Crafting a Story, Part ONE

So starts a journey that I will endeavor to bring you along. I will be plotting, writing, then editing a story that will eventually be posted to this blog. In these series of posts, I will be detailing the steps I take to writing the story. Hopefully, you will enjoy the ride and find it helpful!

Inspiration

Where do we get inspiration? Well, for this story, the bolt of mental lightning came in the form of a conversation with one of my local librarians, Lisa. I find that the local library staff is a wonderful resource of information and underused by the vast majority of writers. It may be worth the trip to the local library to chum it up with your local staff.

Lisa loves to keep me abreast of novels that are coming out and tell about the newer ones that she's read. My eureka moment didn't come as she was detailing the plot of a story but when she told me the name of a book that she had seen, "Words on Bathroom Walls".

Bazinga!

(For those of you that don't understand, that's the sound of mental lightning.)

What was the idea, you ask? Well, it was a really simple one: Young girl finds prophecy on a bathroom wall. That's it, now let's see where we take it.

Developing the Idea!

Ok, the first step in developing the idea beyond its nascent stage is to flesh it out a bit. Let's expand!

First of all, we need to decide what kind of story we are writing. Science Fiction? Literary fiction? Well, we have a prophecy, so probably Fantasy is best. I decide to go with Urban Fantasy. That gives me a guiding principle. Now, there needs to be conflict. We can use the prophecy to set this up. What does the prophecy say and what does it motivate the main character to do? I start with asking myself some simple questions. What form does the prophecy take? What does it reveal?

I've decided that I want my prophecy in the form of a poem. It will be broken up into six quatrains, with every two lines dealing with a different time from one to twelve. So the prophecy will be heavily laden with the concept of time passing. This means that I will have to infiltrate my story with the concept of time: clocks, watches, people talking about it, etc.

Now that we have the form of the prophecy construct, we move on to the content of the poem. What does it show that the main character must do? My prophecy is counting towards an awakening. Each hour is metaphorical, not an actual hour. It tells of a seal that is breaking because of the dying of the warden and the need for a replacement. So, that's our main character.

So, now we have our conflict: Girl finds prophecy scrawled on a bathroom wall that starts her on a quest to replace a dying warden before a seal can be broken and an ancient evil returned to the world.

Characters

So, the last thing we will work on today is characters.

So, let's start with a little bit about the process. I've taken the day and just thought about the characters. Really brought them up in my head. My usual process is having a conversation with them. I find that it is illuminating when I talk to my characters, I find out all sort of fun stuff about them. Along the way, if they come up with something I don't know about, I familiarize myself with it. I don't hold with "write what you know", I hold with "write what you've researched well".

While those characters are brewing inside my head, this is where I'll start my plotting spreadsheet. First page: Characters.

I set it up to contain five points for every character in this story. These are character name, physical desciption, character motivation, powers, and notes. So, we start with the main characters. Well, she's a girl that reads some writing on a bathroom wall. What else is there about her?

I started with her name. Given that we are dealing with fantasy, I wanted to give her a normal name, because I have an inkling we are going to be dealing with Fey and there will be odd names aplenty. I settled on Theresa "Terry" Smith. I proceeded to give her a character description and motivations. One of the things I decided was to make her a teenager. She just turned sixteen. Also, to make her relatable, I decided that would spend a lot of time online because she suffers from social anxiety.

Now, someone needs to come to motivate Terry to follow the prophecy. So, I create my half-faerie warrior. I fall back on faeries because it is a subject that I'm well versed in. I like the idea of a half-faerie warrior, something that symbolizes the joining of two worlds, the mystical and the modern. His name should not be normal, I decided. I settle on the name Ghost Dog. I not only like the name but it will also be integral to one of the literary devices I will be using later. What powers can I give him that will make him stand out? He can't just be a warrior. Well, he could but I want to go for broke. How about a warrior with the power of tattoos? I describe him as being covered head to toe in Pictish runes and the tattoos of six animals. Under powers, I further define what each tattoo does and their limitations.

I create a few side characters. Friends of Theresa, Ghost Dog's campatriots and contacts, the faerie king he must deliver Theresa to, and my antagonist. Now, this will not be a complete list. I will continue to work on characters throughout plotting and may even find myself adding to the character list as I'm writing, but this gives me a good character structure from which to pull from. Decisions have to be made. Like, how many friends does Theresa have? She's a shy girl but also a teenager. I decide that in the real world, she'll have two. Online, she'll have several more but other than maybe one, they'll just be online monikers. I will not be detailing those here, I want to leave something of a surprise. I don't spend a lot of time, just getting the protagonists, the antagonists, and a few essential characters out of they way. When I start plotting out the actual story, more characters will make themselves known to me.

I will tell you one thing, the main antagonist of the story will be a guy named Gary. I decided that I wasn't going to name him anything crazy and would avoid the letters V, S, and Z. Apparently there are way too many villain names that start with those letters. Ok, we've got our basics, tomorrow we will start plotting!

A sample of my character spreadsheet.