marycatelli | Entries tagged with plotting

It's not enough to devise a background for my two main characters to have their conflict against.

I have to weave them together. In particular the timelines. The endings work together nicely, since their final happy ending is when the political situation is settled, and they are rewarded.

But several incidents on the way are just them, and no politics. They still have work together, and not as if I had set them up.

grouse

So why is this story so hard to plot?

The heart-rending story of two people forced together by the politics and machinations about them! They do not care who sits on the throne, but they come to care for each other!

I conclude that they do not care about politics, but politics cares about them. Not in the sense that anyone thinks two lowly born characters have any say in how things turn out. (Until the end, hehehehehe. . . ) But in the sense that I will need at least the broad strokes of how things turn out.

I essayed

It's all very well for Aristotle to talk about logical or necessary procession.

Sometimes, you just have a bunch of things happening during a time, and the only temporal requirement is that they fit into it. Visiting a home and not caring when they visit the garden and talk about the labyrinth there.

It does make it hard to slot them all in.

I essayed

The heroine sits around and thinks, and the writer sits around and thinks about whether there should be more obstacles between her and the meeting with the love interest. The terrible toad was one, and now -- perhaps a bird? I could make a bird a real nuisance and different from the toad.

The dread bird.

The toad is -- well, not dead, since it was never really alive, or (for that matter) a toad.

But the crafty thing is revealing that the heroine is going to suffer quite a lot after her victory.

And here I thought it wasn't even very important in the plot.

I essayed

Ah, discoveries.

There is the leader of the group. There is also at least one rival angling to take over.

Amazing what clarifying the earlier events does.

I think I will have to put in more sightings of the fugitive wizards, just to remind the character that they are the important ones.

I've got to nail down how many villains are up to shenanigans. And establish what they are doing.

Then, and only then, can I work out how the heroine learns about them before the end.

Even though the story's working its way from her viewpoint.

sigh

I essayed

I essay'ed

Oh you plot bunnies!

Two very different stories about a character who finds herself in another world. The means by which they are moved differ, the situations they find themselves in differ, their powersets differ, and the reasons they have powers differ. Their enemies differ, and so does the conflict.

This probably means they should have different reactions to arrival, perhaps all the more in that they do not glide over it as a machine that the readers will simply accept as not relevant to the plot. (It is relevant in both cases, though -- the reasons differ.)

Both are going to have metaphysical questions, though. No matter how different I make them.

(And I don't even know if either one is a full story yet.)

Was plugging along on the first draft, and realized that it might be more interesting with another character, the daughter of one I had in the outline. Breezily wrote pages with her --

And realized that she doesn't work. The hero has to be opposed by someone whose expectation is unreasonable, and so the daughter has to go.

I glowered and grumbled, and poked it to figure out where to set up the no-longer-a-mother do what was needed. I realized that after what happened to the hero's mother, I could set up a kind-and-unkind-girls tale.

Which relief lasted until I sat down and had to write it. I still needed to plot out three scenes and put them in.

Ah, well, at least the vague outlines have formed.

essayed again

The five girls are studying hard, and having some amusements, and trying to devise a project. The big project, the one that proves they can do the job they are studying for.

So how much of the other stuff gets depicted as they pound their heads against the wall? It can't obsess them day and night, or they would be discharged from their studies as crazy. But how much of it is relevant?

essayed again.

This is doubly my stuff, because it's about how I came to write my story

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Mary Catelli's Erraticly Updated and Exceedingly Ill-Organized Journal

being chiefly about the written word

Entries tagged with plotting

warp and weft

ah politics

Sorcery And Subtlety

Bait and Switch

juggling things

Where’d He Go?

nailing down the journey

Ah, the terrible toad

Color By Numbers Series

enter the rival

plot, plot, plot

A Brief Note, Considering Characters

The DM Vs. The Writer, and the Railroad

In My Beginning Is My Ending -- I Hope

Coming-of-age Novels In Fantasy

juggling two stories

muddling through the draft

Dealing Out Drama

time passing

Fairy-Tale Free-For-All

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February 2026

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