Welcome to the Newcastle University Creative Writing society!
Plotting. Why do we do it? It’s hard, it takes forever, and it's not like our characters ever want to listen to us anyway. It doesn’t matter if there’s a giant, invisible sky dragon waiting for them three towns to the west, your characters are bound to head north, chasing a fairy-tale about a wish-granting pixie. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if your characters stray from the path. The story you’re writing is never the one you set out to write, it’s the one you find along the way. All you need to know is where it starts and where it ends. Everything in between isn’t so much plot as it is character dynamics. Revenge. Love. Loyalty. Traitor. Lover. Brother. It’s no coincidence that the most common character motivations are all about character dynamics. Even if your character’s a loner, unless they have lived alone and away from human contact all their lives they should have been formed by their social environment. Rejection is as much a form of social interaction as inclusion. If a fantasy character wants to slay the dragon for glory, who are they trying to impress? If a contemporary character wishes they were more exciting, who’s telling them that they’re boring? A desire for change, negative or positive, needs a catalyst. Just like it isn’t realistic to have a villain who woke up one day and decided that being evil sounded like a good career choice, a hero can’t want to help everyone without a reason. Someone has to have raised them that way, or something must’ve happened that made them determined to save as many people as they could. What happens on the path between the beginning and the end depends entirely upon who’s walking down it. If the characters have only just met, you might need to establish trust quickly. If they’ve known each other forever, maybe they have to adjust to a new person joining the group, or a new dynamic forged between them by the situation. If you get bogged down in writer’s block, you could consider playing around with them. For example, what happens what the group mediator picks a fight? What’s pushed them to it, and who breaks it up? How does the group split after an argument? What do they do when the medic doesn’t have the necessary skills to deal with an injury? Characters aren’t just formed by the climax. Stories need multiple crises. If you end up with one that doesn’t add anything to the story and can’t be tailored to the plot, you can always cut it later. I hope this has been useful, especially with National Novel Writing Month around the corner. Remember, we’ve got a workshop with Alex Jackson, the writer of the Malkonar trilogy, coming up on Tuesday, as well as the usual writing session on Thursday. Hannah
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Blog posts are written by our committee members, posted regularly! We talk about exciting new ventures, upcoming events and opportunities, as well as the odd writing thoughts and topics we think of!
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