Don't look at me! I just write the thing!

I Just Write the Thing is a trope. Shocker, I know. I am not going to explain what the trope is, because I just linked to it, and that would be silly to explain it twice.

So, writers of the Writer's Block.

Do you just write the thing? What is your relationship with your series? Do you railroad and follow through, or do your characters bitch and whine until they make things go their way? Do plot twists legitimately shock you, or do you lovingly build them up so much, you forget they even are twists?

edited 3rd Jul '11 5:26:10 PM by MrAHR

I have certain markers my story needs to hit, but I let my characters find their own way their and use a healthy dose of Schrödinger's Gun. Also, a fair amount of the railroading is done In-Universe by a Chessmaster.

A mix of the two.

I like my characters. A lot. But as their God, I know that there are some things which simply need to happen, tensions and misunderstandings and ugliness and character deaths. To keep myself at the proper distance to feel affection but not close enough to cry when there's a death (which I personally feel is immature), I keep from writing when I am unstable or otherwise stressed (particularly scenes in which Bad Things Happen).

edited 3rd Jul '11 5:40:12 PM by Leradny

See, stuff like this...I could NEVER do. I mean, the amount of inherent wrongness Pierce must have felt to change the story that much...

There's a difference between being close to your characters to allow for organic character growth and being so close that you don't want anything bad to happen.

And in Tamora Pierce's case, it was wrong even from an objective standpoint. The girl who willingly disguised herself as a boy throughout much of her adolescence so she could swing swords at people and ride through deserts, becoming a pampered Queen who stays in the palace most of the time? Thayet does more than the average queen, but less than the average soldier. It simply wouldn't have made sense.

edited 3rd Jul '11 5:48:57 PM by Leradny

I get that, but usually stuff like that is shot down in the vague hazy prelim stage. She actually wrote the darned thing.

Well then, she railroaded and luckily had a flash of insight.

I don't consider I Just Write the Thing to be a valid excuse. As a writer, I've never had my characters boss me around or whine when things don't go my way, and I don't really get that concept. For short stories, I usually have the thing planned out and know how it will end, and I might improvise on some of the details but a lot of the time it goes as I originally envisioned it. With longer works, such as novels, I'm finding it to be a bit more complicated, and I seem to just work at it a section or chapter at a time and then try and figure out where to go next, while having an overall plot in mind. With characters, I kind of make them up as I go along and as I'm writing or revising, that's usually when I get a better grip on the character. This approach of course results in a lot of rewrites and revisions, but that's okay. Since I'm unpublished, I don't have to worry about deadlines and if it takes years to finish a novel, so be it. With a short story, of course, I'll probably be done in about a month. But yeah, if my work sucks or my twist doesn't work, it is my fault. The nice thing about novels though is that I can go back and add foreshadowing to make the twist work better.

A blend of the two. Although I sometimes write by the seat of my pants during a scene (for example, I started a scene with Bryan going to kill a Prime with a tree branch, and it ended up with him distracting her by pointing out her lack of intelligence), but overall, I am the god of my metaverse.

I have a clear intention for each character and the plot. They may be able to sway my decision, if I find it more convient, but my surpreme plan will be abide to. That character could get the girl if I didn't intend him to do, but he will be pushed out that window no matter what. That character will sacrifice herself to save the protagonist. That character will earn his happy ending.

Like a god, I can control everything, but I let some things be when it's convient.

I don't really agree with the way most I Just Write the Thing authors describe it, as if their characters really are telling them what to do - that's just silly anthropomorphizing. My characters are fictional; they don't tell me anything. However, this is just a semantics issue, because I practice the actual writing style of I Just Write the Thing to the extreme - there is no plot outside of what's driven by the characters or setting. I am firmly opposed to any sort of railroading for the sake of the plot, and I've mentioned my hatred of the "Index Ball" quite a few times.

If I'm a god to my 'verse, it's the "clockmaker" kind - build the thing, wind it up, and see where it goes without stepping in.

edited 3rd Jul '11 6:02:13 PM by nrjxll

An awesome plot twist at the end of my webcomic came out of nowhere.

Like, literally. I just wrote it without thinking, really.

Weiiiiird.

I tend to plot out some things, but when it comes to characterization, my priority is to let the characters take me where they take me. Sometimes, the plot has even changed because I couldn't think of a logical reason why a character would do something that the plot required them to.

Oh yeah. I'm totally a slave to the Almighty Arc. This arc comes organically from the first few characters I think up, so having one of my leads run off on me isn't really an issue even when I'm not doing an adaptation as I am now, but I'm already kicking myself for Terrence and he doesn't appear until Act Two.

Hell, I'm having massive guilt about something the original freaking author did.

edited 3rd Jul '11 6:29:27 PM by DomaDoma

When I come up with a plot, I figure out what happens and what I want to show the reader. The problem is figuring out exactly how to describe or say stuff, and picking out which words to use to get from Point A to Point B.

Characters are always created before any plots involving them are. They all start as job descriptions ("a father and calculus teacher who also happens to be a ninja"), and everything just hits me from there after, maybe, a Wiki Walk.

Oh yeah, definetly. I normally have a pretty good idea where the story will go since the ending is one of the first things I'll come up with, but I have no clue as to the route it'll take.

For instance, with my current story a gag character, hobo actually, I made awhile ago popped in randomly. I didn't know he was supposed to be in there. Then the other gag character ended up being his brother and the chick I kind of had bouncing around in the back of my mind ended up being his sister.

Than I figured out the reason the hobo was there in the first place is that he's a spy that works for the bad guys. So the character that was never even supposed to be in the story in the first place not only appeared but ended up being really important to the plot.

What?

My characters always drive my plots. Things don't just happen - aside from things like natural disasters and other meteorological or geological processes, characters make things happen. When I want to write something, I drop a character in a setting, screw things up for hir, and watch how ze tries to fix it. Then my other characters will end up screwing other things up. This is how plot happens, and while my characters rarely "speak" to me, I feel their innate sense of humanity as I write.

More like I don't write the thing, given my usual level of procrastination. Heyooo!

Wait that's sad, not funny.

Anyways, I've got a main plot that's probably happening whether the characters like it or not, but all the side plots and the "how do they get from x to y" is decided more by dropping in characters and figuring out who they are and what would happen.

I think it's kind of silly to say a fictional character from your imagination made you do something. That's still just you doing it. If it makes sense and the critics don't like it, I think it's better for you to explain how writing works and tell them to stuff it rather than to "blame the character."

i keep trying to write plot summaries, but when i do, when i actually try towrite that part, it turns out nothing like planned. so...i guess im the first type?

Yes! That was what I wanted to say before, except much better written. While I'm big on the style of I Just Write the Thing, actually saying "the characters made me do it" comes across as a cop-out at best and unnerving at worst.

Very frequently.

Although the plot is generally set, my characters frequently surprise me in how they act within it. For example, there's a certain Plot Twist in my current story that's been planned from the start, but I'd originally figured my MC would figure it out simply through research. But no. She figured it out by realizing the assumptions everyone had made about a certain thing were wrong, because people have been making wrong assumptions about her all her life. She figures it out through the power of allegory. I had no idea she was going to do that, but it was pretty cool.

There are also minor things that happen, like when I didn't realize she'd gotten so ballsy as to almost skip school. She made it back on time, though.

Allow Stephen King to speak for me:

I think the only time I legitimately shocked myself with a plot twist was when I wrote an exceptionally dark work that was, at its heart, a Distant Finale, and consisted of a bad guy (the descendant of characters from an earlier work in the series) taking over the resident Federation, turning it into The Empire so he could make everyone in it Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence. Then the good guys lose and the rest of the story was spent between the two main characters (who are of the opposite sex and attracted to one another) arguing each others' ideas and trying to decide which was honestly right between The Evils of Free Will and Utopia Justifies the Means not being justified.

Then I realized this didn't fit the series as a whole all that well.

So I made that half of the story and then had aliens attack, forcing The Empire to fight them off. Then the female main character is killed, the male main character becomes a Death Seeker, has a Heel Realization, and then dissolves the empire because he realizes that it defeats the point of becoming a God if it's forced upon the people.

Yeah, it was really cool to do, though the effect would be lost on you guys because most of that summary is rather generic and doesn't do the idea justice.

edited 4th Jul '11 12:40:04 AM by USAF713

^ That seems more like the opposite of this trope—maintaining the story's overall themes even if it requires a Deus ex Machina.

edited 4th Jul '11 12:29:50 AM by feotakahari

It's not a Deus ex Machina (this is a space-faring empire, and they've encountered the aliens before). The point was that I thought it didn't fit, but the solution I came up with surprised me because it was out of left field to me as a plotter. I came up with the initial idea (start a war to shift the status quo) and then was more and more surprised with what I came up with to fulfill the goal. I really thought that at the end the bad guy would still win, not do a Heel–Face Turn and commit suicide (along with his entire species) in order to stop the Precursors from forcing everyone into Godhood. Especially since said species have been the heroes of the story for the whole series. The entire story began as a "what happens after the series concludes" idea, and then became its own story. That, ultimately, is what caught me off-guard, because I thought it would be over with the other story that used to be the end.

I frequently find the characters take on a life of their own - had that experience slammed home to me when the villain in an earlier work "developed a few brain cells" and killed off a character I had originally envisioned surviving the story. Turns out the villain wasn't keen to grab the Idiot Ball and somewhere along the way became a serious threat that took some considerable effort to out-think and beat.

He also identified the protagonists and made plans to have them "removed".

On the whole, not a bad thing, really.

And in response to this greater threat, the other characters turned things up a notch or three and were better for it.

I have rough guidelines of what I think is going to happen and I - as an evil and malevolent god - can come up with reasonable unforeseen circumstances (reasonable in-universe such as "weather turns nasty", "car breaks down" and such) to test the mettle of the characters. But basically the characters have aims, goals, motivations, personalities, fears, strengths etc and they pursue their goals. If they get in each other's way or have conflicting goals, they sort it out amongst themselves.

I have been known to subtly rail-road them from time to time if they're going completely away from where I'd like the plot to go - generally by introducing things that I know that they'll react to in a predictable (because by this time I've gotten to know them pretty well) fashion. So I'm an evil god with an occasional manipulative streak.

I don't like pulling the Deus Ex Machina card so if they get themselves into too much strife, I hope they can pull themselves out of it.

My current work has a bunch of people in a survival situation. They have skills, they have equipment, they have friends and they have each other. I trust that they will work it out and that most will survive to the end.