#in the same way fanfic is so hugely divorced from original fic in terms of story construction

[ishouldreallybeelsewhere]

i think november is just a bad month for me

maybe i’ll enjoy fanfic again one day but until then…

[bedlamsbard]

Do you have any advice for coming up with a plot when you already have your setting and characters? I'm not writing a fic but I figured fic writers also have heir characters and setting pre-plot and you're an amazing writer so I thought you'd be a good person to ask?

I’m not sure that I’m going to be particularly helpful here, because I haven’t written original fiction in a while and I’m the kind of fic writer who believes that if fanfic can be completely divorced from the canon, then it’s failed as fanfic, so I’m not sure how much of this is transferable, but these are some of the things I think about as a fic writer who writes primarily plotty fic:

To oversimplify greatly, plot is the pithy description: “The one where X happens.”  (Ex: The plot of Rogue One is the Rebel Alliance stealing the Death Star plans.)

Also: “The one where X happens because of A, B, and C” – “The plot of Rogue One is the Rebel Alliance stealing the Death Star plans because a Rebel intelligence officer and a group of rogues with various ties to the Empire uncovered the existence of the Death Star and decided to find a way to thwart it.”  (Note: This is not the only way to describe the plot of Rogue One.)

Plot is also the progression of events that make up the pithy description: Thing 1 happens, Thing 2 happens, and as a result of these things, Thing 3 happens; meanwhile Thing 4 is happening because it is not at this point affected by Things 1, 2, or 3, but somewhere along the line Thing 72 will not happen unless Thing 4 happens first.

This is the primary way that I plot – I’ll have scenes or images or lines that I write the story to use, and then backtrace to work out what things have to happen for those scenes to occur later on.

Wake the Storm is a good example of this: the two images that I wrote the story for were Anakin crawling through the ventilation shafts on Vader’s star destroyer and Anakin fighting Vader on Mustafar.  So I had to go back and figure out what the sequence of events for those things to happen would be.  (Wake’s a little unusual in that these are beginning and (near) ending scenes; Gambit and Backbone both have keystone scenes that are closer to the middle of the story as well, but Wake didn’t.)

Sometimes your brain is not consciously aware of these things, and you figure it out further down along the line.  Sometimes you’re further down along the line and you go back and reread and go, “huh, if I use X throwaway line, I can do Y main plot point.”

Plot should flow naturally from characters and setting.  Most of the fic I write is in a genre that I call a single-point divergence AU: if one thing goes differently in canon, how does that affect everything that comes afterwards?  Everything is progressive; actions have consequences both immediate and long-term.  Those actions will flow from characters, both from their choices and events that are out of their control.  (And what will be out of one character’s control will not be out of another’s.)

This is essentially the same method that alternate history writers use.  (I’m a historian, so I think about cause and effect a lot.)

I try to have an action plot (the sequence of events) and an emotional plot (the character arcs).  These should be inextricably intertwined and inform each other; the events of one will ultimately not be possible without the other.

Wake has two primary emotional plots: Anakin and OT!Obi-Wan

Backbone has two primary emotional plots: Hera and Cham.

Gambit is a weird case because the action plot and the emotional plot involve separate sets of characters – the action plot is what happens with the Gambitverse characters, and the primary emotional plot is what happens with the Wakeverse characters.  Certainly there are secondary emotional plots for the Gambitverse characters and a secondary action plot for the Wakeverse characters (and the primary action plot affects the Wakeverse characters because they’re present in that ‘verse, but it’s not their action plot), but Gambit was partially an exercise in seeing if I could separate the one from the other.  I can and did, but the effect was to make the story feel slightly lopsided in a way I’m not entirely happy with (but couldn’t avoid without changing the way I approached the story).

I come up with a lot more plots than I actually use, and about 95% of the time, they flow directly from canon because of the kind of stories I gravitate towards telling.  They also tend to be questions that I’m trying to answer.

Some examples:

How would Anakin react to suddenly turning up in the OT era?  (Wake the Storm)

What would the repercussions of this be, both in the OT timeline and in the PT timeline?

How would Ben react to Anakin suddenly turning up? Luke?  Leia?

What if Queen Amidala was the leader of the Confederacy?  (Queen’s Gambit)

What are the events that would lead this to happen?

What are the repercussions of this change, both in the past and present?

How would canon!Padme react to this?

What if Hera and Kanan were Imperials?  (On the Edge of the Devil’s Backbone)

What are the events that would lead this to happen?  Is there a point in canon I can use for this or do I have to make it all up out of whole cloth?

How this does effect other characters and events in the Rebels timeline?  Other characters and events in the saga timeline? (A.k.a. how important are the Ghost crew, anyway? – Remember that Backbone was plotted immediately after S1.)

What if Obi-Wan a Sith lord?  (All Along the Watchtower; planned)

What are the events that would lead this to happen?

What are the long- and short-term repercussions of this?

What if Anakin didn’t go dark side and survived Order 66? (What is Lost)

This isn’t a great example because I wrote this literally ten years ago and remember none of my thought process, and would do it differently today.

What if Obi-Wan was a woman?  (Oxygen & Rust)

What does this change in the saga?

The way that characters interact with her – how does that change the events of the saga?

Here’s an example from a TCW story that I partially plotted a few years ago, but didn’t end up writing:

In “The Unknown”, Tup reacts to Tiplar and Tiplee as Jedi, but seems unaware of Anakin, suggesting that Anakin may have been specially programmed into the chips not to be an Order 66 victim.

What if more clone chips started malfunctioning and all the Jedi were targeted except Anakin?

The most dramatic way for this to happen would be in a group setting, so that it’s immediately evident to other Jedi that Anakin isn’t being targeted.

That’s going to look suspicious as hell and the other Jedi are probably going to take Anakin into custody.

Let’s have Obi-Wan be injured in this attack and out of the picture, so Anakin feels trapped and alone.

Palpatine is pissed off because this isn’t playing into his plans at all, so he’s revising and improvising on the fly.

If all of the sudden Jedi can’t trust their clones, then that’s going to have massive effects on the war – a.k.a., the Separatists can suddenly make a huge push forward.  What if Dooku starts taking the war seriously?

Anakin’s an enterprising sort and after what happened with Ahsoka, he doesn’t have a whole lot of reason to trust the Order in this scenario, so it makes sense that he would escape.  (Maybe Palpatine helps to engineer this, because it’s easier for him to have Anakin loose than in prison.)

There ought to be a clone in here, make it Rex, who was aware of what happened with Tup and Fives.  He teams up with Anakin.

Rex is going to be wary of having that thing in his head and Anakin needs proof, so they need to find someone to remove it.

How is Padme going to react to all this?  Anakin doesn’t want to actively involve her, but he also wants to let her know that he’s all right.

Anakin escaping makes the Jedi Council pretty sure he’s guilty, but after Ahsoka they’re feeling burned, so maybe they proceed with more caution.

At this point Palpatine doesn’t have many options as Supreme Chancellor other than making Anakin look guilty; as Sidious this is an opportunity for him to recruit Anakin.

It would make sense for Anakin to contact Ahsoka to have an ally outside the Order, especially if she’s still on Coruscant.

at this point I stopped plotting this story out.  I never had an ending.

(this was originally supposed to be my cool down story after Queen’s Gambit; I wrote Backbone instead)

Here’s a link to some writing meta that I like (and which influenced me a lot when I was younger – you’ll note that this is where I got the terms “action plot” and “emotional plot” from).  Her 10 minute AU is essentially the same as my single point divergence AU, but she breaks it down better than I do.  (ETA: I want to clarify that I don’t agree with Synecdochic on everything, but I really can’t deny that a lot of this was pretty crucial to my development as a plot writer.)

This isn’t really helpful insofar as coming up with ideas goes, because when it comes to original fic, that’s…what I don’t write and haven’t written for a while, because I’m so used to bouncing directly off canon for ideas.  When I do write original fic, I have a tendency to mash stuff together – “classic urban fantasy + ancient Rome,” “traditional high fantasy + modern urban setting,” “prison hulks + space,” “New Orleans-inspired + WWII + magic” – and see what that gets me.  If it’s something like a genre – urban fantasy, high fantasy, prison break – then I look at what the common tropes for that genre are and how they function in a different setting.  And hope that something shakes loose.  (I haven’t done originals in a couple of years, and the last time I was working on one I was co-writing.  Which is a whole different thing.)

Hopefully there’s some food for thought here!