Modern Author Showcase

Brainstorming vs Plotting

I'd like to say that there is a point where brainstorming ends and plotting begins. There isn't. It's really all the same process. We begin with vague notions of where we want to begin our story, and as we gradually develop it through the process of accretion--glomming one idea on top of another on top of another, the story takes form.

Throughout the brainstorming process, we often throw out tenuous ideas. At the beginning, everything is vague. But as we become personally invested in an idea--excited about it and motivated to add it to the mix, our story continues to take shape.

So we begin by inventing settings and peopling our world with characters. Just as our characters must grow naturally from their surroundings, our conflicts must grow in part from our characters.

As such, we have a linear progression:

We begin by imagining a new world, a setting. Setting begets Character, Character begets Conflict.

As we create our characters, we need to make sure that our characters are properly endowed with conflicts. Some of those conflicts will arise from external sources. A rainstorm may cause a flood that washes our heroine's home away, or a gunslinger might come to town and shoot her husband.

Those are external conflicts. Some of the conflicts might be internal. Perhaps our heroine will have to deal with a childhood fear of water in order to escape the flood, or maybe after her husband is dead, she'll feel guilty for her anger toward him--and her sexual attraction toward his killer.

You'll want to consider giving your character lots of conflicts, both internal and external, in your brainstorming process. And of course as you create other characters, you should consider what kinds of conflicts each of them could add to the mix. For example, what if we give our heroine a twelve-year-old son who wants to kill the gunslinger, even as the mother is contemplating a marriage with him? What if we create a gunslinger who in turn was a child--when this widow's late husband shot his own dad down like a dog? What if we have a sheriff in town who wants to string the gunslinger up, while the priest teaches from the pulpit that justice has finally been done?

See how the conflicts are generated by creating certain types of characters. And of course, we might decide to make these characters more complex. Perhaps in this very small town, the sheriff and the priest are the same man, and he must deal with his own conflicting feelings about how to handle this situation.

As you consider ways to create conflict, you must also consider how your personal characters might react to the problems that confront them. For example, consider the mother who learns from her young daughter that the girl's teacher has been "touching me between the legs." What would your character do? Maybe she'd call the principle. Or maybe she'd scream at her daughter and accuse her of being the problem. Perhaps she'd run to the liquor cabinet and down a fifth of Scotch. Maybe she'd go to her bedroom and pull out the .45 hidden under her mattress, then race to the school doing seventy in a 25 mph zone.

By having her do any one of these things, you're creating a simple response to the conflict. But of course you can have her do more than one thing. You can have a sequence of reactions. Perhaps she will grab her daughter and fall on her knees, offer a devout prayer for the soul of the teacher. Then, grab a drink to help clear her thoughts. She might consider then the embarrassment that would ensue if she called the police, and as she does, she realizes that the school is closed and the teacher has the habit of staying late to correct papers, so she runs to her room and grabs her gun, determined to handle this all "quietly."

The kind of character that you create determines how they will react to a problem. Her reaction of course causes conflict with others. Perhaps our mother here manages to get to the school without being seen and confronts the teacher. He may be horrified to hear of this "unjust accusation." Or he may decide that, being confronted by a lone woman, he'd like a piece of her as well. So the conflict that he faces will depend in large part upon himself--the kind of character that you imagine him to be. No matter what kind of person you make him, the mother is now the source of a new conflict that he must handle. Is she a half-drunk victim who is yelling at him, hoping to win his soul for god? Or is she a deranged lunatic making crazy accusations while holding him at gunpoint. How will he respond to all of this?

Eventually, if your characters are interacting well, they become like pool balls on a table during the break--bouncing off one another with incredible force. That is when the plotting gets fun. Once you create characters with the proper gads (gads are traits characters have that provoke other players in your tale), you will find that the story begins to unfold seemingly like magic. The tale begins to "take on a life of its own," as new writers too often say.

When you reach this point in the storytelling process, when you find yourself racing to outline the story because it is all coming together in one whirling mass, you've gone beyond brainstorming and into plotting. You may find occasional snags in the process, times when you have to slow down and ask yourself "What happens next." Usually when this happens, you realize that it does so because you haven't given enough thought to some aspect of your characters. For example, in creating your teacher, perhaps he initially reacts like an innocent man, unjustly accused. But the more you think about it, you realize that he is only biding his time, hoping to keep the mother waiting until the janitors have all gone home, so that he can dispose of this troublesome mother--and her daughter. Perhaps he even begins plotting where to stash the bodies . . . in the same place he always does!

So you find that you begin brainstorming for a few minutes here and there, then plotting for long stretches in between. Eventually, all of your ideas will culminate in a story.

Tomorrow we'll begin talking about plotting in earnest, spicing up your story in ways that you might not have considered. I’m going to cover writing the million dollar outline.

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For an excellent resource on handling characters and their conflicts, you should read Orson Scott Card's Character and Viewpoint. (Please note that a lot of books on writing are fairly interchangeable introductions to the craft that give a little advice and spend most of their time defining various writing terms. When I mention a book here in this column, I'm recommending these books, primarily because they contain insights and information that you're not going to find in the average introductory volume. I consider Character and Viewpoint not only to be an excellent, thought-provoking book, but one of such merit that I invariably use it as a text for my writing classes.)

Writing Quote for the Day:

". . . I made my own experiments in the weights, colours, perfumes, and attributes of words in relation to other words, either as read aloud so that they may hold the ear, or, scattered over the page, draw the eye. There is no line of my verse or prose which has not been mouthed till the tongue has made all smooth, and memory, after many recitals, has mechanically skipped the grosser superfluities."

Rudyard Kipling. Something of Myself. 1937

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