I had a clear plot in mind - or maybe I should say a plot idea and a general story arc - before I started 'Spirit' and 'Napoleon'. With 'Napoleon' there was a tendency for the characters to run off on their own - the whole treasure-hunting sequence was fun but irrelevant - but IN GENERAL the basic plot was adhered to and I think that AAR has a 'backbone' that carries the weight of all the strange events. There are far too many characters - and they do tend to go wandering off on their own, but many of them are Napoleonic Marshals, so what can you do - but IN GENERAL I think 'Napoleon' trundles right along.
'Bremen' was built around an essay format that liberated me from having to develop characters or tell the story in chronological order. Where I deviated from that (the 'Republic Militant' section is too dry and too long) 'Bremen' is less successful. But it DID give me the chance to write a whole series of smaller pieces, which is GREAT practice. The hardest fiction is the short stuff - anyone can ramble out a novel or a trilogy or a Turtledovian nine-book series. Writing terse, muscled prose - that's hard.
'Dragons' is - well - a mess. I started it with a vague idea, ditched that, fumbled around, wrote some stuff experimentally, threw scenes to characters I liked and got to the point that I saw no way to wrestle the thing into shape. I joked with CatKnight in an earlier PM about feeling like I was being entombed in that AAR, saying 'For the love of God, Montresor!' as the bricks were piled higher. It didn't help that it was a 'HistoryPark' story and thus very much in the shadow of 'Napoleon'.
Then I started dreading writing on it. Not hating it - just feeling so utterly crushed and inadequate to the labor, you know? So I stayed away from it for FAR too long - I should have wrapped it up in a year or 18 months. After three years of pounding I think the AAR is stale, stale, stale.
Fortunately, coz1 and I have a phone conversation every couple of weeks and when we can stay off politics (
) we talk about writing. We've been doing this since the Washington DC 'mini-con' a few years ago where we talked writing for two days while we drove up to DC and back. Coz1 is the one who hammered and pruned on 'Dragons' and pushed me to actually make up a plot that would sort-of fit. So for TWO YEARS I have been struggling out of my own swamp, and there is FINALLY an end in sight.
My suggestion: Don't do what I did. KNOW THY PLOT. Write it out in scenes if not in full storyboard fashion. And stick to it - relentlessly. Because few of us are disciplined enough to be 'professional' writers we need to be extra careful to set it up, write it out and stay within the limits. You don't learn to draw on a blank page, you learn by coloring inside the lines. THEN you get a blank page. And a pencil with an eraser.
One of the hobbyhorse topics in music is FORM, which doesn't sound very important. I mean, you have a melody, right? And sometimes you have a second melody? How hard can this be, and does anybody really care about whether a march has three melodic lines or four?
What form does in music is to relieve the composer of certain decisions. If you are going to write a march you write (intro)AABBC(D)C with a 32-count melody per letter and D being optional. A symphony is a particular set of pieces, each of which has a particular form. Knowing this a composer works within the guidelines - or can trespass on some of them - and concentrate on the music. Portraits have conventional poses and backgrounds, novels have forms, statuary and dance have conventional types and forms.
So I think settling on a pre-set form (quest, coming-of-age, heroic struggle, tragic confrontation of character flaw, etc) gives us beginner writers a FORM we can follow. You can mix it up a bit, but you'd best master the form before you try to break it.
In music (and in the other arts) you have to decide what the purpose is, where the point lies. And then you shape elements to support that, whether stage backdrops or musical harmonies or alliteration or whatever. For me, where I am right now, the PLOT is the point of the AAR and everything, characters and setting and prose style and illustrations and all is just a means to get the reader to the desired end point.
A story, probably apocryphal:
A student came to Alban Berg (ThreePenny Opera [Mack the Knife]), one of the pioneers of twelve-tone composition. 'Master,' he said, 'I want to learn to write as you do.' 'Go write twelve chorales,' Berg said, 'in the style of Bach.' And the apprentice did. When he came back, music in hand, Berg said, 'Go write twelve more.' This went on for a while. Finally the apprentice said, 'Master, I want to learn to write as YOU do.' "Ah!' Berg said. 'I can only teach you the rules - not how to break them!'
My suggestion is you lay out your concerns or, if you don't want to go public try PMing. I've done that with coz1, stnylan, Amric, Rens and others. We can help you brainstorm and, hopefully, you'll get yourself back on track.