{"id":1984,"date":"2013-10-27T11:13:33","date_gmt":"2013-10-27T17:13:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=1984"},"modified":"2013-10-28T00:32:24","modified_gmt":"2013-10-28T06:32:24","slug":"structure-making-a-story-out-of-a-fragment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=1984","title":{"rendered":"Structure: Making a Story Out of a Fragment"},"content":{"rendered":"

The current story’s day or two in structural revision has made huge changes in its organization and now has it on an open track to completion as a story of approximately (after some cutting) the right length.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It’s an interesting example of the kinds of decisions writers make when something doesn’t run easily the first time.\u00a0 The story had a lot of life in it and lot of good stuff.\u00a0\u00a0 It had two POV characters, though–a character familiar to you, and one you never heard of before (nor had I.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It came with a lot of backstory (why X, the new character, was where he was, doing what he was doing, why Y, the familiar character was where he was…etc.)\u00a0\u00a0 I knew fairly early on what happened–who did what and why–and initially it seemed like writing it down would be easy.\u00a0\u00a0 But it wanted to be at least a long novella and probably a novel, which would knock it out of its potential sale to an anthology and put me in the bind of having to come up with another<\/em> story for the anthology (in less than a month.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It kept saying “I’m just part of a novel…not a standalone story.”\u00a0 And I said “NO.\u00a0 You have to be a story.”<\/p>\n

The first obvious thing to do was cut off all but the tiniest, absolutely crucial, backstory.\u00a0\u00a0 Yes, it was interesting that X had done this, and R had done that, and X had come from here and thus knew someone else who had come from there, but…no.\u00a0 Cut, cut, cut.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But cutting off so much backstory merely revealed that the bigger problem was the two POVs.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I had gone on and written large parts in both POVs…and the interplay was fascinating and more revealing than one by itself, but…it was talky.\u00a0\u00a0 A lot of inside-the-head, a lot of discussion between characters, to reveal what each thought\/planned\/etc about what the other had done and said.\u00a0 OK in a novel, where a chapter of each would work, but not OK in a short story.<\/p>\n

Then the question became “Whose POV should it be?”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I had the known characters: not just Y, but some of Y’s associates?\u00a0\u00a0 I know them; I’ve written them before; they’re fully alive to me.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Y, or one of the other known characters, would have the advantage of signaling to readers right away that they were in a Paksworld story.\u00a0\u00a0 (There are other ways to do that, though.)\u00a0 People who liked Y would want to read that story and get more insight into Y.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, a completely new character, X, would expand the world more than a known character (even a known character doing something new to the reader.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 X struck me as having intrinsic interest–someone you’d want to know more about.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But since I started the story originally in Y’s POV and had thought initially of Y being the protagonist, much of X’s attractiveness was coming from Y’s concept of X.\u00a0\u00a0 X’s POV sections were shorter (at the point when I realized I had to do a structural change. ) \u00a0 But this was not an impossible barrier.<\/p>\n

One cardinal rule of picking your POV (if there’s only one) is “Whose story is this, anyway?”\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Who has the most skin in the game, the most at stake?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Whose motivations are driving the story?\u00a0 The way the story came to me, both X and Y had a lot at stake.\u00a0\u00a0 Well…did they have anything in common at stake?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And from which viewpoint would what was at stake–singly and in common–show up the best?\u00a0 Thinking about this, doodling on paper, thinking more,\u00a0 especially while in bed before sleeping and upon waking,\u00a0 tilted the board in favor of one of the two.\u00a0 It boiled down to “Who got less sleep and had the worse night?”<\/p>\n

By yesterday,\u00a0 or maybe Friday,\u00a0 I had committed to one of them and started figuring out how to use some of the words written in the original story file.\u00a0 By no means all.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Moving solidly into one POV revealed things that were just a little different than when I got them as reports or backstory.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m now 15 pages into the new version, the one-POV version.\u00a0\u00a0 Hoping to finish today but maybe not.\u00a0\u00a0 Every new story I write (and not just in Paksworld) teaches me more, gives me the chance to invent a new tool or refine an old one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The current story’s day or two in structural revision has made huge changes in its organization and now has it on an open track to completion as a story of approximately (after some cutting) the right length.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It’s an interesting example of the kinds of decisions writers make when something doesn’t run easily the first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,102],"tags":[62,39],"class_list":["post-1984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-craft","category-story-2","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1984"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1984"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1986,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1984\/revisions\/1986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}