Is it exciting enough? Plot #4

It's been a long, cool summer--getting hotter now, not that it's anywhere near the record-breaking heat anywhere else, but still. 80 in Seattle is like a 100 anywhere else. People run around looking for air conditioners and buying fans. Guess I'm acclimatized, because I did the same thing--going to Target for something to push the air around and finding out the shelves were bare.

Maybe people think the heatwave in the rest of the country is going to spread, I don't know. I just know that I'm happy to wake up in the morning, when the wind is pushing at the blinds and everything smells crisp and cool. One day when I have time (my mantra) I'm going to stop running and take some pictures. The trees make my eyes happy when I can see them. Just wish I'd known I was allergic to grass pollen, sitting here with a big open pasture next to my window. Allergic conjunctivitis, not a fun thing.

I'm crossing posting with savvy since I had to put up a blog post and had no idea what to talk about. Hopefully I won't freak out the people who're reading and wondering what on earth I'm talking about.

Recently, interrupted by the conference and random things, I've been talking about how much plot is too much plot, stuff about proportion, keeping it real, and the limitations of an author's pov, when Hailey asked me how stripping a character-driven story down to relationship conflict and a teacup-sized plot in a contemporary worked for stories like urban fantasy and paranormals. (lol, I didn't forget) I love questions and it got me thinking about expectations and exactly what defines a character-driven story. Other than a contemporary or something where the focus is on one character's actions.

I wonder how this applies to fantasy/PNR? Since conflict grows out of your characters, the potential for conflict in fantasy is enormous. While I'm content to focus on the characters, there's this sense of "more" hanging over my head.

In a character-driven fantasy or paranormal there's always more going on because character-driven stories change according to the sub-genre. The world, people and potential story events are different, just like reader expectations.

In a contemporary Jane and John are just regular people with issues because that's what contemporaries are all about. In a paranormal, Jane might be a disenfranchised goddess cut off from her powers which would give her a whole different set of potential reactions, issues, and story events. And that goes back to “Is my plot exciting enough?”

The woman who picks up the latest installment in Debbie Macomber's Blossom street series, wants to read about the relationships and interactions between people just like her, her family and neighbors. While the woman who picks up the latest installment in Harry Dresden's continuing fight against ghouls and the Dark Council isn't interested in a cancer survivor who opens a yarn shop—she wants to ride along while Harry saves the world.

Although Lydia from the Debbie Macomber's contemporary has a sister, and spars with her in the same way Harry spars with his brother, Margaret is a real person in a setting with no paranormal elements which means the parameters of Lydia and Margaret's interactions are limited to what might happen in real-life. Harry, on the other hand, is a wizard, and his brother, Thomas, is a White Court vampire. While they might talk about girlfriends, draining your girlfriend's life force to the point of putting her in a coma because you fought a bunch of dead people doesn't happen in mainstream fiction.

The characters are more, which means the story events will also be more. A wizard and a vampire are very different from a cancer survivor and an embittered mom. 

So while the book could be about the hero/heroine meeting in a small village and talking about their lives in the local tavern, sparking a connection, it feels like it's always more important to talk about the dragon they were each hired to kill which led them to the small village and to their eventual meeting. You know what I mean? 

True. Backstory, environment, cultural mores, and a million and one other things that make the characters who they are, and the infrastructure of their sub-genre—the expectations, shared knowledge, and world-building—create probable scenarios. If the backstory you put into your world involves rogue dragons, it's highly unlikely the hero and heroine, who are both dragon killers, would talk about something else unless your world is totally Machiavellian and people naturally talk around the subject instead of confronting it.

Which means plot—which can be a few sentences long in a contemporary where the focus is on the growth of the relationship between characters—changes shape and proportion depending on what you're writing, as well as who you're writing about.

A short story that focuses on Harry and Bob sitting around watching a football game while they talk about life in general wouldn't work because that's not what people expect from Harry or the sub-genre. However a short story Jim wrote to promote the series can be about Harry and Bob talking, because the reader understands it's a promotional piece, (what you're writing) and the characters are true to themselves and their world (Harry is stressed out over his ad).

As I type this, it occurs to me that scenario feeds the character-driven aspect because if they were both hired to kill the same dragon, you've got competition. You've also got attraction. Is killing the dragon and winning the purse more important than the connection the h/h feel? Can the hero let the heroine collect the prize even though it's not about money for him, it's about the dragon that ate his parents when he was a small boy and his crusade to rid the world of the vile beasts so other children can sleep soundly at night?

lol, knitting a baby blanket is not an option for your hero and heroine. The minute you set them loose in your story their huge range of probabilities narrow; think of a bubble gum machine. There are lots and lots of gumballs, but to get a piece out it has to fall through an ever-narrowing chute. Only one goes through the actual dispenser.

The way you build your people—making one a dragon killer with childhood trauma, or another a cancer survivor whose father died, and the genre you put them in has a direct impact on the amount of plot sliding down the bubble gum dispenser. Lydia and Margaret can let go of their anger toward each other and create more than enough excitement without throwing a serial killer into the last third of the book. But Harry and Thomas can't just "be" brothers, because the very fact that their relationship exists creates issues in their world. Characters create scenarios, and staying true to them—wherever they take you, wizard or yarn shop owner, creates more than enough excitement, although the definition of excitement varies within sub-genres.