What is the most difficult thing you've done for your plot?

When I started writing, I would often come with feeble excuses to explain certain decisions taken by the characters, but I don't tolerate this anymore. I'm rewriting a large part of my first book because of this. To make sure the plot makes sense, I've come up with some things which made me wonder if it was really worth all the effort.

For example: in the past days, I invented a new kind of code and used it to codify a message received by the main characters at some point (in universe, it was created by one of their friends). The code was necessary because, under the circumstances, any message sent would also be intercepted by the antagonists (a detail I had forgotten earlier, creating a massive Plot Hole or What An Idiot moment).

The problem is:

1- The character that created the code is a bit crazy. The code could probably me much easier if that weren't the case;

2- The antagonists have robots and advanced computers which would easily handle a simple code (and the story is set in the future), so I had to exaggerate the code's complexity a bit. The heroes also have a robot and the instructions to decode the message. I also wanted to show the coded message in the story.

The result was that I spent several hours rearranging every symbol in a message, exchanging each letter for its corresponding number and applying a certain equation which included using nearly 400 digits of Pi and squaring each digit (using one digit for each letter in the message). I had to make sure I didn't make any mistakes, too. It felt really pointless and dumb at some moments, but it was too late to stop.

Now, if there's something which will NEVER be changed in this story, it's definitely this message. I also don't think any translator would be patient enough to bother with this message at all, unless they received a lot of money.

edited 8th Aug '11 2:57:54 PM by Teraus

If the urge to do that ever strikes you again, buy a copy of David Kahn's The Cobebreakers (which is an educational, often entertaining, and worthwhile read in itself) and copy any method you want directly out of the book. You'll look awesome and only a professional or somebody who owns a copy of that book will realize it's not super-quality-awesome cryptography.

My greatest effort so far, perversely, revolves around a requirement that a pair of characters do something intensely stupid. Both are ten-thousand-year-old AI combat constructs. Both are human enough in form and function that one of them could strangle the other, though few others could. One is somewhat more experienced, stronger, and faster, while the other is effectively a copy of the first executed with a slightly lower budget, but they are more or less twins. So the stronger and more experienced one is supposed to try and strangle the younger one.

It's just that this would be a really stupid thing to do, for a number of reasons. The first is the most painfully obvious reason it's stupid; if they are in skin-to-skin contact, they share complete memories, emotions, physical sensation. They regard this effective loss of self as unpleasant, to say the least. It also would result in a massive security security breach for the organizations each belongs to, due to the second reason: They can't be killed permanently. Both of them will reincarnate good as new. The third reason is that the one strangling would be a fool to try and the one being strangled would be a fool to allow it, as both of them can essentially cause their weapon to teleport into their hand across any distance or obstacle.

But it's absolutely critical to the progression of the story that one of them attempt to strangle the other with their bare hands. In the grand scheme of things because I need to give at least one side of the greater conflict accurate maps so there's less floundering about in the interstellar dark going on. In the smaller scale, because the error will serve to humanize the stronger and more experienced one, who up to this point has been more or less living up to the "battle goddess" title others have conferred on her. On a character level, it's also very important because her being called out on the many levels of stupid this was will have a significant effect on her relationships with some of the other characters, who will see her as more human, and it will eliminate a great deal of the baggage between her and other characters that makes them reluctant to give orders to what essentially amounts to a subordinate. It also serves as a foundation for Plot Bits I'm not sharing.

But she is manifestly not stupid. Being not stupid when it comes to combat is arguably her entire gimmick. About the point in draft I realized I needed to do this, I ended up having to go back and insert stuff in all the previous chapters so I'd have a proper buildup to her completely losing it at this exact moment. I also had to go back and rearrange various things to prevent this mistake from being so incredibly terrible as to result in her being disgraced, i.e. I had to prevent her opponent from reincarnating if they were strangled to death, make it clear her opponent lacked the presence of mind and savvy to simply call her weapon back in a situation where someone already had hands on her throat, and at the same time make it obvious that this was a very stupid way to go about doing that, stupid enough nobody would allow it to be attempted again despite a rather desperate need for permanent elimination of the reincarnating enemies.

I think setup for this added about four thousand words overall, making it far and away the most effort-intensive thing done in the story; most of the rest was natural flow.

edited 8th Aug '11 1:37:11 PM by Night

What's the most difficult thing I've done for my plot? Setting aside my Misplaced Nationalism Patriotic Fervor and deconstructing my own country, flaw by flaw, historical failing by historical failing, and leaving them just as beaten, broken, and destroyed as everyone else at the end of my version of World War One. It wasn't very pleasant, though it was marginally educational.

That, and creating a coherent Alternate History without too much personal bias or "guiding." I had to make Jefferson Davis President of the United States. It was amazing, really, that I managed to do that without going into loads of Author Tract about the American Civil War (Single-Issue Wonk...). Among other things I had to do for it...

I had something similar. It wasn't strangling, but it involved a really powerful and extremelly intelligent character having a really stupid crisis. The buildup was also pretty huge.

edited 8th Aug '11 3:04:35 PM by Teraus

I went to the library, picked up a book on child sexual abuse, and read all the sections that seemed relevant to my story. By the end, I wasn't sure whether I was more creeped out by the abusers, or by the author himself. (I still haven't finished that story . . .)

edited 8th Aug '11 3:31:54 PM by feotakahari

...other than writing it?

Nothing. I...I like learning and researching, and when you spend years on something, it's very easy to accumulate the knowledge you need (for example, in a few months, I will check out my college's fencing club).

So...yeah, writing it.

Finally deciding on an ending for the trilogy as a whole. ( One of the ending candidates was a complete Kill Em All. I decided against it.)

Assenting. Actually writing something is never all too easy.

But I guess that's not the point of this. So I'll speak to two variants: Difficult in terms of research and difficult in terms of emotional investment.

The former would probably be the languages. Considering the hectic, bizarrely ahistoric nature of the world my main work is set in, excluding the Translation Convention that renders English (or something) the primary language of conduct, the number of languages dead and living used in passing is immense: Welsh, Croatian, several dialects of French and Occitan, Venetian, Old Dalmatian, Japanese, Cantonese, Tibetan, Manchu, Old Church Slavonic, Basque, the Mandean dialect of Aramaic... I enjoy that, though.

On the other side of things, however, there is the matter of my plot requiring a number of deaths. Admittedly, they are usually of the just and fitting variety, but that doesn't mean that I find it any less irksome: A Complete Monster is just as... no, more fun to write than The Messiah, and I hate to waste characters, especially when they have the potential to wreak unspeakable havoc (another favourite), but to be honest, sometimes I really do feel like I Just Write the Thing.

I came to the realisation, after finishing the first draft of one of my stories, that the Big Bad was as unrealistic and two-dimensional as a Victorian Villain in a Penny-Dreadful - sans the waxed moustache to twirl, admittedly, but still "does it because he's the villain".

So I decided to overhaul the character - work out his motivations and rationalisations and write him properly. Whereupon he kicked the idiot and villain balls I'd saddled him with out of the park and started behaving like an intelligent and dangerously driven adversary.

This completely altered the story to the point that people who I'd had surviving in the original draft got killed, people I'd killed off survived and it wound up an almost complete rewrite of the whole story.

I think on the whole it was a marked improvement of the work, but what an undertaking.

I've now shelved the story as I can see some other things that need improving and that's going to require more in-depth rewriting of bits of it so I'm saving it for when I have the energy. I don't think it's going to be as extensive as when I gave the Big Bad some brains and realistic goals/motivations/modus operandi etc, but then, I didn't think that was going to be such an extensive change, either...