2017 NaNoWriMo - DAY 1

PLOTTING

I write most short stories by the seat of my pants. So far, I've had 22 of these stories accepted for publication, so 'pantsing' works for that format. For longer works, like novels and novellas, I've had too many false starts, either painting myself into a logic corner, or finding upon later revisions that characters don't behave consistently, or I can't find an ending that wraps up all the details I worked into the developing plot.
I had no plans to do NaNoWriMo. I have a bunch of projects that are in the works which I really should be working on instead. But yesterday (November 1), while listening to one of the many soundtracks I assembled for future and current writing projects, some details snapped into my head, and I was motivated to sketch down these details while on a bathroom break at work. I always bring a sketchbook into the toilet. It's a great place to brainstorm.

STEP ONE

A couple of months ago, I bought the Story Forge card pack and had been experimenting with them. The way these cards work is like a tarot deck, where each card is printed with two parallel but inverted concepts — read it one side up, and it is vaguely positive, read it the other way up, and it is vaguely negative, but both directions provide a plot concept from which to react. 

The booklet that comes with the deck provides a few templates of how to lay out the cards to tell different types of stories. I found that the first template, called Once Upon a Time, was good at kicking off a concept, but provided no closure:

CARD 1: The protagonist at the beginning of the story
CARD 2: The status quo of the world
CARD 3: The catalyst for change in the protagonist
CARD 4: The protagonist's reasons for resisting the call to adventure
CARD 5: What compels the protagonist to get over that resistance
CARD 6: What pushes the protagonist to act
CARD 7: The direction the protagonist moves
CARD 8: The apparent goal

Using these cards requires a bit of colorful interpretation. It helps to have a kind-of-sort-of story idea, or at least the genre you want to work in. In this case, I had the genre and a basic plot, but needed a little more framework. These cards are excellent for providing a framework, but since I found this Once Upon a Time template lacking in closure, I used the inverse of the eight cards in reverse order and assigned them meanings loosely based on The Writer's Journey. 

CARD 8 INVERTED: The protagonist acts on the apparent goal
CARD 7 INVERTED: The protagonist's achievement / reinforcement of this path
CARD 6 INVERTED: The protagonist awakens a deeper truth within themself
CARD 5 INVERTED: The protagonist transforms in some way, maybe achieves the apparent goal, but finds it lacking
CARD 4 INVERTED: A major obstacle appears
CARD 3 INVERTED: The protagonist realizes the goal all along should be this other thing
CARD 2 INVERTED: The return home (physically or metaphorically)
CARD 1 INVERTED: Resolution

Again, with interpretation, and a little squinting at the card concepts, this revised template gives closure. I had my story.

STEP TWO:

Many moons ago, I had adapted two excellent resources in plot development — John Truby's The Anatomy of Story, and Donald Maass's Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook — and combined them into my own mutant workbook. For the record, all of Maass's books are amazing and inspirational, but his Workbook was instrumental in helping me understand how to dissect and assemble my own plots. In my version and particularly in Maass' original version, the protagonist's back story can transform from a vague trope into a very personal exploration of yourself through your characters' adventures. All the subplot characters conspire to reinforce or contrast the protagonist's world view, and orbit around a core theme that keeps your writing project tightly interwoven and cohesive.
At lunch, I began applying the Story Forge story architecture into the workbook. Typically, I will emerge from the workbook with a radically altered version of the original plot. The key is to not be too protective of the concepts you may have already fallen in love with. I'll let you know how that all turns out.

Point of View

Got a story idea and you're not sure what point of view to write in? Try this:

First Person POV

Is your Protagonist considered a criminal, a deviant, or misunderstood? Y or N

Is your Protagonist trying to obscure some dark truth about themself from society? Y or N

Is your Protagonist trying to justify why they have acted in a particular way? Y or N
Is your Protagonist trying to hide some dark truth about themself from themself? Y or N
Is your story mostly focused on one character (Character Study)? Y or N

Is your genre a detective story, crime noir, thriller, or mystery? Y or N

Is your intended audience Young Adult, New Adult, or Middle Grade? Y or N 
Is your genre Romance or Chick Lit? Y or N
Could the format of your story be Memoir, or from diary entries or letters? Y or N

Could your Protagonist be dead, telling this story from the Great Beyond? Y or N

If you answered more often YES than NO, you may consider writing a First Person POV story. That means using “I,” and “We” statements, giving the reader full access to your narrator’s thoughts and observations. 

This is the most intimate storytelling style and can be used in a variety of ways. Particularly if your protagonist has something to hide, you would probably be best to use the unreliable narrator perspective, meaning your narrator has a secret that they are attempting to hide from the reader. This can be either a character flaw they are unwilling to face in themself, or a detail that would otherwise incriminate them. 

In First Person POV, the narrator must know how the story will end. Either they must have survived the ordeal to report the events - - or - - they are returning as a ghost to warn readers not to follow in their path, or they are dead characters and the format of the story is letters that have been written when the narrator was alive. 

This POV is usually told in Past Tense, unless the format is from letters written in present tense. The narrator may be a detached observer of the Protagonist, and not be the Protagonist reporting their own activities. 

The narrator cannot tell the readers what is happening inside other people’s heads, but they can speculate.

The narrator has an opinion about everything they describe. They draw conclusions from everything everyone else says. 

The narrator’s voice is very important. More on that later, but the perspective is always subjective, meaning the narrator has their own agenda for telling the story the way they are telling it.

Third Person POV

Does your story involve multiple subplots? Y or N

That was fast. Yeah, if so, you want to use Third Person. It’s the most common type of narrative style and the most forgiving. It allows the author to focus more on plot developments, which when you have multiple subplots, you’ll probably need to have multiple perspectives.That said, there are multiple variations of Third Person POV storytelling…

Is your story a Speculative Fiction, involving lots of world-building? Y or N

Did you have the overwhelming urge to draw a map of your world? Y or N

Does your story rely on action sequences? Y or N

Subjective Third Person Limited is the go-to POV for genre storytelling. With this narration style, the author reports on a relatively surface perspective—like a screenplay, but focusing on events of one character per chapter or section, and reporting sensory details only that particular character would experience (odors, tactile experiences, sights, and sounds), and their thoughts about what only they could have experienced in the present or past. 

The narrative voice can be tinged by the character of focus. This means that the attitude of the narration can reflect the personality of the character. For instance, if the chapter was about a child, the sentence structure might be more simple than the chapter focusing on a college professor. The voice should, however, remain neutral. 

Objective Third Person Limited is the same as above, but strips out characters’ thoughts and keeps the narrative voice neutral and consistent. This POV is ideal as an exercise for new writers to discipline their writing skills. This POV helps focus on external details like dialog and body language to tell a story, and not expository writing—‘telling’ instead of ‘showing’, data dumps, and ‘head-hopping’. 

Will your story require referencing events in that world’s history beyond what your characters have experienced first hand? Y or N 

Is your story historical fiction or is it meant to sound old?Y or N 

Does your story have a magical quality, or do you want it to feel like a fable or faerie tale? Y or N 

Will your characters all have specialized knowledge that will be important to reveal plot details? Y or N

Is your story epic in scope? Y or N

Subjective Third Person Omniscient can be an awkward choice. If you answered more than one YES above, it may be a valid option. What makes this POV awkward is that it is often done poorly, especially by new writers. 

This perspective offers access into every character’s mind at any point in the story, and for an undisciplined, unfocused writer, this can result in readers feeling detached from events in the story as they drift from mind to mind hearing abstract ideas, historical events, technical details, and other information that serves to stoke the writer’s imagination more than the reader’s enjoyment. It is a playground for the ungrounded. Avoid this POV if possible. 

This is an old-fashioned narrative style and should only be used after first developing firm experience with non-omniscient points of view. Do not risk sounding like a noob unless you have a firm idea what details are important to the story.

The voice of the narrator must be neutral (with the sole exception of stories designed to sound like a fable or faerie tale, when a strong narrative voice can serve to enhance the magical flavor of the story), and in any case, the voice is trustworthy. 

The narrator cannot be a participant in the story. 

Objective Third Person Omniscient is a more modern variation, but equally as dangerous to new writers to tell more than the story needs (or more than the reader is able to absorb without losing interest from data dump expositions). It can be applied to stories that require firm realism, but also requires insights into details that no character can use their senses to know—the insides of a sealed explosive device, for instance. This perspective can be used to reveal to the reader what the characters cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or smell.

This POV excludes character’s thoughts. 

There are multiple variations within this POV which limit the prose to describe only sights, sounds, and dialog as if it were a screenplay for a film. 

Second Person POV

Is your story an instruction manual? Y or N

Unless your answer is YES, don’t use this. Second Person POV uses “you” instead of “I” or  “we” or “he” or “she” or “they” as if you are instructing the reader what to do and think. I consider it the ‘interpretive dance’ POV—If you don’t do it well, you look silly, and it makes your audience feel awkward.

Atom Punk Inspirations

I've always been a fan of retro-futurism. One of my first exposures to the genre was the Buck Rogers hardback collection I found in my father's library. I was 8 or 9 years old, and I broke the spine on that thing, reading it over and over. Dad was pissed, but kind of proud, but more pissed I think.

So, fast forward to 2015, and I find an old Tom Corbett story as a free e-book on Kindle. Space Cadets fighting T-Rexs in the jungles of Venus. I mean, come on. How awesome is that? I'm not sure which number book in the series it was, but you definitely got the sense that the world and characters were established, and they had been through many adventures together. Too much fun to leave it alone.

A couple of weeks later, I started writing my own Atom Punk adventure, complete with a battle-weary captain (Rex Kane of the Zerotroopers of Mars), a burly, hot-headed engineer and comic relief named Buck Gibson, and Dr. Eleanor Simms, cosmophysicist and navigator. Goofy banter was added in abundance to play up a sense of playfulness, and I added editor's notes commenting about previous episodes (which don't exist . . . yet). The notes mentioned a recurring villain named Alyx Saprovorn, the kingpin of Mars. I added in just enough camp to keep it playful and light amidst all the danger, and attempted to balance out the technological anachronisms with far-fetched physics. I had a ball with it.

I didn't have any plans for this story. I had written it solely for the love of the genre. Later that year, an anthology put out a call for entries, and that inspired me to finish the story and tighten it up to fit the word count constraints of 4K, but that anthology never happened, but I kept at it—polishing, refining, and enhancing. Whatever. I decided I'd self-publish it if nobody else wanted it. So there. It was fun.

I sent it off to a few more anthologies (by now, the story had grown from 4K to 8K and qualified it for a 'novelette' by some publishers' standards), and started planning out the next episode involving these characters, and plotting out the previous episodes mentioned in the editor's notes. Weeeeee, worldbuilding!

Episode 10: A Moon Called Terror: A Rex Kane Adventure has just been accepted for publication in the anthology GASLANDIA. Details to follow.

Weird of the Day

Several years ago, I took the 'word of the day' from dictionary.com as a prompt to do some stupid comic strips. Enjoy. Or be offended. I don't care. 

Writing As Therapy

"High-impact fiction requires high courage. It means not only doing something different, but delving into what matters to you: what terrifies, outrages, grieves, inspires, hurts, and heals you."

"To create a novel's emotional landscape you must first open yourself to your own. ... To put authentic emotions on the page, you need to own them. When you do, readers will respect you. It's when you hide that readers feel shortchanged, cheated, and only minimally involved."

"The healing journey resonates with readers."

- Donald Maass, Writing 21st Century Fiction

As writers, we are often told to 'write what you know,' and I think that means more than reporting your experiences of working in a factory, or hanging out with your criminal friends, or describing your experiences in the military, or performing CPR on your cat. I think what is more important than getting the surface details correct is making the reader feel genuinely engaged in your story by telling them what you are willing to share about yourself. This means you as the author, you need to be genuine with yourself.

Write to learn about yourself through your characters. And be honest. They'll know. Your characters will act like superficial idiots if you aren't honest with them.

Using The Enneagram Matrix for Character Creation

“Your threats are meaningless,” croaked Baron Deathgrimace as he aimed his particle cannon. “Your fate is sealed, Captain Chiseljaw.” The Baron laughed menacingly, then fired.

How many times have you read a story where the villain is just a thin spread of menace-jelly on a predictable plot sandwich? In order to make a plot interesting, the hero has to struggle to step up to a challenge created by a worthy antagonist. 

Duh. That’s written in every how-to book you’ve ever read. Okay, great information, but how can you create an antagonist with depth? 

I’m so glad you asked. Behold, the Enneagram Matrix. 

Yeah, I know it looks like the window in Game of Thrones, but the Enneagram is a very ancient symbol – much older than GRR Martin. For this article, I will be using the Enneagram’s self-help personality growth and integration attributes to help you create strong and believable characters. 

Here is a link to a simplified list of the personality types and their traits. A new page will open so you can compare as you read.

Eye-roll-able Psychobabble

You probably have a story that has stalled. Every writer has at least one work-in-progress that is quietly whimpering in some corner of their mind, neglected and covered in bugs. You’re not motivated to get into writing that next chapter because there’s not enough for you to latch onto, or you don’t know how to climb out of the layers of convoluted storytelling that have already been written. Some people call that ‘writer’s block’. 

I don’t believe in writer’s block. I believe that plotting and creating backstory will always give the writer something to write. The plot should always be an extension of the hero’s flaws, and every character around them exists to demonstrate variations in how to deal with their own shit.

Oh, here we go with the real psychobabble. Light some incense. 

If your hero doesn’t have any bad traits, they’ll never evolve. They’ll never find a suitable challenge, and your readers will be bored as your hero does nothing more than grimace and fight, and yell and fight, and do all the things that everyone has seen a thousand times before, with explosions or some kind of arbitrary melodrama. It is the personal struggle that makes things interesting, because people want to relate to a real character encountering a genuine struggle. 

Unless you are writing a memoir, you’re just making shit up like the rest of us, and you’ll need a framework to build your characters. With a complex and interconnected framework, a writer can simulate believable emotional conflict. A true master storyteller integrates their own emotional experiences into their fictional struggles to make those simulated conflicts seem more genuine, and these masters will always have better reviews than the writer who creates superficial bad guys like my Baron Deathgrimace. Always.

So, if you have a story idea that has either stalled or is in an early stage of development, give this framework a try. 

The Enneagram Matrix is designed to account for nine levels of emotional health, from Buddha-like idealism down to homicidal paranoiacs. This framework even accounts for the ways unhealthy personalities can manifest: obsessive-compulsive behaviors, alcoholism, schizophrenia, crippling phobias, martyr complexes, and all kinds of fun stuff.

It’s so easy to find flaws in others – that’s what makes us human – now EMBRACE IT! Use your cynical, judgmental nature to your storytelling advantage! That hero of yours you’ve bubble wrapped in gentle plot twists? That one you love so much? Time for your hero to grow up.

Write down 3 to 5 of your hero’s worst (non-physical) traits. Push the extremes! How much of a bastard can he be? How manipulative can she get?  Get harsh. Get brutally honest. 

I’ll wait. Just 3 to 5 words. 

Okay. Stop crying. It’ll be okay.

As a demonstration, I’m going to use the character of John Wick from the eponymous movie as my hero. 

Volitile. Suspicious. Defensive. Adheres to strict laws. 

If that is all I had to work with, I’d look up John Wick’s bad traits in the Enneagram Matrix and find the best fit:

6 - LOYALIST

BASIC TRAITS: Security-focused. Vigilant. Defensive. Dualistic. Fearful of but attracted to authority. Suspicious. Cautious.  

BAD TRAITS: Unpredictable. Panicky. Volatile if unsafe. Inferiority complex. Sarcastic. Belligerent. Attach to authority standards. Militaristic. Persecution complex. Fanaticism. Hysterical to escape punishment. Paranoid. Alcoholic. Passive-aggressive.  

WHEN STRESSED: Jealous of others’ success. Strive to maintain their illusion of superiority. Devious. Deceptive. Sabotaging others’ success. Arrogant. Phony. Narcissistic. Psychopathic. 

You don’t have to use all of the traits when you create your character, just find the closest fit. 

Because John Wick is the hero of the story, he chooses to not fall to the worst of his worst traits, which would be, according to this personality type, hysterical, paranoid, and alcoholic. Occasionally in the movie, we saw him dip into his ‘stressed’ state when he sabotaged his ex-Boss’s success by burning his assets, and Wick was devious and arrogant at times. I have no idea if the scriptwriters used the Enneagram chart to develop his character, but he certainly fits within the Loyalist personality type. 

John Wick also showed signs of having evolved state of the Loyalist:

Optimistic. Supportive. Healing and calming influence. Mediator. Communicator. Serene. Trusting of self and others. Patient. 

Pieces of this play out in scenes when Wick was interacting with other trusted members of his underworld society, but if the scriptwriters wanted to make him less of a hero, they might have shown his not-so idealized traits, like when he was stressed. Could you imagine a scene where he acted phony or narcissistic, or jealous of others’ success? It would be hard to root for that character if he was acting like a complete douche. So, using this framework you can fine tune which traits you want to share with your readers. 

Your hero should ultimately be likeable. 

The Strong Connection

While revising this system for use in character development – the Enneagram Personality Matrix is supposed to be a self-help guide, so be careful, you might learn something painful about yourself – I decided to use the ‘when stressed’ link between the personalities as a guide for either strong allies or for the Prime Antagonist. It turns out that most of the supporting characters can fit into Wick’s ‘strong connection’ type.

The main bad guy – Wick’s ex-Boss – had the traits of the Loyalist’s strong connection, the Achiever personality:

3 - ACHIEVER

BASIC TRAITS: Focused on performance and maintaining self-worth. Social climber. Urge to be the best. Polished facade. Grandiose. Charismatic. Independent.

BAD TRAITS:  Jealous of others’ success. Strive to maintain their illusion of superiority. Devious. Deceptive. Sabotaging others’ success. Arrogant. Phony. Narcissistic. Psychopathic. 

WHEN STRESSED: Dissociates from all conflict. Numbs self out through drugs or alcohol. Catatonic. Schizoid/Multiple Personality. 

EVOLVED STATE: Dedicated to individuals and movements. Community builder. Hard worker. Sacrifices for others. Lovable. Strong alliances built on mutual trust. Cooperative toward a greater good. 

The female assassin who tried to kill John also demonstrated traits particular to the Achiever. The Boss’s son also had negative Achiever traits, which he demonstrated with his grandiose, jealous, and alcoholic behavior. Conversely, so did John Wick’s guardian angel, played by Willem Dafoe, who personified the evolved and basic states of the Achiever personality. 

To close the circle (or, rather, complete the triangle), the strong connection to Achiever is the Peacemaker. Other characters who emulated the Peacemaker’s evolved traits were connected to the underworld’s ‘Management’:

Ambitious to be the best. Motivational to others. Self-assured. Energetic. Competent. Charming. Gracious. Authentic. Modest. Charitable. Gentle. Humor about self. 

 Specifically, Ian McShane’s character parsed out gracious assistance to help Wick. The strong connection of a Peacemaker is… Loyalist. 

Boom. Triangle complete. McShane’s character provided balance and made sure that the playing field was even by letting Dafoe’s character know about the hit on Wick. The owner of the chop-shop, played by John Leguizamo, acted like a counterbalance to the injustice initiated by the spoiled kid. 

Fear, Desire, and Need

John Wick became a feared assassin while in service to his Boss, and remained so until he encountered something greater, a higher purpose – love. According to the backstory, Wick did the impossible in order to leave his Boss’s control (killing a bunch of people, some with a pencil), and Wick earned himself the name ‘Boogieman.’ John Wick had become death incarnate in order to pursue life. 

Ooh, that’s deep. 

Let’s look at the Loyalist’s Fear, Desire, and Need:

FEARS: Not being supported. Having no guidance.
DESIRES: To find security and support.
NEEDS: Push through phobias and trust issues

‘Need’ in this context is what the character needs to face within themselves to evolve into a higher state – to become a better person. When Wick’s wife died, he was without guidance, and without a connection to life. It took the ex-Boss’s son breaking into Wick’s home, beating him up, stealing his car, and destroying the only connection Wick had left to his dead wife, a puppy, to force Wick to reclaim his role as death incarnate, and a reconnection to something greater than himself – vengeance. 

The Need in Wick’s story is not explicit, but it is demonstrated in his connection to life through the puppy. Wick has issues trusting the living. He had invested all that trust into his wife, who died. And just when he transferred that trust into a dog sent to him through his dead wife (a symbol of her love, and life in general), the dog was taken from him. Once again, Wick had to face his Need—to trust the living.

Let’s face it, the entire movie is one long temper tantrum acting out of Wick denying his Need. Wick’s return to embracing life by voluntarily connecting to another dog at the end of the story is, symbolically, his embracing his Need – overcoming his trust issues he has with the living. 

Wick’s Fear is having no guidance or support. When what little he had was torn from him, Wick reacted true to his stressed state and behaved like a psychopath. When the Boss learned what his son had done to Wick, the Boss tried to use his charisma to charm his way out of a bad situation, then he resorted to hiring assassins to stop Wick from seeking revenge. 

Here are the Boss’s (Achiever’s) Fears, Desires and Needs:

FEARS: Being worthless
DESIRES: Feeling worthwhile. Has a purpose.
NEEDS: Learn to be internally-centered and other-oriented

He’s the Boss, and if it became apparent to the rest of this underworld society that the Boss couldn’t control one man’s behavior (first his son, then Wick), the Boss would seem to have no worth as any kind of valid leader, so he acted out of his Fear. To maintain his Desire to have a purpose – to be a leader – the Boss put out a hit on Wick, to try to erase the problem.

The female assassin who attacks Wick repeatedly is also an Achiever personality. She puts so much value on her skill as an assassin she breaks some core rules of this underworld society to prove her worth. She is also jealous of Wick’s status as being the best (see Achiever's Bad Traits). 

With such a simple plot – kill all the bad guys – this move had to invest some kind of depth for the villains. The spoiled rich son of the Boss is clearly a worthless person with no redeeming value. Fearing (knowing) his worthlessness, the kid doubles down on acting on his worst behavior in order to try to prove he has worth – throwing money around and taking whatever he wants to prove he has power.

Dafoe’s character, our fourth Achiever personality is in touch with his Need and is acting as an ally to Wick, proving his worth while protecting Wick, and achieving his Need as being other-oriented. Dafoe’s character sacrifices himself for Wick, fulfilling his Need.

Can this work for your characters?

When your characters invest in their Fears and Desires, they fall away from their Need, and that’s why they’re the bad guys. When characters face and embrace their Needs, they no longer fear their fears, and that’s what it means to be a hero. 

The plot is all about revealing how all the characters reveal their relationship with their Fears, Desires, and Needs. 

Next Step

Take your hero and flesh out which of the positive and negative behaviors they might demonstrate. How evolved are you willing to make them? How unlikable are you willing to make them? 

Whatever your hero’s personality type is according to the Enneagram Matrix, look at the ‘strong connection.’ How can the Prime Opponent fit into your Hero’s strong connection personality type? What about the other supporting characters? Can you make a triangle? Which of the other supporting characters have a strong connection to the Prime Opponent? How will they play off of each other?

Now, go play!