User blog:Taldin/Ideas And Ideals of Imaginative Storytelling

(Weekend Worldbuilding post.)

With NaNoWriMo just around the corner, I thought I'd talk about corralling in some ideas when it comes to writing.

All stories have a logical structure; beginning, middle, and end.

...or do they?

There is a technique called a 'cold open', or 'in mediaz res'  (Latin for 'in the middle of the action'), and then there's starting with the survivor of a tale relating what happens in one long flashback.

All stories have to be about the Hero's Journey, with the three trials along the way.

...or do they?

Self-help books don't. Historical fact and fiction books don't. Mysteries and horror don't always do that.

Your would-be-novel can be anything that makes a coherent sense, that intrigues the reader, or teaches a lesson, or just puts down those dreams you've been having that don't make sense, yet.

All stories have to be original work, unique snowflakes that haven't been done before.

Wellllll... sort of. If you want to get published for real, you'll want to avoid copying someone's work. But there are whole book series about your favorite big screen or small screen characters, all written by different people. Movie adaptations don't write themselves. The key is that you can use someone else's characters as long as the story within is original, and you stay true to the characters and the universe.

And let's face it, nobody ever complains about you swiping Earth for your setting, or humans for your species, or not making up names that are hard to pronounce.

But what about writing about vampires, or zombies, or werewolves? Hasn't that been done to death?

Yes, but if your story is compelling enough on its own rights, you'll get people who love those things to read.

Novel writing is about having that novel idea; the one that makes the reader not know how it ends, or lose them in overexposed exposition, or dislike the main character in the first chapter. The novel that makes the reader want to follow your words wherever they take the story next is the one that they will read -- no matter how odd the idea might seem to you at first.

I play a game sometimes called 'New Choice' -- an improv comedy tool -- wherein at certain critical points in the novel where a character does something, I ask, 'what happens if he/she/it does something different? What happens to the plot?

I've written some of my best plot twists that way....

(Have to stop writing for now.  Battery's dying.)