Your Ideas Are Not Special. Now Shut Up and Write (Also known as the pinnacle of my ranting ability. Me at my sanest)
So, you want to write a story about two twins who fall in love because they are that close.
Or you want to write a story about a girl committing suicide.
Or you want to write a story about a girl who finds out she's a princess from another land.
Okay, that's all well and good, but if you want to run an idea by me, I'm going to look at it, throw it in your face, and tell you to stop
pimping your plot out and write the damn thing.
Why? Here.
1. The more agonizing you do over your idea, the less it means to you in the end. So maybe you're so insecure, and you're about to pore through your notebooks of writing while listening to Bright Eyes and trying not to drop tears on your scribbled fragments of ideas. You know what? The more you keep worrying about what other people think of your ideas, the more difficult you're going to find it to actually write your story.
Writing, as horrible and trite as it sounds,
comes from the heart. Now, this isn't an excuse to write about whatever and pass off criticism because it's your writing and therefore is the purest vessel of emotion, but it is a reason not to let anyone n** you in the bud of some writing. Even if you're writing a horrible suicide-poetry about how your boyfriend broke up with you and you're so sad, it's going to have some emotion in it. By the gods, it'll lose whatever value it has when you try to change the basic concept away from something that holds meaning to you. And it's damn hard to write something you're not invested in.
So let your ideas grow and change; don't let people mold your ideas for you. That way they're still yours, and they get that distinct personal flavor to them.
2. You doom yourself to failure whenever you're willing look at an idea and say 'i'm going to scrap this completely." Let me let you in on one of my little theories. It goes like this: whenever we get an idea, it sucks at first. It's boring, or flat, or just needs more work put into it. Part of the common progression of stories is to allow them to grow. So maybe you got this idea about a half-demon and how he finds true love despite being stone-cold. And? What, you think this can't be salvaged? Damn right it can be. Having standards for your own ideas is good. Recognizing what you'll kill yourself before you'll write is also good. But when you take this lovingly crafted idea, no matter how cliche, and are completely willing to dump it in the garbage disposal and never look back? That's when you're losing some of your most brilliant ideas. Hell, take that half-demon and stick him in your Big Red Notebook Full of Snippets. Pull him back out when you think that, by golly, he might be good for something.
No idea is worthless. Except for that one.
3. An idea becomes original when you write it in depth. Hey, guess what? You want to turn that idea into something better and cool? How about you
write it down? In the writing process, you get more familiar with those shiny new ideas. You know what that means? That-- gasp-- you begin to be able to develop them. It's not in the overall concepts or in the abstracts that things are unique. It's in the details and the execution and the way things fit together. It's in how you weave them into the stories we've heard before and how deftly you can put realistic spins so that it reads fresh and new and interesting.
4. Ideas by themselves are not original, and having them in your writing is equally not a guarantee of anything unique. You are not the first person to have thought of twincest. You are not the first person to have thought of a goth boy who is so alone who leaves this horrible, cruel life. You are also not the first person to have thought of whatever pretty, shiny new idea you have. The next time you try to poke something into a story and giggle coyly behind your authorial hand as if you have just created Adam and Eve, I hope to God that someone catches you and smacks some sense into you. You can't just present that shiny "new" concept and nudge and wink at the audience as if we're expected to fall all over you with the adoration of a million fans.
Yes, this means you have to develop things and write them realistically. Oh, the horror. Shock factor and pretty, twee little "tweaks" cannot substitute for characterization, good development, and well-crafted plotting. I feel this needs reiteration:
You are not the first person to have thought of your idea. You cannot present it to us and have us still be shocked and surprised and not care if your writing is a steamy pile of crap.
What hopefully seperates you from the first person to think of that idea is that you're willing to carry it through and invest the time it takes.
Aren't you?
Logic, Originality, and You
Part I: The Roadblocks to Creativity
I've always been convinced that you can't tell someone how to be creative. You can tell them all you want that their plots are cliche, but they'll never come up with a twist until they defeat the roadblocks to their own creativity. And then I asked myself, "What are the roadblocks to creativity?". This is what resulted.
The roadblocks are the following:
-Inexperience
-Insecurity
-Closed-mindedness
-Overidentification with the work.
The first: Inexperience. How are you supposed to know what’s been done if you don’t know your genre? Oh, I know, you shouldn’t try to be original... but that’s not all.
It’s very difficult for teenagers to write about the world. I’m saying this as a teenager. Why? Because we haven’t experienced life yet. Think about it. How much do you know? Do you know how societies work? How adult relationships function? How language develops?
Some of these you can learn from books or education. Others have to be experienced. They say to write about what you know, and that’s true to an extent. You need to have a working knowledge of logic, how people move, how they work. You need to have the knowledge of how situations turn out, knowledge that you gain from going through situations yourself. I know, I know, all us teenagers really hope that we’ll say some witty comeback that will completely shock the bullies into silence. But it rarely works that way, as people who have experienced life will understand.
And as you grow and experience life, you’ll also bring your knowledge to the writing table. Teenagers hardly know who they are (hell, I don’t!). The sense of self and the growth of your own style will become more concrete over time-- something that will flavor your writing. Obviously, it's foolish to give up on trying to be creative because you're young, but you should keep in mind that experience will wisen you. Try to get all the experience you can, and your writing will improve. Note: I am not saying that you ought to go out and, say, do drugs and sleep with prostitutes just to familiarize yourself with the world. I am, however, saying that you shouldn't live your entire life in your head. Get out and get involved!
-Insecurity
This is probably the most subversive of all of them. It’s that little voice that says “but what if I can’t pull this off? What if I fail?”-- or maybe it’s even less obvious. The little part of you that loves the tried-and-true just because it’s easy to do, it’s something you know you can pull off.
You may not even notice it’s there. Your style may default to unoriginal just because you’re afraid to be yourself- and you do it unconsciously.
I honestly think this is the problem for more of us than we’d like to believe. And although I am a strong supporter of writer insecurity, you should only be insecure enough to never like a completed work-- not insecure enough to never even try.
So pick up that pen and start to write
you. Don’t write using conventions just because they work. And don’t be afraid. Write something that screams “this is me, this is my style, and this is why I’m here”.
-Closed-mindedness
From the beginning, we’re taught to think a certain way. We’re taught not to question some things and to question others. We’re taught that there are some things that never change. We’re taught that some people are good and others are bad.
The majority of our childhood is spent educating us and encouraging us to learn how our world works. On occasion, these views are biased; other times, they’re just material for story ideas. When you think about a logical consequence, you need to ask yourself why. Why do things need to be like that? Why can’t this happen? Pick one or two aspects of life and question them. I think the most important questions are “why” and “why not” and “what if”.
And it’s the same with the writing world. Everyone knows that the hero has to get the girl, that the girl has to be either spunky and fiery or frail and gentle. Elves always have to be like Tolkien’s, only without the depth of culture and linguistic talent.
But why? Too many beginning writers write conventions and never question why they existed. Sure, there may be a societal reason for some of the stories being popular, but they don’t all have to go that way. Open your mind. People just write this stuff and never question why.
This is tricky, because you have to achieve the proper balance. You can’t write that, say, physics is all wrong without providing an alternative that our minds can conceive of. Yes, you may be enlightened and you may be able to transcend the material, but the majority of us cannot. And if you’re writing for an audience, writing something they can’t believe will ensure that your story turns into another garbled mess that resembles every other garbled mess in existance.
So really, this is one that probably troubles all of us. It’s a mixed blessing, but in a lot of beginning writers, it’s a curse. Things happen because they happen that way, and that’s that. But what if the girl wasn’t a damsel in distress or a fiery, spunky heroine? What if she was just a hard-working peasant with a foul mouth and a tendency to get into trouble while digging in the dirt for potatoes?
-Overidentification with the work.
Let me summarize this part very quickly for you: Change is good.
That being said, let me explain why.
I know when I was beginning, I loved my story idea. I loved loved loved it and I was going to write it and that was going to be that. I think that’s what happens to a lot of writers, especially in the very beginning of the new idea phase, when everything is shiny and special. It’s wholly natural and completely healthy. It’s a creation high.
What isn’t healthy for your stories is when you get the idea that your initial concept is so special it should never change. Often, this is for completely personal reasons- you absolutely won’t change that character because she’s your sister and changing her wouldn’t be true to your sister’s character. You won’t allow an idea to develop because it means so much to you as it is, or because you’re scared it won’t be yours anymore if you pick up shiny new concepts and integrate them.
Don’t be afraid of change. Stories are like beautiful flowers. Nobody’s going to buy a clipped sprout, because, I mean, sprouts just aren’t all that appealing. But they will buy a cut flower, because cut flowers have grown to their peak of beauty (I could go into how nobody buys old, dead flowers, but that will be saved for another rant on knowing when to stop/when to step away) and are gorgeous, mature, and appealing.
Don’t n** your ideas when they’re just sprouting. You can’t grow a flower from a tiny bit of plant matter.
Logic and Consequences Are Shiny
So Orson Scott Card and I, despite being terribly different in terms of who we actually are (and I would probably dislike him vehemently were we to meet), have one very large thing in common: we agree, for the most part, on the writing process and how to come up with ideas, although he's a very established author and I'm still working on my first novel.
Card does this interesting activity at almost every lecture he attends. It's called something like 100 ideas in ten minutes.
What does he do? He asks for a character, then asks questions until an entire premise is set up, tossing out the silly, melodramatic, or overused.
I, on the other hand, volunteered to help out someone who had trouble with her story idea by listing everything I knew about werewolves, turning each into questions, and following the logical progressions of these ideas. Imagine my surprise when I got a bunch of commendation for being "so creative", when I was only working off of my knowledge of how things work in the world.
Surprisingly, flat, illogical ideas tend to, as a whole, be less creative than those well-defined in their world. I think this problem is mostly because a lot of bad stories violate logic for the same purposes- getting a hero out of trouble, creating the characters they want to create.
I'm going to address a few points, then we'll have some communal brainstorming sessions about logical consequences, ways to continue stories, and how to make an idea really work.
1. "My story is fantasy. It doesn't have to follow logic." and other arguments against the Truth.
Surprisingly enough, every story in every genre benefits from logic. To anyone who disbelieves me, I ask you:
-Are there humans in your story?
-Is there any form of physics in your story?
-Do you have societies in your story?
-Is there a world involved?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, you do need logic. Everything travels in certain ways. Societies form in some ways; people act in others. And physics does not alter just to suit your whim, although that would make my problem sets ten times easier.
Even if there is magic involved, you need logic. Magic needs to follow rules in your story. I mean, what do you have without the rules? A jumbled, chaotic mess that no readers can follow. You as a writer may be a-okay with chaos, but your readers are looking for something with organization.
You can redefine things all you want, but they have to fit in with your universe. If you mention that pirates have conquered the seas, and, otherwise, your story is apparently Earth, your pirates are those known to us (through popular culture or through reality), and they are apparently human, you're having a logic problem.
And remember, if we're left in the dust going "WTF is this person on?", you have utterly failed.
2. Research and common sense do not confine a story.
Rather, they open it.
See, I find that the most common logical fallacies occur when it comes to consequences. People shift logic so their protagonist looks better, or they shift it so that the consequences of common sense fall more or less harshly on their protagonist. This is boring.
Take a common example: the girl who still cries whenever someone mentions her boyfriend, because he broke up with her nine years ago. Psychology dictates that, although, yes, she still might have a few quirks due to his leaving her at the altar, and a few instilled fears, but she’s not going to keep crying and be utterly emo about it unless she has serious issues.
“But I don’t want her to have serious issues!” some people say.
To them I ask: Why not? Issues are fun, possibly more fun than kickass vampires. Think about it like this: Conflict defines characters. The more your characters have what’s coming to them, the more they will develop. They’ll surprise you, and there’s nothing more delightful than a surprise in your own story.
I’m of the opinion that people who are against conflict and consequences have never actually punished their hero or heroine. Thus, they hold two misconceptions:
1. “It’s not fun.” Developing characters can be fun. Try it out. You’ll find out things about people and how they react that, yes, will provide for interesting scenes.
2. “It will make the readers dislike my character.” ...and? I think most readers will actually be glad that you gave the characters enough realistic qualities to relate to! If you present your character as a human being, with fears and loves and desires, they will identify with them- and, generally, like them. How do you make sure you don’t lose the way they care for the character? Why, you give your character a decent trait, of course, and an admirable one. We still care for Satan, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, because he is strong, because he is persistant, and because he is eloquent. We can see where he comes from, though we still dislike him for all he stands for.
This is turning into “On giving your characters consequences”, so I’m going to quickly warp back to my point:
Logic gives you story fodder. If your farmer’s wife goes into labor and he leaves to find the midwife equivalent, he’s left the plow in the field. If it begins to rain as he rushes back home, he’ll be involved with the idea of a coming child and might forget to bring his plow in. The iron rusts, so after the hullabaloo is over, the farmer has to go into town to buy a new plow with the money he saved up to buy a cow. When he gets to town, he’s so overwhelmed by the market that he buys his plow and twenty kinds of chicken eggs. So now they have a bunch of chicks, no cow, but a plow.
Do you see? Yes, this requires a whole lot of brainstorming about what your character was doing, and a working memory of everything “on stage” at the time. But it gives you myriad possibilities-- like maybe the kid dies and so he could use the money he was saving up to pay for baby things on getting a new plow and now his wife is upset because he’s being cold and hard-hearted.
...yeah. Follow the paths of logic.
3. Common misconceptions about society and human nature.
a.
Societies develop regardless of their surroundings.
Let me just say: Absolutely not. Societies develop based off of the land they sit in. In the beginning, you couldn't build cities in swamps without stilts. You couldn't push back the sea or make islands where there should be river. You build and you adapt to the land-- the land does not adapt to you. And, depending on the land and how you are forced to live, your culture changes.
b.
The best way to keep an oppressed group of people from rebelling is...
You have no idea how many people have tried to mess with this and utterly failed. Yes, amateur fiction. The solutions range from just dumping them at the bottom of a pit to killing half of them off or whatever. But these don't work. You can't kill all of them off, and if you dump them down a pit, they'll work together to get out of it.
So, here's a handy little guide on how to keep people oppressed:
1. Take away their knowledge of a better world. If all anyone knows of the world is how it is now, they can't dream or want anything more. If that fails, make sure they are seperated from the rest of the world based on
what they are. If they are seperated because, say, they are Jewish, they won't try to rise because you can't become something other than what you are. However, if they are seperated for being "stupid", there will always be the one who rises up and claims to be smart. This is a pain. You need to then deal with that kind of smartass. Better to avoid the whole thing.
2. Split them apart. Now, there are many ways to do this. First, and obviously, is through sabotage/pitting groups against each other. Secondly is by making them compete for “prestige” in their carefully micromanaged world. Third is by offering rewards for people who rat each other out. There are more possibilities- geography, language, religions, etc. Give them conflicting religions. Support warlords.
3. Keep them afraid of something outside. This works best as a first or last resort, when the voices you want to silence are being heard, when you’re moving towards control of a populace. Give them solid, concrete evidence that there’s something to be feared, even if it’s staged. Then give them a slight face to the fear, a face that will represent something to them. But make sure that the fear can never be conquered, that it’s something that will always be there. You can even just ingrain the fear in them from the beginning, from childhood. Miseducation is the way to go.
4. Limit communication. Chances are that someone, somewhere is going to have ideas of freedom, truth, beauty, and love. This is very dangerous. But if it’s only one person, there’s still a way to silence them. How? No, not through violence. You should already have made it near-impossible to communicate ideals. Think NewSpeak. Sapir-Whorf (the hypothesis that language controls how we think) is wrong, but so is the idea that NewSpeak was intrinsically related to Sapir-Whorf. The purpose of NewSpeak was to isolate the voices of truth and beauty. How do you communicate the idea of evil through “doubleplusungood”? Isolation of ideas is the goal. Similarly, there must be no independent press.
5. Keep them motivated. People who are bored have time to daydream. This is dangerous, so there has to be some sort of goal everyone is aspiring to, something they are working towards. The goal will be a figurehead, of course, but there needs to be something for them to do.
c.
Hitler came to power because...
Let’s get something straight: Hitler was a very passionate speaker, very charismatic. But charisma is not enough to turn a country that far wrong.
Drop Hitler in modern-day America and he would not come to power and convince people to kill all the Jews. I don’t care what you’re smoking or that there are neo-nazis.
Countries go radically conservative or radically liberal for some of the same reasons, most prominently the following:
Desperation. The people shift because they are fed up with how things are, because they are tired and hungry and they want more than what they have.
Countries go conservative when they get pummelled after a period of success. See the Germans after World War I. Stuck with heavy war debts, they remembered the good old days, when life had been better. People yearning for the days of yore like to blame their fall on outsiders.
Countries go liberal, or communist, when they globalize really damn fast, when the whole influx of new ideas is all too much, when they learn that things are better in other countries and the workers, the middle class and the lower class, are more valued. When their eyes are opened to the fact that they could do better than a monarchy, they go rapidly in the opposite direction.
Neither system of government has ever taken power in an economically sound country. If you want to keep a people happy, you keep them well-fed and with enough money to spend on things they want, not just things they need.
d.
People who have tough lives will angst about it.
In my experience, no. People who have seriously tough lives don’t actually sit and reflect and mope around about their issues, especially not when they’ve been having these issues all their lives. I know a girl who has an abusive mother. Instead of whining about it, she’s just quiet and has poor social skills and is rather obsessive-compulsive (said girl tried to HITCHHIKE TO MY HOUSE in order to see if she could recode a project so it’d email to our teacher, despite the fact that said teacher had told me it was okay to bring it on CD), as well as having more than a few nervous twitches.
Angst happens when someone who leads a happy life gets their first glimpse of s**t. Why? Because the kind of angst I’m referring to only happens when people aren’t experienced enough to realize that self-pity gets them nowhere. Sure, people take s**t and suffer from it-- their productivity decreases, their energy level drops, they may even go through a period of minor depression. But people who have had abusive mothers and fathers, who were raped at age 14, who are now 20 and living out on the streets won’t break down crying or launch into suicidal monologue when their boyfriend dumps them. Not if they’ve survived this long.
e.
Men and Women are fundamentally the same.
When you write their personalities, okay. But there are differences due to both gender roles AND biology. For instance, a list of various qualities that generally apply to each gender:
Men:
-More aggressive
-Athletic
-Tend to initiate contact
-Interrupt people more often
-Tend to phrase things in the general
-Try to solve problems (ever noticed that when you ask a guy for advice, he never offers sympathy, just a way to fix the problem? Yeah.)
-Try to work things through on their own
-Difficulty in expressing intimacy/private details
-Talk about where they go and what they did.
-Task-oriented
Women:
-Phrase things personally
-Take less time asking questions
-Better at informal discussions
-Try to involve everyone in conversations
-Sensitive to nonverbal cues
-Try to relate to problems (Ever noticed that when you ask a girl for advice, she always offers sympathy, and rarely a way to fix the problem? Yeah.)
-More likely to ask for help
-Tend to communicate information about their private life more readily.
-Talk about how they feel/relationships.
-Maintenance oriented.
-Use “why” a lot and question rather than accuse,
Obviously, individuals vary- and gender roles are always a tricky topic. Could your Hy’Laera rebell against the misogynist traits of her homeworld? Certainly. Is this going to turn her into a man? It’s doubtful. By the time we recognize gender roles, they’re already ingrained in the way we define ourselves. So maybe one or two can completely unmake that-- the majority cannot, and, yes, although many women have “masculine” traits, few of them are complete men. But from the number of women who act exactly like men and never seem to have any sort of problems with their body structure and what genetics has given them, you’d think we were all the same.
Though it might be interesting to read about a fiery heroine who’s the epitome of masculinity, rather than just being a wimp whenever she meets a hot guy.
(Read this link:
http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/2052/they.html )
f.
Gay men act like girls.
Maybe some do, but the majority do not. All the gay men I know are nice and funny and masculine. They don’t squeal and rave. They may be more open about their feelings, but they certainly don’t talk like valley girls and they tend to be more private than the women I know. Looking at my friend Zach, he acts exactly like the typical man when I hang out with him and his boyfriend- it just so happens that the person he’s got his arm around has a p***s.
There also does not need to be a sub and a dom, especially not when they are so typecasted. This is where I believe that anyone who wants to write about gay people needs to have all the yaoi they have ever seen completely erased from their memory.
Yes. I’m going to be racist and blame the Japanese. Why? Because every single yaoi comic I see involves a dom who is masculine and cold and handsome and a sub who is a wimp and acts LIKE A TEENAGED GIRL ON HER FIRST DATE.
Don’t do this. God, please, don’t.
g.
They broke up because...
I cannot tell you the number of times I have seen couples who have moved in, are engaged, have been together for however long the author thinks is a long time.... break up because they can’t communicate.
Mostly, this is due to Big Misunderstandings. The guy gets drunk and kisses another girl. The girl is heard saying something out-of-context, something that sounds mean or nasty.
And these characters can never sit down and talk about what it is, when it’s obvious that this is a problem that isn’t what it seems.
What? How does this make any amount of sense? I can understand some resentment, but she kicks him out because he kissed a girl while drunk and they never sit down to have a heart-to-heart chat?
Relationships do not last without communication.
h.
They hate her because of her clothes! She’s really a lovely person!
No. If your character is of any age, she’d be judged inevitably on her personality. Yes, first impressions do matter, but they’ll also be outweighed by how your character acts.
It is
your character’s fault if they fail to present a front that is appealing to others. Perhaps that goth chick you know (or even you!) isn’t disliked because of her clothing, but rather because she acts sullen and unholier-than-thou. People like that are a pain to be around.
i.
Rape made her...
Let me go over this very quickly:
Rape does not make someone a lesbian.
Rape does not make someone fall in love.
Stockholm syndrome does exist, but it’s exceedingly rare and means your character is honest-to-god messed up.
If you refuse to make your character
messed up and portray them as
messed up, you have no business writing about a girl who falls in love with her rapist. None. It makes you look like a misogynist b*****d (a la Nick Bent).
Your character is not going to turn into a lesbian because someone raped her. Let’s take a look at this, shall we? Here I’m going to start rampantly taking some of Limyaael’s points:
-If your character turns into a lesbian after being raped, you are saying that being gay or lesbian is not inborn.
-If your character turns into a lesbian after being raped, you are saying that female sexuality is dependant on the male gender. I doubt this is what you really want to discuss, as it’s quite offensive.
Also, the plot wherein a character is raped, goes to his or her crush for comfort and is healed by the power of his c**k is really, really awful. Rape is a traumatic event. It is
violation. Somehow, I doubt your character is honestly going to want to feel another p***s inside him or her. Really. Please research the effects of traumatic events before writing about them.
j.
My character is young and is therefore the perfect assassin/soldier/whatever.
Um, no.
Let me take a few examples I’ve read recently.
a. A sixteen-year-old girl is a government assassin. She’s given assignments through an earpiece, along with some special weapons.
b. A ten-year-old prince is hacking apart people on a battlefield at his father’s request.
Tell me you see something wrong with these scenarios. Please.
But I’ll point it out to you anyways.
a. Sixteen is the absolute worst age to assign a girl with any important task. I’m saying this as a sixteen-year-old girl. Me, and most of my peers, are more concerned with grades and college and hormones and oh my god that boy is so hot and oh s**t they’re cancelling the dance I wanted to go to than “Well, let’s get down to business and kill someone”. Not to mention that sixteen-year-old girls have no physical advantage to anyone else who would likely be more suited for the job. I’ve heard the excuse that they can get certain places, like high schools, easier, but why would you want to assassinate a high school student, anyways?
b. ... Apparently his father is like King John in
Blue Moon Rising and wants his son dead. Which would make for an interesting conflict, if the prince hadn’t been actually destroying people.
Let’s get something straight: Princes scarcely belong on battlefields at all, especially not first or second sons. Third sons might make good commanders, but as a contingency plan in medieval settings, they shouldn’t be on the front lines. Especially not at the age of ten.
Ten-year-olds are miniscule and are unlikely to be able to defeat any trained soldier. Period. I don’t care if they’ve been studying the sword from when they were four. I’ll also add that around that age, they’re just about to hit puberty. A hormonal boy trying to get used to his body while fighting? Um. No.
4. Nothing exists in a vacuum.
So you have, say, a princess who doesn't want to be a princess.
Why not?
Nobody springs into being as they are. People, yes, are different on a fundamental level, and that affects the way they respond to things, but we're a lot more influenced by how we're raised and by our past experiences.
So if this princess doesn't want to be a princess, what taught her that there was any other life? Did she get lost on a hunting trip and actually enjoy being with a hunter's family for a little while?
I really don't understand why, say, the royalty would let her run wild. People know how people work, or else none of us would be able to write a decent character. The people would KNOW-- from past experience, from
logic, the same sort of logic you're using-- that allowing a princess to run wild never works because she'll always hate the change in her life.
So think about it. Surely the Princess isn't the only one who decides her future, who gets everything ready-- there's a whole ARMY of people out there making sure everything's set up just right, making sure she never steps aside.
And what are they working for? What are their goals? What if they happen to not be entirely scrupulous?
but wait. I'm getting ahead of myself.
Consider: What caused your character to get here? Why does nobody impede her progress? What are the things that go against her current state of being?
5. How does your character live his or her life?
The best way to do this is to wake up one morning and decide your character’s equivalent action for every one of yours. Really, you’ll be surprised at what you discover. Princess Saralynne doesn’t know how to brush her teeth or that it helps, so maybe she’ll be real pretty until she shows off those yellow, crumbling stumps she has for teeth. That’s different.
Or your character is woken up by servants. But what happens if the servant is sick? What if she wakes up late?
Your peasant character gets up with the sun, because he’s structured his domicile so that the sun falls across his face when it rises. Okay. He wakes his family up. Alright. Does his son go off to school? If so, what sorts of food is he packed? What does he learn? What does the peasant do? Harvest crops, right? How does he cook dinner?
Your werewolf in everyday life... does his school know that he transforms? how does he deal with the classes he misses? What about his homework when he's off eating people?
And, more importantly: What could go wrong in the everyday occurences? Does your princess realize suddenly that she’s completely spoiled her funeral dress and her father’s funeral is that evening? Does she make her maid quickly assemble a dress out of some old curtains, thus meaning that the maid doesn’t get much else done?
6. It expands.
Drop a rock in a pond and the ripples will decrease in size as a geometric series.
The fun part about geometric series? They never reach zero.
So you have a character who is rebelling against her teachers/parents/princess lifestyle.
Why? Maybe her embroidery teacher brought her stories of a life with more freedom. But why would the teacher do that? There are motives to everything. Is the teacher naive and stupid? If so, I would expect that word would get out eventually, and she’d be sacked with the princess undergoing intensive rehabilitation. Who would provide the rehabilitation, and wouldn’t they be a significant influence on the princess? Would news get out, causing a public outrage?
Or your hacker is hired to run some drugs from one end of the world to the other. There are people after him like the police right? And he’s got to lead them to the wrong buildings, etc. What happens to the people in those buildings? I bet they’ll be rather bothered when they’re taken in for questioning, and might even be spiteful enough to try hunting down information about your character on the ‘net. And then those extra hits might make the people who just track the web a bit more interested in who your character is, and they might take time off from doing that just to research a bit more into said character’s past, where they discover that he was in the war long ago and was given dishonorable discharge for hacking into his mindchip. They find out he has a mindchip, then. Chips are reprogrammable. Being mercenary folks, they decide to come up with a program that can hack your character’s mind and they sell it to the people after said character.
Or the character is being hunted down by people to get revenge on him for the drugs he’s sold their relatives. Those relatives ended up dying, and now they want vengeance. So they’ll try hunting him down, working seperately from the police. What happens if they meet up with the police?
The bigger the event, the more people who will be affected by it. Why? Worlds are
dynamic. 9/11 didn't just affect the families of people who died or the people who died, did it? Of course not.
A lot of authors only restrict consequence depiction (or even just hinting at consequences) to the characters we already know. I’m going to use one of the worst fantasy authors of all time, Terry Goodkind. Now, in his book,
Soul of the Fire, his main character, Richard Rahl, has the power to save a nation by effectively fighting off their invaders. However, since a majority of that nation voted against him, he chooses not to.
What happened to the minority? You’d expect they’d be kind of bitter, you know, because they supported him. Some of them might even go after him for revenge or similar things. Certainly not all of them will be captured and subjugated by the invading army, right?
So why do these characters never pop up? There are no frantic refugees that end up speaking publicly against Richard.
I’m willing to be nice to the man and say that he just didn’t think of this, rather than purposefully avoiding a situation that might make his main look bad.
This is especially tricksome when something major like the introduction of magic occurs-- and the world isn’t changed. If magic quickly became an attainable commodity, what would it be used for? Anyone?
A status symbol. Yes, that’s right. In the same way that robot waiters would be status symbols, I’m willing to be that magic would be. Rather than farming by hand, the richer farmers would farm with magic. Exceedingly rich craftsmen would craft using magic.
It can sometimes be hard when you try to take a certain action, take a minor side character, and try to connect them, so don’t. Just think: What are the possible consequences of this action? How does it spread? Chances are there will be few people in the immediate area who
aren't affected.
Even character-focused stories can benefit from a few consequence tracings. Sure, it might not be important to the story that random peasant #98 gets saved from wolves that year, but, hey, you could include it and it will make your universe seem that much more alive.
In a more specific warning: Beware of having your main character do things and not having the people around her be affected. If your character does decide to rebel against being a princess, her teacher will probably be punished. Her friends might scorn her. The noble ladies might gossip. Things like that.
Things never have just one effect on just one person. Living in the desert will effect the whole society, not just your one main character. I don't want to hear about how your main character is dying of thirst while the others seem to always have full waterskins.
7. Consequences run out eventually.
I know this may seem like I'm contradicting the last point, but it's true:
Include consequences that are interesting. They can spur a story onwards.
Do not, however, include consequences that are negligable. Don't have Peasant #6943 come up to your hero and mention how he saved her life because he scooped a vial of holy water that destroyed a vampire that would have tainted the river which would have led to crop destruction.
People who live in your world are unlikely to follow the elaborate strings of cause and effect. You, however, must.
Some of your readers will be intelligent. Severe logical flaws will make us very sad, especially if they completely ruin suspension of disbelief.
Final Words:
I used to be convinced that I was inferior. I would never amount to anything, because something was missing about my writing. The authors I admired were better than me, and hey, why don't I just send that idea in to George R. R. Martin so he can write it properly?
And then I realized that there's a seed of me in all my stories.
Ultimately: Write it. Write it because there is nobody on earth who will write a story that really, honestly comes from the heart in the same way that you do. Write it for yourself, if not for others. You have something special: your personality, your experiences.
All the best, Veive.
