{"id":992,"date":"2018-09-12T08:22:59","date_gmt":"2018-09-12T12:22:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/?p=992"},"modified":"2018-09-12T08:24:12","modified_gmt":"2018-09-12T12:24:12","slug":"where-to-put-that-plot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/2018\/09\/12\/where-to-put-that-plot\/","title":{"rendered":"Where to put that plot?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I may add this as an occasional blog feature: short comments on style or other matters. Here\u2019s a craft one I\u2019ve thought about often–I always question the use of the word suddenly<\/em>. Sometimes it\u2019s perfect, but usually it\u2019s unnecessary, and the word drains the surprise from whatever is about to occur, because it warns the reader. So I\u2019d recommend being aware of it and using it only when nothing else will do.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, however, I once told this prejudice to an editor, who laughed and said, \u201cWriters!\u201d So my opinion isn\u2019t universally shared. I leave it to you.<\/p>\n

Do you like this addition?<\/p>\n

And for those of you who’ll be in the New York City area: I’ll be signing books from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm on Saturday, September 29th, at the Chappaqua Book Festival, where there may be many authors you love. I’ll have plenty of time to chat. Here’s a link to the event:\u00a0http:\/\/www.ccbfestival.org\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On July 18, 2018, Laura R wrote, I have a fanfiction that, while not my current WIP, is on the back burner to be turned into an original story. I agree that we can see what is the essential part of the story. If the essential part relies on something from the original author\u2019s work, can that \u201csomething\u201d be changed? For example, my fanfiction is based on a long, ongoing guild roleplay from World of Warcraft. One of game\u2019s villains was the Lich King in the frozen Northlands. I still plan on keeping the undead, but I changed their location to a dessert (once actually a sea bay) and their leader to a dracolich that\u2019s seeking to gain a corporeal, draconic form again. Many of the characters\u2019 \u201cclasses\u201d (what their attacks and weapon and armor types are based on) are really basic to fantasy settings, so I can drop the game-based specific attacks (or attack names) and use my own.<\/em><\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s your actual plot. If you change the setting, does your plot have to change? Does it become shorter because you no longer have to deal with part of the author\u2019s original world? Does it become longer because you have created your own world?<\/em><\/p>\n

In my reply, I said that I\u2019d address the setting part of Laura R\u2019s question.<\/p>\n

Recently, I received a group email from my MFA alums, alerting people to an adjunct job opening at a university in New York City, teaching a class about place in literature, and the exploration was to be conducted through original student writing.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have time to take on a college-level class so I didn’t apply. From teaching one once, I learned that I spent four hours a week in the classroom and thirty more preparing and going over student work. Even my summer workshop for kids, which lasts only six weeks and is a labor of love, devours a surprising amount of time. Regardless, however, I thought about how I would teach such a class.<\/p>\n

And I realized right away that fantasy, because of world-building, focuses more on place (setting) than other genres. I don\u2019t mean setting isn\u2019t always important, and isn\u2019t sometimes essential\u2013think of mystery series that are set in certain cities or parts of the world in which location becomes almost a character.<\/p>\n

But for fantasy, consider The Wizard of Oz<\/em>! Though I\u2019ve read the book, I know the movie better, so that\u2019s what I\u2019m thinking of (and I just refreshed my memory with the plot summary on Wikipedia). What would be left without Oz and, by contrast, the colorless version of Kansas?<\/p>\n

Without Oz or Kansas, we could have a girl who doesn\u2019t appreciate her life. We could blow up that life in a way that doesn\u2019t involve a twister, and we could have her travel somewhere and feel surprisingly homesick, so that the rest of the adventure is an attempt, that succeeds in the end, to get home. Of course, there\u2019s also Toto, who sets everything in motion by biting Almira Gulch and being in danger of being euthanized, so we can imagine a different inciting incident involving a pet.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s bare bones. There\u2019s much more.<\/p>\n

Dorothy is deluded about herself (that she didn\u2019t like her life at home), and so are other characters: the lion, who wrongly thinks he\u2019s cowardly, the tin man, who wrongly thinks he\u2019s unfeeling, and the straw man, who wrongly thinks he\u2019s stupid\u2013in a universe (setting) that accommodates these sorts of creatures. Not to mention the people of Emerald City (setting), who are deceived by their glasses into thinking that everything is green!<\/p>\n

So we\u2019d have to include fantastical creatures in our world, although not necessarily the same kinds, and self-delusion, since ridding the characters of them is part of the plot.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s the wizard himself, who deludes everyone but isn\u2019t deluded himself. We\u2019d need a revered but remote charismatic figure, whose unmasking figures into the story.<\/p>\n

Then we have the good and evil witches and the enslaved flying monkeys, who are all part of this world (setting). For the new plot, they don\u2019t have to be witches, but we need figures who represent good and evil, and we need minions of evil. The villain has to try to do our MC in, and our symbol of virtue has to save her, because, alas, Dorothy doesn\u2019t get her own self out of Oz\u2013or really do much to better her situation, although she is brave when she throws water on the scarecrow and accidentally melts the witch. I would say for that one, we want in our plot a villain with a secret and weird Achilles\u2019 heel.<\/p>\n

For all the time I\u2019ve watched The Wizard of Oz<\/em>, I\u2019ve never noticed that the threat of Toto being put to sleep is never resolved. So if we\u2019re following The Wizard of Oz<\/em> we have to leave a major plot thread hanging!<\/p>\n

I have to conclude, though I went into this exploration unsure, that plot\u2013a detailed, step-by-step plot–at least in the case of The Wizard of Oz<\/em>–is organically interwoven with setting.<\/p>\n

The charm for me in discovering both my plot and my setting, is the way the two, plus character, act on the others. The setting that we create suggests directions for our story, and our plot suggests the setting that will best accommodate it.<\/p>\n

Having said that, however, we could take the bare-bones plot that I described near the beginning of the post and create a new setting for it and follow the twists and turns that the new setting takes us to. Fairy tales, fables, and myths, with their simple story lines, can be plunked into lots of settings. Same for any plot archetype.<\/p>\n

As for whether our new plot will be shorter or longer than its prototype–could be either one, depending on what we do and the complexity of the setting we create.<\/p>\n

One more thing. This is on the subject of converting fanfiction into original work. I’m not an attorney or an expert in copyright, so I’d use a practical rule of thumb. Turn the tables and imagine that we wrote the work that someone else is basing a new story on. If we feel infringed–if we recognize our own creation in the new fiction and feel that our story has been stolen–then the writer hasn’t gone far enough to make the work her own. Naturally, if the story we’re basing our new plot on is already in the public domain, we’re home free. We want to be original because of course we do, but we don’t have to worry about how much of the earlier elements we’re using.<\/p>\n

Here are three prompts:<\/p>\n

\u2219 You probably saw this coming: Use as much as you possibly can of the detailed Wizard of Oz<\/em> plot summary in a setting of your own devising\u2013could be a fairy-tale kingdom, some part of the contemporary world, a dystopian future, an actual period in the past, or anything else.<\/p>\n

\u2219 Use as much as you can of The Wizard of Oz<\/em>\u00a0plot in a masked ball.<\/p>\n

\u2219 Pick a traditional story\u2013fairy tale, myth, fable, tall tale\u2013and put it in a high-tech setting. Let the setting influence what happens.<\/p>\n

Have fun, and save what you write!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I may add this as an occasional blog feature: short comments on style or other matters. Here\u2019s a craft one I\u2019ve thought about often–I always question the use of the word suddenly. Sometimes it\u2019s perfect, but usually it\u2019s unnecessary, and the word drains the surprise from whatever is about to occur, because it warns the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/992"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=992"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":996,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/992\/revisions\/996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}