the rest of the world is yours if you only give me back to the ocean. Take pity, I beg of you.”

My brother considered the fish's offer. He was never hasty. Neither of us ever acted in impulse. So measured, so careful. Look where it got us.

“I will release you,” he said finally, “but on one condition. I won't make my wish now. I have to consult my sister first, for she is all I have left in the world, and my fortune is her fortune as well. I will release you now and return home to ask her what we should wish for, if you swear that you will be waiting here for my return tomorrow.”

“I swear it,” said the fish, and my brother did as he promised and cut his net. It disappeared into the dark water, and my brother, hoping he had not made a mistake in trusting the golden fish, sailed back home.

As soon as he found me, he told me what had happened, about the fish and the wish it had promised him.

“Just one wish?” I asked.

“A wish for anything. The sun, the moon, the stars. Even happiness. Whatever we want, we can have--except for life. I know what you are thinking, I thought it too. But it cannot bring back the dead.”

“So we have a wish, but we cannot use it on the one thing we want? What else could we possibly wish for we would not come to regret? A wish is a dangerous thing to waste. Money can keep us fed and comfortable, but won't give us happiness. Happiness won't keep us fed. We could make ourselves a king and queen, and die in a bloody revolution when the land is stricken with famine. We could wish for a purse full of gold that never empties, but then be stricken by a disease for which there is no cure that money can buy. Just one wish, and a million ways to waste it.”

“Then what do you propose we do?” he asked me, and I thought long and hard about what the wisest course of action would be.

“I think,” I finally said to him, “that you should go back and catch the fish again. Bring it here, and we will put it in a bowl, and let people pay us to come and see a golden, talking fish. It sounds like a wondrous creature, I have no doubt that it will draw people from all over the world to see it. Right now our worst suffering is our impoverishment, but we need not use the wish to cure ourselves of that. We can keep the fish until we have become so rich that money is no longer any concern, and then we will decide what wish to make. When we have all the food and comfort that money can buy, when our minds are not clouded by constant hunger and the struggles of poverty, then we will make our wish. We can use for something wealth cannot give us, or better yet, save it for when we are in need of it most.”

My brother agreed with me that this was the wisest decision we could make. Having a wish a year ago could have saved our parents, and it seemed prudent to keep one on hand in case a similar need arose. So the next morning, before the sun had risen, he took to his sailing boat and made his way to the secluded little cove.

Waiting for him just as promised was the golden fish, the first rays of the morning sun glancing off its head that broke the surface of the water.

It swam up to my brother and asked, “What is your wish, good fisherman?”

And my brother threw his net over the animal. It fought, and was as heavy as it had been the first time my brother had struggled with it, but once again he managed to haul it up into the boat and dump it into a bucket of seawater.

“I apologize, my friend,” he said to it, “but we need the wealth and fame a creature like you can provide us with more than we need a wish right now.”

“I can give you wealth and fame if you wish for it!” the fish pleaded, but my brother only shook his head sadly and steered the boat for home.

“Your wish is too valuable to waste on instant pleasures or material wealth. We must save it for when we are in need of it most.”

The fish pleaded with him the entire way back, but my brother did not give in, though it pierced his heart to hear it beg so miserably.

It took the both of us to drag the bucket back to our house, and together we poured the fish and the seawater into a large glass bowl which we had placed in our back garden. We tried to make it comfortable, filling the bottom of the bowl with small pebbles and bits of seaweed. But even though it was the largest bowl we owned, the fish had barely enough room to swim in a circle. And it continued to entreat us to release it all the while, begging us to send it home to the ocean where it belonged, but we covered out ears and didn't listen.

Don't look at me like that. You don't know what it was like. We weren't heartless to the poor creature's plight, please understand. We weren't planning on keeping it like that forever, just long enough to make a comfortable living off its handsome scales and clever speech. And once we had decided the cleverest wish to ask of it. After that, we would have let it go again. We tried to explain that to the fish, but it only continued to plead and cry, big silver tears. Eventually we covered the bowl with a cloth, and we went back inside.

From then on, we spread the word to as many people that we could about our wondrous fish. First to come were our neighbors; then people from distant towns; then people from the other side of the country--people from miles and miles away who had heard about the golden, talking fish, and wanted to see it with their own eyes.

We weren't greedy and charged them only a small sum, but so many people came in those first few weeks that we had no doubt we would be able to live like kings in no time at all.

But the fish wouldn't cooperate.

We would lead people into our back garden and take the cloth off the bowl. The guests would gasp in delight, remarking how beautifully the fish's golden scales gleamed, how bright its silver eyes shone, and how it spoke just like a man. But when they fell quiet to listen to its speech, and they heard it pleading.

“Please please let me go, I beg of you! I am so unhappy in this little bowl, I long for the wide, open ocean. Staring out of the curved glass sides of this bowl is making me go blind. I can only swim in little circles, and my body is aching and twisted. And I'm so lonely. I miss the other fish, I miss the quiet of the deep water, I miss the darkness when I dive down deep. Here it is all too bright and loud, and the water in this little bowl grows so hot when the sun shines on it. I am going to die if you keep me like this, please have some kindness! What have I done to deserve this? Why are you doing this to me? Take some pity and let me go!”

On and on it went, and the people we brought to see it would grow uncomfortable and start muttering amongst themselves, casting us ugly looks as if we were torturing the creature預s if they hadn't paid good money to come and gawk at it themselves. You are looking at me the same way now, but you don't understand what it was like. We weren't trying to be cruel, we were just trying to secure our future. If the fish had only listened to us, if it had just cooperated, things might have been different. Like your lover, no? But people are so selfish. They only think about what they want.

Then, slowly at first, the crowds of people who came to see the creature began to dwindle. At the height of our fame we had a hundred visitors a day, and made money almost faster than we could spend it. We repaired the holes in the roof of our cottage, we mended the fences around our land, we patched holes and cracks in the wall and for the first time since our parents died the cold night air didn't seep into our home and make us shiver in our beds. We bought clothing that hadn't been frayed and darned a hundred times over. We ate until we thought our stomachs would burst every night, and were certain our troubles were over. But all those people who came, who helped make us rich, they never came again after they listened to the fish's words.

We went from bringing in a hundred people a day, to fifty, then twenty, ten. At the end, those few who did come only wanted to see if what they had heard about the fish's terrible condition was true, and they sneered and scolded us for how we were treating it. And then none at all would come. Word had spread about the unhappiness of the fish. Our neighbors turned their noses up at us. People in town wouldn't talk to us. We were shunned, even though we tried again and again to explain that we weren't going to keep the fish forever.

“Just let the poor thing go!” they would say to us in the streets.

“We will, we will,” we tried to assure them, “Once we've made a little more money, just a little more!”

“Greedy, greedy,” they said.

Sometimes one or two people would still show up, people who hadn't heard about the fish's sadness, or people who didn't care. We clung to the hope that we could convince the others to come again, and we kept trying, even as what money we had made in those first few weeks dwindled. We hadn't saved anything. We had spent everything we'd earned on making our lives more comfortable, always thinking that there would be more money later.

Two weeks after our last visitor, we spent our last penny. A week after that, we had eaten our last loaf of bread.

We were warm at night. Our clothes were clean and new. And yet again, we teetered on the brink of starvation.

We begged our neighbors for help, for a few spare coins, for a little meat or drink, like they had been kind enough to give us in the past when times were at their toughest.

“After the way you've exploited that poor creature?” they said. “You've only brought this upon yourselves.”

Intentions. Intentions don't matter to other people, do they? They only care about what they can see. Once you've jumped off this cliff, will your lover know what you meant by it? Or will she just see a silly, lovesick fool? How do you punish someone who doesn't understand what they've done wrong?

Where was I? Oh, yes. Selfishness. Of course.

My brother came to me once it was clear that our plans had gone irrevocably wrong.

“Perhaps we should make our wish now and set it free,” he tentatively suggested.

“No,” I disagreed. “We may need that wish yet. Let's not waste it until we have lost all hope.”

“All hope is lost,” he said. “Can't you see that? We're back where we started, only now we're miserable too. At least I'm miserable. We're hated and ostracized, and I don't even care about the wish any more. What we are doing to the fish hurts my soul. I never wanted to capture it in the first place. Can't we just make our wish and leave it in peace?

“We're not doing anything to the fish,” I replied angrily. “We're keeping it alive and fed, we're doing nothing to harm it.”

“We're making it miserable,” he said.

“We are miserable. We need to save our wish now more than ever. Do you remember what happened to our parents? We could have saved them if we'd had a wish then. You still have your boat. You can still fish, so we can still keep ourselves fed. All hope is not lost, not yet.”

So my brother returned to fishing to keep us fed. He refused to even go into the back garden any more, not wishing to see the golden fish in its bowl. I only went out there to feed it, running back into the house with my hands over my ears while it cried after me.

As the days stretched into weeks, my brother caught less and less in his nets when he went out fishing. The creatures of the ocean seemed to flee from him as he drew near, and even his secret cove where he had first discovered the golden fish grew barren. When he went out into deeper waters, storm clouds massed overhead and the waves roiled, threatening to drag his boat down. We had done something terrible by capturing the gift of the golden fish that had been given to us, and the ocean rejected us. Weeks passed. We became thin and stretched, and we laid awake at night while our stomachs twisted with hunger, driving the possibility sleep from our minds. We were driven to eating grass--we ate the leather off our own shoes just to make it feel like there was something in our stomachs. By then, even I realized we had no choice.

We went to the golden fish and drew back the cloth over the bowl.

“Have you finally come to set me free?” it asked us. It sounded so hopeful.

“We've come to make our wish,” we told it.

Have you ever been starving before? Have you ever spent so much of your life constantly, endlessly starving like we did? We were stupid with hunger, and we wished for an end to the one battle we were always fighting. We wished for enough food to keep us well fed for the rest of our lives, and thought that that was the wisest thing we could do.

And we got it. A mountain of good, rich food appeared right there in our back garden, filling every corner, crushing all the plants and almost our house under the weight of it all. The top of the teetering pile reached higher than the cottage's roof, it was the most incredible sight you've ever seen in your life. There were bundles of brightly colored carrots, in more colors than I even knew carrots came in. Did you know there are purple carrots? They're not as sweet as the orange kind, but they're so crisp when they're fresh. There were shiny tomatoes all on the vine, red and yellow and green. And apples, with rosy cheeks and sweet white flesh, and the juice dripped down your chin when you bit into them. Fat grapes were spilling over the other fruits like purple waterfalls; turnips and beets that could have been only just pulled up out of the earth; steaming piles of butchered meat so fresh it still bled; wicker baskets piled high with speckled brown and green eggs; huge metal milk cans at tall as my hip, full of warm, white milk with the cream still floating on top; and a thousand more things I didn't even know the names of. Overcome by wonder at the bounty, we quickly forgot about the little golden fish. We couldn't help but laugh, laugh and wonder why we hadn't done this right away.

As I said, we were stupid with hunger, and it didn't take us long to realize our mistake.

For one week, we ate as well as we ever had. The fish was somewhere out in the garden, surrounded by heaps of fruits and vegetables, and it was far from our minds. For by then, the rot had set in.

We brought as much as possible into the house, but there was just too much. We had nowhere to store it all, and before we knew it the meat was covered in flies and maggots, the vegetables dried out and withered in the summer sun, the eggs went rotten, the milk spoiled and congealed, and the fruit furred with mold and fungus. There was so much of the stuff, we couldn't even move it, we couldn't get rid of it all. The rot and mold in the air began to make us even sicker than before. It settled in our throats and lungs making our breath come in short gasps, making our heads spin, and we vomited up what few long lasting root vegetables we had managed to salvage. And once again--again, again, always again--we found ourselves starving. We were reduced to eating the rotting food in our garden, even though it only made us sicker. So please, try to understand why we did what we did. We never wanted to, we never planned to. We were wasting away to nothing, we had no other choice.

We found the fish again, eventually, once the mountain of food that had hidden it from view had rotted away to piles of sludge and slime that oozed into the earth. It too was thin and weak, but alive, just barely. It was floating on its side in the bowl, without even the energy to sink to the bottom. Its silver eyes rolled when it saw us, and somehow it managed to ask in a rasping voice, “have you come to set me free?”

And we were so very hungry.

It was barely enough to feed the two of us, and its beautiful scales broke nearly every knife I tried to use on it. We piled those scales up, hoping to use them as money since we had nothing else, but the next morning, we found their golden luster had dulled into flakes of lead. Even the little silver eyes crumbled away like so much dust.

My brother was forced to return to the sea yet again, but his luck was even worse than before. He didn't make a single catch, the sea was a desert for him. The ocean would grow dark and tumultuous when he set sail in his little boat, and he was afraid, afraid of what waited for him out there.

Even though all his attempts had been fruitless since we had betrayed the golden fish, he kept sailing out in his little boat, day after day, heading farther and farther out to sea, to deeper waters, in desperate attempts to catch anything at all. And then one day he didn't come back. His boat washed up on shore, shattered to broken bits of wood. I searched for him, walking up and down the shore, calling his name, hoping that I would find him half drowned but alive, hidden by a sand dune somewhere. But I never even got his body back. The ocean had claimed my brother, in payment for what we took. An eye for an eye, and I'm the only one left, blinded by what I thought was my own cleverness. We all think we're so clever, don't we? Now I have nothing left. I have nothing left to want. I have nothing left to wish for.

The woman fell silent, her thin, cracked lips pressed into a hard line. Her gray eyes were flat and dull, sunk deep into hollow sockets. Her golden hair, so thin and brittle, was being blown from her scalp by the wind.

The man watched her quietly for a long time, as she teetered there on the edge of nothingness. Then he glanced down at the things he held in his arms, the mementos and treasures of someone he had loved very much, the things he was prepared to die with. To die for.

“The fish wasn't yours to own,” he said, slowly. The woman's expression was blank, unfocused. She stared out at the sea without seeming to hear him speak. “It didn't owe you anything. You wasted a gift. And now you're here, because this is your punishment.” He paused, wrinkled his nose, and shook his head. “It wasn't even your wish. It was your brother's wish. It was his gift. You took it from him.”

He looked again at the love notes, the limp socks. They had a little lace cuff, whose stitching was just starting to come undone.

“I'm not like you,” he said.

Slowly, as if being drawn forward against his will, he began to edge toward the lip of the cliff, until the toes of his shoes hung barely an inch over the side. Beneath him, it was a hundred feet to the waves that crashed over the dark stones, the sea an angry, churning entity of white froth cresting on gray water. He opened his arms wide, releasing everything he held into the void. The books tumbled downwards, their covers spreading open, their pages fluttering like the wings of flailing baby birds tumbling from the nest. The unbound pages, the love letters and poems signed with kiss marks, were caught by the wind and whipped away, spiraling through the air on updrafts that could have carried them halfway around the world. A pair of white cotton socks spun, intertwined, in a spiraling descent into the sea foam below.

He watched the mementos of love lost disappear into the hungry waters, and took a deep breath of the chill, salty ocean air. Then he turned back to the woman. She was watching him, her eyes deep and uncertain.

“Are you really going to jump?” he asked her.

“You let it all go,” she replied so softly that the wind stole her words away as soon as they left her lips.

“It was never mine. Not really, I don't think.” He turned his face into the wind. It felt cool and good on his cheeks and brow. “I haven't forgiven her,” he said, as if he didn't want the woman to get the wrong idea. “I just... I'm not like you.” A beat of silence. “Do you think losing something can be a gift? Getting rid of something?”

“I've lost everything,” said the woman. “What do I do now? What else is there to do, except...” The waves thundered against the base of the cliff, churning and hungry. “I wish I knew what to do.”

He didn't answer her. He didn't have any answers for her. He just turned away from her, and started walking back down the hillside through the swaying purple heather, the cliff and the churning ocean and the woman with the golden hair behind him, teetering on the edge of possibilities.

[jbrentonparker]

In the Workman Publishing version of Good Omens there’s a photo of you and Sir Terry Pratchett on the back cover. Is that supposed to emulate Crowley and Aziraphale?

You mean this one? http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/126421858629/launchycat-remember-this-thats-right-its   No, that was just me and Terry, how we looked. Or how I looked, anyway. Terry didn’t own a white jacket, so he had borrowed that one from Malcolm Edwards, our publisher. He was cold. But he said that if people looked at the back cover they would be able to tell that he was the good one, so if we got into trouble for Good Omens, when it was published, I’d be the one whose house people would firebomb.

I very much hoped he was joking.

[jbrentonparker]

How do describe a lab while waking up from being a test subject

Hi! Funnily enough, my first published short story, “Gone Dark”, actually has a scene very similar to this scenario!

The way I handled it was to begin by describing sensation, the first thing my character, Cal, was aware of after gaining consciousness. In his case, he was first aware of bright light shining through his eyelids--something out of the ordinary for him. Depending on your setting, your character may first be aware of different aspects of the setting they are in. Perhaps the beeping of a monitor, or how cold it is if they are in a hospital-like setting.

If your character was a test subject and is now waking up, I imagine they must have been put under sedation of some sort for at least some period of time. When I was sedated once during a hospital stay, I felt very groggy and vague. For me, it was very similar to that state when you’re almost asleep, but someone keeps trying to talk to you. You try to answer, but since you’re nearly asleep, you keep losing the thread of conversation and trailing off, or you start narrating the dream that is trying to start instead.

The kind of drugs that seriously knock you often have after effects that last for several hours (think videos of people on their way home after having their wisdom teeth removed), but if you’re writing scifi or fantasy, you can always fudge it and have your character regain their alertness more quickly (because this is the future and drugs are better, or your secret facility has access to advanced drugs, or what have you).

People coming out of sedation will often react to their environment with confusion and sometimes destructive behavior. It’s not uncommon for people who have had their wisdom teeth removed to try to pull out their stitches, or for patients in the hospital to try to pull out IVs. If your character isn’t strapped down, they may experience intense confusion, and have a difficult time distinguishing stimuli. The beeping of a monitor and the prick of an IV and a breeze from the air conditioner could all overwhelm and disconcert your character, and they may try to get up and leave, or pull out tubes they are attached to.

Here’s an excerpt from my story “Gone Dark” where Cal wakes up after an accident, to give you a sense of how I handled a similar scenario (Check out “Gone Dark” at Newmyths.com, Issue 45, to read the entire story):

“...The first thing he became aware of was light. It was bright, agonizingly bright, and red. He flinched and tried to shy away, but found that he couldn’t do more than move his head slightly to one side, and even that sent stabbing pain through his neck and skull. He tried to groan, but barely managed a squeak.

A voice said something garbled and impossible to understand, and the light retreated. Cal blinked, and realized that his eyes were already closed. The red light had just been something shining through his closed lids.

With an effort of will, he pried one eye open. Something was leaning over him and he jerked in place, a startled gasp choking itself out of his dry throat. It was huge and square and white, with a shiny black face and it loomed over him against a backdrop of whiteness and shadows. Cal tried to pull away from the thing, but found that his arms and legs wouldn’t move. He somehow forced his head up a fraction of an inch to look down at his body. Straps held him down by his wrists and ankles, and wires and tubes ran from his arms into machines he didn’t recognize. He opened his mouth to scream, and the thing above him put a long, thin needle into one of the tubes in his arm. A few seconds later, he felt the terror wash away, to be replaced with a fuzzy sort of confusion. He still didn’t know what was going on, but it suddenly didn’t seem so very important.

The figure above him was talking again. He couldn’t understand a word it said, and only stared back mutely, following the shiny black rectangle of its face as it swam back and forth. The thing rose up and turned away, waving a great, gloved hand. Cal’s slightly unfocused eyes tracked the hand wave, and saw another one of the things standing a little ways away. It turned and fiddled with something on one of the white walls. Suddenly the lights dimmed, and after a few seconds Cal could see more clearly. The thing above him turned back, leaning low. It wasn’t a great, black rectangle for a face after all. It was some kind of domed head covering with a little window in it, and now Cal could see the human face staring back down at him from inside. It was a woman, someone he had never seen before. She was speaking to him, her voice strangely muffled from inside the full-body suit. Cal attempted to shake his head, and the world spun dizzyingly around him. He was suddenly grateful he had been strapped down, otherwise he thought he would have gone tumbling away.”

Hope this helped!

[jbrentonparker]

Plotting Method #4: The Protagonist Fucks It Up

Ah, the “Protagonist Fucks It Up” Method.

I have to start this post that way, you see, because I’ve just realized that I started two of the three previous posts in this plotting method installment that way, so now I guess I’ve made it a pattern. Can you guess what one of my biggest weaknesses as a writer is? Yes, it’s repetition of phrases and expression, oftentimes multiple times in the same paragraph, because I immediately forget I’ve already used a sentence only a few lines before. I’m afraid all of my novels and short stories are just different arrangements of the same three sentences.

Moving on. This plotting method is really a variation of the Three Act Structure, but with a little more character agency added. If you don’t like the purely reactionary aspect of the beginning of the three act structure method for the main character, then this might be a good alternative. Here’s the quick-and-dirty (which I believe is a phrase I used in the previous post as well. Case and point.):

The Protagonist Fucks It Up Method:

I can’t remember where I first learned this method, so I am afraid I can’t credit the creator. It more or less plays out like the 3 Act Structure method, but with more of a character-oriented focus. An Inciting Incident occurs, which will forever change the protagonist’s life. In this event, they are passive: something has happened to them. First Reaction: the protag reacts to the inciting incident. Whatever they do, they make the situation worse. They make a new enemy, they wind up in a dangerous place, they fail in a way that leaves them with more problems than they had before. Second Reaction: the protag tries to clean up the mess they have just gotten themselves into. They, of course, fail, and wind up in even more trouble. Harry and Hermione send Norbert on his way without Malfoy getting Hagrid in trouble–but end up getting themselves and Neville detention instead. Third Reaction: In serious trouble now, the protag has a choice to make. Get the hell out of Dodge, or face the consequences of their actions, and try for one last desperate attempt at fixing everything. This leads to them confronting the antagonist and leads into the… Climax, in which everything they have messed up comes crashing down around their head in a dramatic fashion. This is the moment in a RomCom when the main character has driven away all her friends, got into a huge seemingly irreparable fight with the love interest, and is in imminent danger of losing or has already lost her apartment/job/dog/whatever. The movie Bridesmaids is a great example of this story structure.

Now in a little more detail. The key here is that everytime something happens, the protagonist, your main character, is proactive. They come up with a solution and take action--and in doing so, they only make their problem worse.

This type of story can be particularly emotional for readers, in either a good way or a not so good way, in watching the protagonist make attempt after attempt to improve their situation and inevitably backfire, and it’s all their own fault. This can frustrate readers, so it’s important to strike a balance between “misinformed” and “stupid” in your protag’s mistakes.

Another difference with this method is that each time the protag is faced with a conflict, they take an action that makes the situation worse and raises the stakes, thereby driving the plot forward. This method is a good one for stories of political intrigue, and a variation of it can be seen in pretty much all the Song of Ice and Fire novels. Almost every major plot point arises out of one of the characters making a choice in response to a  conflict they’ve been faced with--and that choice resulting in terrible consequences.

In my example above, I used three reactions, but you could add in any amount. Again, looking at Game of Thrones, there are about a half dozen different character arts and plot threads reaching different peaks as different times in each novel, and at any given point, each of those characters is making about five decisions that will come back to bite them in the ass later. If you personally want to go with something a bit less convoluted, stick to two of three reactions that worsen the conflict of your novel.

Before I sign off, I’ll give a couple of concrete examples of how a character is faced with a conflict, and their choices put them in a worse situation, raising the stakes. The best example I can think of is the movie Bridesmaids. Literally every single choice Kristen Wiig’s character makes makes the situation go from bad to worse. She picks a restaurant that gives everyone food poisoning. The entire flight to Vegas, while not exactly her fault, still arises from a series of choices she made rather than events happening to her outside her control (her booking a seat in economy, then taking the pills Helen offers, then having several drinks). Wiig reacts negatively to a kind gesture made by her sort-of-boyfriend and drives him away. Wiig is rude to a customer and gets fired from her job, and then gets kicked out of her apartment. She has a meltdown at the bridal shower and ends up at her lowest point with no friends, no job, no boyfriend, and it is all because of actions that she took.

Another obvious example, and a more literary one, is Bilbo’s meeting with the Trolls in “The Hobbit”. He and the dwarves are presented with a conflict: they are cold, tired, and hungry, with nothing to eat and no comfortable place to sleep. Bilbo observes the trolls, and is faces with a choice: go back to the dwarves and warn them to keep their distance, or try to steal a coin purse to prove his worth a burglar. He of course chooses the latter, and that action he takes (not a reaction, mind you--he isn’t reacting to anything that has happened to him, he is actively pursuing a goal) puts him and the dwarves in an even worse situation than they were in originally when he and they are captured by the trolls.

Now, this scene is inherently different than the next time they get into serious trouble, when the crack in the cave opens in the night and Bilbo and the Dwarves find themselves in the underground realm of the Goblins. That is an example of the protagonists reacting to conflict that has been thrust upon them. They got into this new trouble through no fault of their own, and they are merely reacting to it.

The scene with Bilbo and Golem is of another style as well: Bilbo is more proactive, taking action rather than reacting to events thrust upon him, but it ends positively. His actions solve the conflict, they have a positive outcome.

The final third of “The Hobbit”, however, more or less follows the “Protagonist Fucks It Up” method I’ve outline above, as long as you include the dwarves as our protagonists. Bilbo wakes a sleeping dragon--never a good idea at the best of times. Their ponies are chased away, their supplies lost. Then, he tries to be clever with his riddles, but accidentally gives Smaug a clue that results in the dragon wreaking havoc upon Laketown. Whoops. He and the dwarves are forced to hole themselves up at the risk of starvation in Thorin’s ancestral halls.

Eventually, the threat of the dragon is gone, but now the wood elves and the men of Laketown have come for their due. The wood elves are already their enemies, due not in small part by Thorin’s bad attitude. The dwarves refuse their demands, and under the threat of a siege, Bilbo makes another choice: he barters with his one-fourteenth share of the treasure via the Arkenstone. This choice results in his ostrication from the dwarves’ party, and the loss of his new friends.

And then, as if that isn’t enough, all the trouble he and the dwarves got into during the rest of the book comes back to bite them in the butts with the return of the Goblins and Wargs. The entire climax of the novel is a series of decisions that cause the conflict to go from bad to worse (though the part with Bilbo bartering the Arkenstone is debatable on this point, since really the situation went from “worse” to “still bad, but not quite as bad”, as the conflict goes from imminent war to his friends kicking him out). In general, however, I’m sure you get my point.

[jbrentonparker]

Writing Prompt:

The character returns to their childhood home to find that their imaginary friend is still there.

[jbrentonparker]

Plotting Method #3: The Snowflake Method

Ah, the Snowflake Method! You’ll hear this one mentioned a lot if you’re looking for help with plotting, and it can be very helpful if you have a vague outline of an idea, but are struggling to expand upon it. However, it does involve coming up with elements like main conflicts and character motivations very early on in the plotting process, which some writers prefer to let emerge later after they’ve had the chance to actually familiarize themselves with the characters. In short, this method works for a lot of people--but not for everyone. Give it a try, but if it’s not your cup of tea, don’t worry about it. Here’s the quick and dirty:

Snowflake Method:

Developed by Randy Ingermanson, this is one that’s popular with many writers, especially because if its pick-and-choose nature in which you can skip steps, only using what works best for you. Step 1: Write a one word sentence, 15 words or less, describing in broad terms the subject of your story (”a young boy learns he is a wizard and goes to  a magical school”). Step 2: Turn one sentence into five: the first describes the set up, the next three describing the main conflicts, and the last describing the conclusion. Step 3: Write a one page summary of each main character, describing their major goals, motivation, conflicts, and epiphanies, as well summarizing the story from each of their respective points of view. Step 4: Take the five sentences from step 2 and turn each one into a paragraph, fleshing out the details of the set up, conflicts, and climax in the form of a one page synopsis. Step 5: Write one page for main characters and half a page for supporting characters describing the story from their point of view, expanding on step 3. Steps 6 through 10 continue to add more to the previous 5 steps, so I’ll skip over that for now. I’ll discuss it in more detail in the post devoted to the Snowflake Method, but you can google it to check out the other steps for yourself.

Now to expand upon it a little.

Step 1 is easy if you barely have an idea at all (“all I know is I want to write a book about a talking dog who solves mysteries”), and much harder if you already have a more in depth idea of your novel. Condensing a 150,000 word novel into a 15 word summary is hard for most writers, but it’s an important skill to have, and it does become easier with practice. This 15 word summary is frequently called an “Elevator Pitch”, the idea being that is you end up in an elevator with a big name agent, you could pitch them your novel in a single sentence (maybe three at the most) that will catch their interest. A really good Elevator Pitch covers the core element of your novel. The conflict in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is the search for the stone and Harry’s eventual confrontation with Voldemort, but a large portion of the book is about Harry’s experiences at Hogwarts and learning about the Wizarding World. If you were writing a 15 broad description of The Sorcerer’s Stone using the Snowflake Method, you could either writer “a boy discovers he is a wizard and is sent to a magical school”, or “a wizard boy tries to uncover the mystery of a magical artifact before and evil wizard can”. Okay, my examples aren’t the prettiest, but you get the idea, both are accurate, succinct descriptions of the book. So if you don’t have a concrete conflict in mind to begin with, that’s fine, start with the general subject of your novel instead. Don’t get too comfy though, because figuring out your conflict comes next.

Step 2 is expanding the single sentence you just wrote into five. The first describes the set up, the next three describe the conflicts, the last describes the conclusion. Here’s an example: Original sentence: “A boy discovers he is a wizard and is sent to a magical school.” Expanded 5 Sentences: “1) An orphaned boy is raised by his ordinary aunt and uncle until his 11th birthday, when he discovers he is actually a wizard and is sent to a magical school. 2) He learns his parents were murdered by an evil wizard and his survival has made him famous, which comes with challenges from both his peers and his teachers. 3) He suspects one of his teachers is trying to steal a magical artifact for the evil wizard, and decides to investigate. 4) The evil wizard enacts his plan to steal the artifact, and the boy and his friends are forced into action themselves to save the day. 5) The boy and his friends get through a series of challenges, the boy faces the evil wizard and defeats him, saving the artifact and gaining respect and glory by winning the house cup for his bravery.” Don’t feel forced to come up with 3 conflicts, or feel limited to 3 conflicts. On the other hand, having a main conflict and two conflicts for subplots can help add a little extra depth to your story, and having too many competing conflicts can make your story muddled and confused. If you don’t have much experience with writing long novels, stick to 3 if you can until you have a good feeling for building a workable plot. Now, if you’re more of a panster, this is a good point to stop and just jump into your novel. You know how your story begins and how it ends, and you know the main conflicts to guide you, but how you will get to each point is still up to you to discover during the writing process. If you like more structure to work with, continue on. That’s the beauty of the Snowflake Method, it’s made to be picked apart, so you can use only what elements work for you, and drop those that don’t.

Step 3 shifts from plot to characters. It asks for a one page summary for each of the main characters. That’s one page total, not one page each, so just a paragraph or three, depending on how many main characters you have. Stick to main characters here (e.g. Harry, Ron, and Hermione; maybe Voldemort and Quirrell since their motivations affect the story so drastically). You really want to nail down their motivations before you start delving into secondary characters, because it’s character motivations that drive the plot. For each character, briefly describe their  major goals, motivation, conflicts, and epiphanies, as well summarizing the story from each of their respective points of view. For example: HARRY POTTER-- Goals: to find his place in the wizarding world and a place where he feels like he belongs, and to keep the Sorcerer’s Stone safe from Voldemort. Motivation: He always felt like an outsider in his life with the Durselys’ and had no friends; and he is horrified by the idea of the man who murdered his family coming back into power. Conflicts: characters like Draco Malfoy and Severus Snape make him doubt himself and feel like an outcast; and getting the Sorcerer’s Stone involves overcoming challenges related to what he has learned during his year at Hogwarts. Epiphanies: Bravery is about doing the right thing to help those you love even if your are afraid. And the summary would just be a brief summary of the your five sentences from above from Harry’s POV. Since the book is in third person limited, it would be pretty much the same as your summary--but imagine a summary of the book from Quirrell’s POV. That’s going to be a very different summary, and can help give you an idea of how Quirrell (or your own antagonist) would react to certain parts of the plot and conflicts.

Step 4 turns back to your summary. Take the five sentences from step 2 and turn each one into a paragraph, fleshing out the details of the set up, conflicts, and climax in the form of a one page synopsis. So you are turning five sentences into one page by adding in more details, going more in depth to the set up and the conflicts, a paragraph for each. This is when you (if you were writing Harry Potter) might add in that Dumbledore drops Harry off at his aunt and uncle’s after his parents are killed, and that it’s Hagrid who shows up on his 11th birthday. You would mention the characters Snape and Malfoy as being the ones who give Harry the hardest time integrating into the wizarding world. You might describe a little more exactly what Harry has to do to discover the Sorcerer’s Stone. What you won’t have are the minor subplots yet, like Norbert or Hermione and the Troll, or any Quidditch stuff. All the subplots will come later. By the end, you will have a one page synopsis that covers all the main conflicts and the climax/conclusion of your novel. This is extremely helpful to have, since many agents want to see a one page synopsis in the query letters you send them. You may end up tweaking it once the novel is actually finished since it’s quite rare that a completed novel totally reflects the outline, but hopefully all the bones will still be there.

Step 5 returns to characters. Now you’ll take your one paragraph for each main character and expand it into one page. Really go into depth here and try to get a good handle on their personalities, goals, and motivations. You want to have a clear vision of what they want, and how they would go about getting what they want. Nothing is quite as disconcerting in a novel as reading a character acting wildly out-of-character, just because the author decided they needed “A” to happen and made the character behave in a way that doesn’t align with their previous established personality to make it happen. This part, especially writing a summary of the novel from each character’s POV, can help keep that from happening before you’re knee deep in the climax and realizing that your main character’s motivation shoots a big ol’ plot hole in the life raft that is your story. This is also the part where you get more into subplots and supporting characters. You may have mentioned in step 3 that Hermione is not friends with Harry and Ron until the rescue her from a troll, and here is when you’ll really go into more detail about that, and about all the ways she specifically helps during the search for Nicholas Flamel and the Sorcerer’s Stone, as well as what she brings to the table during the climax. You’ll write about a half a page for Neville, Hagrid, Filch, and all the other supporting characters who appear to the story, and nail down their roles and motivations in relation to the plot and any subplots.

Feel free to stop here, but if you like to plot every scene down to the dialogue, continue on with steps 6 through 10. I’m going to copy the descriptions of steps 6 through 10 from the Advancedfictionwriting.com article on the Snowflake Method, which is Randy Ingermanson’s (the guy who invented the Snowfl;ake Method) own website, because he clearly does a better job of explaining it than I do, and because I have guests coming over soon and need to rush through the rest of this post. Check out the original post, it’s a good one.

“Step 6) By now, you have a solid story and several story-threads, one for each character. Now take a week and expand the one-page plot synopsis of the novel to a four-page synopsis. Basically, you will again be expanding each paragraph from step (4) into a full page. This is a lot of fun, because you are figuring out the high-level logic of the story and making strategic decisions. Here, you will definitely want to cycle back and fix things in the earlier steps as you gain insight into the story and new ideas whack you in the face.

Step 7) Take another week and expand your character descriptions into full-fledged character charts detailing everything there is to know about each character. The standard stuff such as birthdate, description, history, motivation, goal, etc. Most importantly, how will this character change by the end of the novel? This is an expansion of your work in step (3), and it will teach you a lot about your characters. You will probably go back and revise steps (1-6) as your characters become “real” to you and begin making petulant demands on the story. This is good — great fiction is character-driven. Take as much time as you need to do this, because you’re just saving time downstream. When you have finished this process, (and it may take a full month of solid effort to get here), you have most of what you need to write a proposal. If you are a published novelist, then you can write a proposal now and sell your novel before you write it. If you’re not yet published, then you’ll need to write your entire novel first before you can sell it. No, that’s not fair, but life isn’t fair and the world of fiction writing is especially unfair.

Step 8) You may or may not take a hiatus here, waiting for the book to sell. At some point, you’ve got to actually write the novel. Before you do that, there are a couple of things you can do to make that traumatic first draft easier. The first thing to do is to take that four-page synopsis and make a list of all the scenes that you’ll need to turn the story into a novel. And the easiest way to make that list is . . . with a spreadsheet.For some reason, this is scary to a lot of writers. Oh the horror. Deal with it. You learned to use a word-processor. Spreadsheets are easier. You need to make a list of scenes, and spreadsheets were invented for making lists. If you need some tutoring, buy a book. There are a thousand out there, and one of them will work for you. It should take you less than a day to learn the itty bit you need. It’ll be the most valuable day you ever spent. Do it.Make a spreadsheet detailing the scenes that emerge from your four-page plot outline. Make just one line for each scene. In one column, list the POV character. In another (wide) column, tell what happens. If you want to get fancy, add more columns that tell you how many pages you expect to write for the scene. A spreadsheet is ideal, because you can see the whole storyline at a glance, and it’s easy to move scenes around to reorder things.My spreadsheets usually wind up being over 100 lines long, one line for each scene of the novel. As I develop the story, I make new versions of my story spreadsheet. This is incredibly valuable for analyzing a story. It can take a week to make a good spreadsheet. When you are done, you can add a new column for chapter numbers and assign a chapter to each scene.

Step 9) (Optional. I don’t do this step anymore.) Switch back to your word processor and begin writing a narrative description of the story. Take each line of the spreadsheet and expand it to a multi-paragraph description of the scene. Put in any cool lines of dialogue you think of, and sketch out the essential conflict of that scene. If there’s no conflict, you’ll know it here and you should either add conflict or scrub the scene.I used to write either one or two pages per chapter, and I started each chapter on a new page. Then I just printed it all out and put it in a loose-leaf notebook, so I could easily swap chapters around later or revise chapters without messing up the others. This process usually took me a week and the end result was a massive 50-page printed document that I would revise in red ink as I wrote the first draft. All my good ideas when I woke up in the morning got hand-written in the margins of this document. This, by the way, is a rather painless way of writing that dreaded detailed synopsis that all writers seem to hate. But it’s actually fun to develop, if you have done steps (1) through (8) first. When I did this step, I never showed this synopsis to anyone, least of all to an editor — it was for me alone. I liked to think of it as the prototype first draft. Imagine writing a first draft in a week! Yes, you can do it and it’s well worth the time. But I’ll be honest, I don’t feel like I need this step anymore, so I don’t do it now.

Step 10) At this point, just sit down and start pounding out the real first draft of the novel. You will be astounded at how fast the story flies out of your fingers at this stage. I have seen writers triple their fiction writing speed overnight, while producing better quality first drafts than they usually produce on a third draft.You might think that all the creativity is chewed out of the story by this time. Well, no, not unless you overdid your analysis when you wrote your Snowflake. This is supposed to be the fun part, because there are many small-scale logic problems to work out here. How does Hero get out of that tree surrounded by alligators and rescue Heroine who’s in the burning rowboat? This is the time to figure it out! But it’s fun because you already know that the large-scale structure of the novel works. So you only have to solve a limited set of problems, and so you can write relatively fast.This stage is incredibly fun and exciting. I have heard many fiction writers complain about how hard the first draft is. Invariably, that’s because they have no clue what’s coming next. Good grief! Life is too short to write like that! There is no reason to spend 500 hours writing a wandering first draft of your novel when you can write a solid one in 150. Counting the 100 hours it takes to do the design documents, you come out way ahead in time.About midway through a first draft, I usually take a breather and fix all the broken parts of my design documents. Yes, the design documents are not perfect. That’s okay. The design documents are not fixed in concrete, they are a living set of documents that grows as you develop your novel. If you are doing your job right, at the end of the first draft you will laugh at what an amateurish piece of junk your original design documents were. And you’ll be thrilled at how deep your story has become.”

-Randy Ingermanson, “The Snowflake Method for Designing a Novel”

[jbrentonparker]

Holiday Short Story: “From Satan, With Love”

“Deer Santa,

This letter is from Holly. I live at 583 Giglun Avanew. I kno you kno whoo I am but I just whant to be sher that you now wher I live becus last yere I asked for an uquaryum but I never got it. So I just whanted to be sher that you had the right adres for me.

This yere plese I would like a puppy plese. I promis I wood take such good care of it. I would take it for waks every day and I wood even pick up its poop even tho poop is grose.

I have been rilly good all year. Aspeshaly sinse Thanksgivgn becus I new you wood be paying more atenshun. I wood like a small puppy but one that will grow rilly big when its grown up. I wood like one with black fur plese becus I want to name it Shadow. I think is a rilly good name. And it only makes sens if the puppy is black. Gray would be ok to I gess.

So plese give me a puppy for Chrismas and I will be rilly good for the rest of the yere. If my brother says any thing meen about me in his letter, plese ignor him, he is a lier.

Love,

Holly”

Holly folded her letter in threes as neatly as she could and slid it into the red envelope. Her letter was too tall for the flap to close properly over it, so she pulled it back out and refolded again more carefully. It still didn’t quite fit, so she folded the whole thing in half one more time, licked the flap, and sealed the envelope. With a green crayon she wrote “TO SATAN” in clumsy letters on the front, the “n” backwards. Then she covered the back in stickers of bearded, jolly looking men, deer with red noses, and snowmen that didn’t look anything like the lumpy and lopsided snowthings that Holly usually ended up creating in her own backyard. In the bottom corner, the only sticker-free space left, she wrote in cramped letters “HOLLY LITEL, 583 GILGUN”, just in case Santa needed one more reminder. She was still rather bitter about the aquarium fiasco from the previous year.

She got up off the living room carpet and ran outside, forgetting to put on her boots which were right by the door and consequently stepping right into the muddy snow slush that covered the porch in her socked feet. She hopped from one foot to the next as she clipped her letter to the outside of the mailbox, which she was only just tall enough to do this year.

Pleased with how she had efficiently handled writing and mailing her letter all by herself, she dashed back inside to the warmth and comfort of her home. Her younger brother had come into the living room in the few moments she was gone, and she glared at him.

“Have you sent your letter to Santa yet?” she asked him.

“No,” he said, blinking up at her.

“Well you should, because if you wait too long then it won’t have time to get to the North Pole before Christmas. The North Pole is miles and miles away and it takes the mailman a really long time to drive there. Don’t write anything mean about me in your letter, I already told Santa that whatever you say about me isn’t true.”

“I wasn’t going to write anything mean,” her brother replied indignantly. “Maybe I will though, and I’ll tell Santa that you’re a liar. He probably won’t be able to read your letter anyway, you can’t even spell. How far away is the North Pole?”

“Miles and miles,” said Holly. Then she had a horrible realization. She gasped, turned and ran back to the front door, yanking it open and nearly slipping in the half melted snow outside the door. She reached for her letter in its red envelope–

And her little hand grasped at empty air. It was gone. Someone, the mailman probably, had already taken it. Holly wailed.

Her mother, who was in the kitchen, heard her and hurried out to the front porch, her hands held out in front of her as if she were a freshly sterilized surgeon because they were covered in the sticky dough of biscuits that always came out of the oven with the texture and consistency of mud bricks.

“What is it, Holly? What’s wrong? Are you fighting with your brother again?” Worry and irritation fought for dominance in her tone.

“My letter to S-Santa!” the girl sobbed.

“What letter? Did you write a letter?”

“I forgot to write ‘to the north pole’ on the front! And the mailman already t-took it! They won’t know where to send it and Santa won’t get my l-l-letter!”

“The mailman?” Her mother frowned and looked down at her wrist, which was watch-free at the moment. “I thought the mailman already–oh, that doesn’t matter. It’s okay, Holly, you don’t need to cry. Did you write Santa’s name on the envelope?”

Holly sniffed. “Yeah.”

“Then it will be perfectly fine! Everyone knows where Santa lives, and your letter will probably go into a big bag full of other letters addressed to Santa, and I’m sure most of those other letters will have his address on it. So your letter will definitely get to the North Pole, don’t worry.”

Holly was doubtful in spite of her mother’s reassurance, but grown-ups seemed to know a lot more about the inner workings of the postal service than she did, so there was nothing for it but to put her faith in her mother, for now at least.

“Okay,” she said, only a little sullenly. “But he said that Santa won’t even be able to read my letter!” said Holly, pointing a damning finger at her brother, who had his nose pressed against the screen door, watching the drama unfold.

“Because of your dyslexia?” her mother asked. She put a gentle elbow, rather than a sticky hand, on Holly’s head, and shot her son a stern look. He made himself scarce. “Lots of other kids have dyslexia, or are too little to be very good at spelling. Santa is used to that, he can read anyone’s letter, no matter what.”

“No matter what?” Holly repeated.

“No matter what. I promise. Now come inside, alright? It’s freezing out here. The weather said it might snow again tonight. Holly, where are you shoes? No–no! Don’t walk on the carpet with your socks like that! Just take them off and go inside barefoot. That’s better, now give me those wet socks and close the door please. Thank you. I’m in the middle of making biscuits–don’t make that noise, that’s very rude–I’m making biscuits so why don’t you come into the kitchen with me and tell me what you asked Santa for. It wasn’t another aquarium, was it? I told you last year that aquariums are a big commitment and difficult to clean and take care of. Plus fish die so easily.”

“I asked Santa for a puppy this time. It’s too late for you to tell Santa not to get it for me now because the mailman already took my letter, and even if you sent your own letter telling him not to my letter would get there first because I sent it first. So he would get me the puppy before he even got your letter telling him not to get me one.”

Her mother sighed and closed her eyes, up to her elbows in overworked dough. Holly climbed up onto a kitchen chair and took a small piece of dough, which she popped into her mouth. Her mother smacked her hand away.

“Don’t eat raw dough, that’s how you get salmonella!” she admonished. Holly made a face and clambered back off the chair.

“That didn’t taste like I thought it would. I thought it might be like cookie dough.”

“Why would it be like–oh, never mind. Holly, we’ve talked about the puppy thing before. It’s the same as with the aquarium. Puppies are a lot of work, and they can be very destructive. Plus they need to be walked every day and socialized with other dogs and people, they need lots of expensive shots and they need to be chipped, and you have to pick up their poop every single day. And dog food is expensive. I just don’t think that you are old enough to really be ready for that kind of responsibility, and I don’t want to be left as the only one taking care of a dog that I didn’t even want.”

“I will take care of it!” Holly whined. “I already told Santa that I’ll walk it every day, and I’ll clean up it’s poop too. And I’ll use my allowance to buy it food! Or I can share my breakfast and dinner with it. It can eat at the table with me and we’ll share a plate. I’ll share my food with a puppy, I promise! I don’t mind sharing, I don’t eat that much anyway!”

“You say that now, but I know that you’ll be bored of taking care of it by New Year’s.”

“I wooon’t!”

“Don’t whine,” said her mother sternly. She tried to drop a poorly formed biscuit onto a baking sheet, but it stuck to her doughy fingers and defied all attempts by gravity to claim it. “Now don’t you have a room to be cleaning? Santa won’t leave you your presents if you don’t have a clean room to put them in.”

Holly sprinted out of the kitchen. She had faith in Santa, even if he did drop the ball on last year’s aquarium. He would know how much she wanted a puppy, and he wouldn’t let her down.

DECEMBER 25, 5:05 A.M.

Holly’s parents awoke to two small bodies hurtling into the bed from the upper atmosphere.

“It’s Christmas, it’s Christmas!” they shrieked, jumping up and down with a complete disregard for the unholiness of the hour. Their father groaned and pulled the blankets over his head, and their mother struggled to turn on the bedside lamp without opening her eyes.

“Yes, but it’s also early,” pleaded their mother. “Can’t you two go back to bed for a little while longer? It’ll still be Christmas in an hour or two.”

“I can’t wait an hour!” Holly’s brother proclaimed in horror.

“We can’t go back to sleep now!” said Holly. “You can sleep on the couch while we open our stockings!”

Their father rolled himself into a sitting position, bleary eyed and unshaven. “I’ll get the coffee started,” he said in the defeated tone of a man headed for the gallows. He shuffled down the hall as their mother pulled on a robe and followed the scrambling children into the living room, where their Christmas tree stood, sparkling with fairy lights and a rainbow of ornaments, but only from the base to about half way up, which was as far as Holly and her brother could reach since they had insisted on decorating the tree by themselves that year.

Their mother threw herself onto the couch with a stifled yawn while the children wrestled their stockings from the fireplace. They immediately dumped out the contents in the middle of the living room and began rifling through their haul, not noticing in their wild abandon that their respective piles of toys and candy were getting intermixed. Their mother noticed, and knew this was likely to cause some strife when they inevitably started arguing about what belonged to who, but she was too tired to take preventative measures just then. She would cross that bridge when she came to it, hopefully after she had had a strong cup of coffee.

As if on cue, their father came into the living room holding two steaming cups. He passed one off to their mother and dropped onto the couch himself. He elbowed his wife and asked her through the corner of her mouth, “Maybe I’m just more tired than I thought I was, but I don’t remember that large present in the red wrapping paper, do you?”

Their mother tore her eyes from the children and noticed the large box for the first time, about two feet tall and two feet long, wrapped in crimson paper with a huge black bow on top. She frowned.

“No, I don’t. Did you put that one out?”

“I already said I didn’t recognize it.”

“Can we open our presents now?” Holly’s brother begged, surrounded by a nest of wooden and plastic toys he was already bored with, his small, round face smeared with chocolate from the lumps of “coal” he had received. Two oranges that had been stuffed into the toes of the stockings lay abandoned.

“Sure,” said their father. “Go for it.”

“Ah, we forgot the video recorder!” their mother suddenly gasped. Their father, who hadn’t forgotten, waved her off.

“Just use your phone. Or better yet, just enjoy the moment without having to document it.”

“You’ll regret not having home videos when we’re old and our grandkids want to see what their parents were like as children,” their mother admonished.

“No kid wants to see old home movies. Kids, do you want me to pull out my and your mom’s old video tapes from when we were kids at Christmas and watch them?”

“I want to watch Frosty,” Holly’s brother replied, looking as if he was about to burst into tears at the prospect of not.

“I want to open presents!” Holly demanded with all the barely restrained energy of an atom bomb about to go off.

“Go on then,” their mother sighed, pulling out her phone and setting up the video camera.

The children crawled over to the base of the tree and began hauling out presents, inspecting tags as they went. Each one that Holly found addressed to herself, she carefully placed on the ground in front of her and pressed her ear to its top, gently knocking on the side and listening intently. She even checked the smallest presents, just to be absolutely sure.

Holly’s mother noticed and groaned. “Holly, you did not get a puppy. I told you that you can’t have a puppy this year, and I am positive that Santa agreed with me. Maybe next year, if you prove to me you are responsible enough by keeping your room clean all year, you can have a hamster or something.”

“Who’s this one for?” Holly’s brother interrupted, trying to drag the large red gift out from beneath the tree. “It’s heavy! Aw, it says Holly on it. That sucks.”

“That isn’t nice. Holly, does it really have your name on it?”

Holly got up and rushed towards the black and red present, her little heart pounding fast enough to burst. There was a white tag attached to the bow, one corner very slightly singed.

To Holly, it said in an elaborate script that was almost impossible for her to read. “It is for me, it is!” she squealed, dancing on the spot.

“It must be from your mother,” said Holly’s mother out of the corner of her mouth, covering her phone’s speaker with one hand. “She has a key and it would be just like her to sneak in the house in the middle of the night to drop off the biggest present of the bunch. Maybe we should get a dog after all, one that barks.”

Holly pressed her ear against the box, and gave it a light rap with her knuckles. This present was different than all the rest. Surely, that must mean it was the special one, the one that Santa had set aside especially for her.

There was a long moment of unbroken silence, and Holly’s hopes began to tip over the edge of despair. Then something unmistakably shifted inside the box, something alive.

Holly shrieked and leapt to her feet, tearing the bow and paper from the box in a frenzy. Underneath was a plain brown box with a lid, like a giant shoe box. Holly flung the lid away, and stared down into the box.

“Well?” said her father. “What is it?”

“Is it from your grandmother?” asked her mother. “It’s not an aquarium, is it?”

Holly didn’t respond, she just stood there, staring down into the box. Her brother inched forward and peered in over her shoulder.

“It’s a dog,” he said. “I think.”

“What?” shrieked their mother.

“What do you mean you think?” asked their father.

“It’s…” Holly said hesitantly, speaking for the first time. “It’s sort of like a dog.”

Her parents exchanged looks.

“Step away from the box, Holly,” said her father, struggling to rise to his feet off the low couch.

“Touch it,” said her brother.

“Don’t touch it!” said her mother.

Holly touched it.

“I think it’s nice,” she said, as her father hurried to her side. The dog… thing pressed its side against her hand, seeming to react pleasurably to her touch. It turned its snout towards her hand and sniffed, before sticking out something approximating a tongue and licking her fingers.

“What hell is that?” her father gasped, grabbing Holly about the waist and hauling her away as she squealed in protest.

“It’s a dog!” her brother said as if it were obvious, and stuck his own hand into the box. Their mother, who was only a few steps behind their father, grabbed her son and pulled him back as well.

“Jesus Christ,” she gasped, looking down at the wriggling thing. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing’s wrong with him,” said Holly defiantly, upset that mean things were being said about her new dog. “He’s just different is all. Didn’t you say that it’s okay to be different?”

“I think it’s a… a hairless… something?” her father suggested weakly.

“A hairless what?” snapped her mother.

“Cool, a hairless dog!” her brother said, trying to wriggle out of his mother’s grasp.

“I think it might be a puppy,” said her father, holding Holly back with one hand and leaning over to peer more closely at the animal in the box. “It looks young, I think.”

“What kind of puppy is that big? I’ve never seen a puppy that big before,” her mother hissed.

“A great dane puppy? Or a malamute?” her father suggested.

“That is not a great dane!”

“His name is Shadow!” Holly interjected as she tried to fight her way past her father’s arm. “I asked Santa for a black puppy named Shadow, and he got it for me! I meant I wanted it to have black fur, but I don’t care! I love him!”

Her mother and father exchanged a look. Her father turned and took Holly by the shoulders, kneeling so he was on her level.

“Holly, did you tell anyone other than your mother and Santa that you wanted a puppy for Christmas?”

“I told all my friends that Santa was getting me a puppy this year.”

“Did you tell any grownups? Did you tell Grandma, maybe?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m going to go call her,” said her mother, dialing her mother-in-law’s number.

“Honey,” Holly’s father said very gently, “I don’t think we can keep this puppy.”

“Why not?” wailed Holly, all her hopes and dreams and faith in the basic good of the universe crashing down around her.

“It looks… um, well, like it might be very sick. I don’t think we can take care of a very sick puppy like this.”

“He isn’t sick, he just looks like that! And even if he is sick, then I’ll take care of him! I’ll take him to the doctor’s and I’ll give him medicine and I’ll make sure he gets lots of rest!”

“She isn’t picking up,” said Holly’s mother angrily, stuffing her phone back into her robe pocket. “What was she thinking? Where did she even find that thing?”

“His name is Shadow!”

“It’s got to be sick or something,” said Holly’s father. “Maybe an eye infection? I don’t think it’s eyes are supposed to… bulge like that. Or be that color. And it definitely has an underbite. And an overbite. It can’t seem to close its mouth over those teeth. I bet it probably has respiratory issues. Pugs have respiratory issues. Do you think it could be some kind of a pug?”

Holly’s mother just laughed incredulously.

“Those things on its back, that look like scales, that’s got to be a skin infection. I wouldn’t be surprised if it has mites or something.”

“Are dogs supposed to have that number of toes?” asked her mother.

“You know what,” said her father musingly. “I would be willing to bet that my mother decided to get Holly some fancy purebred puppy, but tried to save money by going to a cheap breeder. This is probably a very sick, poorly bred… something.”

“What are we going to do with this dog?” Holly’s mother groaned.

“Keep it, keep it!” shouted her brother, hopping up and down excitedly. “I want to show it to all my friends at school! Can I bring it to school when we go back? It’s so gross, it will freak everyone out!”

“He’s not gross!” Holly shouted back at him. “He’s mine and I love him even if he is bald and has scales! I don’t care, I love him! Santa probably picked him because he was lonely, because nobody else wanted him and Santa knew that I would love him anyway! He needs me!”

“Well we can’t get rid of it like this,” her father said in a low voice to her mother. “Nobody would take him, and a shelter might not have the resources for a dog with this many health issues.”

Her mother groaned again, and pinched the bridge of her nose. “You’re right, you’re right. God, this dog is going to cost us a fortune in vet bills.

“We can keep him?” said Holly, a tentative hopeful waver in her tone.

“For now, at least. But you have to take care of him, Holly! Just like you promised! If you get bored of him and start neglecting him, then we’ll find a new home for him as soon as he’s healthy...ish. Do you understand me?” Holly didn’t reply, she only squealed in joy and ducked beneath her father’s arm to rush the box. “Be gentle, be gentle!” her mother hollered. “It’s all… messed up, be gentle with it!”

Holly hauled the puppy out of the box with extreme difficulty. It tried to help the process along by doggy-paddling its taloned feet in the air. Once out of the box, Holly saw that it had a shiny red leather collar fastened around its thick neck. It nearly vanished between folds of leathery skin, but she was able to find the bone shaped metal tag and saw the name Shadow engraved on it. On the back, where an address would normally go, were just three repeating numbers.

She scratched him behind an ear, which was set lower on his head than any dog’s ear she had ever seen before. That was probably to make way for the small nubbins of horn that were just barely starting to sprout on the top of its head, she figured. Shadow opened his horrifying mouth and panted happily, his tail–which was almost as thick around as his barrel-like torso–thumping against the carpet.

Holly’s mother winced. “I’m going to go see if we have any skin ointment in the house that is dog safe,” she said, leaving to go check the medicine cabinets.

“We’ll have to go buy a leash and some dog food later today,” Holly’s father said. “It would have been nice of Grandma to have supplied that herself since she didn’t consult us about this, but…”

“Oh, can we take him with us to the pet store?” pleaded Holly. “I want him to pick out his own toys!”

“I think maybe he should stay here, honey.” He grimaced a little at the thick ropes of drool that hung from the dog’s open mouth. He didn’t notice the way the carpet singed slightly wherever drops of saliva landed. “He might… we don’t want him getting any of the other dogs sick too.”

“Oh,” she said sadly, but she didn’t argue. After all, she had a brand new puppy to play with. It was a bit of an unusual puppy for sure, but she had complete and utter faith in Santa’s reasoning, whatever it was. She did wish it had fur, but at least it was black like she had asked. She would just have to be more specific next time.

JANUARY 9TH, PRE-DAWN

Holly slept with Shadow at the foot of her bed every night, usually covering him with a special blanket they had picked out for him at the pet store so he wouldn’t get cold at night, since he had no fur. This wasn’t really a problem, because Shadow’s body temperature ran at about 200 degrees. This had the positive side effect of ensuring that Holly never had cold feet in bed.

Their local vet had been no help at all, so the family had taken Shadow to a friend of theirs that worked on a farm as a vet for livestock. He had serious doubts about Shadow and voiced them to Holly’s parents, but by then the girl was so attached to the dog, and the dog to her, that it would have been cruel to separate them. At the very least, their vet friend was able to work it out so that Shadow got all his vaccinations and shots, plus some prescription-only anti-rash and anti-fungal ointments. He could only recommend daily tooth brushing for the sulfurous breath, and that they work extra hard on potty training because he didn’t know of any cures for urine that burned holes in the furniture.

He sent his friends and their new dog on their way, and watched them try to load the enormous thing into the back seat of their car. He shuddered, crossed himself even though he had never been a particularly religious man, and went back inside to burn the gloves he had used while handling the thing that was a dog, but only because it wasn’t anything else.

So by two weeks after Christmas, Shadow had all of his shots, a huge basket full of new dog toys, special dog food that promoted healthy coat growth, and even a small stocking that was covered in cutesy paw prints and had “Good Boy” embroidered on the white cuff, which had been on sale for half off at the pet store.

It was clear that Shadow was staying.

He seemed vaguely fond of the entire family, though he always gave them the slightly disquieting sense that he hardly ever actually noticed that they were there, or that he cared when he did. As for Holly, however, he followed at her heels night and day, struggling to keep up with her with his stumpy legs and the lizard-like tail that dragged behind him, and nearly doubled his length. He was as devoted as any dog has ever been, and true to her word she took him on walks twice a day (the neighbors found themselves locking their doors when the pair passed their houses); cleaned up his droppings all by herself even though she had to wear welder’s gloves to safely handle them; and gave him bi-weekly oatmeal baths that seemed to be having no impact on the strange scales on his back, but which he enjoyed nevertheless.

In the two weeks since Christmas, he had already grown several inches in height and length, and put on so many pounds that Holly could no longer lift him. For some reason, his red leather collar still seemed to fit perfectly fine, despite the fact that they hadn’t loosened it. His horns too had grown significantly and were now almost two inches tall. Holly’s parents ignored this, and as time went on, they found it was becoming easier and easier to ignore many things about Shadow. They also stopped getting headaches all the time when they started to just ignore things like his horns. Holly’s father often went on walks with them in the evening, and her mother had developed the bad habit of feeding Shadow scraps when she was cooking. This may have had something to do with his ever expanding girth.

Shadow snored when he slept, the occasional tiny spurt of flame shooting from between his teeth. Holly snored too, though it was hard to tell over the deep, earthquake inducing rumble that came from Shadow. Mid-snore this particular night, however, Shadow awoke quite suddenly.

He didn’t get up, or move in any way; he only opened his eyes and was instantly wide awake. The strange not-quite-silence of night time filled the air, the sound of the house settling, the impression of wind blowing outside, the soft sleep-sounds of Holly as she breathed and snored and shifted.

Shadow lifted his head, and a low growl escaped his throat.

The dog got up and slid off the bed, the heavy thud of his body hitting the floor failing to wake the girl. He trudged out of her room and down the hall, pausing to sniff at the doors of Holly’s parents and brother. Apparently satisfied, he continued on into the kitchen, and to the back door.

Holly’s parents had decided against installing a doggy door, since the back door was right off of the kitchen and it snowed where they lived. That didn’t stop Shadow though, and he slunk into the back yard on silent paws, his body low to the ground, almost fading into the darkness like a, well, a shadow.  He prowled around the border of yard, staying close to the fence and stopping to sniff at anything that seemed suspicious. He sat on his haunches beneath the leafless oak where the children’s tree house had been built, little more than a slightly darker smudge against the already dark landscape. For a long time, he didn’t move. He didn’t even breath. 

Then his eyes narrowed. Up against the sky, black with storm clouds, a dark speck moved. It came closer and closer, its great leathery wings flapping rhythmically like a nightmare of a bat. It soared silently through the air, and alighted like a ghost on the fence of Shadow’s yard. It didn’t seem to notice the dog, but Shadow’s eyes were fixed on the thing and his hackles would have been raised, had he had any fur.

The thing looked around the seemingly empty yard with quick, jerky movements, and then climbed down the fence the way a spider climbs down a wall to scuttle into a dark crevice. It began to crawl across the yard on all fours with overlong limbs, making towards the house. Before it could get very far, a growl like the splitting of tectonic plates filled the air. The creature froze and whipped its head around almost 180 degrees, and this time it couldn’t miss Shadow. The puppy charged at the creature, his maw–which was little more than a black hole lined with switchblades–gaping and glistening with ropes of saliva. The creature gave a screech of fear and frustration and leapt into the air, flapping its great wings once, twice, and just barely managing to pull its taloned toes out of range of Shadow’s reach in time. The thing spit and hissed, but it wasn’t stupid. It flew away with only its pride wounded, to find some easier victim to prey upon.

Shadow watched it go, filled with doggy-pride for having defended his territory. But that small skirmish, he was aware, had been nothing. It had been only an imp, after all. Just a skulking minor demon that crept around under the cover of night to create minor mischief, the kind of creature that made a person wake up in a bad mood for no reason, or hide car keys in obscure places just to ruin their day. 

There were other threats, much worse threats, that Shadow could see where poor stupid humans couldn’t. The man who lingered near the park where the family took their daily walks and watched the children while they played. The teenage neighbor boy whose mouth was like the slash of a knife, who always smelled like the neighborhood cats and dogs that kept disappearing. The woman who had been smoking a cigarette outside the movie theater Shadow had seen from the back seat of the car when Holly’s father dropped her and her mother off to watch an evening film, the woman who befriended troubled young girls and convinced them to climb inside vans which would take them far, far away from their friends and family. Any human would have the sense to be afraid of an imp if they saw one, but Shadow had found that they didn't seem to be able to see the wickedness in their fellow men the way that he himself could.

Shadow wouldn’t be a puppy for long, and he was territorial. He would protect his house and his new family, and he was going to make sure that he was the only piece of hell that was allowed free reign in his little corner of the world.

An opossum scuttled along the top of the fence, and Shadow barked excitedly at it. He didn’t much like opossums either.

His duty done, his house defended, he went back inside and climbed onto the foot of Holly’s bed once more, struggling a little on his way up because of his stubby legs. He curled up and closed his eyes. Holly awoke just a little, rolled over, stuck her toes under Shadow’s warm body, and then went back to sleep, snug and warm and safe.

A holiday short story, and yes, it was inspired by the picture you’re thinking of. Happy Holidays!

[jbrentonparker]

Plotting Method #2: The Three Act Structure

Ah, the Three Act Structure. It’s one we’re all extremely familiar with, even if you aren’t aware you’re familiar with it. It’s a story structure used largely for TV, though this structure can also be applied to prose and used as a scaffolding for plotting out a novel.

One warning though: this plot structure can very very repetitive and predictable. Think about House: any person who has watched two episodes of House could write their own episode. Patient gets sick, goes to hospital. House or one of the other doctors makes a diagnosis. It seems to work, but then suddenly, something bad happens. First commercial break. House makes another diagnoses. It’s not lupus (except that one time it was). It’s wrong. He makes another. It’s almost right, not not. Things go really bad. Second commercial break. Another diagnosis is made, almost kills the patient. Climax. Someone says something poignant, House figures it out, usually in time to save the patient, sometimes not. The end. Every. Single. Episode. The Three act structure is used all over TV and most people aren’t bothered by it, but just a warning: if you use it the exact same way over and over again, readers will start to notice, and it can take the wind from your stories’s sails.

The Three-Act Structure:

Similar to Freytag’s model, but this one has been developed specifically for narrative fiction. The First Act: SET UP  The first act begins with exposition: the introduction of the characters and the setting. It gives the reader a sense of what “normal” is in the context of the narrative. Just like I mentioned in the discussion of Freytag’s model, it’s important that a state of “normalcy” be established. The reader has to know what’s everyday for your characters, so they can be equally surprised when something out of the ordinary happens, rather than confused. One good example I was just reminded of yesterday: In the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Picard is speaking to Data and Troi. Picard uses the word “snoop”, and Data asks what that word means. Picard makes a comment about how Data is programmed to know so much about human knowledge, but doesn’t know the word “snoop”. Boom, the viewer knows that Data is an android, and that that is normal in the context of the setting, as no one reacts in shock or surprise to hear Picard or Data talking about his android-ness. A second later, Troi says, “Captain... I’m sensing a... a powerful mind.” Once again, Picard does not react with shock, confusion, or surprise. Clearly, he knows that Troi is psychic (technically empathic, but whatever), and this is not unusual for the setting. So now it has been established for the viewer that things like androids and psychic abilities are within the realm of normal for the setting of Star Trek. However, a second later, alarms start blaring, and a huge barrier is put up blocking the Enterprise’s path. Every reacts with alarm and confusion--it is obvious that this ISN’T normal, that this is outside the bounds of what our characters can typically expect to experience. All within the first four minute of the first episode of the, we are introduced to “normal”, and that state of normalcy is broken. In a novel, of course, a little more time is usually spent on building up what is “normal”, especially if it is a fantasy novel set in another world or a hard scifi novel, but often times, character reactions can serve to show the reader what is every day and what is unusual. And this is important: I wrote a novel, and while having the first chapter critiqued, I received a lot of feedback that readers were confused about how “normal” monsters were in the world, whether it was just my main character who knew about them, or if their existence was widely known and accepted. I did not clearly establish a state of normalcy, and I ended up with confused beta readers.  A little ways into the First Act is the Inciting Incident, the thing that changes everything for the protagonist. The letters start coming for Harry, the Dwarves show up at Bilbo’s house. This incident offers the protagonist the chance to change their situation, a chance for their life to change. Maybe they want to take it, maybe they don’t. But it happens, and the protagonist usually gets sucked up into it somehow. The protagonist getting sucked into this Inciting Incident leads to Plot Point A, and signals the end of the first act. Think of Plot Point A as the dramatic moment in a TV show right before the first round of commercials start (e.g. House’s first guess being wrong and the patient unexpectedly coding). Sometimes it happens right after the inciting incident (Katniss immediately offers to take Prim’s place in the Hunger Games when Prim’s name is called), and sometimes it takes a while for the main character to lurch into action (Richard Mayhew in Neverwhere meets and helps Door, then tries to return to his own life, only getting further involved in the plot when he realizes he’s become forgotten in his own life).

The Second Act: Confrontation  In the Second Act, the protag is reacting to and trying to deal with Plot Point A. This is usually the longest act, and takes up most of the story. This is the long and marshy “middle”. They will start to have to face roadblocks and challenges and learn the “rules” of the situation they’ve been thrust into. They don’t have the necessary skills yet however, and only continue to wind up in increasingly worse situation (this is their character arc, them gradually acquiring the skills to triumph later). At the beginning of the second act, the protag is usually reactionary. They’re simply reacting to the things that are happening to and around them. By the end, they are usually proactive, making things happen themselves or setting out to face conflicts head on and by choice. Now comes the Midpoint! This is the moment everything goes wrong, and, unsurprisingly, comes about halfway through the narrative. The protag is knocked on their ass, plans have failed, the Wizard refuses to send Dorothy Home, Bilbo is trapped in the Goblin cave, Westley is dead and Buttercup will be forced to marry Prince Humperdink. The Midpoint leads to Plot Point 2: the moment the protag is at their lowest. Everything that could go wrong has, and it seems as though they will never succeed, but they have to make a choice: forge ahead anyway, or give up. And Plot Point 2 is them doing just that: reflecting on the failure that was the Midpoint, and making a decision to do something about it. This is usually the moment the protag changes from being reactionary to proactive. And so ends Act 2.

The Third Act: Resolution  The third act, also called “The Dark Night of the Soul”, commences with the protag still trying to clean up after themselves despite the hopeless situation. They have grown stronger, but so has the villain. They know they must face the conflict head on, but they doubt they can handle it. Before the Climax often comes the Pre-Climax, and no, it’s not a weird sex thing. This is the three challenges Harry, Ron, and Hermione must face while trying to retrieve the sorcerer’s stone. The climax is obviously Harry confronting Voldemort, but getting past Fluffy, the Devil’s Snare, the enchanted chess set, and the room of potions constitutes the pre-climax. The protagonist must face danger, sometimes even the villain themself, but it is not yet the final and ultimate confrontation and overcoming of the conflict. Often times, the protagonist is left in a weakened state, and aren’t at the top of their game when heading into the Climax. They are forced to face the conflict head on in the Climax. This is the final moments of the story’s overarching conflict, and it has to be settled here. This usually takes the form of an ultimate clash between the protagonist and the antagonist in fantasy. One or the other comes out victorious, and the remainder of the act follows the same lines as Freytag’s Denouement. The very ending involves the wrapping up all the loose ends, fulfilling any promises made to the reader, and releasing the tension built up from the climax. This part is important as well. Have you ever watched or read a murder mystery when the story just abruptly ends with the killer being arrested? I know I’m often left wondering “But what happened to everyone else? How did the victim’s family react when they found out who the murderer was? What about the subplot about Character A and Character B gradually developing a romance, did that ever pan out? And whatever happened to the guy they THOUGHT did it and got accused and arrested but was actually innocent? He was never mentioned again!”

[jbrentonparker]

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the water is turned on.

Louis L’Amour

[jbrentonparker]

Plotting Method #1: The Freytag Pyramid

Now that I’m over a particularly nasty, week-long cold, I’m going to jump into breaking down the plotting methods I briefly covered in an earlier post! Here’s the quick overview I gave of the first method:

The Freytag Pyramid:

Developed by German novelist and playwright Gustav Freytag, the pyramid was really developed to map out the story structure of five act Greek and Shakespearean dramas, but it can often be modified and applied to short stories and novels as well.

In Freytag’s pyramid, there are five parts (acts) to a narrative:

Exposition, in which the background of characters and events that occurred prior to the plot are given; Rising Action, which is the series of events that lead up towards the greatest point of interest, or the turning point in the narrative; Climax, which isn’t the same as what other people refer to as the “climax” of a story–Freytag means the turning point that changes the protagonist’s fate; Falling Action, when the conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist comes to a head (what is actually usually called the “climax” in novel writing); And Denouement, all the stuff after the Falling Action to the very last scene, in which the narrative is wrapped up for better or for worse.

As mentioned above, Gustav Freytag developed this story structure map specifically in relation to Greek and Shakespearean plays. With a little bit of tweaking though, it can be used to structure prose as well.

Exposition: In Shakespeare plays, this literally comes in the form of exposition in which the background for the play is stated outright to the audience. “In fair Verona where we lay our scene...” etc etc. In a novel, this would be the first chapter of Harry Potter (again, I’m going to frequently use Harry Potter as my example, since most people are at least familiar with the story). In chapter 1, “The Boy Who Lived”, the audience is given the background. Takes place in England in modern times. Strange things which are revealed to be of a magical nature at the end of the chapter are not common, or commonly known about. Wizards are a thing, but they hide from the non-magical world. Harry Potter is special, but he will not know that for many years. We learn the setting, and the state of “normal” within the bounds of the narrative is established. This is important!

Even if you are reading the most wild, out-there fantasy or scifi story ever, the reader has to know what is considered normal in the context of your world before things can start going crazy, otherwise it’s easy to lose their attention along the way. That being said, the establishment of normalcy can be quick. I’ll reference Artemis Fowl, since it’s another fairly popular middle grade book many people have read. The first book starts off in Ho Chi Minh city--bam, we know it’s set on earth. There is a cafe, Artemis and Butler are wearing suits, they drive a hummer. We know it’s set in modern day.  It is explained that Artemis is searching for something, and he worries this may be another failed attempt. We know that whatever is going on isn’t common or usual. We meet the fairy, and it is established that this is not an everyday occurance, and that Artemis’s knowledge of them as a human is singular.

So the fantasy aspect of the plot is introduced very early on, but even so, we are given a very clear concept of what the normal state of things is in these books: fairies exist, but humans do not know about them. Therefore, Artemis knowing about them is unusual, special, and worth writing a book about.

So exposition and establishing the state of “normal” in the context of your novel often go hand in hand. Neither usually last more than a chapter or two however; you don’t want to leave your readers waiting for the “good stuff” for too long.

The Rising Action: All the stuff leading up to your main character taking action, or being forced to take action, or what have you. In Hamlet, this would be all of Hamlet’s whinging about what to do, whether to take revenge or not. In Neverwhere, this would be the bits where Richard is just “along for the ride”, just trying to get his life back while staying as minimally involved in Door’s actual drama as possible.In this part, the protagonist is usually trying to avoid the conflict, or keep it from happening.

Climax: The climax in Freytags’s pyramid is very different than “the climax of a novel”! They are two totally different creatures. I like to think of Freytag’s Climax as “The Point of No Return”. This is the moment the protagonist must face the conflict for better or for worse. This is a major turning point in the story, and there is no going back to the way things were after this moment. In Romeo and Juliet, this is when Romeo kills Tybalt and is banished. Things can never be resolved peacefully now, he has slain a member of Juliet’s family, he is banished, they are now physically as well as socially separated, the rift between their two families is bigger than ever, worst has come to worst (or so they all think at the time). Often during the Climax/Point of No Return, things have gone very wrong. The protagonist is forced into action because there is no other alternative. The can no longer avoid or prevent or flee or peacefully deal with the conflict, they must face is head on like a freight train barreling down upon them. Then comes the:

Denouement: the way the characters deal with the fallout of the climax. Juliet gets her hands on some poison and sends Romeo a letter--which he never gets. Hamet stages a play “wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king”. Now this is the part where Freytag’s model as it applies to plays does no align so well with prose. In Freytag’s model, who more substages follow: Catastrophe, and the Moment of Last Suspense. Catastrophe is Romeo believing he finds Juliet dead, and killing himself, and then Juliet awakens and kills herself as well. In the Moment of Last Suspense, the two families come together and see how their behavior has led to two such bitter deaths, and finally let bygones be bygones. In Prose, however, you have the Climax instead of Catastrophe (though your climax could be a catastrophe, but it doesn’t have to be obviously).

The conflict comes to a head, the protagonist and the antagonist often clash especially in fantasy, tensions are as high as possible, the stakes are as high as possible, and the protagonist must deal with the conflict and deal with it now. In a narrative without a human antagonist, this would be, say, the scene where the protagonist gets trapped in an avalanche but claws their way out of the snow and drags themselves, half-frozen, to the side of the road where they collapse, only to be found (alive? dead?) hours later by a passing hiker. In Monsters Inc, it’s pretty much the entire last twenty minutes of the movie.

Then, hopefully, if you’re a kind writer, you end with your wrap up, your own Moment of Last Suspense--which usually isn’t really all that suspenseful, but the same concept applies. Tensions are released, loose ends are tied up, questions are answered, and we have a sense of how the conflict was resolved. You could, of course, end your story with your character half-frozen on the side of the road after an avalanche for dramatic reasons, but most readers like to see the “after” bit of the “happily (or not so happily) ever after”. I know I once read a trilogy that I otherwise adored, but the ending killed me--it just ended immediately after the villain was defeated, with the characters standing of the edge of a cliff, hundreds of miles from home, after a harrowing, month-long journey to get there in the first place. As a reader, I wanted to see the characters I loved get back home safely as much as I wanted to see the antagonist defeated, so that ending disturbed me a little. An excellent example of a satisfying wrap up, in my opinion at least, is Neverwhere. I won’t go into it because I’d hate to spoil it for those who have not yet read it, but I think it is fantastically satisfying.

I believe that more or less covers the aspects of the Freytag model and how it can be applied to prose. Stay tuned for the next detailed overview, the Three Act Structure!