Writefags on Veeky Forums, what is the key to plot?
This is my eternal struggle. My characters are in-depth and unique and well-rounded, by dialogue is interesting and witty, my settings are unique and intriguing, but I've got fuckall idea of where to go with them. They all exist in a kind of stasis. When I sit down to right, I have all these good ideas, but I get caught up on "Yeah, but what actually fucking happens?" and can't write anything.
What's the secret, Veeky Forums?
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probably missing a conflict or a reason for why the characters are doing anything at all.
shit happens
it doesn't matter what, it's an excuse to get characters talking.
Well the problem is my conflicts are all philosophical and thematic rather than concrete. Characters are upset by their place in society or struggle to reconcile their preconceived notions of reality with what their reality actually is. All that pretentious stuff is well and good, but it leads to nothing but characters sitting around talking to themselves, each one having their own private existential crisis.
Well no shit, sherlock.
You'd be hardpressed to come up with a plot where shit didn't happen.
Family, Power, Wealth and Violence.
Just don't write. It doesn't sound like you're particularly good at it.
This is the opposite of what happens to me. I have a rough sketch of my plot when I conceive the story, but I want to continue it so much that I skip characterization.
These are vague, thematic concepts. They're of course the building blocks, but I've got plenty of these.
I'm also not good at getting laid, but you bet your ass I'm going to keep trying. Those rare few times where I luck out and succeed always make the struggle worthwhile.
That makes logical sense, but from personal experience, I can't begin to imagine it.
Character is the whole appeal to me. People are infinitely fascinating.
The entire conception of a story for me is coming up with the characters and then thinking "Okay, I want to tell his/her story. But what is it?"
You have to make the struggles concrete and real to the character, even if they are abstract to the reader. There have to be specific situations and events where the character's ideology causes internal conflict, not just an overarching sense of angst. I hate to say this, but Catcher In the Rye actually does a good job of balancing the deep-seated angst with the conflict the protagonist's ideology leads to.
I adore Catcher and Salinger has been a tremendous influence on my own writing style. You're 100% right about it, but how the fuck he ever pulled Catcher off baffles me. Holden does fuckall nothing the entire book. There is no one traditional overarching plot. Some meaningless shit just happens at random. And yet it's fantastic and deep and addresses all that inner turmoil. It's brilliant and I have no idea how to emulate it.
start here
Just write about your characters doing stuff without thinking, without considering "plot" or "significance" or whatever else. Go in any direction you want, in many directions, and ideas for stories will begin to take shape. You can then build on particular offshoots.
I've been playing with this a bit over the past 20 minutes, it's a neat idea but I'm worrying it's shoeholing my story into the traditional adventure narrative, and that what comes out the other side will just be lame genre fiction.
Yeah, but what do characters DO?
I'm not racked by indecision between ideas, I'm stuck on a lack of ideas.
You just don't have a plot. Stop. If you can't even decide in a basic level what the story is about then you have no story. Do something else until a revelation comes of something to write about. No one gets inspiration from banging their head into a wall.
In this chapter of my scifi story, the superhuman giant Loufer fights the supposedly indestructible android from the central capitalist regions Jereus 8 for so long that Jereus' body begins to actually start to give at blows, and can be torn or deformed. But I forgot Anome was in this chapter/the town it takes place in when I left off, so I'm writing about her finding what she thinks is a transport craft, but actually turns out to be a hovering organic orgabism with a computer jacked into it. It looks like a large grey pill and can be used for storage my inducing it to melt open by chemical touch. Once it bonds to her and has its computer removed so it can travel by more than the routes along paths it was programmed to, it can fly and pretty much becomes her kintoun (like from dbz). It even melds to her touch microscopically so it can secure her and she learns to ride it like a witch on a broom. Until then, though, it takes her to Cassidy, where Paul, Eighteen, and the still cloaked MC Arliend flew to when Jereus 8 and his hired drugskull contracts attacked the town that Arliend and Loufer were investigating under cloak (fortunately the mayor and all the people were in the underground baths celebrating an old weavers birthday and escaped to the slug mines when the chaos started)
so imo plot for me comes by writing, over years
Read a lot of genre fic pageturner books. You'll literally imbibe it through mental osmosis. Of course if you're reading nothing but Proust and Shakespeare and Joyce all the time, your writing will be dull as heck, even if the style and characterizations etc. are good.
Philip K. Dick is a great one for this, almost any of his books can be read in a day or two once you get past the mostly boring expositions, dude was a master at plot.
You must unite the best of genre fic and literary fic, OP, only then will you be truly great...
Read Aristotle's Poetics, and read standard modern commentaries on Poetics. Read Frye and Ricoeur at least, particularly on the subject of telos and anagnorisis (of the telos).
Narratives are causal structures. Things happen because of other things. A fully functional narrative or story requires Ricoeur's third level of mimesis, for full anagnorisis. If you're writing everything-and-the-kitchen-sink "stories," you're writing something other than Western narrative - something like the epic mode.
Seriously, read Frye at least. Take the themes you want to discuss and emplot them through the story, so that characters undergo them, rather than having characters be mouthpieces. If you want that, write Dialogues, which is a fine genre of philosophical explication and exploration.
Or 19th century classics.
>Joyce
>dull as heck
You've never actually read anything by him, have you?
This is such an objectively stupid response that I ain't even mad.
try harder
Just to clarify, I've read Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses and objectively can say that Joyce is a boring writer.
I highly doubt that there is anyone in history who ever was reading Portrait and thought, "Damn, this is so interesting I HAVE to see what happens next!" then stayed up and read 200 or 300 pages of it.
I suppose that would be your reaction if you only read for the plot, yes.
BURNED
Whatever floats your boat, dude. Who am I to judge if really getting into Stephen's head gets you high or whatever it is that it does, bro?
tut tut tut, you just don't get it.
K, I'm going to go read VALIS by Philip K. Dick now, bye.
