Idea overflow in plotting?

Dreaming up story ideas is like wandering through a farmer's market. Every stall is piled high with wonderful ingredients. Honey! Turnips! Croissants! Pork Chops! Limburger cheese! Brussels Sprouts! Kale! Peaches!

Writing is like cooking a meal that you know your family will like. Do you go to the cupboard where you put away everything you bought at the market and say to yourself, "I have to come up with a recipe that uses all these things!"

No, you do not. You pick one or two ingredients to build a meal around. You figure out which flavours and textures will harmonize well with your main ingredients. If there is some element missing that you need to make the meal really taste good, you go back to the market and search for that ingredient.

If you are asking, how do I get all the cool details I have dreamed up into my story you are asking the wrong question, and the result will be an unappetizing mess and a waste of good ingredients.

So start thinking about the problem differently. Choose the main ingredient of your story. Choose a second ingredient that complements it well. Figure out what other ingredients you need to harmonize the whole dish. If you don't have those ingredients already, go out and get them.

Save the other stuff in the cupboard for the next meal.

posted almost 5 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Mark Baker‭

4371 reputation 12 1104 744 58

You have to analyze your own writing.

You are weaving together three things.

• The Plot, the basic events that force characters to take actions. eventX happens, charA respond with eventY, leading to charB to respond with eventZ, and so on. The chain of "cause and effect", including failures, successes, eventually playing out as defeat or victory or some mix of both.

• The Setting, which impedes or accelerates action in the story. If its medieval, travel may be slow. If magical, perhaps fast for a few. If civilized law may impede actions, if uncivilized (including futuristic outer space) perhaps its the law of the jungle.

• Character development. Characters have personalities, likes, dislikes, multiple goals, and things at stake. Who they want to protect, what they are willing to suffer pain to keep, things wrong with them, weaknesses, strengths, loves and lusts.

The danger of overwriting something is boring the reader, communicating details that don't really matter to the story, OR the atmosphere, OR the character development.

To analyze your work, you need to identify why you are writing something, exactly what in a general sense are you trying to communicate to the reader?

For example, is it the beauty of nature in your imagined world? Fine, that's worth communicating. But it isn't worth communicating endlessly, it gets boring. Does the beauty of nature matter to the characters, or is it taken for granted because they have spent their whole life in it?

It does no good, and it is bad writing, to constantly hammer the reader with the same basic information over, and over, and over. There are only so many ways you can say Jack was overwhelmed by this beautiful thing, then that beautiful thing, then this other beautiful thing, before we think something is wrong with Jack.

That's the first principle, don't be endlessly repetitive; it is like somebody obsessed with sex that tries to inject sexual meaning into everything. Fun for the author, perhaps, but irritating to readers that aren't obsessed with sex. Try to identify your particular obsession so you can restrain it.

Imagination is certainly fine, but details in a setting have an exponentially declining value to the reader. Too much detail bogs them down, it is too much of a memory strain. If your imagination overflows, that's fine, just don't put it all on the page: Make a list of what you are imagining, stop for a few minutes and don't look at it, then without looking, list the most important three things. Don't overload the reader, descriptive prose of a scene (or machine or whatever) gets exhausting quickly.

You say you are a fan of something: Analyze the descriptive prose in THAT work, and see how much a scene is described just in raw words. (There are roughly 250-300 words per page in most books). Try to emulate that average, no more. If the description of the setting is broken by dialogue, character feelings or thoughts or character action, emulate that too. No uninterrupted descriptive prose longer than what you are already a fan of reading.

Prose is an interruption of the flow of action. You can get away with more at the beginning of chapters, or scene changes, because there is little going on with the characters at those points.

But once the characters are involved, readers are interested in character actions and interactions, feelings and thoughts. Readers are there to become the characters, imagine themselves as the good guys on a harrowing adventure. Settings are there to help or hinder the action, to echo the feelings of the characters, or contrast them, or to force the feelings of the character.

It is fine to over-imagine things, that's a valuable asset for a writer. But not to put every one of the twenty things you imagine on the page: Over-imagining lets you choose the best two or three things to put on the page. You need to be analytical about these things you have brainstormed, prioritize them, and pick the few most important or impactful or representative things. That way, you don't overload the readers memory or slow down the story too much. To choose, I'd focus on the characters and how the details can affect them, it is good for characters to notice the details that create some sort of emotional reaction, memory, or feeling in them. Anything from a fond memory to disgust, missing a friend to anger. Relate details to their past, and you get a two-for-one: Mental imagery of a scene and character building.

posted about 5 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

5y ago

Amadeus‭

3156 reputation 2 1399 613 37

I think you'll be surprised by how little detail you need to include in your story to get the point across. If you're worried about how to include all of your ideas thoroughly enough to tell the story you've envisioned, I think the solution is surprisingly simple: The vast majority of what you want to say can be left unsaid, entirely implied, and your readers will get it!

This is a rule of thumb I've found helpful when writing: You only need to include details that contribute directly to the story. The reasoning behind this is, if you stick to the chunkiest meat of what makes your story move forward, you'll keep your readers engaged. More than that, in fact - You'll invite them to actively interpret and predict what's happening with each individual line. You won't accidentally include any red herrings that a reader might try to dig deep into without uncovering anything that helps them understand your story more deeply.

This means that there are whole rich worlds that you don't have to explicitly describe in your story. You don't have to give us what an ordinary day for your protagonist working at the newspaper is like. You don't have to explain the entire college town. You don't have to make sure the reader understand exactly how the visions or supernatural powers work.

So you're free! You can just not write these details in order to focus on the core of your story, and your creative vision will get through! In fact, by not including all of these details, your story will be stronger for all the reasons I explained above.

I want to make it clear, I'm not saying that you won't benefit from understanding all of these details yourself. If it's what you're interested in, some thorough worldbuilding will help your story be more consistent and stronger for it. You just don't need to reveal all of the background details explicitly.

And the operative word in that last sentence is explicitly. Omitting thorough details of all of your ideas does not mean hiding them from the reader. On the contrary, you're giving your reader the extraordinary respect of assuming they can read in-between the lines and use their imagination to fill in the details you don't spell out for them.

For example, I don't think it would help your story to describe what a typical day at the newspaper is like for your protagonist. But when we jump into an untypical day with some kind of conflict already boiling, a smart reader will be able to figure out what an ordinary day would have been like based on what the protagonist reacts to. Likewise, you don't need to explain exactly how the magic in your story works. If your main character struggles through enough to understand her powers and visions enough to take advantage of them and avoid getting trapped by their weaknesses, the reader will understand how the magic works as well, more than well enough to track with where the story is going.

You won't lose tone, either. In fact, the dark and mysterious tones it sounds like you're aiming for will be enhanced. As a rule, whenever a reader pieces something important for themselves, they'll feel it far more strongly than if you spelled it out for them. For example, avoiding fully explaining your magic system will avoid the mistake Star Wars made with the force. In the original trilogy, the force was vaguely explained as a mystical power tying the universe together. This mysticism felt right. It made the themes of good triumphing over evil because that's the way things should be resonate more strongly. But then the sequels explained where the force came from, and the magic was completely deflated, even though we could understand it more clearly. Especially if you want your story to be paranormal and mysterious, don't give us all of the answers outright!

So instead of explicitly checking off all of the ideas you have, take the route that requires a shorter page count and let your reader uncover the richest ideas for themselves.

posted almost 5 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Kevin‭

175 reputation 0 32 35 8

One key thing that I learned in my classes is that when you outline a story plot of any kind, you don't want to write the whole thing out on a planning document. My advice is to write half the plot down and have faith in your characters and setting to carry the rest of the plot forward.

I know now every major detail/plot point of my story that has to happen in order for my characters to end up where they are supposed to end up.

This, to me, is a dangerous way of writing a story -- because it's backwards to how it should be. Characters need to push the plot forward, rather than the plot pushing the characters to a point they need to be at. This is tricky, I know, as some of the best stories give the illusion that the plot is tugging the characters forward, but good active+dynamic characters are the kinds of people that readers want to see in their stories: the ones who take their world by the wheel and drive with it. People like that in real life are interesting -- and are often the kinds of people you hear about in biographies, documentaries, and news articles.

I do think the basic plot points you have here are very interesting and could blossom into something great; I just need to stress that the focus should be on characters first, then plot. Setting, I believe, is also affected by characters -- because like I said: active people are the ones who help shape their world.

A lot of people get caught up in worldbuilding -- and that's understandable. To me, though, it's something you need to be loose with and then hammer out harder when you get into actual plotting and revisions. I am certain that if you do this, your story will be great!

posted about 5 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

AlRey‭

20 reputation 0 3 4 0