How to get a derailed book back on track?
Before I started writing my fantasy story (80,000 words so far) I had a pretty strong outline prepared. Within the structure of my plot, I wrote relatively organically and my characters started to develop their personalities.
One character in particular (a traumatised fifteen year old girl) grew a very different personality than I'd initially designed her and I'm very proud of the result. There is now a ripple effect whereby a lot of my plot no longer makes sense in light of these character changes.
Given that my initial plot was quite basic (and perhaps not very interesting), I'm faced with a decision:
Should I salvage my work by adapting the story around my evolved characters, or start again and write a different story and include the best elements from this first attempt?
Also, does anyone have any general advice for this kind of situation?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/26012. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
2 answers
Always work around your characters. They're what drives the story forward, not your plot. Without interesting characters, you've just got a series of events happening one after the other which wouldn't make for a very good book at all.
I once had a character I wanted to go to a specific location. She didn't want to go. There was no reason I could think of for her to be there other than I wanted her to. Later, I changed it to be that she heard about what happened at that location and it gave her the anger and drive she needed to progress without her ever stepping foot near the place.
Listen to your characters. Don't try to make them do anything they don't want to.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26014. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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You may be discovering the difference between a plot and a story. A plot is a series of events. A story is an arc of rising tension followed by a resolution. Events intervene in the lives of characters to drive the rise in tension, but the tension itself comes from the characters, who they are, what they want, and what they are willing to do to get it.
It is often quite easy to come up with a detailed outline of a plot without putting any real thought into the arc of the story. When that happens, the result will either be a flat story, or, as in your case, you will begin to discover who the characters are, and therefore what the sources of tension are, as you write.
At that point, the sequence of events that you have outlined will almost certainly not be the sequence of interventions you need to drive the tension of your story. Why would they be? They were not designed for that purpose.
Outlining a story is much harder work than outlining a plot, and it is often hard to tell the difference. But a plot outline without a very firm idea of the story arc whose tension the plot is driving, simply isn't going to hold up.
So, on this occasion and in general my advice is the same: find your story arc. Find the tension that drives the story. Then write a plot to fit. Whether you can outline your story arc before you begin or whether you have to start writing your characters in order to figure out what tension drives them, is something you may need to discover for yourself. There are specific techniques for mapping the rising tension of a story arc, for mapping out the two-steps-forward-one-step-back structure of many plots. Different approaches are likely to work for different people.
Whatever you do though, always remember that plot is the servant of story and until you understand the tension the drive the story arc, you don't know what your story is yet.
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