Story Arcs

There’s a couple of TV shows that were good but didn’t make my list because they contained story arcs.  These are stories that encompass the entire season.  Bad guy shows up in the first episode, and then he’s defeated in the season finale.  Or, in the case of other series, the arc continues as long as the series lasts (The X files) or resolves at the end of the run (Babylon 5).

These don’t hold up well for me over time.  Great in the first run, but not when I come back to it.  Much harder for me to get into.  The problem is that they need to be watched in order in entirety to get the story, and I need to see the entire season.  Worse, if the story arc doesn’t work, it isn’t an episode or two that’s affected–it’s the entire season (Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s 6th season).   One of the B5’s DVDs was not available so I was sent the next DVD, which created a lot of confusion for me because I didn’t know what was going on.  I couldn’t just tune into an episode at random.

I’ve also seen the same thing in some books.  There was a urban fantasy writer I picked up because I liked the title.  There were whole sections that referenced the previous part of the series in a vague sort of way, and it essential to understanding what was going on.  But I hadn’t read the first book, so I couldn’t get into the story.  I never took the time to read the author again.  On the other hand, I’ve picked up books with underlying story arcs that are less dominant–Jim Butcher–with a stong story that has a resolution.  Those are written so that a reader could pick it up at any point in the series, read the book, enjoy the story, and maybe want to get the first book to start reading the entire series.

On  the other end of the spectrum, there are also both TV series and books where they ignore what’s happening in previous books.  One of my bottom five TV shows, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, was like that.  The crew would encounter an alien or a monster trying to take over the world and act like it was the first time it would happened.  Whereas, in shows like NCIS, they bring a character back who appeared in one episode in another season, and everyone knows her from that.  Not necessary for us to have seen the episode, but it might make us want to see the episode.

A good story arc in a series should allow us to pick up at any point along the way and not require readers or viewers to have prior knowledge.

 

What Did I Learn This Year?

One of the great–and aggravating things about writing–is that no matter how much I learn, I always find there’s something else new to learn.  This last year is no different.  So what did I learn this last year?

1.  That I could finish a book on my own.  I’d gotten into co-writing for two books (same book, completely different rewrite) because I struggled so much with plotting the story itself.  Then we broke up.  I wrote a first draft in thirty days to prove to myself I could actually get an entire book done without a co-writer.

2. To outline.  This last year, I finally found an outline that really works for me.  I think I’ve tried every form there is, so I ended up making up one of my own.  That’s one of the major reasons why I’ve done better with plotting.  Still not perfect, but the outline has helped me keep from doing rewrites of the entire book to work my way into the story.

3. That I need to stick with writing what only I can write.  Earlier this year, I was trying to make a subplot work (the one I’ve been having so much trouble with), so I introduced a crime to the book.  I figured it would be a way to make those elements Ineeded for the story come into play.  Spectacular crash and burn.  It should have been a sign when I fought my way through the chapter showing the discovery of the body.  I like to read crime novels, but write them?  Not for me.

4.  Omniscient viewpoint.  This year, I discovered omniscient viewpoint.  All of the writing books had generally dismissed it as not being used any more and never had explained why you might want to use it.  I did a viewpoint workshop in February where I rewrote my opening in all the viewpoints and realized that my story needed to be omniscient.

What I go into the new year learning:

1.  Taking advantage of everything in the story.  If an unnamed waitress walks into the book for one scene, I’m reminding myself to think about what else I can do with her.  At the moment, said waitress is going to tattle to the tabloids about something she didn’t hear (no, that’s not a typo; she just made something up).

2. Subplots.  I still have a lot of problems with this one, but each effort I make chipping away at it gets me close to possible solutions. 

3.  The sense of smell.    Earlier this year, I did a workshop on description that I had a really hard time with.  Two reasons:  How I do description and inflexibility on the kinds of scenes we were writing using all the senses.  I tend to spread my description over more than a few pages.  I also had a problem with describing characters and senses like smell in the middle of an action scene (that was the inflexibility part) where the choices were things like fighting and extreme sports.  But since then, I’ve run into a book which used the sense of smell throughout (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) and did a different workshop where smell was approached differently, and I’m thinking about ways to use it more.  Not in the middle of an action scene, though.

Subplot Woes

I’ve run smack into a subplot problem with my WIP.  Me and subplots–we don’t get along, and I’ve been wrestling with this one for a while.  The problem is that I can’t get the book moving forward unless this particular subplot is fixed; it’s very important to elements in the main storyline. 

This is my third attempt to get this particular subplot working.  I’m still trying to understand why they are so difficult for me.  Some of it is because I did short stories for many, many years.  They often have a simple story, and of course, no room for subplots.

But I was also studying published books to see how authors handled subplots, and at that time, ran into badly done subplots.  I remember one that you could easily skip over and not miss anything.  Another went on for 100 pages–too much time away from the main storyline.

I studied Laurell K. Hamilton’s books to see how she did subplots.  In her early books, she both had subplots that tied into the main story and were page turners in themselves.  Ironically, her lack of subplots in her most recent book shows me why it’s so important to have them.  Subplots give the reader a necessary break from the main story.

Right now, I’m contemplating information from two sites I found over the last week:

Just Plotting Along.  J.A. Konrath talks about not only having a story goal but a personal goal.  Once I thought about that, I realized that I already have some of those elements in place.  Now I have to think about howt o make them work.

Don’t Waste Your Plot Ideas from The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes by Jack Bickham.  It says there are sometimes problems coming up with enough incidents and events for a novel, so it’s important to do more with what you have.   That is, if I introduce a waitress in one of my chapters, maybe I should think if there’s anything else I can do with her. 

What’s really interesting is that I originally had the Bickham book, but I gave it to a book sale about five years ago.  At the time, it felt like I’d gotten everything I needed out of it–but I never picked up on what was in this particular section. Here I am, with a fresh perspective, and suddenly this section is very important in what I’m doing now.