Monthly Archives: September 2020

Discovery During Drafting

One of the things I hear fairly often from pantsers, writer who compose their text directly without a synopsis or outline guiding their writing, is that creating an outline feels to them like something that drains away surprise and spontaneity from their work.

Fair enough for them but I find that even with my extensive outline and synopsis building the pieces still manage to surprise me with revelation along the way.

My current work in process started with just the barest idea of who got killed, who killed them and why. Okay, that’s the essential elements for a murder mystery but hardly enough for me to fully understand the world or the characters so I moved on to extensive notes about the world.

I created these notes to explain to myself how the ship, which would take generations to reach its destination, worked, how the various groupings of people coalesced into stratified cultures and how all that impact the formation of character and motivation. That itself revealed some subtle changes to the original concept that deepen the ‘reality’ of the world.

Next I produced a bullet pointed act break down of the story as experience by my protagonist. I like working with acts not because the structure is king over all but because understanding how structure emerges from story illuminate what I need for this particular tale.

The curious thing and the discovery is that when I started making the bullet points for Act 1 I had a very simple understanding of the antagonists point of view, a very reductive reason for their actions, but when I reached Act 5 and the protagonists and the antagonists clash in a final revelation of truth not only had I discovered a deeper relationship between the two but the antagonist’s motivations had deepened. It because easier to see how they were the heroes of their own story and discovering this at this very early stage will make the prose outline a richer and better document with its own surprised which will repeat with the novel itself.

Somehow, I always have discoveries inside my thoroughly plotted stories, discoveries that would have eluded me had I tried to ‘pants’ my way through it.

This is not to say pantsing is a wrong approach merely that surprise and discovery is part of every process and you need to find the process that works for you.

Share

Horrors Ahead but It’s All Good

The horror I am referring to is not the dystopian political landscape, nor the hellish pandemic scarred terrain of our future for the next few months but rather to dark cinema, frightening film, that will shortly be coming into and enriching my life.

This week year 11 of the Horrible Imaginings Film Festival. Two years ago, the festival moved from its native city of San Diego to the Santa Ana in Orange county about an 80-minute drive from my home and in anticipation of days going back and forth to the festival I took several days off extending my weekend to five days. Of course, the pandemic has shattered these plans but the festival’s director Miguel Rodriguez has managed to keep the celebration alive by movie it online and this weekend I will still be watching blocks of short films and several features all of these from around our world. It will not be the same without the mingling in the theater’s lobby, discussing the films we just watched with the fans and filmmakers but in the depressing times we must find what joy we can.

This weekend will not be my only excursion into unknown horror cinema. Sunday night while doom scrolling through the terror that is my twitter feed, I came across a link of an older Finnish horror movie that the tweet described as a were-reindeer movie. I mentioned it to my sweetie-wife, who has a love of things Finnish, and soon we discovered the film The White Reindeer from 1952 was a Cannes and Golden Globe Award winning film inspired by pre-Christian Finnish folklore. Well, damn! That’s something we both need to see and bang a Blu-ray of a recent restoration has been ordered and should arrive from Germany later this month.

Share