Bradel Bookwork – Storybuilding and I.C.E.S. · 2:55am Feb 20th, 2014
So in the wake of "Three Nights" and "(Robot) Dog"—and pre-reading Skywriter's new chapter of "The First Time You See Her"; if you haven't read it yet, you should go do so—I've been thinking a lot about stories, and what I want to do next. I've enjoyed both of these last two stories, but I'm not entirely satisfied with either how they turned out or how they performed on Fimfiction. I should be able to do better.
All this has gotten me thinking about how I building stories. Every time I sit down to write something I try to ask myself, "How will this story help me grow as a writer?" 'cause here's the thing: Fimfiction has a lot of really good writers. Far more than a fanfiction site has any business having, I think. And I tend to get confronted with them pretty much constantly, whether it be the folks I pre-read for, the folks I follow, the folks who submit to Equestria Daily, or the folks who we look at for the Royal Canterlot Library. I want to feel like I belong with those folks. I want my stories to be some of the best our fandom has to offer. And they're not there yet—so I have to keep working.
Being at the story inception stage right now gives me a chance to look at some things I haven't thought about much in the past. Most of my stories come about from me sitting at my computer, having a moment of inspiration, and trying to translate that into pony words. That works, but it's not a very solid process[1]. So is there a way I can formalize story development more?
Well, you're reading my blog about it, so I suspect you already know the answer is yes.
After a day or two of thinking about storybuilding, I hit on a way to categorize stories that—at least for me—helps me evaluate what i want to do next. This categorization scheme owes a lot to Orson Scott Card[2], but I'm changing it up a little for my own purposes[3].
Generally speaking, story concepts can be broken down into four categories: idea stories, character stories, event stories, and setting stories. I'll discuss them each below, but two initial notes.
First, a lot of stories we read are going to contain more than one of these. Any novel worth its salt is probably playing around in at least three and maybe all four. I'm not going for a hard and fast discrimination analysis here, just a way of thinking about stories and trying to get a handle on what I want to write.
Second, you might notice some similarity between these four categories and the four axes of writing I often talk about: plot, character, setting, and theme. There's a very rough correspondance between theme and idea stories, and between plot and event stories—but it's easy to oversell this. Theme is about expressing an idea to the reader; idea stories are about exploring an idea in the text. Plot is about what happens in your story; event stories are about what happens in that world. There's an important difference in locus of execution. Plot and theme are about what you do as a writer; idea and event are about how you choose to center your story's world. The same holds for character and setting, though I think it's worth retaining names there.
Really, I think, the key is this: a story is an exploration of something. So what is it that we choose to explore?
Idea Stories
Outside example: Wikihistory by Desmond Warzel
Fimfiction example: Biblical Monsters by Horse Voice
Idea stories are about exploring some central conceit. The focus here is on accurate extrapolation from a given (predominantly unusual) starting point. These are "What if" stories. A lot of science fiction, especially hard science fiction, uses idea stories. If you significantly manipulate one variable in your story world, how does that play out elsewhere. Idea stories don't lend themselves very naturally to endings. The story's over when either the idea is no longer an issue in the world, or everybody dies.
"Wikihistory", the story I've linked above, examines what would happen if time travel were so mundane that it would be effectively just like editing wikipedia entries , with constant reversions for junk edits. It's short, and very good, and I was incredibly pleased to have a chance to recommend it to ~50 stats students earlier this year, when the topic came up rather organically in class.
"Biblical Monsters" is a Royal Canterlot Library inductee. It's excellent, if very divisive. It spins the Human in Equestria concept to Pony on Earth, and it runs that idea to one possible logical conclusion. Probably the only story I've read on Fimfiction that uses the [Tragedy] tag correctly.
Character Stories
Outside example: Firstborn by Brandon Sanderson
Fimfiction example: Moving On by Bad Horse
Most of what I write are character stories—stories whose primary purpose is to allow us to more fully explore characters from the show, often by putting them into situations the show is unlikely to confront them with. Outside the world of fanfiction, character stories primarily involve plots that are designed to highlight a character and delve into what makes them tick, rather than more traditional "things happen" plots. It's fair to say that a character story doesn't have a satisfactory ending unless the central character or characters resolve some significant internal conflict.
"Firstborn" was one of the first things I read by Brandon Sanderson. It's the story of two brothers who are very, very different people, and how the lesser of them learns his place in the world.
"Moving On" was one of the first things I read by Bad Horse, a close examination of Twilight many years after the (eventual) end of the show. Not a lot happens in the objective sense, but it really digs into who Twilight is and how being Princess Celestia's student has changed her. It's pretty standard Bad Horse fare, which means you'll probably want a box of Kleenex and something to scourge yourself with whenever you feel jealous of the writing.
Event Stories
Outside example: A Tall Tail by Charles Stross
Fimfiction example: Contraptionology! by Skywriter
These are my real weakness, and what I've decided I want to work on. An event story is about something happening. Something happens in almost every story, but the key here is that the event is really the catalyst for change in the story world. Everything that follows is, in some sense, a reaction to that event (possibly precipitating, possibly ongoing). An event story can't end until the event is over and any serious ramifications have been dealt with.
"A Tall Tail" is a story about a bunch of sci-fi writers getting together at a conference—and you're never quite sure whether or not it's true. It's got a story-in-a-story, too, about the space race. It's all about people responding to the events around them, and if you've got any kind of head for science, I think you'll find it very entertaining.
Contraptionology! is one of my absolute favorite stories on Fimfiction, and if you haven't read it already, you really need to go do so. It's about a science fair gone horribly, horribly out of control. Be prepared—it's novel length, and it includes more than just the overall event story—but you're not going to find a lot of things on this site that are more worth your time.
Setting Stories
Outside example: Bridge of Snow by Marie Rutkoski
Fimfiction example: Lost Cities by Cold in Gardez
Last up, we have setting stories. These are kind of weird animals. Their purpose, much like character stories, is to get you to explore something. But that something is the world in which the story is set. This can give rise to some pretty unconventional story structures, and it requires a certain repositioning of thought. Worlds are like huge, slow-moving machines. They change over time, but they don't have the dynamism of characters, events, and ideas. Frankly, I have no idea how these end; I assume you must just decide you've seen enough and it's time to go home, and if you're lucky maybe you polished off some sort of pseudo-story in the middle that let you look at more things.
"Bridge of Snow" is a vignette between a mother and her son, set in the world of a larger story. While it introduces one of the characters of that story, its focus is really on building the world, by painting cultural differences and mythological legends. It ends twice, and rather abruptly both times, but it leaves you with a lasting curiosity about the world it's drawn from.
"Lost Cities" is another Royal Canterlot Library inductee, and essentially a work of tremendous description. It's not a story in the traditional sense, but it's extraordinarily compelling nonetheless. It's basically a character sketch of the world of ponies. If GhostOfHeraclitus's "Whom the Princesses Would Destroy..." is the high water mark for original characters on Fimfiction[4], then this is the fandom analog for original setting. It's a radical reinterpretation of the world, but it sucks you in and whispers of stories it has yet to tell.
What I see, when I look at my own work, is that I've spent a lot of time writing character stories. Almost everything in my catalog is, at its heart, about exploring characters. I like reading that, and I like writing that, but if I want to be able to write better stories, I need to try to work with things that are outside of my comfort zone. If you've read my stuff, you can probably pick out a couple places I've dabbled with idea stories and setting stories, too—but not event stories. That's the area I've really been avoiding. And that's somewhat natural for the way I've gotten my story ideas thus far. I think about what sort of fun things I can do with the characters in the show or fandom. I don't think about ways to mix up the world. That's why I always find myself drifting toward the [Slice of Life] tag rather than the [Adventure] tag.
Building an event story requires me to fundamentally change what I'm looking to do with my writing. The ideas I've been mining are the ideas that get you character stories. Event stories are about asking, "What happens?" I suspect I'm going to have a much easier time building conflict and finding endings once I get a bit more experience with event-driven narratives.
I'm not sure what's up next for me right now. But I'm looking forward to figuring it out.
[1] It's important to me to have process backing up my writing. The big reason for this is that the way I write is fiercely disorganized. Maybe this is true of everyone, but it feels inexcusably chaotic. There's very little room for me to wiggle around once I'm actually typing things out; characters and events just go in the direction my mind says they ought to go. And that's why I care about process—because if I can't get control at the writing phase, I need to get control in the planning phase. I can sit down and write a character towards some target, but I need the target in place before I start writing, or that character is liable to get up and go do something completely irrelevant. This happened a couple times in "Three Nights", and generally to good effect I think. It's possible to over-plan things, and sometimes the direction you think a story ought to go isn't the direction that's most natural for it. But without that inital framework, all I'm liable to write are characters stumbling around in the darkness until some sort of plot and ending appear, as if by magic. Sort of like French New Wave cinema.
[2] And the less said about him, the better. But he really was a good writer, before he decided to switch careers and become a political agitator—and he produced a couple good books on writing that I read back in the early 2000s. Credit where credit is due.
[3] OSC used the acronym M.I.C.E. with my S (setting) being his M (milieu). It's pretty obvious he just wanted the nice acronym, because (1) milieu is a terrible word and (2) why on earth would you put the least useful story category first?
[4] Which he'll deny with probability ~ 0.8[5], and which is actually false with probability ~0.1
[5] Correction: he just did it, so him denying it is now officially p = 1.
Huh. A fascinating narrative paradigm to consider and some cool original fiction to check out. Thanks, Bradel!
Looking at my own work, I seem to focus on event stories, which makes sense. My writing method, such as it is, is visualizing the story and transcribing the events as I see them unfold. I usually do this from a specific character's perspective in a given section of the story, the better to get an emotional resonance going so I know how to work the mood. It's especially fun when inside Pinkie's mind.
Yeah, you probably didn't care about that, but it was a chance to look in the mirror, and again, I thank you for it.
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I like making people look in the mirror.
Look! Look, damn you!
This is really interesting.
I'm sitting here trying to categorize all my published stories so far... honestly I'm not sure where some of them fall. Spark to Light a Candle came to me as an idea, (I want to write a NMM wins story) but the idea produced a setting, (what is the world like when NMM wins?) and is also kind of an event story (the quest to defeat NMM is the event that everything that happens revolves around) and a character story as well (there's one character who really learns and grows over the course of the story.) Go me, I guess?
I can't find a theme or type in my other stories when thinking about them this way, there are a few others that do neatly fall into a category (Longer than Diamonds is definitely a character story), but there's no category I seem to be leaning towards.
It almost feels like that's a shame, like it would be nice if I noticed I was missing one of these and could work on it. I think in reality that I need to work on doing all of these things better.
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Hah, I already broke all my mirrors. But, uh, more seriously, a great analysis of both writing in general and your own in particular. Always glad to see blogs like these even if I myself don't write.
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While I was walking in to campus today, I basically went through and categorized all of mine. Like I said, I think hitting more than one category is perfectly valid, and pretty much necessary in longer stories. This is really arbitrary, but I kind of thing of it as one focus per Nebula category, so one for short stories (<7500 words), two for novelettes (7500-17,500), three for novellas (17,500 to 40,000), and four for novels, as a rough benchmark. Certainly some stories do more and others do less. Anyway, here's what I see as the breakdown on my own work:
Bell, Book & Candle – Character, Setting, Idea
"A Filly's Guide to Not Making Headlines" – Character, Idea
"Purple Prose, or A Night at the Clopera" – Idea (obviously)
"Princess Luna Likes Coffee" – Character
"The Amazingly Awesome Adventures of Tank the Tortoise (by R. Dash)" – Character, Idea
"Three Nights" – Character, Setting (w/ hint of event on the letter and the storm)
"The Curious Incident of the (Robot) Dog in the Night-time" – Idea, Setting
So, at least to my mind, I've only really hit on event in one story, and not strongly there. I've got character marching all up and down that list. I've probably got elements of all four of them in most of these stories, but when I look at the process that brought me to them and that guided my writing, I think this is a pretty good breakdown.
For "The Spark to Light a Candle", based on how you described it, that sounds like Idea and Setting more than anything to me, since those seem to have been the first two impetuses behind it. (Though I haven't read it, so it's hard for me to be too sure that's how it came out.)
You know I'm mostly an all Character, all the time girl... with a little bit of Idea thrown in there for flavor. However, I did wander a little into Event territory with The Homesteading, and I predict an event story from you would look similar to that, in that the Character will end up taking the thing over. But I did have a lot of fun writing it, so I hope you come up with something as fun!
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Oh, does "Maiden's Day" not wind up being an event story? It was one of the first things I thought of when I started thinking about dividing things up... but I still haven't read it, so I couldn't be sure. It just sounds so much like an event story, though.
I need to do some statistics work, but maybe I'll take the evening off from ponyfic writing / maintenance long enough to read it. It seems like one of those nights.
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Once again, that one is something that should have been an Event story, but it got buried under Character and Idea. Maybe it is an Event story at heart, but in my Event stories at least, the Event always ends up being resolved by the Character conflict being resolved, or taking a backseat to the Idea behind the whole thing. (Best Young Flyer is also hung on an Event, but with the Character story running it over.)
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Ah, there's nothing wrong with that. I think character and event make a good pair.
No, strike that, I think character and event make the best pair. If I had to choose two story types I'd like to read together, it'd definitely be those two. Idea gets you to some nice places, as does setting, but character and event are the most naturally conducive to telling stories that, y'know, end.
character : event ::
: 
!
Interesting way to break it down.
Snit is clearly a Character story. Done and dusted there. It even languished for a long time because I had no idea how to backdrop the character interaction I wanted to write.
The One is harder. You might call it a Setting story, because it explores a place in Equestria. It might also be called a Character story--a little snippet of the relationship between two elder and one younger princess. It was prompted, so I'm not sure how much the thought process helps, but it definitely started with 'Canterlot Vault'->'Twilight doing a dungeon crawl'.
'Alicorn Stories' is Character again, I think. The framing story is, anyway, since it's about Twilight finding out more about Celestia and Luna in the context of her own ascension. The first fairy tale came from looking at that 'sisters going round' piece of art from the pilot's opening storybook and having the thought that maybe they were running from each other. When you're casting Celestia and Luna as primeval forces, where does Character stop and Setting begin?
I believe all my prompt shorts are Character sketches, to a one.
The Twilestia fic I'm planning is definitely Character. I made up a driving event to make the character interactions I wanted more natural.
So yeah, I've got the Character bug, like you do. I've been thinking of expanding the short 'I can Fly, my Friend' into something for the Everfree contest. I should see if I can make that larger version more event-driven, if I get to it.
1855266 Well, technically it *hasn't* come out yet, since it's not finished! Although I have written an outline all the way to the end, and have a bunch more chapters that somebody will be editing someday. *eyes her editor*
(And thank you for the watch, BTW. I appreciate it.)
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Goodness, whoever are you giving that terrible stink-eye to?
1855533 Gee, I wonder...
Whom The Princesses Would Destroy... isn't the high wat—
—ah, what's the use.
Hm. A nice way of categorizing stories, actually. Mine are almost all setting and character. I have a real problem with getting things to happen. As I joked previously, my perfect fic would be a 10 000 word dialogue on political philosophy with lengthy worldbuilding digressions.
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Well, if WtPWD... isn't, then you tell me what is.
Check and mate.
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*flips the board*
1855718 I think there's more water in there, just waiting to get out and flood.
And I like the MICE model in that order. The M in nearly all of MLP stories is the framework upon which the rest of the items are hung, describing the limits and characteristics of the world in which everything lives and breathes. When the M is carefully warped (which I had a lot of fun doing in Monster), you wind up with a world in which very different things combine in possibly explosive ways, like Cadence becoming Queen of the Changelings, or the Elements of Harmony being used by the Cutie Mark Crusaders.
I can't write a story without a central idea that runs through the creature from beginning to end. That was one rule I had on Traveling Tutor. I had the beginning and ending figured out before I started, arranged all the characters carefully preloaded with their motivations and goals, and let them write the story for me. It was a little like watching rock candy crawling up the cotton thread over the course of weeks as the two young characters met in the most embarrassing way I could think of, grew together as time passed, then had to go their separate ways just like people do all the time. The only change I made from my original idea was that they continued to see each other afterwards (which gave me one more story, Diplomat's Daughter, and the leeway to write yet another sequel).
Characters have always been somewhat easy for me, due to years of practice running FRP games as a GM. I blame the other players. They would demand names, backstories, plot hooks, etc...
Events are my weak point. See Bob. See Bob fall in the well. Bob is now wet. Will somebody help Bob? I've done a lot of work on that weakness, but I've got a long way to go.
I've tried several times to write longer event fiction, and it can't help but become character fiction along the way. Hard Reset 2 is symptomatic of this. About half its wordcount so far is basically Twilight and Celestia sitting and talking.
That nobody has called me out on this suggests to me that the lines here blur. Heck, Hard Reset (the original) is the Eventiest of Event stories … and yet what made it transcend its roots and become one of the site's top stories is how it is willing to keep telling the story after the battle is won, and start deconstructing the aftereffects of Twilight's time looping. (Which HR2 is trying to do from the inside.)
The point being, don't feel too bad if you gravitate to certain types of fiction. I'd be surprised if any of the authors you cite have equal skill in all four categories, either. (Except for Skywriter, who is actually the physical incarnation of the deity worshipped by the words we write. They leave him little offerings of the very best among them, which he picks up and shares with the rest of us.)
I'll join the chorus of character-writer confessions. My most recent project, ostensibly a worldbuildy adventure story, has a first chapter about 4400 words long, 1700 of which are just character interaction in a mundane setting.
I wonder why we're getting so many character-writers here. Is it because character is the most important part of narrative? Or does FIM, being based primarily around characters, attract that sort of person? Or do you just tend to get followers who are more interested in character?
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I was thinking about that a little earlier tonight (and I need to reply to other people in this thread, but it was a really good question), and I think there are probably a number of things going on.
(1) I'm off reading Bookplayer's "Maiden's Day" right now, which she insists is a character story. Now admittedly I'm only halfway through, but it reads like an event/setting story primarily to me. So I think it's possible the lot of us think we're doing character more than we actually are. Possible, mind. My stories feel awfully character-y to me, though.
(2) I probably do have a crop of followers who skew toward the character side of things, and I probably tend to follow people who do so, too, just based on reading preferences. But I strongly suspect this relationship can be overstated. This may contribute, but I think there's definitely more to it.
(3) Writing fanfiction makes being a character writer really easy. You don't have to do a lot of the work independent fiction writers do in building characters from the ground up. That's not to say that doing good character work doesn't still take a lot of effort, just that you get certain advantages for working there.
Anyway, it is a very interesting pattern. My thoughts are starting to lose coherence, however, so I think I'd better go to sleep now.
I kind of wish that I could more easily turn down reading recommendations, since my reading list keeps me from writing my own stuff, but hey, at least most of what I'm adding to it from this blog isn't ponyfics for once.
I generally prefer to write character and idea stories in tandem: the idea side of it is what gets me to think of a story in the first place and the character part is what makes me want to flesh it out more. Events follow from the character part, and setting is by far what I have the hardest problem with. I feel insecure about my relative inability to worldbuild, even though I've been told over and over again that worldbuilding should never be the first priority for a writer.
As always, you do my stuff an embarrassing amount of credit, but thank you anyway.
I'll tell you why I gravitate toward character pieces: they're a lot easier to write. If you can just sit down at a keyboard and let a character yammer for a while that's a damn sight more enjoyable than having to chip away at a what-exactly-happens-when sort of narrative. It's the difference between painting in abstract and building a clock.
For the sake of clarification, your traditional action-movie-y "an asteroid is going to crash into the Earth, let's blow it up" will almost always be an Event story, right?
Since you mention it, I see 'milieu' as meaning something both more precise than and very different from 'setting'. While I see 'setting' referring to the world around the characters--hills, caves, mountains, castles, tunnels and so on--I see 'milieu' as referring more to the beings in the world--dragons, farmwives, kings and princess, heroic knights and powerful wizards.
This may have come from reading too much AD&D while I was in high school.
Well, I opened your 'Wikihistory' link, read approximately the first paragraph, and now I'm maintaining parallel headcanon on the real world. I've decided that the guy who shot Archduke Francis Ferdinand, thereby kicking of the first World War, was a time traveler endeavoring to prevent some other atrocity. Whether it was/would have been worse, I have no opinion on.
I hope all you bronies are happy. Look what you've done to me! As if maintaining multiple parallel mutually-contradictory headcanons about something fictional wasn't bad enough...
Can you write a "just character" story? A character is defined by what he/she does with an idea, in a setting, after an event, etc.
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In an abstract sense, I suspect it could be done, but it'd be pretty weird (and straying well into the art-as-dumb-cul-de-sac territory, probably).
I tried to make a little distinction between story concepts and stories, though I know I could have been more forceful on it. Certainly a lot more goes into a story than just one concept; and certainly almost every story needs more than just that central concept, even by the loosest definition of 'story'. But I think most stories are either built around or come about because the author thinks of one central conceit (or possibly a small number of them).
But by my way of thinking, a character story (or story concept) is largely one revolving around an internal conflict. The character or characters need to learn something (or otherwise be explored in some way if we want to be liberal with the idea of story). That's not a central feature of any of the other three classifications, to my mind—which is one of the reasons I think most stories need to combine a few of these.
I don't think you can (or at least I don't think I could) write much beyond short story length without having some sort of character story; it's just too hard to remain engaging with flat characters. Then again, that's arguably what Agatha Christie and Tom Clancy always did—write really compelling plots with horrible and/or static characters.
Anyway, like I tried to make clear in the blog post, I think it's not so much about what you do and don't have, but where you focus your attention in building the story.