Writing Excuses 10.9: Where Is My Story Coming from?

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Writing Excuses 10.9: Where Is My Story Coming from?

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2015/03/01/writing-excuses-10-9-where-is-my-story-coming-from/

Key points: Where is your story coming from? Emotional impact and appeal. Genre and tone. What is your intention, what are you trying to do with this book, what reaction do you want the reader to have? What answer are the readers looking for, what question are they asking? MICE helps set the question. What question makes the reader go to the next chapter? Not just cliffhangers, you want deeper questions everywhere. Key: What is going to happen because of what just happened? Make sure there is a main question. Avoid writing to make your writing group happy, or introducing new questions to generate tension. Look for conflicts in the original questions. Knowing your starting point helps determine your structure. You may not want to outline, but even discovery writers need to know their tone, the promises they are making, and your intention.
( And then what happened? )

[Brandon] I'm going to give you your writing exercise for this month now. Once again, we will give you one this week that you can use, and then we will be building upon it throughout the month, so that you can... We can kind of take you along this path with an exercise. But also, if you don't want to do it, any of the given ones can be done on their own. This week, what I want you to do is take a favorite piece of... A favorite story of yours. It can be in any medium. It can be a television show, it can be a short fiction work, it could be a novel, whatever. I want you to look at it and I want you to reverse-engineer the plot threads that are involved in it. I want you to build an outline.
[Mary] When he says a favorite story of yours, he means not something that you wrote, but something that someone else wrote.
[Brandon] Oh, yes, I should have said that.
[Howard] That episode of Sherlock would make a great choice because the structure is so funky.
[Dan] Is so wacky.
[Mary] although I would recommend doing something in the medium that you work in.
[Howard] Yes, yes, yes.
[Brandon] That might be. I like doing this with television shows and movies...
[Mary] Sure.
[Brandon] And applying them to books.
[Mary] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[Brandon] I think you can... The thing is... Yeah.
[Mary] That's actually what I did with Valor and Vanity is...
[Brandon] Right. You looked at heist novels.
[Mary] Yeah, I reverse engineered...
[Dan] If you are... If you still consider yourself a beginner and this seems imposing to you, pick a fairytale. Pick something simple that you... That will be a little easier to deal with.
[Mary] What you're looking at with this is what are the scenes, what does each scene do, and what are the promises that are being made in those scenes.
[Brandon] We want you to look at multiple plot threads. Don't just look at one. Figure out what you think the main plot is. Figure out what you think the secondary plots are. Build an outline out of those. Then identify those promises. Look and see what promises in the first 10%, whenever that is, however long it is, take the first 10% of it and see how the creators of that piece were making promises to the readers right from the get-go.
[Mary] While you're at it, don't forget what we talked about in the character module, and make sure that you're also looking at what the character conflicts are, too.
[Howard] Oh, my gosh, their heads are going to explode.
[Mary] But they've got a whole week to do it in.
[Brandon] That's right. In fact, they've got two weeks.
[Mary] Two weeks. That's right.
[Brandon] Because next week will be a wildcard, during which we'll just have a regular writing prompt, not an exercise. So you've got two weeks to work on this till we come back. I also want to give you a little warning on something else. We are going to be, at the end of this month, doing a new feature we're doing this year, the Project in Depth that we've done in the past. We're going to pick one of our projects and we are going to dig into it, referencing the months that have come before. For instance, we're going to reference structure and character an idea development for Howard's story.
[Howard] We're going to go through Parallel Perspectives, which is the 13 page bonus story at the end of Massively Parallel, which you can pick up at store.schlockmercenary.com. This is a lot of fun. First of all, I'd love if you bought one of my books. We don't know yet if I'm going to be able to have this out in digital format. But if it's available digitally, it'll be available there as well. Store.schlockmercenary.com. Massively Parallel.
[Brandon] We encourage you to get that early, because we will be doing this the last week of this month. Every month that has a fifth week in it, or a fifth day in it of Sundays, which is when we do these podcasts, we will be doing one of these projects. So go pick up Howard's. Read it ahead of time so you can follow along as we discuss the really interesting structure of this bonus story. All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.