Month Two: Think Sideways

Sorry for the untimeliness of this post; this past weekend has been insane, and the insanity is set to continue as we gear up for a major family wedding next Monday. I'll do my best to keep the posts coming over the next ten days, but no promises. Thanks for understanding :)

Wow, it's that time again already! This month has gone so fast (thank goodness).

So, Month Two, the month of Planning. (If you want to read up on month one, by the way, it's here).


Week Five

This was a week that a lot of people taking the Think Sideways course had trouble with. Mostly, I think, because we like things in neat boxes - and sometimes planning a novel doesn't fall into a neat box. In this lesson Holly introduced the concept of the Dot and the Line (see my post here); and as a way of kickstarting story-brainstorming, I'm in love. The main point of this conceptual way of looking at things is learning to narrow down your focus, to concentrate only on what matters, what is different, what is special about your character and conflict and story, and put your effort into building that, rather than getting caught up in the million-and-one other pits the avid world-builder can fall into.

The Dot: Stop. Look. Something happens here. That something is small, it is contained, and it is different from everything around it. It is the one or two or three aspects of a character or conflict or twist or setting that make it stand out from the others around it; the reason why it is that character's story, or why the story starts here.

The Line: Difference. Things on one side are not the same as things on the other. The simplest way to work this is to juxtapose dots: antagonist versus protagonist, protag versus the setting, past versus present versus future... etc. Keep it small, keep it limited: Where are the differences that will cause conflict? What changes?

Week Six

This is the genre week. While it might not seem like much of topic for a lesson, I actually got quite a lot out of this - especially the 'Technique' section, entitled Amazon River %-) This lesson is a perfect example of the things you don't even know you need to ask. Writing careers change, books go bust, and sometimes, you have to do a genre jump. This lesson explains in great detail exactly how you go about learning a new genre in a matter of days, giving techniques for dissecting books in the genre, techniques for finding not just good books, but books that YOU will like in the new genre, and all importantly, techniques for switching genres mid-book.

Week Seven

Worldbuilding. How to do it, and do it right. By which I mean NOT spending years and years and forests of trees planning out every single detail before you write the first word of the story. There's one really simple way to figure out if you need to build a piece of information or not, and it all hinges on the one question that I would certainly never have thought to ask, and that it's taken Holly 17 years to think of asking:

Why do writers worldbuild?

Have a good think about that for a moment, write down some answers if you have a pen. Why?

There are, of course, many answers to this. But there is ultimately only one important answer: To create conflict.

Therefore, if the thing you're looking at building before you start writing doesn't induce a change in your character/s, or in some way create a conflict, don't bother. It's something you can invent as you go along, because it won't change the direction, or the heart and soul of your story.

There are eight extra modules in this huge lesson which deal with the specific areas of conflict, character, culture, scenes, language, maps, time and maths, and come with great worksheets and so forth that will help you build what you need without going over the top. Remember the principle of the dot and the line: small, contained, different.

Week Eight

The final lesson for the month is aptly titled "How to Plan Your Project Without Killing Your Story", and teaches you how to make an outline that will neither make you its slave, nor leave you in a funk when you hit that nasty muddley middle :D The basic premise is the line for scene method, but Holly also covers how to use this method to fix boring spots in your novel before they happen - and before you waste valuable time and words on them.


Conclusions

I am absolutely in love with the techniques I'm learning here. And writing from the middle of month three, I can tell you, they just keep coming. The Dot and Line principle, the Amazon River technique for finding alternative genres for your work (SO useful for remarketing short stories), how to prevent boring or messy bits... these techniques have changed the way I approach my writing, and have made my pre-writing stage so much more efficient and streamlined. Approaching planning in this way is also great for when you're putting together your submission package (week 11, which I'm reading now). Having nutted out the themes and concepts of your story early on, you're in the best position possible to create a winner of a query letter, and a sound synopsis.

So, Think Sideways sounds like something you might be interested in? Previously, to sign up for this course, you had to wait for the next designated sign-up week (which happen about once every two months, from the looks of it), and hope that you got in early enough, since they're all limited-intake.

However.

However. Holly's top 25 affiliates now have access to passwords which mean you can sign up at any time. Given I've sold less than ten items through my affliate link like, ever, imagine my shock when I was included in that email! :D

So, anyway. The long and the short of it is that if you sign up through my link, you can get in at any time, and be guaranteed a place. Skip the sales hype and go to the bottom of this page. If you want to do the six-month course at $47/month, the password is checkin. If you'd prefer the 12-month version (same lessons, just once per fortnight instead of once per week) for $25/month, the password is taketime. Hehe.

Don't forget, payments are monthly via paypal, and you can opt out at any time and get a full refund for any lessons you haven't yet recieved :)

So, that's me for the day! Have a great week, and hopefully the rest of this week's post will be more or less (hopefully more!) on time! :)

Think Sideways: The Dot and The Line

I was supposed to write this last week, but I realised as I was looking at it that, in a way, the dot and the line is Holly's way of looking at significance. So I decided to write the article on significance first. If you haven't read it yet, it's here.

So, first of all, what is the dot and the line? What on earth am I talking about? :)

This principle comes from week five of the Think Sideways course. By this point, I have my basic idea, I have my Sentence (logline) with the MC and their major problem, in an interesting setting, with a twist - and I'm ready to continue. What do I do next? The dot. And the line.

The Dot

The basic principle of the dot is that it's small, defined, and contained. It's different (and in some ways opposite) to the blank space around it; it's special. Extraordinary. Stop, it says. Look. Something important happens here.

The most obvious application of this is in maps - you draw a rough sketch, and you let your subconscious pepper it with dots. Then you ask the questions - why there? What happened? What's extraordinary about that place?

Extraordinary is the key word here; an important principle of pre-planning that helps you avoid over-planning is to let the ordinary speak for itself. You only need to define the extraordinary. This is where the concept relates to what I said about significance: you only need to worry about things that are significant to your story. For now, nothing else matters.

This can apply equally well to characters as to settings: For Neighbourhood Watch I shoved a metaphorical dot on my MC and asked the question. Why him? What happened? What's extraordinary about this boy?

For this story, the MC's defining trait is his jealousy for his younger brother, who is cool, confident, and rules the neighbourhood. This is the trait that kicks the story into motion; this is the trait that provides the MC with all the motivation and tenacity he needs to get himself into Really Big Trouble - from whence he will have to find his way out.

Dots can also apply to conflicts: Why this conflict? What happens? What's so special about it? In my Evil Tree Story, the one I'm developing for the Think Sideways course, the major initial conflict is that my MC Jake has to decide between helping out his girlfriend, who gets into serious, life-threatening trouble, and preserving his reputation - no too-cool teenager wants his friends to know he's out hugging trees ;) Why this conflict? Because Jake has always struggled to fit in. Because it's something he's only acheived recently, and it's something he'll fight tooth and claw to hold onto.

Because he adores his girlfriend, and would sacrifice his life for her if he had to.

Thus the dot: Stop. Look. Something important happens here.

The Line

The line has a different power to the dot. The line shows not importance, but difference. Things on one side of the line are not the same as on the other. For me, this was an easier concept to grasp - lines, difference, makes sense :) And it applies to things other than setting much more intuitively, for me.

Setting is easy. Tomorrow, when I post my maps, I'll show you my primary setting 'lines', and give a quick explanation of them. Essentially, the world on one side of the line is different to things on the other side (big surprise there, huh).

So, characters. My MC in Neighbourhood Watch was easy: his line is the line that he draws between himself and his family. He is at once ashamed of them, their poverty and low-class mannerisms, and wishes nothing more than to be disassociated from them forever, and at the same time intensely jealous of his brother's ability to lead and blend in at will. But he would never, ever admit this - his line between his family and himself is (currently) absolute. They are not his, he is not theirs; they just happen to share a house because he has no other choice.

Applying the line to conflict is a bit different: rather than saying what is different on one side of the conflict to the other (although writing this I realise that that would be a perfectly valid approach, too; what is different before the conflict as opposed to after it? What changes?), I looked at what are the lines that cause conflict.

Lines between people are an easy place to start, because often it's the person's dot - the thing that makes them special is the thing that makes them different, which causes conflict, because difference = conflict...

Take Jake for example. On the one hand, he wants to rescue his girlfriend. On the other hand, his mates don't think he ought to have anything to do with tree-hugging hippies in the first place, let alone rescue them when they 'get themselves into trouble'.

Or Heather, my MC from The Project. On the left, we have Heather, who is going to do whatever it takes - whatEVER - to save that little girl, because of her own past. On the right, we have everyone else, who thinks she's getting way too involved, and ought to a) mind her own business, b) leave it to the police, or c) at the very least not make so much trouble over it.

Conflict. Differences. The line.

Remember, this is not the be-all and the end-all of planning. This is just a neat way to kick things off, to figure out what your focus should be, to understand what it is that makes this your story, an extraordinary story, something different and special and you. It's flexible, and I don't think there's any need to feel constrained by its boundaries: if one area isn't working for you, skip it. It's okay to not know every single detail going into a story :)

Tomorrow, when I figure out how to turn my PDF scans into postable images, I'll throw up my initial workings for the Evil Tree Story, and if you can decode my writing you'll see how a couple of sketchy maps sparked the entire conflict and gave me a name for my MC :)