Fall Reading Reviews '15

OCEAN’S EIGHT (2018) dir. Gary Ross

Writing from Scratch #12: Compound Plots, Part 2

Compound Plots, Part 2: Parallel Plots

Parallel plots share a lot in common with subordinate plots. As with subordinate plots, parallel plots occur simultaneously – the individual problems and their solutions should be introduced and resolved at roughly the same time. However, parallel plots can be divided from each other and stand on their own, unlike with a subordinate plot which is dependent on the principle plot for its try-fail cycles.

“Parallel plots” is a bit of a misnomer. “Parallel” comes from the idea of parallelism in sentence construction because parallel plots often act as mirrors to one another or two sides of the same coin; they often work on each other indirectly to strengthen or emphasize the Thought of the story. What we don’t want to do is fall into the trap of thinking that the plots cannot intersect; although you should be able to separate them into their own stories, in a single story, they are meant to work together.

Superhero stories have parallel plots a plenty with the main character dealing with a plot-problem as their civilian identity and dealing with a different plot-problem as their superhero identity. We’ll look at one of these examples, Spiderman: Homecoming. Peter Parker is dealing with a Character plot in overcoming his lack of confidence to ask Liz out on a date; meanwhile Spiderman is dealing with an Inquiry plot involving the sale of alien tech weaponry on the streets. These do have points of overlap – they should for effective storytelling. However, if you take the Inquiry plot out of the story, you have a rom-com/coming-of-age story with a complete plot of no confidence to ask Liz out to yes confidence to ask Liz out. If you take the Character plot out of the story, you still have Spiderman investigating the origin of the alien tech weaponry.

Continue Reading on WordPress

Story idea: the local Academy of Magic has an Archaeology Department. They have an ongoing feud with the Necromancy Department because necromancers keep stealing bones from the archaeological lab, and archaeologists keep interrupting necromancy rites to ask the undead about their funerary rites.

The two departments also keep arguing over which one of them has the highest count of “ooops-found-an-ancient-evil-thing-and-almost-destroyed-the-world”.

Writing from Scratch is a series I’ve started on my blog as a way to get back to the basics of the storytelling craft.

I wrote well over 20 of these blog posts in April while I was out of work and self-isolating at home. I don’t have to say that since then a lot has changed. I considered not posting any of these at least for now; who needs my silly thoughts on writing silly stories when the world may finally be coming to the tipping point of the end of systemic racism? But I have always expressed myself through story – my hopes, my dreams, my fears – and for me, it’s gift to have this outlet. So I want to share it. Storytelling developed so that we could make sense of the world and shape it into a safe place by creating community. Stories won’t win this war against oppression that has been raging for centuries, but stories reveal the truth of our hearts, and for that, I believe they are essential.

i hope this doesn’t need to be said but just in case

you might have seen people talking about sudowrite and/or their tool storyengine recently

and just like… don’t. don’t do it. don’t try it out just to see what it’s about.

for two main reasons:

1) never feed anything proprietary into a large language model (LLM, eg ChatGPT, google bard, etc.).

this means don’t give it private company information when you’re at work, but also don’t give it your original writing. that’s your work.

because of the way these language models work, anything you feed into it is part of it now. and yeah, the FAQ says they “don’t claim ownership” over anything and yeah, they give you that reassuring bullshit about how unlikely it is that the exact same sentence will be reconstructed—

but that’s not the point.

do you have an unusual way of constructing sentences? a metaphor you like to use? a writing tic that sets you apart from the rest? anything that gives you a unique writing voice?

feed your writing into an LLM, and the model has your voice now. the model can generate text that sounds like it was written by you and someone else can claim it’s theirs because they gave the model a prompt.

don’t feed the model.

2) the other reason is that sudowrite scraped a bunch of omegaverse fic without consent to build their model and that’s a really shitty thing to do, because it means people weren’t given the chance to choose whether or not to feed the model.

don’t feed the model.

Writing from Scratch #5

The Inquiry Plot

The problem of an inquiry plot involves a question that needs answering for its solution. The classic is Whodunnit? But any who, what, where, when, why, or how style questions can provide the problem for an inquiry plot. Traditionally, try-fail cycles in an inquiry plot come in the form of following clues which can lead to more clues (or questions) or end up being red-herrings that have caused a set back in solving the riddle.

Let’s look at the classic mystery “A Night of Fright is No Delight,” Scooby Doo! Where Are You? Season 1, episode 16. (I went a little overboard on this one, but it’s just too fun!)

If you haven’t seen this classic episode, then a quick background is that the gang has been invited to spend the night in an allegedly haunted house for the chance to receive a part of an inheritance along with four other possible heirs.

The Question: Who is the Phantom Shadow?

Read More on WordPress

How fucking annoying is it when you feel so restless with creative energy but you can’t decide what to do with it and when you finally try to create something it comes out shit so you just give up and sit there being all creatively annoyed and jittery.

Structuring a Series: Part II

Structuring a Series: Part II: Extrapolating Complete Episodes from the Trilogy #writerslife

Welcome back! If you haven’t checked out Part I already, go ahead and do that; we’ll be right here when you get back. Extrapolating Complete Episodes from the Trilogy (more…)

View On WordPress

Writing from Scratch #1

Welcome to Writing from Scratch!

I’ve been writing a long time, and sometimes it feels like I lose the trees for the forest. Writing from Scratch is a chance for me (and you!) to get back to the basics of storytelling.

If you’ve never written a story before, if you’ve never felt like you could come up with one that would be worth writing, my hope is that if you follow along with me here, you will have the confidence and know-how to come up with an idea, build it into a story, and share it with the world.

These posts will be little, easy-to-digest nuggets. At the end of every post, look for a prompt and share your response in the comments!

What Is a Story?

A story can be defined by what it contains: at least one plot, character, and setting, and a style through which it is told.

Story Bits

To begin, let’s take a look at the second smallest unit of a story – the sentence. A sentence is a set of words that conveys a complete thought. And communication is fractal, meaning each part shares the same pattern as the whole. A story and its components, therefore, will also convey a Complete Thought.

Continue Reading on WordPress