#I'm sorry for how long this answer turned out to be brevity is not one of my strengths

[solo-walker]

What is "strange noises from the hole in the wall"? It sounds interesting but googling it didn't give me much information

Hullo! Thanks for the ask! :-D

Ok, so there's this group of British improv comedians on YouTube and tiktok (though I don't have the latter of these apps) called 'Shoot From The Hip', known as SFTH for short. They're really really REALLY good and post a lot of fun games, sketches, skits, snippets from shows etc. Sometimes, they bless us with fully improvised plays, some of which can last over 30 mins!! They take title prompts from the audience and improvise the entire thing using one of those titles. These plays can be emotional, complex and have well-developed plot and characters, along with a healthy dose of unhinged chaos and jokes that will make you split your sides laughing!

'Strange Noises from the Hole in the Wall' was one such title which was accepted by sfth as the prompt for their 40th improvised play. This play is genuinely VERY interesting and creepy (all with a seasoning of classic sfth humour) and has been immensely popular among the Tumblr sfth community ever since it came out! It is one of my personal favourites. Like, keeps-me-up-at-night level of favourite. It has sparked fics, art, theories, analyses and more!

Is this entire answer me blatantly urging you to go watch this play and check out other sfth videos? Yes. Yes it is. Have fun watching the adventures of two children on a Very Normal train run by a Perfectly Ordinary driver! :-D

[fontasticcrablettes]

Hey. I'm sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if you have any tips on how you usually get from the "broad idea" stage of a story to actually figuring out the events and how things go from point a to b to c? I get ideas all the time and I want to try actually writing some of them, but I always get stuck at actually going from "wouldn't this be cool" to "how does this plot actually go down as a story"...

Ok so this got pretty dang long because I am forever loquacious and suck at brevity.  And it’s 4am so excuse typos, lol.  And also, writing is very personal and everyone has different methods and things that work for them, so this isn’t like the One True Way to block out a story.  It’s just how I do things.  

Part One is about narrowing your broad idea and defining the shape of the story.

So, the most important things to keep in mind when trying to figure out how the story actually goes are A) Who are my characters? and B) What is the message?  

The first thing is characters.  Who are you characters and what do they want?  The very simplest plot outline is that you have a protagonist who wants something, and an antagonist who stands in the way of the character getting that thing.  

When you know what your characters want, and you know their personality, think about what they woud logically do to achieve that.  What is your main character trying to do? That’s your story.      

Second, the message.  Almost every story I write has a message.  The ones that don’t are some of the self-indulgent Goretober ones, or really quick fluffy ones.  These aren’t grand, life-changing messages or things I’m trying to change the world with, but just a basic theme.  I’m sure you’ve all learned about themes in your literature class so I’m sorry to turn this into school, but themes are important.  The theme defines the basic voice of the story.  It’s what it’s about.  For Want of a Nail is about evil twins and a serial killer, but it’s about how circumstances and environment can alter a personality and that goodness is a choice, not a trait.    

Knowing what your story is about helps to give it a cohesive shape.  When deciding what direction the plot should go, the overall theme gives you direction.  If you know your story is ultimate about “enforcing one’s justice”, you’ll choose your plot points based on “how does this contirbute to the idea of enforcing one’s justice?”.   Not every single thing, but enough to give it that structure.  Like, I knew For Want of a Nail was about choice, so I knew that the strongest ending would be giving Alter-Flynn a choice rather than just killing him.

It doesn’t have to be a positive moral, or even a clear message, though.  Still is about sanity and how fragile it can be - no message there, just exploring the concept.  As the Sparks Fly is about religion and faith, and 3 different conclusions are reached by the end.  Heck, at its core, Under the Ice was based around a song lyric from Into the Woods (”Sometimes people leave you/halfway through the woods.”)  If you’re stumped, focus in on what the most important aspect fo the story is (maybe it’s a relationship, maybe it’s a characters personal growth, maybe it’s an existential idea like death or lonliness).  Sometimes, a moral-style theme will naturally come through while you’re writing and you can pretend you’re a genius who thought of it.  

So when trying to narrow down your story from a broad idea, answer these questions: Who is my protagonist?  What do they want?  Who is standing in the way of them getting that?  What is this story ultimately about?

Once you know these things, you should have some structure to the story.  The trick thing now is to fill in all the blanks.  So Part 2 is about how to fill in all that empty space that appears once you have the vague shape of a story defined.   

I find it helpful to talk it over with someone.  Often, ideas will be stagnant until I start typing them out, and once it gets flowing it’s easier to keep that momentum going.  Explaining ideas to someone else is good for this, because it gives you an excuse to type it out, you’ll find yourself adding more details on the spot as you realize your friend is going to ask about that plothole, and depending on where you have the conversation, you’ll probably have a transcript of all your ideas to look back on.  It’s even better if the friend is also interested in the idea, and can throw ideas back at you.  A lot of my stories came to form through conversations with Daffy, Hoskky, Nurse Friend, or Lynx.  

And if you don’t have a friend to talk to, I seriously love talking about stories with people.  There are few things I enjoy more than plotting stories so I am 100% up to talk to anyone about their fic ideas. 

But other than just sitting down and throwing ideas around, here are some things I do.  I am a big history fan and I base a lot of my stories on history, either explicitly inspirationally.  Like, N’oubliez pas is clearly based on the French Revolution, but there are aspects of history in a lot of my stories.  For Want of a Nail was partly based on Jack the Ripper, for example.  So when I have a broad idea of something, I start doing research and read about similar scenarios in real life.  Like, right now I’m plotting a sequel to The Uninvited, so I’ve been watching documentaries and reading up on real-life victims of kidnap.    I’ve talked about this before when asked about research, but research and inspriation gathering is often the same.  Bits and pieces of real life get added to my list of “scenes that would be interesting.”  

I’ll look at other fiction, too.  Other stories with a similar premise.  What has already been done effectively, and why did it work?  How can I twist that in mine? I pick up plot elements from my older, abandoned ideas, too.  I often try to combine a bunch of rejected ideas into one big one, to get them all taken care of at once.  

Think about the characters.  Like I said in the beginning, think about what your characters want and what they would do to achieve that.  The antagonist has something they want, so they make a move to reach it.  Then the protagonist reacts to that and makes a move in response to them.  Then the protagonist makes a move toward what they want, and the antagonist reacts to them (try not to have your antagonist to all the proactive things; entirely reactive protagonists tend to be boring).  Plotting becomes a chain of figuring out what each character would do in reaction to the others, or independantly toward their goal.

The goal here is to create a list of scenes or plot points you want in your story.  These are all pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and now your task is to try to put them together.  Start listing the scenes in chronological order.  Look for connections between plot points, which things could lead to which other events.  If you have a good idea, don’t worry about whether you know how to get there yet.  Quite often, during the explaining to a friend stage, the conversation is like

Me: And then THIS happens!

Friend: But how?

Me: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Magic.  I’ll figure it out later.  

Jump around.  Throw in conclusions you want and trust that you’ll find the connection to get there eventually.  You might not, but don’t disregard it until you try.  Just start shuffling things around until the connect-the-dots start forming a cohesive picture.  I find I work better with pencil and paper at this stage, and draw lots of arrows and circles and squiggly lines to connect points and add notes.  The danger in this messy part of planning is you might change something near the beginning that makes what you planned for the end impossible, so stay aware of that and try to catch this issues before you start writing.  

And when you’re stumped and don’t know how to get from a to b, I don’t have anything to suggest but to lie face down on your bed and think.  I can’t really help you there; ultimately you’ve just gotta fish them from your brain.  If it’s a bland or dumb idea, just go with it for now and hopefully something more inspiring will come to you later.  At least you have the foundation down for now.  

Ok that’s all I can think of for now.  It’s really late so I hope my sleepy rambling made sense.  The best TL;DR I can give is that working out a story is like gradually whittling down a piece of wood and giving shape to the creation beneath.  It’s gonna be blobby and ill-formed for a while, and there will be mis-steps and bad ideas you’ll eventually drop, but just keep the core of the story you’re trying to find and the characters moving it in mind and chip away at it until it takes form.