adventuredesign - lol, wouldn''t a attempting a literary mountain with perilous trails make one _more_ nervous than trying to write extruded crap?

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Original post by adventuredesign
B, You are absolutely on the right key when you say "feel". Plot is often described (and I know you know this, particularly with your encyclopedic understanding and education) as, "What''s at stake?" Lots of ppl think this is ''the stakes'' what will be won, lost or neutralized via actions and circumstance. But it can also mean the feeling the characters have going on in the back of their mind (expressed or not; see: confused looks on protagonist''s faces in film) regarding just simple grasping the whole tamale of what they are up against, or involved in, or subject to.

Good plot grips you, won''t let you stop thinking about the welfare of your protagonist, or stop salivating about the day you get to write the scene where the antagonist gets their comuppance.

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Hmm. More and more, I''m getting the feeling that other people must experience plot differently than I do. I can understand dramatic tension, but I don''t like being worried that there might not be a happy ending. The scenes I salivating over writing are the intensely emotional ones, love scenes and angst scenes, which are usually introspective and don''t advance the plot anywhere near as much as they develop the characters.

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All this stuff that was just written sounds more like circumstances of plot rather than emotional drivers of plot.

I''m not sure they are going to solve their plot problem with this type of approach.

To me, it''s just like quitting smoking cigarettes. Everytime you light up, ask yourself, "What am I feeling?" and the act of identification, over and over across the function of time, will piece together the emotional drivers that make you self medicate with nicotine, a peak emotional supressant.

Chain those feelings up and it will make a list of plot drivers, compare those plot drivers (the emotional ones) to the biographical emotional background of the protagonist, and you are on the way to some important discoveries.

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Chain feelings up - you mean link them to each other, right? Not restrict them, like something is restricted when it''s ''chained up''? I think I can do that. If there''s anything I''m good at doing, it''s emotions and transitions.

SnS... mmmmh, I know you are gonna start thinking I am her publisher or something, but for some reason I find myself coming back to Laurell K Hamilton''s novels yet again.

Maybe it''s because she is a girl ? But her novels are usually more character driven than plot driven.
Oh, there *is* a plot, but most of the time, it''s so thin you wonder how you cant see through it. What really makes the plot, well, secondary, is the way characters keep getting in the way. Conflicts between characters arise, creating crisis situations, and pages and pages are spent describing the storm between the various protagonists. When it''s all over, you realise you have just read, like, 50 pages, for something that, in terms of RPG, would have been a random encounter, or a secondary NPC.

Say, the main character is chasing some brutal murderer outside of her jurisdiction, and ends up teaming up with an old friend of hers. Except this time he has brought friends. Well, in most books, introductions/descriptions would be made, then the story would start. Not with Hamilton. Each of the new characters "reacts" to the heroin, in our case the reaction becoming a crisis situation. She almost gets raped, almost kills her friend''s partner, then another of the partners talks to her, dialogue to which she reacts internally, etc.

It''s really girly, to be honest, but for some reason it works.
I dunno, maybe that might give you ideas ?

My point is, it can be done, I ve seen it.
But the thing is, the plot *does* comes first.
It''s an excuse of a plot, but it does have twists, red herrings, and surprises, although only your barebone minimum.
*then* she puts the characters through the plot, and let the show begin.

It''s a bit like putting together totally conflicting characters in a standard PnP RPG, as a team, and they wonder why they spend their time digressing, arguing and generally caring more about each other and their respective worldviews than trying to GET THINGS DONE. Most of the time, the plot advances but only after a philosophical debate on why something should be done, how, and how it affect each team member, their emotions, and their relation toward each other and the rest of the world.

I am barely exagerating, actually

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Sancte Isidore ora pro nobis !