Migration to Wordpress

 I am suspending posting to this blog, having created a personal WordPress-based site at davidalexlamb.com. I copied over all my old posts, and will slowly be adding categorization that I rarely did here.  If you were subscribing to this blog using an RSS aggregator like Feedly, you should update it to point to the new site instead, since I don’t expect to post here again.

Unifying Three Story Structures

 I’ve been reading about writing for years, and am often puzzled by the differences in what different people tell you are essential, approaches to various aspects of writing. I am usually skeptical of “essentiallism” and “only one way” approaches; one of my teachers, Mary Robinette Kowal, once said in one of her Patreon classes that “all writing advice, even mine, is what worked for that writer.” So I focus on what seems useful to me in my current state as an aspiring writer.

At the moment, what I’m working on is character development for my protagonist and secondary characters. I’ve been mostly plot-driven in the past, and my characters have to a large extent been “cardboard” plot tokens. So I’ve been studying sources on creating character arcs; this is a summary of what I’ve learned.

Settlers 6 Custom Scenarios, Part 1

 I’ve said before that city-builders are one of my two favourite forms of video game. Unfortunately, sometimes they have “gotchas” that make you start over from the beginning (or from a many-turns-ago save file) that lead me to wish for walkthroughs that don’t give away too much but at least give me a chance to prepare for whatever the problem might be. Lately I’ve been playing The Settlers®: Rise of an Empire – Gold Edition (released April 18, 2008 by Blue Byte Studio / Ubisoft). There is a nice walkthrough for the campaign scenarios, but I haven’t found one for the custom ones. If anybody out there is still playing this almost-13-year-old game, here are a few warnings. If you want to try to reduce exposure to spoilers, just read the list immediately after the break gives the key idea of the gotcha.

Reflections on January 6, 2021

 As part of learning how to write, I have been reading Kate Wilhelm’s Storyteller, her reflections on 27 years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshops. One section talks about how she works “from images, to scenes, to incidents, then situations and finally plot” in contrast with either pantsing or the usual kind of plotting. The images often arose from her subconscious, her “Silent Partner;” plotting is essentially knitting together the scenes and incidents into a coherent order, adding new material to connect the old. Diana Gabaldon describes a somewhat similar process, and in a brief conversation with Nalo Hopkinson on the 2015 Writing Excuses Retreat cruise she told me she writes this way, too.

All of my NaNoWriMo novels started with images or very brief scenes. So after the riots on January 6, my reactions crystalized around a small number of images.

First Acts, Chapters, Pages, and Lines

At this point in my growth as a writer I’m a plot-oriented “plantser,” combining some planning with some discovery writing. At the moment I’m working on improving my planning skills, preparing for a rewrite of my 2018 NaNoWriMo science fiction mystery novelette, expanding it into a full novel. I’ve read advice that mysteries require more planning than some other genres. So I’m working on those skills, and this year I’m primarily working on developing more interesting characters. I’ve researched how to develop engaging characters, including developing character arcs based on the character’s negative core belief (“Lie” the character tells themselves). Based on advice that it can take time to build up reader interest in a character, I looked into how to write bridging conflicts to maintain reader interest while developing the main plot. Now it’s time to start rewriting the first chapter, and I didn’t like my first attempt of a few weeks ago, so I did even more research. Here are the results.

Character Wounds and Lies

While I was researching my post on “writing engaging characters” I happened to skim my old post on “articulating your character’s greatest desire” and found a mention of K.M. Weiland’s post about the character’s “lie” as something critical to a character arc. I’m not entirely convinced that character-above-all is the only approach, but my specific learning objective in the current novel is to explore character development. I decided that as I was working out my speculative fiction mystery’s main character, I needed to understand better what “lie” meant in the context of character definitions – and fell down a rabbit hole of several dozens of posts about the subject and the related one of “wounds” or “ghosts” behind the “lies.” Here’s what I found.

Writing Engaging Characters

Since mid-March I’ve been doing a lot of planning for rewriting my 2018 NaNoWriMo speculative fiction mystery novelette; my previous research suggested that mysteries required more planning than other kinds of story. I had hoped to start writing for the April 2020 Camp NaNoWriMo, but there was still a huge amount of planning to do. About two and a half weeks in, I got frustrated about not writing and drafted the first scene – the start of a bridging conflict – meant to introduce the characters and setting before getting to the first plot point (the murder). I finished a draft, about 1,000 words, and realized I hadn’t done enough of what such conflicts are supposed to do: make the main character engaging. So like a good little scholar I did a bunch of research on how to do that.