posted
As I sprinkle tinder on the glowing embers of my previous writing career and try and coax them into some small semblance of a flame I decided to go back in time and resurrect the first story I ever wrote. Of course it's unfinished, but it served its purposes at that time.
Anyway, I decided now was the time to seek out the inciting incident to trigger the events that start the action. To be precise, I needed a 'real world' trigger that would cause a transcendental crisis in the mind of the central character which eventually manifests in a 'real-world' event that will start the whole ball rolling. Confused? You should be, I am.
During a session of free-association with a number of glasses of fermented grape juice I came up with an idea: The trigger to all of this was the character watching a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis only to be ensnared and eaten by a spider while it waits for its wings to dry. Great, let's go!
Then I had a crisis of confidence: Really, that's what you're going with? As I was being consumed with self-doubt, two days ago while motorcycling through the bush I came across a juvenile bird of one species (Currawong) killing a fledgling of another species (Australian mynah). It was just nature doing its thing; survival of the fittest and the fight over scarce resources. But its callous, unrelenting brutality affected me. It shouldn't have--I've seen people do far worse to each other. Which I guess validates my fictional inciting trigger. It isn't as lame as it first sounded.
Just wondering if anyone else has had a fictional idea validated by events in the real world.
posted
I've never had an experience quite like that, but I do get story ideas from real life from time to time.
I actually got a story idea pondering this concept--I realized I could translate what used to be a fairly frightening experience to me into something even worse if I added a speculative element. (I worked at a hotel for about five months, mostly night shifts. It's absolutely nerve-wracking when someone storms into the building at two a.m. demanding their significant other's room number because their car is outside. Especially when the person in question is male, half a foot taller than you, and has muscles that show through his skin like taut cables.)
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posted
A butterfly newly emerged from its chrysalis eaten by a spider is an inspired metaphor: once maturity is achieved, while taking stock of the adult form and final preparation for the new conditions, the life is ended by an ambush predator. I imagine the spider is one of the ambush types, like a wolf or crab spider, perhaps a tarantula. Which specific species is a matter of setting specificity and its influence of the drama.
Survival of the fittest is a four-cornered Darwinian concept, not merely a matter of the strongest, cleverest survive, the oppressive militant society model: species fitness to habitat, species reproductive success, inheritable fitness to habitat, and inheritable reproductive success -- natural selection's mechanics anyway. Fitness's social aesthetics follow the mechanical ones: reciprocal, shared, and mutual efforts and outcomes bind social species' fitness.
Synthesis of Darwinian fitness is to species, not individuals. A number of other matters attend fitness, like intraspecies' social co-dependence; social coordination at least (reciprocal), sometimes cooperation (shared), uncommonly codetermination (mutual), often dysfunctional co-dependence unto toxic contention, confliction, confrontation, conflagration; suitability to habitat as well; that is, a fit species thrives upon and expands to the limits of its habitat's resource provisions. Fitness may depend upon, for examples, concealment, guile, wisdom, retreat, noncontentious social interaction, shared resource consumption, and coordinated resource and habitat conservation. An unfit species exhausts its habitat's resources and dies back, perhaps unto the brink of extinction.
How, though, does a vulnerable insect and an ambush insect's fitness contest event relate to the human condition? "Ambush" is a key word. For such a metaphor to succeed, the human condition connection might should be accessible at the instant of reading the scene, like through personification and diction choices: humanized portrayal of the contest. Like the butterfly's drying out alludes to, say, an infant's first natal moments, or that of an adult after a bathe in a pond; the spider's that of a peeping tom or rogue thief or a stalker bent on violence, or some such allusions.
Yeah, sometimes validation comes unbidden, sometimes it comes from development processes. What is natural? Naturally, an ambush predator preys on vulnerability. That a prey species thrives nonetheless is due to abundant reproduction, species fitness in numbers. Some are prey; some are predators -- the pure state of Nature human condition. Yet human natural law demands at least cooperation, elsewise the predator species exhausts the habitat's resources and perishes or becomes the prey of the vulnerable masses. Nature abhors oversaturation as much as a vacuum.
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posted
There is also the possibility that because you are attuned to a particular perspective on things, you will see other things that fit that perspective and seem to validate it.
Not unlike the experience of becoming aware of a particular kind of car and then seeing that kind of car almost everywhere you go after that. Are there suddenly cars like that all over, or were they always there, but you didn't notice them because they didn't mean anything to you?
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quote:Originally posted by Disgruntled Peony: I've never had an experience quite like that, but I do get story ideas from real life from time to time.
I actually got a story idea pondering this concept--I realized I could translate what used to be a fairly frightening experience to me into something even worse if I added a speculative element. (I worked at a hotel for about five months, mostly night shifts. It's absolutely nerve-wracking when someone storms into the building at two a.m. demanding their significant other's room number because their car is outside. Especially when the person in question is male, half a foot taller than you, and has muscles that show through his skin like taut cables.)
Disgruntled Peony, that experience has enough drama in it that it would scare me without any supernatural elements added. What in the world did you do?
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quote:Originally posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury:
quote:Originally posted by Disgruntled Peony: I've never had an experience quite like that, but I do get story ideas from real life from time to time.
I actually got a story idea pondering this concept--I realized I could translate what used to be a fairly frightening experience to me into something even worse if I added a speculative element. (I worked at a hotel for about five months, mostly night shifts. It's absolutely nerve-wracking when someone storms into the building at two a.m. demanding their significant other's room number because their car is outside. Especially when the person in question is male, half a foot taller than you, and has muscles that show through his skin like taut cables.)
Disgruntled Peony, that experience has enough drama in it that it would scare me without any supernatural elements added. What in the world did you do?
I will admit I exaggerated the musculature in my initial description, but the guy did look pretty strong. I explained that I couldn't give out any room information. He yelled for a bit and then stalked outside, where he proceeded to continue yelling as he waited in the parking lot. I ended up calling the cops because the hotel in question was way too low budget to afford any kind of security guard. They talked to the guy and I think he ended up leaving of his own accord.
I might be meshing multiple tales into one. This happened in some variation at least three times during the five months that I worked there, with different people every time.
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posted
An angry guy can be scary even if he isn't all that strong. Good job, Disgruntled Peony.
And meshing multiple tales is one thing writers have to do at times. It doesn't make the story any less valid and meaningful.
For example when you start out with too many characters and realize that you have to merge some of them into each other because you don't need so many to tell the tale.
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Conflation (n), or conflate (v), is the term of art I know of for combining events, settings, and characters of prose. The method is somewhat odd and fascinating in that conflation is most crucial for short prose, perhaps, at times, a worthy consideration for long prose. Yet specificity, likewise a crucial method, often opposes conflation. The Goldilocks ideal is a delicate weighted proportion for each.
However, as well, the two methods are a harmonic synthesis if unnecessary repetition bogs down a narrative. A term encountered for that is "circling the drain," where circumstances repeat without new or amplified escalation. One dead body, two, three, discovered in sequence, circles the drain, unless new revelations and further influence transpires.
Yet Vladimir Propp proposes the Law of Threes, three refusals to act against problems and for wants in particular; three events sequenced provokes motivations. Other triplets as well: three bears; three chairs, three porridge dishes, three beds, etc., in three acts.
One circumstance can be an incitement of the action and the problem only partially unraveled, a problem puzzle-type mystery, for example. The second circumstance then reveals more pertinent clues and altogether of a greater emotional charge. The third circumstance reveals more clues and further builds emotional charge, such that puzzle problem satisfaction appears conclusive, though is not yet, not for a complex plot, yes, for a simple plot.
The complex plot-type revelations result in a dramatic pivot, or turn or twist, a ninety degrees or more reversal of the action. Sought the murderer, for example, and discover the murderer is an agent of another actor. Pivoted -- now the puzzle is who is the other actor and that actor's perhaps different though congruent motivations and stakes.
Such crimes, all crimes, all antisocial acts base upon [guilty] motive, means, and opportunity, plus mens rea, guilty thought, or the entire Latin: actus reus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea -- the act is not culpable unless the mind is guilty. Plus actus reus, a guilty act, one that attends a mens rea -- [guilty] thought, word, and deed. Motive, means, and opportunity, in a nutshell, prose's complication feature of motivations, and conflict's stakes in opposition. Tone develops added emotional charge from an emotional attitude toward the subject crime and persona or personas involved.
A brute who braces a hotel clerk to find a love interest who, what, fled from the brute? is motivated, has means, and opportunity, though is somewhat emotionally inflamed and less than fully conscious of a mens rea and actus reus. The brute's not in an entire right mind, unforgivable conduct no less. The brute's conflicted and emotionally tonal, too. So has motivations, stakes, and tone.
What about the clerk? What about the love interest? Their private motivations, stakes, and tones? The expected public action of the clerk and the interest is avoid a spectacle scene of confrontation and conflagration. A surprise and perhaps artful set of private motivations and stakes might be congruent and contradict the public ones. Say the clerk knows the interest is capital-T trouble and the brute is too. Arrange circumstances so that both are satisfactorily alleviated for the clerk and the public.
What, though, about the clerk's private motivations and stakes? Personal safety, sure, what privately else though? Some related personal want-problem, like a net gain at some personal cost, say the cost is safety posed for a time in jeopardy, and alleviated by restoration of safety and a personal gain. Hah! Transferred to a better-paid and daytime shift due to the mischief responsibly managed or laterally promoted to a little to no public contact job. Maybe awarded a bonus or public recognition for uncommon bravery. Maybe the private motivation is for a more peaceful and enjoyable home life complicated by the couple lives downstairs neighbors from the clerk!?
The opportune occasion (kairos), though, must of natural necessity be premeditated in order to be authentic, a natural and probable occurrence. The heat of the moment is a difficult occasion in which to act decisively and conclusively. Foreknowledge and preparation, maybe some setup, certainly foreshadowing, might realize a pendent problem when the interest checks into the hotel.
Hah! Deniably let someone peripheral know the interest is there so that the brute timely finds out. Maybe the couple lives downstairs from the clerk and are noisy apartment neighbors; they argue violently and concern for their safety and the safety of the apartment residents and of the clerk are a foremost concern. Problem satisfied at the OK hotel corral, by the timely intervention of the law. Perhaps the interest and brute are wanted, too, in connection with other crimes, say a violent contraband substance distribution conspiracy. This could be a Time wounds all heels message story.
Now, a contemporary or urban fantastical motif could as well suit the story, a near infinite fantastic motif choice.
The above, for me, is an attendant concept validation process; that is, validation part drawn from personal experience, even if unbidden, and part designed to authenticate a narrative's reality through emotional charge and public and private complications and stakes for all central actors.
posted
Actually, in my experience hotel clerks tend to get almost exclusively hired to work the midnight shift since it's the most difficult to cover. If they're lucky, they get promoted to a morning or afternoon position later on if one opens up and/or a new person gets hired. If they're unlucky, or if the hotel is unpleasant enough to work at that it has a high rate of turnover (like every hotel I or anyone I know has ever worked at in my current hometown), the person who gets hired to work the night shift often ends up working swing shifts (night and afternoon shifts, respectively). Because hotel clerks have eight hour shifts, working a swing shift in that kind of job is utterly horrible. You work 11pm to 7am, go home and hope to get five to six hours of sleep if you're lucky because the sun is up and that screws sleep patterns up horribly. Then you get to go back in at 3pm and work until 11. I never had to work a double, but I know people who have. Pretty much the worst possible outcome is working a swing shift that then turns into a double because someone calls off or quits and no one else can cover the midnight shift.
Seriously, I do not recommend working at a hotel except as a last resort. The job is incredibly dehumanizing.
In any case, I'm thinking the hotel clerk is a new hire and has been out of work for awhile, which means she's a) new to the position and doesn't know how rough it is and b) has a strong desire to keep the job because she needs the money. There will probably be other motivations that click into place as I develop her character further, but that seems like a good place to start from.
Beyond that, I have a pretty solid idea of where to take the plot in generalities but I'm not yet to the point of working on specifics. I need to outline the characters and determine the exact details of the fantastical element (because this is definitely dark and dread-filled contemporary/urban fantasy, the way I want to write it). I do know that things aren't going to go as neatly and tidily as they did with me in real life. The antagonistic visitor is going to be a repeat problem for the clerk protagonist rather than a one-time encounter, among other things.
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quote:A butterfly newly emerged from its chrysalis eaten by a spider is an inspired metaphor:
The imagery is indeed a metaphor; on multiple levels. It is, in fact, with certain details left out so as not to cross over into fragments and feedback territory, a metaphor for the entire story. But the story operates on at least three different levels, both emotionally and narratively. One reason why I abandoned it; it was a story well beyond my ability to tell at the time: A complex variation on Freytag's Double Drama. The entire scene is also a subtle and partial foreshadowing of things to come.
quote:Originally posted by Grumpy old guy: Originally posted by extrinsic:
quote:A butterfly newly emerged from its chrysalis eaten by a spider is an inspired metaphor:
The imagery is indeed a metaphor; on multiple levels. It is, in fact, with certain details left out so as not to cross over into fragments and feedback territory, a metaphor for the entire story. But the story operates on at least three different levels, both emotionally and narratively. One reason why I abandoned it; it was a story well beyond my ability to tell at the time: A complex variation on Freytag's Double Drama. The entire scene is also a subtle and partial foreshadowing of things to come.
Phil.
It's certainly an interesting metaphor. Very visual, with a great deal of potential meaning included therein as well. I'm curious about how it ties into the story as a whole, and I don't even know what the story is about.
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posted
I've worked the graveyards for a number of jobs: campground, military, civic, factory, and business watch person, clerk of hotel, and convenience store, 24-hour gas station, grocery, etc., stores, plus restaurant and conference center services that had a five a.m. report and work until as late as 3 a.m., and split shifts that required an early a.m. clock-in, skipped daylight shifts, clock-in late evening again, and late wee early hour clock-out, the daytime shifts kept for favored others.
I've also been a favored other who worked my way up to preferred shifts as well as been passed over for various and sundry excuses why not a favorable shift schedule. My circadian rhythm anymore is non-24 adjustable. The bedroom is sound and light resistant, quiet and dark as best I'm able to arrange it.
The central point of my previous post is that event, setting, and character development, and as needed conflation and specificity, for concept validation among other features, is that each entail public and private motivations, stakes, and attitudes related to a central contest among the agonists, personas or otherwise.
quote:Originally posted by extrinsic: The central point of my previous post is that event, setting, and character development, and as needed conflation and specificity, for concept validation among other features, is that each entail public and private motivations, stakes, and attitudes related to a central contest among the agonists, personas or otherwise.
That is my intention; I've just not worked everything out yet. The idea is still in its infancy. I've got ideas for how to progress, but I'm working on other projects at the moment so I'm going to let it simmer for a bit in the meantime. It will earn my full attention soon enough, I'm sure.
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quote:Originally posted by Grumpy old guy: The imagery is indeed a metaphor; on multiple levels. It is, in fact, with certain details left out so as not to cross over into fragments and feedback territory, a metaphor for the entire story. But the story operates on at least three different levels, both emotionally and narratively. One reason why I abandoned it; it was a story well beyond my ability to tell at the time: A complex variation on Freytag's Double Drama. The entire scene is also a subtle and partial foreshadowing of things to come.
Phil.
Friedrich Schiller's Wallenstein illustrates Freytag's Double Drama discussion. Freytag notes that parts are double threads that unfold separate and concurrent to each other, a part and the whole in particular. Another approach to the same concept is that feature, a standalone piece internal to a larger, main action. "The Battle Royal" excerpt from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is another example. J.R.R. Tolkein's Ring cycle contains numerous long double dramas. Richard Harris's Hannibal Lecter cycle also contains double dramas, some brief, some long. Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holme's ongoing, at times peripheral, contention with Moriarty is a double drama. Picaresque's episodic form is especially amenable to the double drama form.
Double drama's mechanical convention is that aligned, nemesis, and villain contestants begin together or apart, separate in event, time, location, situation, joined now and again and, finally, intersect in a third, fourth, or fifth of five acts, and that the action relate to a central mutual, shared, reciprocal, or contended complication and public and private stakes. Also, a narrative then entails multiple agonists, in particular, protagonist, deuteragonist, and triagonist, or an agonist ensemble. Due to separate events, settings, and characters, double dramas are often longer narratives and a challenge or a distraction issue for shorter narratives.
One short story I know of contains a double drama: Mark Richard's "Strays." I think it's about three or so thousand words. Two central agonists separate from three others, one the objective character, at the start, go their separate though congruent ways apart, and rejoin for a time at the end. Strays indeed.
An aesthetic convention for the double drama is that each agonist have related public and private complications and stakes they must of necessity pursue apart for a time. "The Battle Royal's" separate action transpires for the same agonist as the larger drama; however, the excerpt stands apart due to the episodic wrench from routine it entails and that it stands alone and apart, event and setting-wise, character, too, to the extent the age of the agonist markedly differs from other sections, as a related complete action within a larger complete action.
In short, double drama is a matter of timely and judicious dramatic divergence and intersection.
posted
I didn't know any of that at the time; I'd never heard of Freytag. I'd just found and read James Scott Bell's Plot and Structure in the library, got energised by his opening chapter, The Big Lie, made some notes, and started creating a story. I started with the idea (see Freytag) and then developed a plot and character that would tell my story.
The Idea came first, but the development of character and plot was a symbiotic process--I think. All I know is that I ended up with a, well, a triple drama really.
posted
Do you count Plot and Structure among how-tos? I do, though studied it anyway. Another of a multitude of synonymous explications for dramatic content organization. Most all of Writer's Digest distribution list are. How many does an itinerant writer challenged by content and organization craft need to study, what, three? Enough to learn organization nuances and observe the many are derivative and repetitive of each other. And thousands out on the market.
On the other hand, writers who have developed a formula appreciation probably strengthen their understanding by reducing it to written words arranged to some shape of publication readiness and make a few returns from it. Hah! some net worth after all, additional to challenged writers' formula education services.
A standout takeaway from Bell's is the introduction piece "Putting the Big Lie to Sleep." Its strength is less that the content is original -- that discussion is as old as narrative theory's earliest extant publications -- more so the strong emotional charge and subjectivity of the introduction, which do not rear again later in the work as either craft principles or illustrations of a core or attached concept. Aesthetics edges scratched at somewhat.
Those emotional charge and subjectivity concepts amount to the greater reader effect result from subtle causes more than overt mechanical content and organization concepts. That's a crucial distinction between content and organization how-tos, like Bell's, and poetics' aesthetics, like Freytag's, and a substantive distinction between what works for readers and what doesn't: H. P. Grice's implication principle, and reader capacity to infer therefrom, applied in all its artful grandeur.
Double drama, as Freytag explicates, can be triple or so though no less labeled double drama for simplification's sake, like Tolkien's secondary settings and Jonathan Swift's second voice principles. More than three dramatic threads risks circling the drain, risks lost readers from over-complex and distracted drama, and risks Kierkegaard's infinite absolute negativity from too many ironic contradictions to timely access.
Though I'm reluctant to proscribe more than triple drama threads: no absolutes -- save the one: no absolutes. Henry James' The Turn of the Screw is a triple drama nested within a triple-irony satire. Triplets are a more common narrative phenomenon than doublets or singles, generally.
posted
The short answer to your question is yes; in fact I had outgrown him by the time I reached the end of his book. The greatest help I got from Plot and Structure was his opening chapter; it convinced me I could learn to write despite the learned naysayers hoarding of arcane secrets to themselves.
For a fuller explanation of my thoughts on such things as 'Top Ten Ways to . . .' Internet lists and 'How To' books, give me a day or two to collect my thoughts; they concern both writers and writing in general.
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