Writing and NaNo Ramblinh
Sep. 20th, 2009 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccastareyesMost of my drabbles are written like I imagine other folks write poetry -- I have an image or joke I want to tell, and I craft the setup around it.
Short stories tend to have a simple conflict. I need to know the character, but the conflict is usually set with the story idea, and the characters fold around that.
My longfic -- and here I use anything that's novella or novel length -- seems to be very character driven. I come up with a protagonist, and maybe an antagonist, and give them conflicting goals. Sometimes the protagonist can drive him/herself and I just need to figure out who comes up in the way, but sometimes the antagonist is driving things by wanting something that the protagonist is opposed to. NaNo '08 was like this. So was NaNo '06, a bit, until the protagonist discovered his goal of 'get home' and then 'free my buddy'. (NaNo '06 needs to be strip-mined. NaNo '08 might suffice with a polish.) NaNo '07 had protagonists that didn't need to be prodded as much -- partially because it was a sequel, but also because I knew the characters' goals.
(The project I'm writing for![[insanejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/ij-userinfo.gif)
scifibigbang may be different, since I'm deliberately trying to echo the plot of the FMA anime. But I still had to figure out what Dante (the antagonist) wanted.)
I'm thinking of giving Melisan -- a game character of mine -- a story for NaNo '09, once I get a world for him other than the (copyrighted) game world we played in. Problem is, that the thing is shaping up to smash his world to pieces in the opening chapters, which means I need to dive into his psyche and see where he goes next.
For background, Melisan was born a woman in Theocratic Patriarchal Culture A, which inhabited a barely habitable area full of monsters and stray magic. She loses her family in a raid by Annoying Neighbor B, and she takes on the identity of her youngest brother and attempts to join the priesthood. Here he* tries to get involved with foreign policy, to steer things away from the cold war with Annoying Neighbor C, who isn't particularly aggressive, but has lots of resources and a particularly offensive-to-A culture, to ally with C versus B -- C is kind of the regional superpower, so B would love to conquer them. Melisan also develops into a paranoid and manipulative person -- scared someone will discover he is a woman, he collects others' secrets for blackmail purposes. Just in case. This does not make him popular.
Anyway, I'm thinking that Melisan discovers some of his superiors engaging in some kind of anathema magic, and gets told 'if you help us, we'll make sure you get that promotion -- oh, yeah, and we know your secret, so if you expose us, we'll make sure to take you down'. And Melisan decides that his own personal goals, not to mention life, isn't worth getting this out of his country, and blows things up in the most spectacular way he can pull off and hopes that this is too quick or unexpected
No good deed goes unpunished. Melisan is caught, and for the crime of breaking every law about proper behavior of women, gets tossed to the wolves. Well, that and this being an excuse to get Melisan's Purple Files out of Melisan's brain and into Internal Affairs, and so no one gets the idea that disguising yourself as the opposite sex is allowable.
I'm thinking about starting with Melisan about to be interrogated/psychic-probed and being broken out of prison. Which gives me a bunch of internal plotlines of 'what do you do when the country you are loyal to until death tosses you into the scrap heap after trying to get every bit of use out of you?' and 'Melisan sorts out gender identity, now that external constraints are no longer directly pressing on him'. But, I need some kind of external plot for a character who expected to die, and just had a very busy month.
* Melisan does have some gender dysphoria, which complicates pronoun use. I'd say Melisan is a genderqueer individual who lives as a male and is biologically female -- he doesn't identify as male, but is most comfortable with a masculine identity, and is uncomfortable presenting as a woman, even in situations where everyone knows his biological sex. (And wasn't especially comfortable with being a young woman as a child.) Melisan's culture doesn't have words to describe this. And it's all complicated by the patriarchal rigid-gender-role nature of Melisan's upbringing and that Melisan has been hiding his biological sex for over a decade under severe penalties.
tl;dr: Melisan's culture fucked him up, and this interacts with his natural inclinations.
Short stories tend to have a simple conflict. I need to know the character, but the conflict is usually set with the story idea, and the characters fold around that.
My longfic -- and here I use anything that's novella or novel length -- seems to be very character driven. I come up with a protagonist, and maybe an antagonist, and give them conflicting goals. Sometimes the protagonist can drive him/herself and I just need to figure out who comes up in the way, but sometimes the antagonist is driving things by wanting something that the protagonist is opposed to. NaNo '08 was like this. So was NaNo '06, a bit, until the protagonist discovered his goal of 'get home' and then 'free my buddy'. (NaNo '06 needs to be strip-mined. NaNo '08 might suffice with a polish.) NaNo '07 had protagonists that didn't need to be prodded as much -- partially because it was a sequel, but also because I knew the characters' goals.
(The project I'm writing for
scifibigbang may be different, since I'm deliberately trying to echo the plot of the FMA anime. But I still had to figure out what Dante (the antagonist) wanted.) I'm thinking of giving Melisan -- a game character of mine -- a story for NaNo '09, once I get a world for him other than the (copyrighted) game world we played in. Problem is, that the thing is shaping up to smash his world to pieces in the opening chapters, which means I need to dive into his psyche and see where he goes next.
For background, Melisan was born a woman in Theocratic Patriarchal Culture A, which inhabited a barely habitable area full of monsters and stray magic. She loses her family in a raid by Annoying Neighbor B, and she takes on the identity of her youngest brother and attempts to join the priesthood. Here he* tries to get involved with foreign policy, to steer things away from the cold war with Annoying Neighbor C, who isn't particularly aggressive, but has lots of resources and a particularly offensive-to-A culture, to ally with C versus B -- C is kind of the regional superpower, so B would love to conquer them. Melisan also develops into a paranoid and manipulative person -- scared someone will discover he is a woman, he collects others' secrets for blackmail purposes. Just in case. This does not make him popular.
Anyway, I'm thinking that Melisan discovers some of his superiors engaging in some kind of anathema magic, and gets told 'if you help us, we'll make sure you get that promotion -- oh, yeah, and we know your secret, so if you expose us, we'll make sure to take you down'. And Melisan decides that his own personal goals, not to mention life, isn't worth getting this out of his country, and blows things up in the most spectacular way he can pull off and hopes that this is too quick or unexpected
No good deed goes unpunished. Melisan is caught, and for the crime of breaking every law about proper behavior of women, gets tossed to the wolves. Well, that and this being an excuse to get Melisan's Purple Files out of Melisan's brain and into Internal Affairs, and so no one gets the idea that disguising yourself as the opposite sex is allowable.
I'm thinking about starting with Melisan about to be interrogated/psychic-probed and being broken out of prison. Which gives me a bunch of internal plotlines of 'what do you do when the country you are loyal to until death tosses you into the scrap heap after trying to get every bit of use out of you?' and 'Melisan sorts out gender identity, now that external constraints are no longer directly pressing on him'. But, I need some kind of external plot for a character who expected to die, and just had a very busy month.
* Melisan does have some gender dysphoria, which complicates pronoun use. I'd say Melisan is a genderqueer individual who lives as a male and is biologically female -- he doesn't identify as male, but is most comfortable with a masculine identity, and is uncomfortable presenting as a woman, even in situations where everyone knows his biological sex. (And wasn't especially comfortable with being a young woman as a child.) Melisan's culture doesn't have words to describe this. And it's all complicated by the patriarchal rigid-gender-role nature of Melisan's upbringing and that Melisan has been hiding his biological sex for over a decade under severe penalties.
tl;dr: Melisan's culture fucked him up, and this interacts with his natural inclinations.
