Startide 4, Draft 3 Post-Mortem (for now!)

[windjamm]

Recently I decided to take a break from writing Startide 4. 

 

Note: this is not a post about me feeling bad about it! That I'm here writing it at all is solely because I want to analyze what I did here because it was fun but I think I can learn some stuff from it. 

 

As a post-mortem for the writing up to this point:

 

I have been writing all my life, but I never got much practice planning and plotting. This has presented various hurdles, but recently I got to the 60% point of a story and largely fell off of it as I lost the space to land it. And so I wanted to explore what other people did to structure and plot out a story. 

 

Before writing this draft of Startide 4, I had looked at a talk Mary Robinette Kowal gave about the MICE Quotient, which is a tool, a structure like the 3-act structure or the 5-act structure, but one that makes writing more active and goal-oriented whereas, to my taste, the 3 and 5 act structures feel more useful as diagnostic tools rather than planning and plotting tools. They simply feel too open-ended in my hands. ("Second act is 50% of the book, good luck! rising action! remember it!") (More on that on this post)

 

This was my first story really working with that kind of outline. I established a MICE Quotient nested set of stories and largely I think that was successful at the planning stage in terms of giving me direction, but ultimately I don't think my outline accounted for a lot of nuance, which makes sense! I mean, trying something I'm not practiced in will, of course, not turn out how I want it to the first time. 

 

However, I think it's interesting to explore the things that didn't turn out how I wanted. 

 

I think the largest part of this was that it became a bit cyclical. One of my ingredients was Persona and the video game structure IS cyclical and so I didn't really pay it too much mind. Dungeon arises, meet a new character, into the dungeon, debrief, dungeon arises... But I do think taking that structure hindered what might've been earlier concerns about the way the story was unfolding. 

 

I also fell into a lull with my characters. I think also partially because of the persona influence. I wanted to spend a lot of time hanging out with characters, which made the pacing stagnate a lot and it would've been fine except I did want to reach my other pieces I had planned and that made a lot of internal tension inside of me. Ultimately, I think thinking about characters more than story affected the pacing quite a bit. 

 

Finally, I did forget about the overall structure. Having an outline to follow meant that I was doing much fewer "little seanan"s, as I call them, which is to say using the advice Seanan McGuire gave once in an interview, which is to think of what you want to write before it's time to write it. Which sounds simple, but was revolutionary to me at the time because I was operating on, "I'll figure it out tomorrow when I write." 

 

However, having an outline meant I was pretty confident I knew what the next day would bring, which meant I arrived every time with either a strong idea or a vague one, but nevertheless I rarely questioned the outline I had made ages ago except in short bursts that changed the lower-layer of things, story arcs and such, but not the overall structure. 

 

These are an interesting set of mistakes and largely something I think I can work with. I think the MICE Quotient worked really well for getting me into the story, but I got complacent. I want to be more mindful of the try-fail cycles and the ways that the MICE stories they're in affect the overall tone. I'm not quite sure how to be more mindful beyond saying "be more mindful" but maybe I need to print out something and pin it behind my monitors or get a tattoo that just says "MICE" 

 

Seriously, though, this was a really good learning experience and first attempt at using this structure seriously and I think that was worthwhile! 

 

I do want to finish Startide and I think overall my IDEAS in here are really solid. I just have to restructure them and that's going to take some work, but! It should be fun whenever I'm up to trying it again.

 

For now, looking forward to what's next