theallycat

 First things first: I have not posted it a long time. If this were writing, there would be no excuse. However, since writing is the reason I haven't posted...

Ah, what the heck. I was lazy.

But when I was going over my old posts, I realized something horrific: I had never, not once, mentioned Worldbuilding.

Yes, Worldbuilding, with a capital W.

If you're writing a story that takes place anywhere from an American high school to planet Raxacoricofallipatorius, you need to understand the world you're in. 

So first, you need a map.

Now, obviously, if you're writing a story that takes place in, I don't know, Boston, you are permitted to use google maps or an equivalent. Actually, scratch that. Please do use google maps or an equivalent, because remapping the city yourself would be a colossal waste of time. But you also need to map out your character's house, your character's school, or workplace, the hospital they meet their love interest in or the military base they discover the secret plot to assassinate the prime minister of wheretheheckistan.

If your story takes place in a make-believe city, country, continent, planet or universe, you need to map it out yourself. No, you don't need to be an artist for this. You just need lots of paper, colored pencils, and a good imagination-- which, if you're trying to make a career out of writing, you should already have. If not, leave this page and go find one.

Then, figure out why. Why are there no cities within miles of the mountains? Why is one of the most fertile areas on the continent completely uninhabited? Why are those lakes and forests named things like "Scary Lake of Doom" and "Forest of Fear"?

And from there, you can develop a plot.

But be warned; Worldbuilding is not just about geography. It's everything from the culture to the food to the music to the slang. Until you understand all that about your world, you cannot have a coherent story.

 Okay, now you have characters and they have motivations. You've developed a conflict. If you've gotten to there, you probably have some idea what you want to happen in your story. Now, there are plenty of different approaches to this stage of the game, but for now I'll start with one.

Figure out where you want your characters to end up.

Yes, it's great to say, "Okay, so Joanne wants to move to Paris and Luke wants to marry her and stay in Oklahoma". Now you have to say "Joanne and Luke will get together in the end, but they'll move to Paris together."

Many, many authors will do things differently, and what works for them is always great advice. But here's why I like this method.

Now you have to figure out why your characters end up there.

If Luke and Joanne move to Paris together at the end of the book, that means Luke has decided he loves Joanne more than money and is willing to give up the latter for the former. For this to work, Joanne has to learn about Luke's plot and about his eventual decision to abandon the money.

Well, if I were writing this book, the first thing I would tell myself would be, "I want Joanne to be strong and independent. I want her to be the type of woman who wouldn't compromise her future for a boy. So I want Joanne to discover Luke's intentions and dump him for it. But if they're going to get back together, Joanne is going to need honest proof that Luke's changed. 

"So, in that case, we're probably going to need a showdown between Luke and his grandfather. Maybe Luke could pack up his stuff and leave? Oh, I kind of like that. Luke gets in a huge fight with his family and announces that he's not going to let their manipulations get in the way of him being with the love of his life. So, in that case, maybe his family tries to set him up with another woman once Joanne dumps him. Oh, that could be good.

"But for maximum dramatic impact, Joanne has to be seriously considering marrying Luke when she finds out about his plans. Maybe he could have proposed and she was thinking about it. Maybe she'd even accepted, and when she finds out she breaks the ring. But why would Joanne, a strong, independent woman, be willing to abandon her dream? She must fall really hard for Luke, but that wouldn't be a good enough reason. Maybe there are financial difficulties? That would be a good external conflict for Joanne. So, she's having some financial difficulty while falling desperately in love with Luke, and when he proposes she sees this as the best outcome for her.

"So then the story would have a recurring theme of love vs. career. Both characters are willing to give up the former for the latter at the beginning (Joanne is willing to leave Luke for Paris, Luke is willing to settle for his high school sweetheart rather than wait for the right person) and later on, both have a moment of choosing love over career. And at the end, the two strike a balance. Maybe, at the end, Joanne won't be able to afford Paris, but she decides to try and make it in New York instead, and she stays with Luke. And maybe Luke finds something he's truly passionate about and pursues that. Yes. Yes, I like that."

Either on paper or on the computer or talking to a friend over the phone, ramble your way through the novel. You'll develop an idea of who your characters are, what challenges their going to face, and where they're going to end up. Once you've figured this out, it's time for the real stuff.

Decide how long you want this novel to be. I'll go with 70,000 words, a decent length for a YA romance. And I'm going to write a chapter a day, on any day I can work. Each chapter will be 2000 words.So that's thirty-five chapters. I'm going to divide the novel into the point-of-view (POV) of both characters. 17.5. Hmm. I'll write 18 chapters each.

Now, decide on the necessary scenes. I think I'll start with graduation, and the novel will take place over the summer. Come up with a basic timeline of what must happen for the story to reach it's conclusion, the bare minimum of things.

And then come up with things that could be fun to write.

You want a scene between Joanne and Luke's grandfather? Okay. You kind of want them to go to a ball? Luke's family can hold an annual one. You want-- hey, how about a love triangle! You'll introduce the new love interest for Joanne halfway through the summer, Luke can get jealous, and he'll realize that she's more than a means toward money for him.

And so on, and so forth, until you've got all the chapters plotted out in a fun, logical way, where the characters' actions are consistent with their character development and you really want to write. You now have a plot, and a plan, and all you have to do is write 2000 words a day for a little over a month. Then, of course, comes revision and whatnot, but for now, let's just focus on the first draft, yeah?

 ...because plotting takes a capital P.

I'm planning on doing a series of posts (not necessarily consecutive) about plotting, because it's such a huge topic and there are so many different ways to do it. I'm a firm believer in having a chapter outline of some sort, whether it's a sentence in summary or a spreadsheet of details. But I'll start with the beginning of plotting, because I think it's the most important bit:

YA novels are always CHARACTER DRIVEN.

Now, most genres are-- or at least should be-- character driven. But this blog centers around YA. And what makes YA such a big deal is that, while middle grade novels are usually about characters reacting to something, a young adult novel must have your characters acting in their own interests.

This doesn't mean the story has to start with them acting. Oh, no. Like in The Hunger Games, the bestselling story of a girl forced to represent her District in a televised fight to the death, the main conflict of a story could be entirely external. However, the main character of a middle grade novel would react to the situation they are forced into. YA novels usually contain either a coming-of-age theme or a character who has already "come of age", so to speak, and one of the symbols for coming of age is a character not just going on the defense to what is going on, but going on the offense, acting in their own interests and planning out what they want to happen. In a YA novel, a character must be presented with a situation and respond to it by deciding what they want out of it and figuring out what they must do to get that. This is called motive. 

What makes a story work, what makes each word a matter of life and death and creates tension so intense the pages are flipping by themselves, is when two characters have motives that directly oppose the other's. This is the basis of conflict. 

Let's say one character, a girl named Joanne, is graduating high school and desperately wants to move to Paris to become an artist. However, her high school boyfriend, Luke, needs to get married to inherit his grandfather's fortune and company, and he wants to marry her. This is conflict. Luke can only achieve his goal if Joanne fails to achieve hers, just as Joanne's success means Luke's failure. Only one can succeed. 

So this is what plotting needs to start with: a conflict. You can build a world with as many mysterious mountains and magical lakes as you like, and you can create a character and know everything about them from their hair color to the name of the pet rock they had when they were three, and you can end up with an entire universe of people talking and laughing and of bad stuff happening to these people, but until you create conflict, it doesn't really matter.

And Rule Number One, the most sacred and fatal law about fiction, is this: It has to matter.

 Here's my best piece of advice for this part of the novel:

Don't celebrate at 10k. Celebrating at 10k, for most people I know, always guarantees you don't finish a novel.

Because 10k feels magnificent. 10k feels like you've finally gotten past the hard part. 10k feels like you're in this for the long run.

10k is a liar.

The first 10k, you're introducing your characters. You're setting up the conflict. You're excited by the novel, and though it's tough, you know where it's going.

Then you get to the next 10k. Which, you tell yourself, won't be as hard. You're past that lousy beginning part, right? Wrong. Now your characters are starting to think for themselves. They've reached the rebellious teens. You're no longer writing them, they're writing themselves, and just like with teenagers, you can't let them run amok or they'll self-destruct, but you can't keep them trapped on a narrow path. You're reaching the worst part of the book to read and to write: you're no longer at the beginning, when everything is brilliant and new, but you haven't gotten to the middle, when everything's starting to come together and you're racing to the climax. This is usually the part of the book requiring the most editing, and the only way to truly write it is to sit down, ask your characters what they want to do, and modify your plans for them. Write crazy, and write true, and hit 20k before you start feeling accomplished.

Don't quite get it? Here's an example: in my first outline of Mad As A Hatter (back when it was a murder mystery, and not a thriller), when my Scotland Yard officer, Corwin, couldn't find anything out about the murders the honorable way, he turned to... less honorable sources. When I reached that part, though, Corwin would not let me write it. At first, I was mad at him. I wanted him to have a dark side, to challenge what he should be. And then he told me why. He told me that he was just as determined, just as cunning, and just as angry as his enemies. The one thing that separated them was, he said, his unwillingness to go against his values. He would not be a hypocrite: he would rather die than lose himself in a search for justice, because justice without morals is no different than vengeance.

And so I let him do what he wanted to do, and I let the others characters do what they wanted to do, and every night I wrote 2k-3k words, no matter what, and in a week I reached 25k. That weekend, I wrote the next 25k in a mad frenzy.

The only other novel I've finished, The Rain Legacy, I wrote in a week of horrible strep throat using the same technique.

Almost every other novel has had me cheering at 10k. And none of those ever got much further than that.

If you're just here for my diet tips, remember that the first week, you're on a bit of a high. You're enthusiastic, excited, pushing yourself. At the end of the week, maybe you'll treat yourself to ice cream as a reward. But a week of healthy eating really isn't all that much, and if you convince yourself it is, you'll probably fail your diet.

And now I have to go write a history exam. Cheers, everybody!

 Yes, I'm a sucker for alliteration. Sue me.

I've heard people say that writing a novel is like pregnancy. I've heard others say it's like running a marathon. I say it's like going on a diet. 

The idea of a diet is a fantastic thing. For days, maybe weeks, you walk around your house, thinking of the foods you're going to eat and the exercises you're going to do and, most of all, fantasizing about the killer body you're going to have at the end.

But you don't go on your diet right away. Oh, no. You have to have it planned out-- and you can't just start it on some random Thursday. It has to be on a meaningful day-- maybe a Monday, the fresh start to a brilliant week. Or maybe it can't just be the start of a week. Maybe it should be the start of a month. Or maybe, just maybe, it should be your New Year's Resolution.

Okay, you gotta face the facts: you're avoiding it.

But not because you don't want to diet. Who doesn't want a bright, bold, bikini-clad lifestyle? You're totally willing to do it. Enthusiastic, even. And if you were, say, three weeks down the road, you would be all over it. You just don't know where to start.

There are a million ways to plot and plan, whether the subject is your debut novel or your debut abs, but the cold, hard fact is that everything has to start somewhere. And the longer you put that start off, the less likely your plans have of ever succeeding.

So if you're trying to find a time to start a novel (or a diet, or a new pair of Gucci shoes), stop thinking about it and dive in. Right now. The moment you finish reading this post, go open a new Word document, type in "So this is how the story starts", and let your fingers and imagination run wild. 

It's like my grade seven history teacher once told us (although I believe this was about the Roman empire). If you open the fridge and see a whole cake, you probably won't cut yourself a piece. If you open the fridge and see a quarter of a cake, well, it's every man for himself.

Or, if you are starting a diet and don't want to be faced with that temptation: once you've broken the ice, it gets much, much easier.

 There are a lot of really good things about blogging. It’s a way to express your feelings on something, it’s a way to connect to other people, it’s a way to… well, it’s great for a lot of things.

You know what sucks about blogging? Coming up with a good first post.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure this doesn’t qualify. All right, so here’s the mandatory mini-bio on me. I'm the Ally Cat. Yes, that is a clever play on my nickname. I’m fifteen. I love to write— I’m trying to get representation on my second completed novel, since the first one is trunked— and I ramble. A lot. So try to bear with me.

Or don’t, I guess. Whatever you like.

And with this, I cross the first post barrier and get to enjoy blogging about whatever I like. Cheers!