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snowflakesbooklr · 7 days

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Powerless - Lauren Roberts

My rating : ⭐️.5

I read this book because a friend asked me to, but honestly I struggled the whole way. There were some few places where the writing was quite good, but overall it was like being slapped with words. My main criteria for reading any book is whether or not I can immerse myself into the story, either by viewing myself as the main character or being able to visualize the story in my mind. When I tried to do either of these, all I could visualize was words being spat at me, like I was reading a dictionary.

The dagger to the throat trope was majorly over used. By chapter 20, it's happened at least 6 times already. I'm not an expert, but as far as I know, it's not just a knife to the throat that makes people go gaga, there has to be that underlying tension to go along with it. I don't mean romantic or sexual tension necessarily, I mean there has to be some sort of a build up, something to keep you on your toes in the scene.

As a matter of fact, it seems like the entire book is just a huge mashup of tropes. Yes, it's really nice to read certain tropes, but they have to be well written. You can't build a book on a tower of tropes.

The banter between Paedyn and Kitt sounds... unnatural, to be honest. It feels sort of like those tasteless fan service scenes in anime. Like talking to c.ai, they're giving you the words you want but it's empty.

Another thing, no hate to Lauren, but we need to stop pitting girls against each other in books. I love female characters, female villains, female antagonists, but the female "bully" here is just a girl who grew up rich. And everyone hates her? She's not even a bitch in my opinion, she's just like punching bag throughout the book. (Yes, I did read chapter 59. It's the Trials, what did you expect?)

The absolute worst thing for me is PLEASE get rid of the whole "having brothers as LI's" thing I beg every single published and upcoming author! There are too many fish in the sea for this to be as common in books as it is. The LI's can be neighbours or friends or enemies, that's options. They can even be total strangers, just not brothers!!

#snowflakesbooklr #Lauren Roberts #powerless #book review #1 star books #booklr #book side of tumblr

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snowflakesbooklr · 2 months

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Plotting a story -- inductive and deductive plotting

When it comes to plotting habits in writing fiction, there’s a scale. Most people label the ends of this scale ‘gardener’ and ‘architect’, although the terms ‘plotter’ and ‘pantser’ are also in use. If you’re a writer, you probably know this scale, but I’ll briefly explain for those who haven’t and then get into my model.

An architect, or plotter, is a writer who thrives with a lot of planning. Like an architect planning a house, they assess what story they’re telling in advance and what needs to happen to tell it. They assess the materials, plan and measure the acts (if they’re using an act structure), decide on the climax and how the characters will develop and map those onto the plan. Then, with a plan, they write.

A gardener, or pantser, by contrast, writes ‘by the seat of their pants’. Pantsers may or may not know where their story is going in broad terms, but they certainly don’t know in any detail beyond ‘this’ll be a cool scene if I can get it there’. To these people, writing is less like architecture and more like gardening – you can build your beds and plant your seeds, but a whole lot of what’s going to happen next depends on how the plants grow, and all you can do is keep an eye on them and prune or train them as necessary. You can dream about what your garden will look like in the spring, but you won’t know until you get there.

Plotters and pantsers are not two distinct categories of writers, but ends on a scale. The writer who ad libs sentence by sentence with no goal at all is extremely rare, as is the writer who starts from an overall view of the plot and cuts it down and down until they’re planning on the sentence level. Most writers tend towards one end of the scale to a greater or lesser degree, but very few write completely using one method and none of the other.

The plotter/pantser scale is one that many writers find incredibly useful to help them understand their own process. By knowing where you are on this scale, you can better understand how you write and better understand how the habits and advice of other writers may or may not be useful to you. (A pantser trying to meticulously plot their story in advance following some formula they found in a writing advice book is wasting their time.) However, this model has little utility beyond that, which is why I find it more useful to address the phenomenon not as a scale, but as the manifestation of two separate skills, that I like to call deductive and inductive plotting.

In logic, deductive reasoning is when you take broad rules or generalities and apply them to specific circumstances to predict things – you start big and go little. “Things fall when you drop them, therefore if I drop this rock it will fall” is deduction. Inductive reasoning is the opposite – you start with small observations and build them into a pattern to predict something bigger. “I dropped seventeen objects and they all fell; therefore, perhaps when you drop things, they fall” is induction. (There’s also abductive reasoning, but that doesn’t fit into our plotting skill metaphor.)

In my experience, these skills match to the habits of plotters and pantsers. Plotters, or architects, assemble a big picture of the story they want and then deduce their individual scenes and fill in the lines to map to their overall general picture. They are deductive plotters. If you ask a deductive plotter to start writing without an outline, they become lost and their output seems directionless and erratic – how can they know what to write if they don’t have an outline to break things down from? Deductive plotters tend to think of stories in terms of overall structures and themes that can be broken down into characters and events and put on the page.

Pantsers, or gardeners, are the opposite. They’re if-then writers, and build the plot upwards from the individual actions of their characters and create the story from the sum total of those interactions. They are inductive plotters. Brandon Sanderson often describes a pantser’s first draft as just a really thorough outline, and he’s not wrong; a pantser needs the scene-by-scene minutae to know what happens next. How are they supposed to build an outline if they don’t know what happens next? If you ask an inductive plotter to build and follow a thorough outline, their writing often comes out as wooden and arbitrary as they have to force the actions of the characters between the restrictive rails of predetermined plot. Inductive potters tend to think of stories in terms of characters and discrete events that build up into something bigger with a consistent mood or theme. Inductive plotters sometimes complain of their characters having a life of their own and defying the plot – this is the effect of their moment-by-moment if-then reasoning of the character’s next action not matching their initial predictions, and surprising them.

Again, the vast majority of writers have some rudimentary skill in both inductive and deductive plotting. A strong deductive plotter (architect) can usually sit down and infer line-by-line a scene that their outline lists as “the three characters meet in the coffee shop and share evidence, Rosemary sees Harold’s notes and realises where the gun went.” Similarly, a strong inductive plotter (gardener) usually has some idea of where their story is headed next even if they don’t know how long it’ll take to get there or what complications will pop up in the meantime. But I’ve never met a writer who is equally strong in both inductive and deductive plotting; most writers specialise heavily in one, and tend towards one end of the scale. I think this is because there’s such a huge overlap in utility; when we start learning to write, we start plotting in whatever way is easiest for us, and train that specific method over decades. There’s little reason to invest even more decades into getting just as good with the other method when your favoured method already achieves everything you want.

I find that viewing this scale as the result of two skills, inductive and deductive plotting, can be very helpful in understanding specifically how we write. Thinking of myself as a heavily inductive plotter with rudimentary deductive plotting skills has really helped me understand why some methods of writing work for me and others don’t, as well as help nail down specific weaknesses in my writing. I also find it useful to think of writing styles and strategies not as some unchangeable characteristic we were born with (as the plotter/pantser scale is frequently envisioned), but as skills that can be built. You don’t write the way you write because you happen to be a plotter or pantser – you write the way you write because that’s what you learned to do! And it was hard! And you did it! Be proud of your skill!

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