Decided to base all of the excercises around part of the back story for the NaNoWriMo novel I wrote (edit in progress) in 2017. Last night the exercise was about characters, tonight it was all about the Setting for the story.
Consistency of detail is key when working on a series, or collection, of stories involving the same characters and setting. This is perhaps where pantsing can fall down, I'm having to go through the 2017 draft to pull details out. The exercises are helping me to get these details all written down, concisely, and in one place.
The story I already know, roughly. As I said earlier it's back story, but well worth telling. And worth telling well.
I'm going to have a stab at a little pulp fiction with this, and will be using Lester Dent's 6000 word short story master formula. It's going to be interesting to see how I wed Shaunta's plotting course to Lester Dent's formula (Shaunta is gearing this towards a Novel, so things might change...).
The Lester Dent Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot
Now, the author of the article linked above has left something out. At the end of the article we read
"Did God kill the villain? Or the hero?"
This is a warning against the use of Deus Ex Machina (from God the Machine). The Hero needs to kill the Villian with his own experience and skill, without resorting to some hitherto unseen device.
Deus ex machina - "a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly and abruptly resolved by an unexpected and seemingly unlikely occurrence, typically to the point of being perceived as a contrived plot point."
Tomorrow we'll be working on "Situation".
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