Recap or a play by play?

[Deadman]

Been working on a story recently and I’m thinking about the way I am writing the story partly.

I asked a while before about inspiration from other stories and this is the story I’m doing for it. I just started writing it because I felt the plot bunny running.

So what I did was sorta began with an internal monologue of an entire story line. At least up until the story where I wanted to go forward with the story. It involves the main character seducing another character which they then use to help seduce someone else. After a kind of “recap” of how the first seduction happened, I go straight into the second seduction.

Partly I’m thinking if the first seduction is something I should actually play out as the very first chapter. Though I’m enjoying how the story is playing out the way it is.

Where do you come down on giving character/story development directly versus recapping it?

 

[Desiderius Price]

When I write, I generally prefer “showing” over “telling”.  Thus, don’t tell them a character is angry, show them slamming a door, raising their voice as they shout back, etc.  Obviously there’s extremes to either end, 100% showing winds up with a 1M+ Harry Potter fanfic…  I typically don’t like being told what to think, I prefer judging for myself, which is why I prefer showing over telling as I read and as I write.

An internal monologue…sounds like either a good start to summary/outline or a wall of text doing info-dumping (use sparingly).  However, a short monologue/dialogue is a decent way to introduce facts you want to de-emphasize to some degree, maybe soften/de-gory some bit of it (ie, a rape, an abortion). 

Overall, you can tell I favor character/story development over recapping, and it’s spun off stories as “character development” 

[GeorgeGlass]

20 hours ago, Deadman said:

Where do you come down on giving character/story development directly versus recapping it?

That depends on how central this character and this point in their development is to the story, and also on whether you think readers would enjoy reading that scene.

[Wilde_Guess]

Hi, Deadman and all.

Beyond what GeorgeGlass and Desiderius Price wrote, I would add that you should try to go more for “telling the story” instead of “telling about the story.”  I.E. show the “action” directly as much as possible without making the story too unwieldy for either your readers or yourself.  You could briefly describe the first seduction as the “intro,” and have the protagonist flashback and compare “key” parts of the second seduction to the first, comparing the two.

Cheers!

[Thundercloud]

As a general rule you should include stuff that is important for the story and cut the rest. Deciding what parts that are important to the reader the experience you aim for is the central task of being an author.

In this specific example...if the second seduction is the important thing then you should probably start there, but if you feel the second seduction need to start with a internal monologue about the first seduction it sounds like the first seduction is not just some back story but part of the important stuff.

At the end of the day you must start somewhere that is well beyond character-was-born. This means your character will have done tons of non important things before the start of the story. Things that impact the future plot is probably important...but it is not given. For instance, a story about a character suffering from a trauma might work better if you keep the trauma hidden from the reader until events of the story make the character recall the event. Telling the reader about all the important events of the character but keeping them hidden from the character is not a way to make the writing easier.

[Desiderius Price]

33 minutes ago, Thundercloud said:

At the end of the day you must start somewhere that is well beyond character-was-born.

What?  That’s limiting…   

More seriously, I learned by doing it wrong in my first original story (now deleted).  I crammed it with so much backstory/flashback that I confused my readers and myself.  On reflection, I realized I basically had multiple stories in one.  So, I spun one backstory off as a regular chaptered story (complete), and the other off as an episodic serial (still WIP).  And working on a second episodic to explain where the main protagonist’s swimming instructor came from, so yeah, gotta cut backstory off at a point or it’ll explode with plot bunnies and you’ll never get back around to writing the story you intended to write in the first place.

[Deadman]

Thanks for all the feedback @Desiderius Price, @GeorgeGlass, @Wilde_Guess and @Thundercloud

For additional context, the story that inspired me to write this story involved the main character Dom seducing two subs. In the story, the two seductions happened over a couple chapters before the author didn’t finish the story. The first seduction happened but I was looking forward to the end of the second seduction, which wasn’t finished.

So part of the reason why my story kinda “recaps” the first seduction is because I was left… satisfied story wise with that first seduction dynamic. It’s not referencing the story that I didn’t write, the story is different and even built on a story I originally wrote before I read this story that inspired me.

I wanted to get to the second seduction and complete the thing I didn’t get in the story I enjoyed. Part of my reason for recapping is my own interest. But the other aspect is that I wanted the two subs to meet, which they didn’t. And the main character uses the first sub to tempt the second sub into being seduced.

Hopefully that makes a certain amount of sense.

The recap is about one page long, but I need to fill in details so at most it will be a recap of about two pages. But about half of that recap is the first seduction and the second half is how the main character is using the first sub like I mentioned above.

 

[Deadman]

Basically, ignoring the first seduction gives me what I want. But in writing it, I feel like it might be fun to elaborate it. At the same time, I have a second chapter thought out which is going to round out the story.

At least until I get into a “sequel”, which is also frustrating because things are again snowballing story wise for me. Gotta stop doing that.

[Desiderius Price]

One idea… write up that first seduction as a oneshot short story, and make it a prequel.  If it’s original and you can center it around Halloween or the Winter holidays, it’d be a great addition to the annual round robin.  (Alternatively, you can *start* a similar round robin in your particular fandom.)

[Deadman]

3 hours ago, Desiderius Price said:

One idea… write up that first seduction as a oneshot short story, and make it a prequel.  If it’s original and you can center it around Halloween or the Winter holidays, it’d be a great addition to the annual round robin.  (Alternatively, you can *start* a similar round robin in your particular fandom.)

That might be a fun thing to do. I might just do it for the fun of writing how it went down, but not post it unless I decide to later.

[Desiderius Price]

5 minutes ago, Deadman said:

That might be a fun thing to do. I might just do it for the fun of writing how it went down, but not post it unless I decide to later.

Even if you don’t post, I find writing background snippets helps immensely.  Especially if you put the project on hiatus, come back to it years later. 

With my Harry Potter fanfic, I did that with key meetings even if they weren’t part of the actual narrative.  I’d write up a minutes to the “Death Eaters” meetups, breakdown of what everybody knew, how they wanted to adapt their strategy.  Funny enough, that’s a bit OOC compared to canon where the DEs seem to have an inflexible plan that Harry always fell into anyways.  After a couple of comments from readers a bit perplexed, I had leveraged those minutes to create “Seeker/Keeper” scenes, short snippets that showed a touch of the conspiracy w/o revealing too much of it.

[Deadman]

28 minutes ago, Desiderius Price said:

Even if you don’t post, I find writing background snippets helps immensely.  Especially if you put the project on hiatus, come back to it years later. 

With my Harry Potter fanfic, I did that with key meetings even if they weren’t part of the actual narrative.  I’d write up a minutes to the “Death Eaters” meetups, breakdown of what everybody knew, how they wanted to adapt their strategy.  Funny enough, that’s a bit OOC compared to canon where the DEs seem to have an inflexible plan that Harry always fell into anyways.  After a couple of comments from readers a bit perplexed, I had leveraged those minutes to create “Seeker/Keeper” scenes, short snippets that showed a touch of the conspiracy w/o revealing too much of it.

For sure, I’ve gotten into doing this quite a bit and it’s gotten more detailed recently. Many years ago I wrote down a bunch of summaries for stories that I only have recently gotten to. Some of which are being posted now. In fact, the most recent chapter on my Scooby Gang Time story is one of them. Though I ended up abandoning the original premise and went with something more canon dependent.

More recently, I have started kinda writing little pieces of stories. For instance, the story that I asked this original thread about is one that is getting future pieces written in bits. While I was writing the story I just finished had a second chapter which I was writing small dialogue exchanges and general outlines of story development for the second chapter. A few years ago I didn’t do that. I went right into a story and didn’t write anything down until I got to it.

[Desiderius Price]

7 minutes ago, Deadman said:

For sure, I’ve gotten into doing this quite a bit and it’s gotten more detailed recently. Many years ago I wrote down a bunch of summaries for stories that I only have recently gotten to. Some of which are being posted now. In fact, the most recent chapter on my Scooby Gang Time story is one of them. Though I ended up abandoning the original premise and went with something more canon dependent.

More recently, I have started kinda writing little pieces of stories. For instance, the story that I asked this original thread about is one that is getting future pieces written in bits. While I was writing the story I just finished had a second chapter which I was writing small dialogue exchanges and general outlines of story development for the second chapter. A few years ago I didn’t do that. I went right into a story and didn’t write anything down until I got to it.

I try to never delete anything, and write things down...even if it’s 100 chapters in the future in terms of plot.  A half scene, even if I know I’ll rewrite later, is nirvana in terms of having goal posts to write toward.  I’d hand sketch out maps/blueprints, still good years later, notes, etc in spiral notebooks.  I’ve still got the spreadsheet I started two decades ago, and that really helps.  Having a naming system for the files helps too, thus I typically use something like YYMMDD-description.txt for the various snippets, which is, again, really useful in the rewrite many years later.

It is funny to think that I’ve been working on this story for decades, and will likely still be working on it for decades to come… however, it’s nice that it’s being reworked into a much better story IMO.

[Deadman]

24 minutes ago, Desiderius Price said:

I try to never delete anything, and write things down...even if it’s 100 chapters in the future in terms of plot.  A half scene, even if I know I’ll rewrite later, is nirvana in terms of having goal posts to write toward.  I’d hand sketch out maps/blueprints, still good years later, notes, etc in spiral notebooks.  I’ve still got the spreadsheet I started two decades ago, and that really helps.  Having a naming system for the files helps too, thus I typically use something like YYMMDD-description.txt for the various snippets, which is, again, really useful in the rewrite many years later.

It is funny to think that I’ve been working on this story for decades, and will likely still be working on it for decades to come… however, it’s nice that it’s being reworked into a much better story IMO.

Yeah, I don’t necessarily get this detailed. I don’t have the time and energy to go into maps and blueprints. My focus is more on the idea that some day people will adapt it visually and they’ll make some choices I won’t necessarily agree with it.

[Desiderius Price]

1 minute ago, Deadman said:

Yeah, I don’t necessarily get this detailed. I don’t have the time and energy to go into maps and blueprints. My focus is more on the idea that some day people will adapt it visually and they’ll make some choices I won’t necessarily agree with it.

Google maps has me beat for details.   And in the originals, I now tend to cruise for online blueprints of something close to what I want, make a couple of “alterations” notes wise, and use that.  (That’s what I did for my demon story.)  Still, having a rough idea of the house/building helps me keep the details consistent, so a bit of time sketching is usually a good investment.  That’s my chaotic process.

[Deadman]

36 minutes ago, Desiderius Price said:

Google maps has me beat for details.   And in the originals, I now tend to cruise for online blueprints of something close to what I want, make a couple of “alterations” notes wise, and use that.  (That’s what I did for my demon story.)  Still, having a rough idea of the house/building helps me keep the details consistent, so a bit of time sketching is usually a good investment.  That’s my chaotic process.

See, I couldn’t use Google maps because most of my locations are in fictional towns that don’t exist. I downloaded a fictional map for the purposes of figuring out the way the story would play out. But that’s as far as I tend to go.

[Desiderius Price]

4 minutes ago, Deadman said:

See, I couldn’t use Google maps because most of my locations are in fictional towns that don’t exist. I downloaded a fictional map for the purposes of figuring out the way the story would play out. But that’s as far as I tend to go.

For potter fanfic, there’s plenty of online things for Hogsmeade, Diagon Alley & Hogwarts… outside of that, I do the same thing I do with originals.  Select a real place, permute the name so it’s fictional, and that typically gives me close enough so I can add things as necessary.  (Also, on the odd chance my story hits success with TV/films, keeps fans from flooding a real person’s house/business).  Of course, originals and the potter basically take place in modern society, so that’s why my trick works.  If it’s fictional-fictional, like game of thrones, well, all bets are off, but that’s not what I’m typically writing outside of dream-like sequences (or inside fictional video games).