Complex Concepts in Plot Hooks

neandermagnon · Sep 19, 2018

I don't think your plane analogy is a useful way of thinking about writing. If you have to land a plane you can only land it once and it either lands safely or it doesn't. With writing you get unlimited goes and unlimited amounts of edits. You don't get just one attempt. You get as many attempts and as much editing as you need and you can get feedback between edits as well. If you want to stick with a flight analogy, you're in a flight simulator - nothing bad's going to happen if you do anything wrong - and you have an unlimited number of attempts to make the approach, and you can get feedback and suggestions for improvements between each one. And when you've finally done the perfect landing, you can record that one, and that one alone, and all the others get deleted forever (unless you want to keep them).

Your concerns regarding how much readers will or won't get are totally valid and getting your work critiqued and getting feedback will help a great deal with that. Also if you spend a lot of time reading (anything) and critiquing other writers work that will help you hone your own skills in writing and editing your work, with regards to all kinds of things including how much readers will take in and infer about the situation from what you write. Another trick for editing for this specific thing is to take some time away from the project, forget about it for a while, then go back to it and try to read it as though you're a reader, not the author. This isn't a perfect substitute for having someone else look at it and give you feedback, but you will pick up a lot of things and it will help you to develop your ability to tell how much the reader's going to understand from what you write. I would strongly recommend to get your work critiqued by others as well though.

Fallen · Sep 20, 2018

Hillsy7 said:
I went for a twist on the Prophesy trope: Book opens with the prophesied invasion of a Kingdom to retrieve a special Maguffin that will save everyone. Except it wasn't there - someone stole it. This gives the high level concept: What do you do when Prophecy fails? What lengths will you go to to ensure it happens? What is belief anyway, and how does it change us.[.. ]So how do you weave in levels of complexity, and have faith in the fact the reader has "got it" sufficiently to continue through the plot, when simplifying the plot means pretty much tossing the book?

I keep thnking of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. God, that film underpinned every Prophecy trope going, especially how the search for the Holy Grail led to... King Arthur being arrested by the 80s police for the death of an historian who got in the way of his quest, this is after Arthur faces the Knights of Ni, a giant killer rabbit, and Arthur claiming Camelot is "Just a silly place to live". The premise for it works so well because, well, there is no premise, and sometimes that's the best reflection of life, people, and the hodge-poge soup mix that's belief, monarchy, and politics: Only chaos and distortion of reality and fact is the real constant, and most times leaves you in stitches at the absurbity of it all.

Sometimes you do go too 'thick' on detail with complex plotting, and you lose the reader. So it's getting the heavy plot themes through in a clear and concise way, where all the foreshadowing is there to help reach that 'a-ha' moment. Trusting the reader is paramount, but getting 'test' readers is more so, because they'll tell you if they've connected the dots or not, and you need to know that before it hits the wider market. I'd certainly look at the beta section here, or going on Goodreads and Facebook. In my genre there are good readers out there who do specific beta reading for authors, but you need to know your genre and be a part of groups where these readers go.

Hillsy7 · Sep 20, 2018

Again – Appreciate all the feedback you’ve all given. Cheers.

Just for the record, I’m not against critiquing others because I don’t think it has any value – I’ve done quite a bit of it before and generally speaking, I’m more than passable at it. On a line by line level, my writing is mostly fine, and develops/has developed OK. I’ve nearly done my million words of practise over the years.....

What I mean is I found the process of critiquing on a regular basis psychologically damaging. Firstly, the emotional effort of qualifying, describing, and justifying why a passage/paragraph/character/sentence jumped out at me (Good or bad) saps me of enthusiasm. As I said, I was regularly writing critiques as long or longer as the section I was critiquing. This is not healthy. On the back of this, I was now primed to find faults – and having perfectionist tendencies, that’s a bad place for me to be I’ve found. As you can basically find an alternative way of writing pretty much anything, this makes writing/assessing line-by-line incredibly difficult – at what point is something ‘better’ or ‘different’, and which would more people prefer.

At a plot/character/theme level this makes this nigh on impossible, as you are moving from the objective assessment of writing “rules” into the world of subjectivity. I do not have strong Subjective opinions; I naturally assume I’m wrong. I’m also guilty of second guessing (as you can probably tell from the fact I’m on my third paragraph now trying to forestall potential replies of “Well even if you don’t like it, you should just do it anyway”). Second guessing for negativity in something subjective is suicide. Logically, I know “Art” in general is about creation as a performance, not as a bespoke consumer good – however, I also logically know that when someone says “this isn’t working for me”, they are telling the truth and an adjustment *can* be made.

I know that I’m not particularly well suited to writing, psychologically. Unfortunately, I’m half decent at it and I love telling stories; I’ve tried kicking the habit, but I can’t quite find a creative substitute. Hence why I try and find workable hacks to bypass the issues with me that derail my writing……..such as trying to solve the anxiety that I’ve already built the novel around a fundamentally unworkable plot idea. Or finding a way to get your work read without having to critique back in a way that doesn’t make you look like an arsehole…….

angeliz2k · Sep 20, 2018

Hillsy: so, you have difficulty knowing when to stop editing. That's actually not an uncommon problem with writers.

But, yes, of course, you do still have to do it if you want to write--I mean this in relation to your own work and others' work. You can't hope to succeed if you aren't turning a critical eye on your own work, right? And how do you know how to assess your own work, except by comparing it to other work? And how can you compare unless you evaluate other work critically, too? (And "critical" here, of course, isn't necessarily negative.) So, yes, you do have to have that internal editor in your head, and, yes, it can be difficult to rein that internal editor in, but it has its role and purpose. It may not be easy, but you're clearly very aware of your goals and your obstacles, so, hey, why wouldn't you be able to make it work? Maybe you can put limits on your inner critic. Only one paragraph of feedback per page/chapter. On your own work, give yourself time-frames. Do multiple passes where you focus on one thing so you don't get sidetracked. Do a pass where you don't allow yourself line edits, so you can focus on story and character, do a pass where you only focus on getting those sentences perfect, so a pass for typos only . . .

But I do feel that critiquing at some level is necessary to growing as a writer. It's the key to finding what can be improved.

Harlequin · Sep 20, 2018

There's a place for very in depth critiques. One of my beta readers is super critical and it's immensely helpful to see from that perspective.

But if you feel it is massively time consuming, then I would ask people you critique for to provide a detailed list of what they want. So for example, if someone says "no line by line, simply highlight which bits of dialogue sound unrealistic" then you could try sticking to that, and critiquing to order as it were.

I generally focus on one stand-out issue when critiquing excerpts, and try to pick something that no one else has commented on in the thread so far.

Complex Concepts in Plot Hooks

neandermagnon

Nolite timere, consilium callidum habeo!

Fallen

Stood at the coalface

Hillsy7

angeliz2k

never mind the shorty

Harlequin

Eat books, not brains!