purpose

As I said in the last post, I've been applying my "checklist" system to scenes in the stories I'm working on, and have come up with a couple of amendments. The first had to do with conflict; this one has to do with purpose.
Purpose is now the sixth category on my checklist. It's different from the Goals category, which is about what the characters are trying to achieve in the scene; purpose is about what you are trying to achieve. It's where you ask yourself: why am I putting this scene into my story? How does it fit into the overall narrative?
Is it there to grab the reader's attention and hook her so she has to read the rest of the story? Is it there to reveal a character's personality, or demonstrate conflict in a relationship, or to show that a character has grown in some way? It might be there to introduce a setting or to give the reader some important information. Or it might serve several purposes at once.
These are, of course, questions I ask myself all the time. NOT!
Nah, usually I just dive in and start flailing. And that can be okay; sometimes you can discover amazing things by flailing. When it comes to actually putting the story together, though (or revising it), there's a place for purposefulness. After all, if you don't know what you're trying to acheive with a scene, you can't really know if you're achieving it.

more about conflict

I've been using my checklist system for the last few scenes I've worked on, and have been finding incredibly helpful. Even for scenes that aren't a struggle to write, taking a few minutes to go through the checklist and answer the questions seems to give me a better, more organic "feel" for what's going on between the characters and where things need to go.
After I'd applied the checklist to three different scenes, I noticed that a couple of amendments are in order. The first has to do with conflict, since only one of the three scenes I "checklisted" actually fit my definition of conflict. I assumed conflict usually comes from characters clashing over competing wants or needs, as in the example of the guy who wants bus change getting in a fight with a coffee shop owner.
One story I'm working on has where a group of characters are meeting to discuss how they're going to solve a crime, though. They don't have competing wants or needs because they all want the same thing: to solve the crime. Instead, the characters are in conflict with whoever committed the crime, a person who isn't present in the scene.
In another story I have a scene with only one character in it. Is there conflict? Yes! He's in conflict with himself as he tries to rationalize his own behavior, so he has competing wants and needs within himself. Internal conflict, in other words. Thinking it over, I realized that it's this internal conflict that makes a scene interesting (to me, anyway). It gives a sense of depth that you can't get from external conflict alone.
In the example of the guy arguing with the coffee shop owner, we could say that the main character is really yelling at the coffee guy because he's mad at himself for leaving things 'til the last minute. Like most of us, he finds it much easier to blame the other guy for being such a jerk than to face up to his inner motivations.
Maybe his leaving things to the last minute is a form of self sabotage. He might not really want to go on that date because he's still in love with his ex. Or perhaps he's late meeting his parole office because he doesn't trust himself or feel equipped to deal with life "on the outside." By adding the internal conflict he suddenly seems more real and interesting than if he was just some guy yelling in a coffee shop.
So going back to the checklist, I think it's useful to think about what kind of conflict your scene has, and not just whether or not your scene has any. And maybe ask yourself if it could be made even more interesting by adding internal conflict to an externally focused scene--or vice versa.
Next post, I'll talk about the other amendment I want to make to my checklist: Purpose.

what's wrong with this picture?

So, you know how it is when you're writing a scene and everything's just humming along with dialogue, setting and characters just kind of clicking in place? Right. Well that's not what's happening with the scene I'm working on now. It's been a bitch to write, but the good news is, I figured out why. The scene has two fundamental problems that I somehow didn't notice right away.
First of all, I had a huge coincidence where my secondary character just happens to show up at around the same time my two main characters arrive on the scene. The guy has a reason to be there--he's visiting the grave of a family member--but what are the odds that he'd turn up just when my two heroes do?
Second, I didn't give my secondary character a clear goal. Sure he's got a reason to be where he is, but that didn't give him a strong motivation to interact with the main characters. So, when I got the three of them talking to each other, the dialogue kept coming out all rambling and stilted. No wonder!
The thing that bugs me the most about this is that I spent literally hours plugging away on this scene, patiently rewriting in hopes that it would suddenly start working. So, I hereby promise myself that from now on, whenever I find myself slogging away on a scene that doesn't work, I will step back and go through the following checklist of super-basic questions:

1). Logic: Does the situation make sense? Do the characters have a reason to be in that particular place, at that particular time, doing the things they're doing?

2). Coincidence: Does anything in the scene happen by chance? Not that coincidences are always bad, but they should be there for a good reason. (Hint: laziness on the author's part is not a good reason.)

3). Goals: Does each character (or group of characters) have something that they're trying to accomplish? This doesn't have to be saving the world; maybe your character just needs bus change.

4). Conflict: Are the goals of one character (or group) in opposition to what the other side wants? And this doesn't have to involve explosions; maybe the character who wants the bus change could get into an argument with a coffee shop owner who doesn't want to give it to him.

5). Stakes: Do the characters care about the outcome? If the bus-change-seeking character misses his bus, will he be late for something important, like a date or an appointment with his parole officer?

Pretty obvious stuff, you say? Well, yeah. But it's the obvious stuff that tends to slip my attention when I get caught up in the minute details of writing a scene. And when I run into difficulty, my tendency is to just work harder at the thing that's not working. Sometimes that's okay; sometimes I do just need to plug away at it. But even then, taking five minutes to run through the checklist couldn't hurt. In fact, I think I'm going to change my resolution: from now on I will run through the checklist *before* I start writing a scene, and maybe I won't run into so many snags in the first place!

the shower story

My total for last week is 4589 words. Comparatively low for me, but I'm okay with that because it all feels like progress. For one thing, my untitled Yami story is growing a title! I'm calling it Stigma. For now, anyway. Up til last week it was just "the shower story," because it's based on a scene from one of my old notebooks in which Tsuzuki and Hisoka are about to get in the shower together.

My task in writing this story is to figure out how they got to that point. Since I want the lead-up to flow seamlessly into the existing scene, so it's been a matter of plotting in reverse. I started by going through the shower scene and picking out elements of dialogue, situation, relationship dynamics, and so on.

Much as I tried to be systematic, though, it took a lot of writing and throwing away to get to a beginning for the story that has the right vibe to set up the mood of the later part of the story. As tough as it is, though, I'm really happy with how it's starting to come together. Of course I'll be even happier when the boys start coming together...

carbonmade rocks!

My current work contract is coming to an end at the animation studio where I work, so one of the things I absolutely had to get done last week was get my portfolio online and updated and looking reasonably professional.

I'd been putting it off because, while I technically can build websites, and have done so in the past, I was dreading the actual image gallery part. Lucky for me, I discovered carbonmade.com.

It's a portfolio service that lets you put your images up for free, in a very professional looking format. They also have a paid version that allows more images, but the free one was perfectly fine for what I needed to do. So carbonmade gets a big thumbs up from me, and for anyone who's interested, feel free to check out my spiffy new animation portfolio!

Word count

I was sick with an Evil Virus this week, so I was amazed to tally up my word count for the week and realize that I still got just over 7,000 words written, across three different projects.

Embarrassingly, the vast majority of that, around 4,500 words, was written for my untitled project, though the actual chunk that I'm keeping is under 3,000 words. I wonder if an inevitable part of writing consists of churning out scenes until something actually seems to fit. Maybe it is, though I can't help wondering if there's some way to shorten that process. Perhaps it's a skill that comes with experience?

On the plus side, I was typing along on Lucidity this week and suddenly realized that I have one scene left to go in Act 2, which means I am halfway through the first draft! Act 2 is a mess at the moment, with randomly placed chapter breaks and a number of original characters who don't actually have names yet, but that's okay... it's progress, and I'm really excited about it.

My favorite line is from my untitled story, so far called "the shower story" on my hard drive.

Hisoka stilled beneath him, his eyes taking on a look of expectancy. His body felt hot through the layers of their clothing and he was all sinew and sharp angles, his lean chest rising in sharp, quick pants.

I so love writing from Tsuzuki's POV...

weekly word count

Favorite line of the week:

Hisoka's body, frozen as it was at a hormonally inconvenient age, was not to be trusted at the best of times. Sharing hotel rooms with Tsuzuki when they were out on cases together had become its own special kind of torture.

My butt is being kicked by an Evil Virus this week, but I still managed to get a decent chunk of writing done. For Lucidity, my "A" story, I got 4,669 words written. For my untitled "B" story, I wrote 2,315 words, and for a third story, tentatively titled Scorched Earth, I wrote 1,379 words. So for the week of March 2 thru 8, that's a grand total of...

8,363 words. Yay, me!