Aug 31, 2020
As I start to write out these thoughts, hopefully to the benefit of any of you out there who read this, I have realized that starting at the beginning is always hard. The blank page can be daunting. And the flash of a cursor or the tap of a pencil lead can be oddly paralyzing.
The most important thing you can do when getting started is just getting started. Helpful right?
But it really is the only way to begin anything at all; push past the blankness staring at you and put something down in its place. Even something as simple as a title or even "New Story". Cut the blank page with those first few words and it all gets a little easier.
Now I am aware this advice is either a long-needed mind explosion or deserving of a smarmy 'well duh'. This is not the advice a writer needs unless it IS what the writer needs. And if that is the case, you're welcome and we're all done here.
And because I am aware that my opening is pedantic, let's quickly move on to something more tangible. Who doesn't like a simple little list? And for the record, I'm rattling this off rather stream of consciousness style to prepare for our future dives into these topics.
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Step One: The Idea
This is why that blank page is so daunting. Pulling the threads of nothing and weaving it into something. While that is a bit dramatic, it is also essentially accurate. Good ideas come from those who create them.
And you know, I must admit, this is not overly true. Some great ideas come from things other people have already dreamed up. Whether it's some of the far-flung adventures in the wider Star Wars Universe or fan fictions written as unique works of love, some ideas absolutely can be inspired by other ideas. And if you have no want to publish or otherwise monetize these ideas; go nuts.
Go ahead and take Die Hard, set it in a fantastical world of swords and sorcery, make Nakatomi Plaza into an ancient wizard tower and Hans Gruber into an Evil Wizard bent on extorting all the gold coins from the surrounding kingdom. You know... Or something like that, not to be too specific.
What I will be doing in the following articles is to help any readers create new ideas. Sometimes my examples will be as above; silly but otherwise interesting, though I intend to give much more focus on unique ideas and world-building.
Step Two: The Story
This is the part of creating ideas that others will, hopefully, latch onto. Whether you are creating for friends, players, readers or a combination of all the above the goal is almost always to share the story. The method matters much less than the act of creating the story itself.
To follow the Die Hard example above, a story can be as simple as taking down the criminal and saving the hostages or it can be more complex and address the marital issues of John McClane and that one of the hostages is his ex-wife. Ultimately a good story has layers to it, potentially not obvious at first but revealed at the right times in the story to draw the readers/players/friends deeper into the story and give the participants meaning and direction.
Simply put, a warrior with vengeance in his heart will never be as good as a disgraced soldier atoning for his past actions. Both stories can absolutely be the same but the second one will have people caring about the warrior himself not merely the badass situations he gets into.
But a story has many more elements to make it compelling. Setting, time and timeframe, style, narrative choices and many minor details. In fact, as much as the minor details at first are not tremendously important, they can often be the difference between a good story and a great story. It also can help define the story as you move forward.
If you know a little bit about subspace mechanics (even if its made up) it can help you define what happens when the mass driver slug from the antagonist's ship smashes the slipstream drive of the protagonist's ship as he enters the subspace slipstream. Will it fail? Will the protagonist get thrown about randomly in the slipstream? The simple act of knowing a little about how that slipstream drive works can inform you about what happens later in the story.
Details can be your friend. At least until the super fans corner you at a convention to ask why the slipstream drive works like that when a different event happens... Then, you're on your own.
None of this addresses the primary elements of any good story though. Protagonist, Antagonist, Tension, Crisis, Resolution and many other concepts too numerous to address in this initial post. But we will get to them, don't you worry.
Step Three: The Characters (if any)
The story inevitably blends into the characters in that story. It is the characters that provide the engines for events, the impetus for actions and effects to occur. Characters are not always clearly defined or even necessary, but they absolutely help propel things along.
But what characters do you need? That is the important bit, right? Well, there are some common examples in most stories:
-Protagonist: the hero, or at least, the main character about which the story revolves. This can take many forms; from the heroic paladin slaying evil to the down-trodden street rat scraping by to survive to the unwitting pawn in larger machinations who narrates the story from a point after the story has finished.
-Antagonist: the villain, the thorn in the hero's side or simply the concept that counters the hero's life philosophy. An antagonist could even be a well-meaning nobleman who just does not understand what is happening around them. The only real defining characteristic of an antagonist is being the counter to the protagonist.
-The Setting: sometimes the most important character you can make is the backdrop to the story itself. Think of Alice in Wonderland, Wonderland itself is a character in some respects more so than The Mad Hatter or The Red Queen. Or Mordor in Lord of The Rings. Yes, Sauron is absolutely the dark heart of Mordor, but Mordor itself causes a quickening of the hearts of all Good Men of Gondor. You don't need to mention Orcs or Trolls to get that reaction, just the name of the place they come from.
Many more character types and archetypes can make your story simple, complex, easy to understand or morbidly obtuse. It all depends on how you use them as your tools to carve out the story from your idea.
Step Four: The Crisis
Now, this part I admit, can be very vague at times. It sounds like it must be a problem or a disastrous event, but it could easily be anything. A wedding can be the crisis as much as an apocalyptic war. What is necessary is something for the Protagonist to overcome, something that creates growth or change in one or more of the characters. And yes, if that change is in the wider world or setting and not in a character then that works as well.
But if the day starts in a raincloud and continues all day and the rain still comes down at sunset, then not much has really happened has it? The crisis could be that if the rain does not stop, the city will be flooded and somehow there exists a way to stop the rain that someone or something could affect, use somehow. And from that point you get dragged back around into story and character issues.
A Crisis is almost intrinsically linked to one or more characters. In our world, you know, Earth? In this horrendous year 2020 our crisis could be that this year is happening. Maybe the resolution is simply to make it to January 1st, 2021. Of course, its not a fight against the calendar we are engaged in, but that gets into territory that is far too real for a website called Practical Fantasy... So, let's refocus a bit yeah?
Crises can be gigantic or miniscule and often come in groups. Yes, the apocalypse may be coming, but the one who causes it is experiencing a terrible relationship with both family and a first-time love. For the rest of that character's family, their crisis is to stop the apocalypse. The first-time love is a crisis of emotional abuse and manipulation. The character herself (feel free to guess in the comments on this one) is struggling against both a crisis of self and a crisis of unnecessary medication. There are four just on the surface of that story.
Having the strength to go grocery shopping can be a crisis to a character who is struggling against an illness or disease. So, crises vary drastically depending on both story and character. This topic is going to be a long winded one when we get to this point.
Step Five: The Resolution
The resolution is almost always for the reader or player, only sometimes is it for the character themselves. In the example above the character succeeding at the grocery trip is absolutely a resolution for that character but it also is a resolution for anyone consuming the story as well.
Resolutions can be good, bad or neutral. They may impact characters or people, or they may be miniscule and nearly pointless. But it is something that every reader is waiting for in any story.
Resolutions are also difficult to pin down as this is the most "choice oriented" part of any story. In a tabletop rpg, the storyteller gets lucky a bit, most choices are made by the players. If it is only you writing a story, then all those choices are made by you.
Regardless of who does the choosing, these choices lead to resolutions and slightly different choices can lead to vastly different outcomes and resolutions. As simple as the hero goes right and forever misses the person locked in the dungeon. They may still rescue the prince or whomever, but they never saved the prisoner. If they had, later in the story the prisoner would be able to make the choice to rescue the hero. A vastly different story.
So as much as resolutions are the kind of payoff for readers or players, resolutions are also most definitely the last thing to worry about. Especially if you are a storyteller working towards a session or campaign idea for a tabletop game. In that case don't even worry about the resolution as it will likely come very naturally.
Writers have a few more options in this regard. Whether to decide on the outcome at the beginning of your story planning (architect style story creation) or if you discover what makes sense as you go along (discovery style writing). These terms are talked about slightly differently by Brandon Sanderson in a far more eloquent way than I ever could (link) but those are the two extremes.
Regardless of how the writer comes to answer the questions posed by their own writing, these choices will result in resolution for the characters, the story and the consumer.
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As I said at the top of this first ramble of mine, starting is the best way to start. Hopefully, things got a little more useful after that point; until next time everyone.
Eric
For more info, here are some links I thought might be helpful. Bear in mind these are external links I found by googling "Five steps to creating a story". They have some different viewpoints than I expressed so hopefully they can help you get started on finding methods that help you: