Story Idea: The Local Academy Of Magic Has An Archaeology Department. They Have An Ongoing Feud With

by Ashton MV

Writing from Scratch #4

The Milieu Plot

The problem of the milieu plot involves a problem of location or setting. The character is often either in a place they need/want to escape from or not in the specific place they need/want to be in. The try-fail cycles will involve traveling away from or to the location. Gulliver’s Travels, The Great Escape, and The Hobbit contain milieu plots.

The Lord of the Rings contains one very large milieu – the problem of getting the One Ring from the Shire where its been hidden for a number of years to Mordor where it can finally be destroyed. We can further break this down into smaller milieu plots. Let’s look at one: the problem of crossing the Misty Mountains. (And we’ll use the events as they occur in the movie, since more people have watched that than read the book)

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Writing from Scratch #1

Welcome to Writing from Scratch!

I’ve been writing a long time, and sometimes it feels like I lose the trees for the forest. Writing from Scratch is a chance for me (and you!) to get back to the basics of storytelling.

If you’ve never written a story before, if you’ve never felt like you could come up with one that would be worth writing, my hope is that if you follow along with me here, you will have the confidence and know-how to come up with an idea, build it into a story, and share it with the world.

These posts will be little, easy-to-digest nuggets. At the end of every post, look for a prompt and share your response in the comments!

What Is a Story?

A story can be defined by what it contains: at least one plot, character, and setting, and a style through which it is told.

Story Bits

To begin, let’s take a look at the second smallest unit of a story – the sentence. A sentence is a set of words that conveys a complete thought. And communication is fractal, meaning each part shares the same pattern as the whole. A story and its components, therefore, will also convey a Complete Thought.

A simple sentence is an independent clause, containing a subject and a predicate. It may have any number of phrases attached to it, but in its simplest form, a sentence can be as short as two words.

A complex sentence is a sentence containing an independent clause and at least one dependent or subordinate clause (a set of words containing a subject and predicate but that is dependent on another clause for a complete understanding of its meaning).

A compound sentence is a sentence containing at least two independent clauses.

And a compound-complex sentence is a sentence containing at least two independent clauses and at least one dependent or subordinate clause.

Plots are exactly the same as sentences. A simple plot can be broken into two parts, a subject and a predicate, or, better, a problem and a solution. It can then be complicated or compounded with additional plots.

Next week, we’ll look at what exactly we’re talking about when we’re talking about plots.

Share in the comments:

How else have you heard “story” defined? What aspects of storytelling are you most interested in? What makes a story worthwhile to you?

If you want to read more, you can check out the over 80 posts on my website, theferalcollection.com

Writing from Scratch #7: The Event Plot

The Event Plot

The problem of an Event plot is a disruption to the status quo. The solution comes either from setting everything right again or adapting to the change. The Event plot is probably what most people think of when they think “what is a plot?” Any story that deals with a life-changing or world-changing event is an Event.

The first plot I analyzed, from The Expanse television series, is an Event plot. Let’s look at another: The Princess Diaries. As we did with Lord of the Rings, we’ll look at the movie rather than books because more people will be familiar with the movie (which is a damn shame).

The Event: Mia Thermopolis’s grandmother tells Mia that she is the princess of small European kingdom Genovia, and she must take the throne.

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I always find it kind of weird that matriarchal cultures in fiction are always “women fight and hunt, men stay home and care for the babies” because world-building-wise, it makes no sense

think about it. like, assuming that gender even works the same in this fantasy culture as it does in ours, with gender conflated with sex (because let’s be real, all of these stories assume that), men wouldn’t be the ones to make the babies, so why would they be the ones to care for the babies? why is fighting and hunting necessary for leadership?

writing a matriarchy this way is just lazy, because you’re just taking the patriarchy and just swapping the people in it, rather than actually swapping the culture. especially when there are so many other cool things you could explore. like, what if it’s not a swap of roles but of what society deems important?

maybe a matriarchy would have hunting and fighting be part of the man’s job, but undervalued. like taking the trash out or cleaning toilets: necessary, but gross, and not noble or interesting. maybe farming is now the most important thing, and is given a lot of spiritual and cultural weight.

how would law work? what crimes would exist, and what things would be considered too trivial to make illegal? who gets what property? why?

how would religion work? how would you mark time or the passage into adulthood? what would marriage look like? if bloodlines are through the mother, bastardy wouldn’t even be a concept - how does that work?

what qualities would be most important in a person? how would you define strength or leadership? what knowledge would be the most coveted and protected? what acts or roles are considered useless or degrading?

like, you can’t just take our current society and say you’re turning it on its head when you’re just regurgitating it wholesale. you have to really think about why things are the way they are and change that. 

Writing from Scratch #7: The Event Plot

The Event Plot

The problem of an Event plot is a disruption to the status quo. The solution comes either from setting everything right again or adapting to the change. The Event plot is probably what most people think of when they think “what is a plot?” Any story that deals with a life-changing or world-changing event is an Event.

The first plot I analyzed, from The Expanse television series, is an Event plot. Let’s look at another: The Princess Diaries. As we did with Lord of the Rings, we’ll look at the movie rather than books because more people will be familiar with the movie (which is a damn shame).

The Event: Mia Thermopolis’s grandmother tells Mia that she is the princess of small European kingdom Genovia, and she must take the throne.

First try: Mia tries to reestablish the old status quo of being a nobody by running away from her grandmother to her mother’s house. Fail: No, she is not allowed to ignore that she is a princess, and she must undergo “princess lessons.”

Second try: Mia tries to adapt to the new status quo of being a secret princess by taking princess lessons and letting her best friend in on the secret. Fail: Yes, Mia gets a makeover and goes to a state dinner, but she is kind of a mess emotionally and embarrasses herself.

Third try: Mia tries to ignore everything that is happening to her status quo. Fail: No, everyone knows she’s a princess now, and because horrible school bullies school-bully she is a laughing stock.

Fourth try: Mia tries to run away from the city to avoid reestablishing the old status quo by renouncing the crown or adapting to the new status quo by accepting the crown. Fail: No, she doesn’t successfully run away, and she arrives at the ball looking like a drowned cat.

Final try: Mia tries adapting to the new status quo by accepting the crown. Solution: Yes, Mia adapts to being a princess, and she impresses everyone with her speech.

Prompt: write a flash fiction with an Event in which the plot-problem that disrupts the status quo is a marriage proposal. How a marriage proposal would disrupt the status quo is up to you. You’ll also choose the character, setting, genre, and stakes, as well as what is preventing this status quo from being reestablished or adapted to immediately. This simple plot can create a story from a rom-com to a fantastical action-adventure.

If you like this and want more, check out my website theferalcollection.com

Disney Princesses at their Current Ages

Writing from Scratch #8

Now that we have gone over the four simple plot-problems (1, 2, 3, 4) and how they are solved through try-fail cycles, we’ll take a look at how to make complex, compound, and compound-complex plots through the same devices as sentence creation.

The first way we’ll try complicating a plot is by making the solution of the first noted plot-problem dependent on the solution of a second plot-problem, which stands in for easy solution prevention. We’re typically going to use dependent plots to strengthen audience satisfaction when the character is finally able to succeed. Or, like in the case-study we’ll look at today, they can be used to draw what appeared to be disparate plots together in longer works.

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The Problem Most "Creating Feminist Female Protagonists" Guides Are Missing

The Problem Most “Creating Feminist Female Protagonists” Guides Are Missing

If you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of talk about how to write a female protagonist believably and without bringing down double standard criticisms of “Strong Female Character” or “Mary Sue” that male character simply don’t receive.  But most articles and blog posts focus so fully on the creation of the female protagonist that they miss the underlying problem. (more…)

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Writing from Scratch #8

Now that we have gone over the four simple plot-problems (1, 2, 3, 4) and how they are solved through try-fail cycles, we’ll take a look at how to make complex, compound, and compound-complex plots through the same devices as sentence creation.

The first way we’ll try complicating a plot is by making the solution of the first noted plot-problem dependent on the solution of a second plot-problem, which stands in for easy solution prevention. We’re typically going to use dependent plots to strengthen audience satisfaction when the character is finally able to succeed. Or, like in the case-study we’ll look at today, they can be used to draw what appeared to be disparate plots together in longer works.

Read more on WordPress