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tossawary · 3 years ago

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ooo could I ask about the plotting process of PINTW, Catch a Falling Star, or Nothing to Me, Nothing to You? Your story beats always dovetail nicely into the next.

Sure! And thank you! Though I'm not sure how well I can explain it. Have you ever seen those discussion threads on how your audience doesn't know how a piece of art was supposed to look in your head? They just take it as it is. Or how your audience doesn't know what you did on purpose and what was a happy, unconscious accident? Yeah.

This is going to be so rambly, because I love talking about this stuff, and so I will try to limit myself to repeating advice that has and ideas that have really helped me over the years.

I am also, obviously, not the final authority on writing. Writing is an entirely situational affair, based on what the author personally wishes to achieve. What goes for one situation may not go for another.

That said about happy accidents, plotting is a lot of work. I spend a lot of time thinking about my stories, usually while I'm out walking every day, and pretty much every story I write now has a companion document called stuff like "SVSSS - PINTWILF - NOTES". And I try to organize all my notes about future scenes, events, and character moments chronologically by how I want them to happen in the story, though I may end up pulling them forward or pushing them back depending on how the story develops as I write it.

Thankfully, with fanfiction anything, a huge chunk of your... let's call it "pre-production" work (character and world design) is done for you. PINTWILF is essentially a rewrite/remix of the first half of SVSSS (+ Pre-Canon) with Shang Qinghua as the main character. "Catch a Falling Star" is "Stardust" with Bingliushen. And NTM,NTY is an MDZS AU. A lot of their beats are already built in, so I'm working with and around those, which helps a lot.

With stories in general, I could argue that the basic plot structure of every story is "something changes". Well, "something happens", at least, but with most stories, it's "something changes".

Characters who are selfish and cynical can become kind and generous (positive character development). Characters who are kind and generous can become selfish and cynical (negative character development). And these are limited to feel-good happy endings stories and tragedies respectively. And of course this kind of character development is not always linear or permanent.

Have you ever heard the saying that "Art is how we decorate space. Music is how we decorate time."? Stories, at least stories without pictures, I might say, are another decoration of time. In most stories, time is always moving forward. If things happen to a characters, but they refuse to change, then there's still a story in the fact that time changes in this place but the characters don't grow as people (they're still getting older, though, of course).

It helps me to approach stories knowing the beginning and the ending, or at least one of them, because it's easy enough to work out a beginning if you know your ending. At least with the kind of stories I write, which pretty much all have fluffy endings.

Which gets into the subject of themes. I write mostly about Character Growth and Friendship/Love. If you know your beginning and some of your themes, you can sort of engineer / reverse-engineer a lot of your story, building from there.

With PINTWILF, I had just finished SVSSS, and I desperately wanted to see what would happen if I forced the detached and self-serving Airplane Bro into connecting with his world and the people in it. I knew that it would have a "happy ending" from the moment I started writing, because that was the story I wanted to write. My story beats therefore revolved around Shang Qinghua coming to care about his new family and facing the plot for them.

NTM,NTY was more complicated, because the ending was always going to be ambiguous, a first meeting unable to be fulfilled, at least not yet. It takes place during the guest lectures, so it begins with Mobei-Jun (and Shen Qingqiu) entering Shang Qinghua's life and then leaving it again, working around some of the antics stolen from MDZS. I wanted them to form a special connection. Due to the political shape of the MDZS world and the way I wanted it to end, the story had to begin with Shang Qinghua and Mobei-Jun unable to be vulnerable to other people, especially emotionally, and without the power to have things in their lives for themselves. They can't be anything meaningful to each other, at least not openly, at least not yet, hence the title, and all beats formed around that theme.

"Catch a Falling Star" is a little simpler, not being as long as PINTWILF but still having a more defined ending. I had most of the plot beats delivered to me by "Stardust", and most of the preliminary character work delivered to me by SVSSS, and I wanted it to end with Bingliushen running off together; the note that Liu Qingge leaves Mingyan at the end is taken almost directly from the book when the main characters also run off together: "Have been unavoidably detained by the world. Expect us when you see us."

I had to ask myself questions like, "Okay, why does Binghe want the falling star?" And, "Why does LIU QINGGE want the falling star?" And also, "Why is Liu Qingge alive if Shen Yuan wasn't there to save him?" and "Why is Binghe not the Demon Emperor?" And come with reasons for that. So, working all that stuff out, it's a story about all the character learning to trust and break out of their predetermined roles, and falling in love with the wild, System-less world around them enough to run away together at the end.

Looking at other people's stories and working out what certain beats CHANGE for the characters and their relationships can be a lot of fun. I think a lot of people get angry when things happen in stories that SHOULD change things, but change either doesn't come or doesn't come in a believable way.

I made up a LOT of PINTWILF as I went. It was DEFINITELY NOT fully plotted from the get-go. I made a lot of writing decisions either the day before or the same day that I posted a chapter. My outlines were constantly making way for new ideas. Old ideas that didn't work anymore were constantly being scribbled out. There were plenty of ideas that could have worked just fine! Possibly better than the idea I went with in the end! But it was one or the other, so I had to pick.

I would tackle the next beat in the overall structure that SVSSS gave me, adapted it to PINTWILF, while keeping the overall goal of "Shang Qinghua grows as a person and gets his happy ending" in mind. WHILE also having to keep the growth arcs of various minor characters in mind as well, which was tough. Some of them didn't get as much spotlight as I would have liked.

Like, the Immortal Alliance Conference, for example. I knew from SVSSS that it happens every few years. At least a few Immortal Alliance Conferences would happen when Binghe was very young, but I hadn't thought to bring it in in Part 1. So, okay, let's say that the Immortal Alliance Conference is being revived for a new generation, and it'll happen every five years instead of four (unlucky number), which will make Binghe's conference the third one. Rule of three!

Bringing in the Immortal Alliance Conference early was an idea to add tension to the story, reminding Shang Qinghua that he's running out of time before the plot starts. And then I realized it allowed me to bring in the other great sects. And further explore Shang Qinghua's relationships with Yue Qingyuan and Shen Qingqiu. And then it just built and built and built! I was constantly grabbing old throwaway lines and seeing what I could make of them, trying to tie every element to something else, foreshadowing every big move. I was constantly doing things because I thought they were fun or funny, then asking myself, "Why? Why? Why?"

"Why is Jiahui younger than Shang Qinghua thought she'd be?" (I didn't have a solid explanation for that from the beginning.) "I need demon enemies for this House of Rejuvenation thing, because humans would be no match for Shang Qinghua, so why is there a demon there?" (Went back and looked at those things I had Shang Qinghua say to Mobei-Jun about politics back in Chapter 4.) "Why would Shen Yuan transmigrate into Shen Qingqiu? I want there to be a reason for it. Can I foreshadow it somehow?" (Cue the Shen Qingqiu qi deviation storyline.) "I've decided that I don't want Shen Jiu to die, actually, how can I keep him around?" (Cue Shang Qinghua telling Shen Jiu the truth about Yue Qingyuan's sword.)

I was putting myself in the shoes of various characters, like, how would Shang Qinghua react to this? Well, I think he would do A. Okay, now Shang Qinghua has done A, how does everyone else react to that? I think Mobei-Jun would do B, and Luo Jiahui would do C, and Shen Qingqiu would do D, and Shen Yuan would do E, and if Shen Qingqiu does D, then Yue Qingyuan is definitely going to do F...

I have a principle I call the "Hobbit with a Rock in a Sock" principle. It's about story tension, minor character agency, character toughness, worldbuilding, and so on. Characters do not have to be physically strong or skilled to make a difference. Anyone at any moment can put a figurative rock in a sock and hit someone else with it. They don't need the super special and shiny Sword of Prophecy to wallop someone. Anyone could be the Hobbit taking the Ring of Power to Mordor to defeat the Dark Lord (Lord of the Rings). If your main character or villain CANNOT be defeated by some random person with a rock in a sock, then there should be reasons for that, at least basic ones. And so on.

It can make plotting incredibly difficult, BUT I think it makes stories exciting, too. PINTWILF was (later, I consciously and concretely made this decision somewhere late into Part 2 and it started really gearing up in Part 3) also plotted around the "For Want of a Nail" theme that everything Shang Qinghua was doing early on would come back to him in some way.

I just took one step, then the next, and then I looked at the past steps I'd ahead, and then I looked ahead at my destination, and then I took another step, and then I checked my position again, and then made another step. And sometimes I said, "Fuck it, I'm just making a choice. I'm having fun and also I have an update schedule." And somehow it all worked out pretty well.

#silva-jadefang #ask tossawary #pride is not the word #nothing to me nothing to you #svsss stardust fusion au #spoilers #tossawary svsss

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