Are you ever surprised by your own plot elements?

I pulled out a long unfinished story the other day and ran through the portions that were already written. For some unknown reason, I began to get ideas for a chapter that was near the end but otherwise sitting out in the middle of the blank second-half of the story; neither a continuation where I'd left off, nor the conclusion.

I started typing and by the time I was done I had much more than the outline I'd expected; I had a pretty fully fleshed out chapter. Today, I went over it again and tightened it up here and there, and fleshed out a couple of places that were asking for further elucidation.

I read it over again, then, and said, "Shoot, I never saw that coming."

I know that many authors talk about a story writing itself but this is the first time I really felt like it was doing just that. The chapter began where I expected it to begin, and ended where I had originally expected it to end, but the route between those two points took some turns that I had never anticipated, let alone planned out ahead of time.

It will be interesting to see if the rest of the currently missing chapters do likewise.

Firstly, is there one of us RPers who isn't a budding writer?

But I know exactly where you are coming from. I am what I believe is described as a 'discovery writer' so I set up the initial scene and characters and have a rough idea where I want it to end and then I just write.

Sometimes it works out and sometimes the story goers off in a whole new direction all by itself and the ending I envisioned gets trashed in the process.

It can be great sometimes just letting the story run away with itself and just going along for the ride but sometimes I wish I could outline a bit better as it avoids rewrites.

All the time. For RP plot, it never survives contact with other players so is guaranteed to go off course. For fiction, I usually start with a vague idea and then just start typing. Stories frequently write themselves, I find.

I never have any idea what I'm doing, so the fact anything at all gets done is fairly amazing in itself.

While I don't do a lot of plot for CoH (It's my relaxation RP really! I plot for games I GM in other places) there's still a lot of mental stuff that's come out of throw away references or jokes and storylines that have taken lives of thier own.

After being inactive for a long time (11 months or so) I came back and wanted to find my handbook page to update, couldn't remember it so I googled my mains name. It brought up some old thread arcs I had run and I had so much fun reading through them, as I couldn't remember writing half of it.

So yes, sometimes it does feel like the story takes over itself and you're just it's focal point.

When my main, Anbaric Amber stumbled into the Doppleganger missions, the character evolved significantly and was greatly traumatized by the experience. I had designed her to be from a parallel world like in Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" series. When the doorways were closed by the events in that novel, which were real in her world, she was stuck in this one. Meeting a doppleganger from yet another parallel dimension, along with dealing with the villain version of herself that lived here prior to her arrival, has caused Amber no end of trouble. She finds herself preoccupied by thoughts of parallel dimensions and doubles and duplicates and will bend any ear in Pocket-D willing to listen to her.

This was unexpected as while I knew Anbaric Amber was from a parallel dimension, I had no idea that the story convention existed in CoH so it was a very fulfilling experience for the both of us.

E.

Happens to me ALL the time. The storylines of Andrea Blake and Sorina Tavarisch expanded in every direction at an almost exponential rate, in ways even I had no way of seeing coming, just by simple interactions with others or story arcs or whatnot. No one was more shocked than I was when Andrea (built SOLELY as an experiment for a dark/psi defender)'s history became as richly layered as it did. (Same goes for Sorina, who I'd just sort of created to fill in a gap in our SG.)

Then there's all the weirdness that Sorina's involved in with the whole TCOSR thing...

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Every. Single. Time.


No matter how much I outline or plan things, I'll find myself getting to the end of a page or a paragraph and wondering how I wandered so far off track and why this was all so much better than what was on the outline.

I've learned to roll with it. No outline survives contact with the word processor.

JWB

Are you ever surprised by your own plot elements?

Yes I am. I think most writers are. In fact, on some occasions, if I do not sit and write when the story is "developing", then it never gets written. Even on the "In The Newspapers" thread, it may be based on an AE arc, but the actual writing just plots out as I write. If I have the whole story finished in my head before I write, then it is done, and I seldom if ever actually write it after that. It would be like immediately reading a book I just read.
I will, at times, laugh and tell my wife "hey, look what so and so just did/said"...I know...weird, since it is my own writing. <_<

Yep. Nearly all of my characters have at least one example of change brought on unexpectedly. Characters very often, the good ones anyway, are their own creatures.

@Guinevere

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Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

To the OP: oh, hell yes!

Case in point: I currently have plot going on that has peripherally involved the Praetorian versions of my main RP toons. One of them has suddenly taken on a vastly more important role than I ever envisioned. I have no clue how it's all going to work out.

Nitoichi's death. She was supposed to die, wake up evil, and take months to come back. Meanwhile her Praetorian twin, Gunwitch, would turn up and have plenty of time to take over (so to speak). But, as FFM said, plans rarely survive contact with the enemy (players), and the other people around GG put in so much effort that I was pretty much forced to bring her back sooner or disrupt too many other things and characters.

Usually, my written work does what it's told these days. I have a start and an end. I may not know exactly how I'm getting from one to the other, but that's fine, there are rarely actual surprises involved. (Though I had no plans to make Gunwitch's nanobots semi-sentient until it kind of fell out of a story.)

RP plots, however, are different, simply because other people have input to them.

It's what's known as "inspiration," I'd say, and I find that to be pretty normal for any creative process. I know movies and some authors have made inspiration out to be like some kind of divine providence and clairvoyance, but to me, inspiration in writing is simply the state in which are able to come up with great idea on the spot, which are in actual fact much better than what you had before. It's that "Yes. Yes, I love! I can do so much with this!" moment, in essence.

Moreover, writing is a constant creative process. Even if you sit down and write a detailed plan of how the story will go, that's still only a guideline because you can't account for every little detail you'll run across while writing and every idea you'll come up with along the way. People often speak about "how a story wants to be told," and that's less some kind of quirky zen thing and more just the pragmatism in that the way you tell one part of a story tends to define how you need to tell the subsequent parts.

It could be something as simple as needing the hero to escape the planet in a space ship, but in the heat of the moment you write that taking an artillery shell through the cockpit because the drama of the moment was more important. Suddenly, you have to roll your chair back and try to figure out how to rewrite the plot so the hero can still escape and make sense... And then you wonder: "Well, suppose he COULDN'T escape? Then what? Maybe he'll have to survive and grow as a person. Maybe there are other survivors on the planet who can help him? Maybe... Maybe..." and the thing rolls downhill from there and all of a sudden you're telling a completely different story that feels much better than the one you'd planned to tell before. And the best part is you can still pick up the other story at a later time.

Sometimes, though, it's something much smaller. For instance, you had originally intended for the villain to be defeated by missing an important detail of the hero's plan, and it seemed like a good ending - villain loses because he's too self-assured. But then, to add drama to a previous situation, you made the villain very meticulous and attentive, enough to spot a very minor clue that gives the hero away in a previous scene where you'd planned for the detail to be a lot less minor. Suddenly, it kind of doesn't make sense for this sharp-eyed, quick-thinking villain to be blindsided in such a silly manner, so other things have to happen for him to be defeated. Or maybe he isn't defeated at all and the story has to continue for a few more chapters?

Most of the time, I'd expect a story to run away from a writer at least once along the way, simply because that's a sign of flexible writing which specifically writes subsequent events to make sense given previous events. Consistency and interesting events are all too often more important than sticking to a specific plan.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Hmmm... digression... Being a successful author doesn't make you a good one, it makes you a lucky one. Popularity has little to do with talent, or imagination, or originality. (Though Anne Rice did do well on what I think was the original concept at the time of taking the monster and writing from its perspective. I kind of doubt it was entirely original, but she certainly popularised it. And no, I could never finish Interview..., I hated the main character. Mind you, I don't think Rice liked him either.)


Anyway, back to the point. I recall an interview with Anne McCaffrey in which she said that her stories wrote themselves, often going off in ways she did not expect since the characters had their own minds.

And then there was the interview with Iain Banks where he commented on that kind of thing saying something like, "Some authors say that their characters have minds of their own and the story can diverge massively from how they originally intended once the characters get involved. Well I'm not like that; my characters do what they're damn well told!"

It's all a matter of style and how you like writing, I think. As I get older (I won't say more experienced), I tend to do more and more research before I start writing (or, actually, creating a character). That doesn't mean I know everything there is to know about a character, or a story, before I start; I'm simply too impatient. It does mean I understand the characters and setting better, so there's less chance that they'll do something I hadn't expected.

I've just started writing what I hope might be a small novel. I have a load of material on the world's background and the principle characters, but I have no idea where I'm going with it once I've got the, unfortunately necessary, character introduction phase out of the way. I'm sure I'll have some inspiration when I need it.

As a side-effect of all this research, I've become far less tolerant of lousy research in stories and almost intolerant of not bothering at all. With the Internet out there, there's no real excuse for not doing a bit of research to get your facts straight. (One character annoyed most of GG by being based on a premise about in-game lore which was (1) entirely wrong and (2) easily discovered as wrong with 5 minutes work.) Subverting facts and lore is one thing, just straight ignoring it or not bothering to find out... I'd rather read something done by an author who cares enough to put the effort in.

Heh. I was writing a lot of stuff in New York despite never having been there, so I decided to take the opportunity to visit when I went over for HeroCon. I have to say, it does improve my writing to know what walking down a street in Queens actually feels like, or what Central Park really does look like on the ground.

However... Google maps can show you what places look like fairly well, and these days you can actually drop yourself right into a street and look around.

The technology and the information are out there, if people can be bothered to use one to find the other.

"Research" is part of why I tend to write fiction and give tentatively little explanation on the precise workings of the technology and science involved. This is also why I don't like writing in-canon fiction about City of Heroes, as I haven't read all the comic books, proper books, Wiki entries, Easter egg badges, exploration badges, plaques, Paragon Times articles and basically I haven't seen much of the expanded universe to know enough about the setting. Just not my thing.

To be honest, though, I'm generally not very hard on people who don't do their research. As long as the story is good, I can forgive a lot of minor details because, really, good ideas and inspiration is most of what I'm after. If a story manages to deliver a good idea across well enough, then even if it does so, then I can swallow quite a few factual mistakes with no complaint. I'm not grading a student's homework when I read a fictional story, after all. I read it for fun and to expand my own horizons, so all that matters is that it's decent.

Sure, a BAD story that has factual errors ON TOP of that (curse you, Doom movie!) is going to piss me off to no end, and one day finally get me to make my own Snob videos, but that's far and away besides the point, I think.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

It's happened a couple times to me. Sometimes characters think or behave in ways I hadn't intended.

I shudder to think about how they would behave if I applied more irrational decisions to the mix.