Stella Cameron Writer's Workshop - Plot, Plot, Who's Got the Plot? 01/18/01 at Writerspace

Stella Cameron Writer's Workshop - Plot, Plot, Who's Got the Plot? 01/18/01

Cissy - You ready to set us all straight on plotting, Stella?
margi - O.k. I'm slow
Lynn - Thanks Stella and ascribe. I'm trying to be tough
pushpen - Thank you Lynn--you know I needed that!
Lynn - Anytime Stella
DeeGat - Looking forward to learning from Stella
Lynn - G'Nite y'all See y'all at the next workshop
Cissy - Hi Dee!! Any friend of Stella's and all that...
pushpen - Yes, I'm ready, but this will not be as easy going a session as usual. I will be "lecturing" a bit. Oh, dear....
ascribe - Lecturing is good.
pushpen - SIX STEPS TO A PERFECT PLOT.
jeff - Rave on, Stella.
ascribe - Especially from a pro.
Sharon - Lecture away!
Lynn - - 1/18 at 8:59pm EST
DeeGat - Can we print this off when it's finished?
pushpen - Already I betray myself. The title above shows I can't be trusted. There ain't such an animal as a perfect plot, only a plot as near perfect as the writer can make it.
pushpen - More importantly, a plot that works.
Cissy - Lecture away, Stella! Everyone, after Stella's opening remarks, we'll be operating on protocol. Type ? to line up with a question and I'll put you in line. I'll start calling on people when Stella's done.
ascribe - Yes, but you got our attention with your title.
Cissy - Dee, we'll be posting a transcript, and that can be printed
pushpen - What doesn't work will newver work. If the reader stops, frowns, re-reads, and stops again--there's something very wrong. The cause of this pause may be loss of viewpoint control, chronological slips, failure to privide adequeate pegs into the setting or,
pushpen - much more likely, an inconsistencey in plot. These inconsistencies, whether they result in an uneasy sense of imp;lausibility, or actually slap the reader between the eyes with an impossiblility--
pushpen - these inconsistencies result from careless plotting compounded by either failure to double check each development, or some vague but suicidal confiction that no one will notice the blunder!
pushpen - Am I overloading here, Cissy--or is everyone prepared to stay longer?
pushpen - My job is to help you learn how to assemble a plot, and how to bullet proof that plot.
BarbH - logged on - 1/18 at 9:02pm EST
pushpen - Point 1.
pushpen - Answer me someone--are you asleep or getting something out of this. I can change directions easily.
Cissy - you're doing great, Stella - carry on
Sharon - You are fine, didn't want to interrupt!
Tina66 - All ears, Stella!
margi - I'm with you
niklovr - I'm taking notes. Keep going!
DeeGat - Me either. Trying to behave and listen!
Renee D - Not sleeping
kamy - logged on - 1/18 at 9:04pm EST
pushpen - 1. GATHERING: The question I often hear and always groan over is" "Where do you get your ideas?" A natural question from a non-writer but strange from someone who is a writer. W our ideas from a p;lace we can't see or touch--our imaginations. What sets the fiction writer's
ascribe - I'm here, wide awake and waiting patiently, also trying to stay out of trouble.
Renee D - Please cpntinue
kamy -
pushpen - imagination apart from other types is the way it collects and organizes. The way it gathers.
pushpen - A painter may look at a tipped vase, strewn flowers, spattered water and see --a tipped vase, strewn flowers, etc. A comp;osition of visual fact to be translated onto canvas.
pushpen - t
BonnieC - logged on. - 1/18 at 9:06pm EST
pushpen - a fiction writer may look at the same things and see something quite different. What comes to mind?
jeff - violence
Sharon - Actually I'm wondering why did the vase fall?
pushpen - bouquet with a card on top, a card from whom? The card is signed by a man employed by the advertising firmm she works for. She calls a female co-worker and excitedly tells her Mr. X has sent the flowers.
Sharon - Like Jeff, my imagination tells me violence
margi - A storm outside; the window was open. But why?
Renee D - what the bouquet looked like?
BonnieC - your readers will be wondering that, too, Sharon--and there you have a story question to answer in your plot. (hi, all, btw.)
jeff - break-in
pushpen - Is she excited enough to be less than cautious, maybe? That's possible. Exited enough not to question someone else who arrives (we don't have to know who at this point) someone else arriving at that exact moment with a, "Surprise! Surprise!" approach?
pushpen - Into the kit chen with the surprise visitor she goes. Her guard is down. She takes a vase from a cupboard cuts the stems on the flowers, fills the vase with water, drops in the flowers.
pushpen - She laughes.
pushpen - And dies?
Sharon - Aha!
jeff - possibly
jeff - unless she is a self-defense expert
DeeGat - poisoned flowers?
margi - eek!
Tina66 - (LOL, Jeff)
BonnieC - Maybe she kills.
pushpen - That's how the mind of a fiction writer works. That's where the ideas come from--in there, somewhere. Think of yourselves as gatherers. Cultivate the shady side of your minds where impressions can grow freely. This gathering is license to designate a favorite place to do absolutely nothing but think. Than would qualify as a job benny, folks!
pushpen - Now you've got me giggling--you're all taking off with your writerly minds, devleping plots because you can't sit still at a moment like this.
BarbH has timed out.
pushpen - Hope Barb makes it back.
BonnieC - <needs to take off her writerly mind, after a wasted day of tring to come up with the perfect "opening scene">
Susanna - - 1/18 at 9:14pm EST
JaniceS - logged on. - 1/18 at 9:14pm EST
kamy - ...she realizes the visitor is not there for a friendly chat and she gets out of there...just barely without so much as her purse or coat
pushpen - So, you gather, you stuff in notes on napkins, magazine articles, write down the title of a song, or a line from the lyrics--save it all. Scenes snatched through car windows. Scents are evocative. Poke around in the sensations evoked bt a scebtm wrute diwb tiyr cibckysuibs,
pushpen - Sorry--you'll just have to guess what that meant!
Sharon - LOL
pushpen - I'm trying to shorten my thoughts.
jeff - Could you repeat that, Stella?
kamy - lol.....I'm understood....that's scary as hell
DeeGat - Okay Stella! We'll try to figure it out
pushpen - If you doubt that this is all an okay exercise and not all so much flib flam, remember your childhood. I was a gatherer then,
pushpen - and I wger you were, too. We collected things to use in various games. And we saved them in boxes and bags and drawers
Renee D - What about when you are going through the motions and something changes
pushpen - And we put those treasures through their paces, talking as we played, usually in diffferent voices for different characters. And we invented stories and created sound effects.
Renee D - in your mind that is?
pushpen - Watch children now, your children or someone else's, and you'll see them repeating the process.
pushpen - Before I go to #2--any comments--other than this is going to take more than one session....
bfch - logged on - 1/18 at 9:18pm EST
margi - still with you
Cissy - I mentally rewrote all the books I read that didn't do what I wanted them too
Sharon - My problem's not finding ideas, it's developing them into a usable plot
kamy - LOL...me too Cissy!
Cissy - We can always do "Plotting Part 2" next month, Stella
pushpen - I rewrote stories, too. Good, Margi, now we help Sharon figure out what to do next.
pushpen - #2 Selection:
DeeGat - I'm with Sharon on that one!
Sara - well, i constantly make up stories to go with little scenes around me. drives family nuts
pushpen - This is the simple point. When yiou're ready for the serious plotting process, choose the strongest idea. Or let it choose you. Sort through your mind, the boxes and the bags and _bam_, the strongest idea will convince you you've chosen well. In fact, you'll wonder why there was ever any doubt.
Sara - - 1/18 at 9:20pm EST
pushpen - This is also the time to assemble all the balls of string and sealing wax that relate to the idea you're going with. All of it. Select and expand, and immerse yourself in your wonderful idea.
kamy - Sara has to change her dress...same color as Stella's
pushpen - Back to the woman with the flowers.
KimElliget - logged on. - 1/18 at 9:22pm EST
pushpen - You find that clipping from a newspaper about a woman who faked her own disasppearance. And you draw a plan of the lower floor in the house where the flowers were delivered--and the garden through which the person who brought them walked.
KimElliget - ooops sprry I'm lte, I keep converting the time wrong
KimElliget - and sorry for the typos too... hi everyone
pushpen - Then there's a map of the town where the woman lives-a reference book on the advertising business, some details on life insurance and collecting it with or without a body. You read up on faking ID, and on the legal aspects of arrest on suspicion of murder. What you don't do is set out to become an authority of any of this--yet. You concentrate
pushpen - on knowing only what you must know to tell your story.
Tigg - logged on. - 1/18 at 9:25pm EST
pushpen - This is what can happen when a fiction writer remembers a vivid impression he or she has gathered and p;lays a little "what-if?" then reads a selected newspaper article, and makes a connection tot he impressing--you may become absolutely BRILLIANT!
pushpen - about to go to point 3--any questions or comments?
Sus - logged on. - 1/18 at 9:26pm EST
pushpen - Hi those who just arrived
Joanna - logged on - 1/18 at 9:26pm EST
Sharon - scribbling notes...
pushpen - No questions?
Joanna - Hello
DeeGat - No, you're doing fine.
pushpen - Hi Joanna
kamy - still with you Stella...
pushpen - I only want to know if anyone needs clarification, but I'll go on.
Tigg - logged on. - 1/18 at 9:26pm EST
Sara - wait, what was the name of the second one. I had to change clothes
Sharon - No questions yet! We'll all bombard you at once, I'm sure.
Cissy - "Selection" Sara
Renee D - I am doing fine also
Sara - thank you.
pushpen - #3 People: I call this step "people," rather than "characters," because more and more I'm convincerd that in good, fully realized fiction, we people our storylines with real people. Too often I find myself reading, and failing to actually see the people come alive. I've decided this happens because the writer created caricatures rather than characters and they're one-dimentional.
pushpen - In truth, throughout every phase of the plotting process, you're working with your people, your conflict, and your setting. The obvious question is: which comes first? The answer is: bits and pieces of all elements come at the same time, they come side by side, falling over each other, spurring each other on, adding to each other, puffing up the caricature into character, and people, and giving them bones (conflicts) to fight over, and a place to hold the fight.
pushpen - So, first gathering of ideas, then moving on to expanding and selecting ideas, then to devloping the characters.
pushpen - PEOPLE!
Joanna - oops... Stella ... trying to catch up on what has all ready transpired...
pushpen - Now we're at the point when we must have our most important cast members and our secondary parts. Hero and heroine. They have to fit the roles you've developed from taking an idea and expaning that idea. Background and personaility, skills--must be appropriate.
pushpen - As you build these people, you constantly check and cross-check their history, past and present, to make sure you haven't chosen poorly. You must give them the right kind of baggage to drag with them. The heroine who takes her first breath on page one of your book is an obvious 130lb newborn. She's got a lovely, but empty face, no wrinkles in her clothes, and no wrinkles in her soul. Her heart is empty of anything but the emotions she'll start learning at 25
Susanna has timed out.
pushpen - lready dead, and who cares.
pushpen - But--Her name is Emily. She's twenty-five and ought to be pretty. She is pretty if you don't look too hard. The eyes take it.
pushpen - No, no hope in there--that beaten-down-and-don't-care-anymore hopelessless. A smart woman. Smart but trapped by old patters, old habits. Men treat women badly. She knows this because she grew up watching it. She was never going to let it happen to her--but she did. Then she broke free at last--or did she?
pushpen - Emily is the woman who opened the door to the flowers. We're building here.
pushpen - One character doesn't make a novel. We need a hero, secondasry characters. I need trats and agendas for those people. I'll build them just as I built Emily.
pushpen - ##Mike is a man who knows what he wants. He was born knowing what he wanted and he's been going after it ever since. He's also honorable, loyal and smart--and confident. Understanding women isn't something he's worked real hard at, he never had a reason before. He does now. There's a woman he thinks he wants, and wants very much. She works at the office and he's tried to get to know her but she doesn't cut him any slack. He doesn't like that, but he can't
Tina66 - - 1/18 at 9:38pm EST
Sharon - - 1/18 at 9:39pm EST
pushpen - get her out of his head. It doesn't help that she applied for the promotion that was given to him instead. Nor is it a plus that her ex-husband is one of the firm's biggest acxcounts and that it's rumored the guy still thinks of his ex as his property###
pushpen - I've started to make a hero. He's taking shape. Major characters lead to secondary characters and so on.
pushpen - The next point is #4, Wants. I would rather we discuss what we've covered so far and continue in a second session.
pushpen - Wake up!
bfch - we are just thinking
JaniceS - listening!
bfch - but we are a quiet bunch
margi - snuggle, gork!
Sara - okay, any questions to this point? Type a ? and we will go in an orderly fashion
DeeGat - But I can't wake up! I've got to get to bed and think about what you said. It works that way for me!
Joanna - Stella as you are developing this all down ... are you keeping up a character list ... ?
pushpen - It's my intention to work all the way through to a sort of rough plot with Emily and Mike but let's go to questions and give ourselves time to take this much in.
Joanna - whoops.... "a"
Rosa Pearl - ou feel
ascribe - logged on - 1/18 at 9:42pm EST
Cissy - If you have a question, please type ? and I'll call on you in turn.
Cissy - ok

Go on to Part 2