The Crucible

...when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.

Harry and Voldy, in the crucible of "the Prophecy"

I've been reading David Farland's e-book "Million Dollar Outlines" lately to review elements of story and the various tools useful to writing fiction.

One area he covers is the crucible; the element of the story that keeps your characters there/involved/together. The thing that answers the question about why they don't just leave or give up when the trouble starts.

In one of my writing projects, this element is a struggle, because the characters have to keep deciding to be involved each day, voluntarily, actively, and their involvement means that bad things keep happening to them. The reader is certainly going to ask: Why would they stay here?

In Dave's book, he uses the example of a man and woman in a bad marriage. Why don't they just get divorced? Marriage is a voluntary arrangement. Of course, we all would come up with his answer: the children. It is believable that they would try to work things out for the sake of the children.

So there must be reasons, good reasons, why our characters keep going, keep on keeping on, even in the face of trial and tribulation.

I did a brainstorming exercise once with Orson Scott Card where we all came up with a lot of answers to the "why?" question, and he kept twisting and turning the answers until we came up with less cliche outcomes. I think this is also important to do with our crucibles.

Maybe the married couple stay together for the children, that's easy. But let's twist that. Perhaps instead it is the stress from the children that is tearing the couple apart. Maybe the children even want the divorce, or say they do. So what then? We get to dig deeper and invent new reasons the couple must stay together. Maybe both husband and wife both had divorced parents and never wanted to become like their parents. Or maybe everyone told the wife she was making a mistake, that the marriage would never last, and she wants desperately to prove everyone wrong. Maybe the husband hates failure and so doesn't want to admit defeat. Maybe one or the other is in politics or business where the image of marriage is important. Whatever we choose, we must have a crucible or we have no story. We must thoroughly answer the reader questions about why our characters are going through the trouble instead of giving up or avoiding it. Otherwise, they just seem like dogged dolts.

So, what are some of your favorite crucibles, either in stories you've written or read?


Write on,
Amber M
http://www.mindsbase.com

Rust and short stories

or "from the Amber that doesn't write too much"

I may share a name with our dear cabin girl, but I don't share her problem. Mine is that I have written very little in the past five months... or more like a year. Ever since last spring break, when I started to home educate my family.

Since that time, I get up every morning, stretch, and feel a slight creak. It's the rust. It creeps and spreads, chewing, gnawing, eating away at my writing implements. Ruining them! So when I finally get a free hour to write, I sit down and start oiling my tools with a little writing exercise, or I look over a tangle of partials, or write a (blog post), and before the tin man has said nary a word, something interrupts and the moment is gone.

And every day, it's a little bit worse.

Do you go through periods like this? Does the feeling resonate with you?

Well, I have found a satisfying way to keep my arsenal shiny and oiled: SHORT STORIES.

src: wikipedia.org

Yep. Now, I know short stories are not the enticing vixens that novels are. I have shied away from them in the past... it can be hard, particularly, to write a short story with a sci-fi/fantasy bend because you don't have much time for world creation. But short stories are great for exploring characters and situations. They give you a chance to create a satisfying arc, a cycle with a beginning and an end, something with emotional kick. All in just an hour or two!

Some of my shorts have been totally new ideas, a chance to test drive (before laying out 50k and finding out it stinks). Some have been shorts of longer partials I have laying around. Or self-contained scenes that don't fit in the main storyline. A short is a fantastic way of spotlighting a minor character that you love (or can't find a way to love) without letting them take over your novel manuscript.

So if you haven't written a short lately -- or ever -- here's your nudge. Write a complete short, say three thousand words, and see if it makes you feel just a bit more limber than before.

And then, if I didn't fear being called a hypocrite, I'd tell you to submit it! Or, at least, think about making it into a novel or screenplay.

Write on!

In dreams begin stories...

Okay, raise your hand if you've ever gotten a story idea from a dream?

So, you know the elation you feel when you first wake up with that golden nugget sparkling inside your brain. Maybe you grab for the notebook and jot the whole thing down, bleary-eyed.

This happens to me, like a lot. And then the next part happens:

I wake up properly, and as the threads of story leave my brain and I try to decipher my scribbles, I find gaping holes in the story logic that my sleeping brain found perfectly acceptable. Or things that seemed really cool but are in fact ridiculous. Here's an example from last night's dream:

source cnn.com

I'm a nurse at an unauthorized research facility that has snatched young girls, harvested their eggs and is performing experiments with embryos. At some point, the facility is found out and the administrators run so fast they leave the girls behind, chained to their hospital beds. As a few of us nurses free the girls before running off ourselves, I stop at one girl's bed, a 12 year old, and as I unlock her, I covertly slip her the fruits of two of her eggs -- two embryos held in stasis. One is a control, which if implanted would mature into a normal baby, and one altered embryo. No one knows exactly what it will become.

Kind of a cool premise for a story about the girl, perhaps a few years in the future when she considers implanting the embryo(s?). But what I, the nurse, slipped the girl was, in fact, two BLUEBERRIES.

source bellybytes.com

Blueberries, yes. The embryos were stored inside blueberries. Are you done laughing yet? It seemed perfectly reasonable in the dream.

I like the overall idea, but the feasibility of handing a girl some transportable embryos is a roadblock that will probably make me abandon the story. And here's the thing: My whole idea-making factory (my brain) is suspect, since I must have thought the blueberries were just as cool as the rest of the show. My whole dream -- or any waking idea for that matter -- is suspect.

So I have a two-part question:

How do you go about vetting your ideas for stories, deciding which are workable,

and,

how do you move them from mere ideas to fleshed out stories?

Big questions, I know. But I'm going to join some old conference buddies this month in a little writing boot camp, and I need to turn some cool ideas into short stories, so I could use some fresh tips.

Feel free to provide examples of weird dreams that became kickin' stories. :)