How not to escalate a plot... or, why does everything involve the end of the cosmos? · 5:26am Dec 27th, 2012
I have just stopped reading two rather lengthy fics today, because of developments which simply blew their internal believability and consistency out of the water.
One was the sequel to "Colt of the West", which has just become absurd with its Gary Stu villain Sure Shot, and a plot line that sounds more and more like "Revenge of the Sith" all over again in its ludicrousness. The other was... eh, forgot the title already it pissed me off so much. But anyway, it started out perfectly fine, with a seemingly central humorous plot of Scootaloo secretly being Celestia's daughter. It carried on for quite a while in an enjoyable fashion, with decent pacing and plenty of humor. Then somewhere along the line, the writer seems to have suffered severe head trauma and totally lost pace with where the story was going. Luna suddenly had a bunch of soul fragments that were conscious while she was NMM in the Moon, some of which had had kids, of which Trixie was one... and then Tirek came up, and history was rewritten... and some chapters started following the show, but then began jumping between subplots of drastically different tone and pacing within each chapter... and then a mention of demons and 'the truth about Equestria's history'... and that's when my eye started twitching... and then a mention of Light and Shadow beings... and I said, "Oh god no... do not throw in a crossover this far into the story. That is just NOT HOW YOU WRITE A STORY!!! LITERATURE 101 RULES HERE!!" And then there was Morden pony... and I went insane with rage and stamped about shouting, 'HOW THE FUCK DO YOU SHOVE A "BABYLON 5" CROSSOVER INTO A STORY THAT'S ALREADY 70,000 WORDS LONG WITH NO MENTION, NOR HINT, NOR ANY TRACE OF IT UNTIL NOW!!! GRAAAAAAAHHHH!!!" And then I exploded... 10 times. That's how pissed I was.
And it's not the only one that has done this recently. I cannot count how many stories these past couple of months have gone off the deep ends in terms of excessive escalation on steroids. It's like half the writers around here are in a contest over who can make the mot muddled, convoluted, out-of-control-escalation possible!
A story needs to pick a central theme and STAY WITH IT!!! Find your main plot, note it early on, and keep it there without meaningless and random escalations and subplots that fly off every which way until no one can figure out where the hell it's going.
And the other one, the western one, the characters have just become less and less believable with every chapter. They're reduced to pathetic shells, automatons going through the motions. Everything feels so utterly forced and mechanical. The author is essentially intruding severely into the story, instead of letting the characters define themselves and move in natural directions. The villain is a ludicrous caricature of every over-the-top 'muwah ha ha ha, my plan is utterly fool-proof because I'm smarter than everyone who has ever lived' bad guy I've seen, but taken far too seriously given the absurd hyper-complexity of his plans, which to succeed require him to essentially lobotomize everyone involved to get them stupid enough. And instead of sticking with the Western theme, it's now going into some demon thing which I just can't take any interest in anymore. It's like crossing "Wild WIld West" with tones of "Underworld", if I were to make a comparison.
These two other stories did not just jump the shark, they jumped a friggin' Astral Entity Shark with Death Stars for eyeballs that swims in the black hole at the center of the galaxy with a friggin half-demon, half-cyborg Fonzie riding a Borg-constructed Lightcycle!
When one is writing a story, all the main plot elements should be in place early on in the story! Suddenly throwing in a major new plot 10-12 chapters into the tale is ridiculous! Having a light comedy suddenly morph into a grim battle for the fate of the cosmos with alien races from a totally different television show is idiotic!
I mean, look at "Harry Potter" for how to do it right! The seriousness escalates from book to book, BUT THE PRIMARY PLOT REMAINS THE SAME!!! From the very first chapter of Book 1, we know there's a Dark Lord, and we know he may come back. And we know Harry is going to be crucial to defeating him. And so, everything that happens from then on is unified around that central idea. Unity of theme and focus is CRUCIAL to a story's integrity!
I didn't even bother making a list of place where they went wrong. The stories have become such unsalvageable wrecks for too many chapters. All trace of internal logic is long gone. Pretty much the latter half of the stories need to be completely thrown out, and the ideas in them those parts discarded because they have no little to no continuity with the early portions of the stories (especially the Scoots-is-Celestia's-foal one... I just really have no idea what's going on in the author's head to justify any of what's been happening lately. It's so disjointed now. I have never read a story which derailed so severely into a death-spiraling random tangent.)
Seriously, people, stop with the excessive obsession with melodramatic escalation and inexplicable, random plot twists. Many of the best works of literature in history revolved around very simple ideas and one strong central plot. Many of the worst, conversely, fall apart because they try to become too over-reaching and over-bearing. Life can be random at times, yes. Think, life can throw a sudden car accident at you, or an unexpected tornado, even a bombing. Those are events that are plausible occurrences in our world. They make sense within its framework. But no one walks down the street after a lifetime of working a dead-end job and having a falling out with a girlfriend and then suddenly gets attacked by alien zombie ghosts from alt-universe Mars. There has to be some consistency in the severity of events, even the random ones. They have to make sense in the world, a world that should have all its primary characteristics defined and maintained from early on.
And even in a story where art imitates life, tossing in even realistic random cataclysms doesn't usually work well. It's most often far too disruptive to the narrative. The one place where this works is often in horror, such as "Psycho", where the woman we believe to be the main character is abruptly murdered. That sudden shock to the mind, the loss of the one we thought would be the main protagonist, drives the horror home.
I mention this over and over to individual authors, but I now feel the need to post it to all who happen by: OUTLINE YOUR STORY AND WRITE OUT CHARACTER BIOS BEFORE YOU START WRITING YOUR STORY!!! Make sure you know exactly where the story is going and how you're going to arrive at the conclusion! Make sure your summary covers the major topics, especially where subplots are a big part of the story. And then, PLEASE, take the time to think about your idea and ensure it makes sense. If you can, pass the outline and summary to reviewers who are skilled. You can become blinded to the 'brilliance' of your own idea in your excitement, completely missing major flaws that an independent voice will spot. That's the simplest way to make sure you don't go crazy with story development.
>>>...they jumped a friggin' Astral Entity Shark with Death Stars for eyeballs that swims in the black hole at the center of the galaxy with a friggin half-demon, half-cyborg Fonzie riding a Borg-constructed Lightcycle!>>>
I just realized that this would make one hell of a hilarious picture. I need to commission it.
Hmmm... You've given me something to think about here. My current story (which is a sequel to another) has started, and it has taken a bit of a darker turn than the previous. Several of the commentators have mentioned that this darker "B plot" seems superfluous and detracts from the romance drama which makes up the meat of the "A plot". I think I'll make a blog post about this, and see what they think. The "B plot" could be altered with little problem to make it more lighthearted, or even dropped completely with little loss, seeing as I'm only four chapters in. The problem is that it may significantly shorten the story.
In any case, thank you for reminding me of the need for consistency.
This is some rather good advice. I have noticed certain stories where the author doesn't seem to do much research and just makes up the plot as they go along.
Those stories you mentioned also seem to suffer from what the Spacebattles Creative Writing IRC called "Large-scale setting syndrome". Someone suggested the idea for a crossover with Warhammer 40k where Equestria becomes the equivalent of a good eye of terror or somesuch, and its creation is majorly involved with the formation of the 40k universe. In other words, it was simply needlessly huge for the scale of the story. You don't need to make your protagonist singlehandedly bring down nations, after all, unless it's integral to the plot and that was part of the plot from the start. If the scope of your story is small, simply slice-of-life focusing on just a few people, don't suddenly throw in a gigantic battle for the cosmos without warning.
Planning out your plot beforehand can also reap great benefits, as it allows you to do awesome foreshadowing and other tricks. Look at "Life is a lemon" for an example of a story where the meaning of the earlier chapters completely changes once you read the later chapters. Fallout Equestria: Heroes is the same. In your fic, you plan stuff out way ahead of time, and it's very beneficial.
Sound advice. I may need to rethink where mine was headed. Also, who needs Locutus when you have Fonzie?
653666 I'm seriously going to commission that picture. I was still laughing about it this morning.
As for captions, I'm thinking: F%^& Believability! LET'S ESCALATE THIS SH%T!!
653673 MAKE IT SO. t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQqTj9oZOdh1hTxI8nsWw4BcW5GGdBMuImrK-GyxxaP9WW4YWrZF8VdRdwd
I was looking up various Scootaloo backstories as I was writing my most recent story, to see what other authors had done, and I stumbled across that one you were talking about. I read the comments earlier, and you're not the only person who was baffled by the Babylon 5 crossover, among other things.
I mean, the idea of Celestia being Scootaloo's mom is actually pretty hilarious. There's lots of ways that it could go... but the author just started taking things too seriously. I looked at whatever chapter Babylon 5 showed up in, just to see what happened, and there wasn't even a single mention of Scootaloo in there as far as I read.
I could see a story with that premise having Scootaloo having to fulfill some great destiny or something, but that's still going to be pretty ridiculous, and potentially hilarious if done right. This story wasn't.
654084 Exactly. It doesn't even feel like it's the same author anymore. I thought it might be a prank on the readers at first, when Blueblood panicked and slammed the door in Morden Pony's face. Sort of a 'ah-ha! trolololo!' thing which would never show up again.
But then it did and that was the last straw.
I know there was much more to say about the story going off the deep end, but the B5 inclusion was so far off the beaten path I had to focus on it as a prime example of what not to do. I think it was about half-way through the story that the side-plots started to become odd and ill-fitting.
652931 It would also make a great story.