In the current season of the Writing Excuses podcast, the team is going through what they call the “elemental genres” – treating genre not so much in terms of flavour and set dressing as in terms of story shape and the kind of development you’re likely to find there.
To help them distinguish from the marketing-label genres, they’re using different terminology. Instead of SF, for example, they talk about “the Idea elemental genre,” in which you explore a what-if.
(The following is an adapted extract from the draft of my nonfiction book Writing Short, currently in preparation).
Mary Robinette Kowal, in this episode, offers a couple of useful approaches for working with “idea” stories. She uses Orson Scott Card’s “MICE Quotient” (which I have renamed, I think more accessibly, the SPEC elements: Setting, Problem, Events, Character). I’ve added the examples below to her original list:
How does the setting create conflict?
– Threats in the physical environment that make it difficult to travel through or just live in (dangerous creatures, disease, pollution, mountains to climb, rivers to ford, seas to cross, hard vacuum all around a space station).
– Social inequalities (the Man is keeping a brother down; the brother gets woke).
– Rival groups. (This is a particularly fertile area; I was stuck on my novel City of Masks for a long time until I mapped out the various groups and how their agendas clashed, then assigned various characters to the factions and put those characters in contact with each other. From there, it more or less wrote itself.)
– Valuable resources for which competition exists (a classic steampunk element, though you can also use it in other genres).
How does the story’s problem create conflict?
– The detective wants the mystery solved, the criminal doesn’t.
– More generally: the protagonist wants to achieve a goal, the antagonist doesn’t want that.
– Even if there’s no specific antagonist, the protagonist needs some kind of resources (perhaps information or help) from someone else in order to solve the problem, and whoever controls those resources is disinclined to assist.
– Different characters compete for a McGuffin (some object or objective that’s only important because people want it; a Maltese falcon).
– Different people want to solve the problem in different ways, and argue about it.
– The protagonist tries different solutions, and the first few don’t work (a try-fail cycle).
How do the events create conflict?
– Just when the protagonist seems to be making progress, a new external problem occurs to knock them back. (The opposite of the deus ex machina, where a convenient solution turns up out of nowhere; considered legitimate, while the deus ex machina is considered a cheat.)
– The protagonist’s solution to the first step in the problem itself creates or reveals further problems. (This approach is the heart of Jack M. Bickham’s excellent craft book Scene and Structure.)
How do the characters create conflict? (Some of these overlap with the “problem” conflicts, obviously.)
– They disagree about ways and means to achieve joint goals. (One will win out, to the annoyance of the other, and may turn out to be wrong, or may be vindicated by events.)
– They’re allies who disagree about what their joint goal should be. (Similar resolution.)
– They have different goals, and each one pursuing their own goal brings them into conflict because their immediate goals are in conflict. (The hero wants a mentor; the old warrior wants to be left alone to brood.) This one can be resolved by finding a way in which their deeper goals align, and the process of doing so can give you a good chunk of story; or it can continue to be a source of conflict until one defeats the other, in which case you have a protagonist and an antagonist.
– They’re in direct competition for the same goal. (Protagonist/antagonist, but they’re in a race or competition of some kind.)
– They should be working together, but don’t trust/like each other. (Make sure you make this believable, rather than just manufacturing distrust or dislike for the sake of plot. Giving them backstories where they each don’t trust/like the kind of person that the other character is, or appears to be, is a classic approach; it enables you to collapse the distrust when they get to know each other as people rather than types, typically while working together in a common cause. See Legolas and Gimli in The Lord of the Rings.)
In the same podcast, Mary Robinette Kowal also suggests working backwards from the idea (asking “why?” to figure out the causes) and forwards from the idea (asking “what if?” to figure out the consequences). This fills out the idea and enriches it.
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I find getting story ideas easy – I have about 60 of them in a file I keep, even after I removed the ones I’ve used – but developing them is a different matter. I’ve pulled out the seven that I feel are closest to being “ripe”, and I’m going through them using the above approaches to fill them out into outlines that I can write from.
I’m a pantser that desperately wants to be an outliner but I can’t wrap my head around outlining a novel. I’d love to find outlines of famous novels or things I’d read to see the idea on action.
Nice post.
I’m a pantser that desperately wants to be an outliner but I can’t wrap my head around outlining a novel. I’d love to find outlines of famous novels or things I’d read to see the idea on action.
Nice post.
Thanks. I used to be a total pantser, but I’ve become a rough outliner – I like to have a general idea where I’m going, and maybe a few key scenes where cool stuff will happen, laid out in advance for the novels.
For the short stories, I write down something like what you’d write if you were telling someone the plot of a movie or TV show, so that I get a general sequence of events and can weigh up how long it’s likely to be. Mid-size pieces are hard to sell (too long for magazines, not long enough for people browsing Amazon), so if the outline indicates I might have a novelette or a novella, I’m less likely to go ahead with it.
Also, endings are hard, so if I start out with an idea of how I’m going to end, it’s more likely to be successful. Novel endings are a bit easier, and tend to evolve naturally, but I find it difficult to find a satisfying ending for a short story if I’m not building towards it from the start.
Thanks. I used to be a total pantser, but I’ve become a rough outliner – I like to have a general idea where I’m going, and maybe a few key scenes where cool stuff will happen, laid out in advance for the novels.
For the short stories, I write down something like what you’d write if you were telling someone the plot of a movie or TV show, so that I get a general sequence of events and can weigh up how long it’s likely to be. Mid-size pieces are hard to sell (too long for magazines, not long enough for people browsing Amazon), so if the outline indicates I might have a novelette or a novella, I’m less likely to go ahead with it.
Also, endings are hard, so if I start out with an idea of how I’m going to end, it’s more likely to be successful. Novel endings are a bit easier, and tend to evolve naturally, but I find it difficult to find a satisfying ending for a short story if I’m not building towards it from the start.