So I have a new story
idea* I’m going to start plotting:
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It’s a young girl’s
journey to discover the parents that abandoned her when she was a baby.
And along the way a hot
gypsy boy tries to rob her, but after she beats him up, he decides to join her
instead.
Turns out he belongs to
a band of gypsies who guard the secrets of the last pack of shape-shifting
dragons.
And one of those
dragons is the girl’s mother!
Also, there is another
hot shape-shifting dragon boy, who has a secret gypsy girlfriend, but finds
himself inexplicably attracted to our girl.
Turns out his
girlfriend is our girl’s half-sister! On the shape-shifting mother dragon’s
side.
So both boys set out to
help our girl with her quest, hoping to win her heart in the process. Her newly
discovered half-sister comes along too to keep an eye on her man.
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Along the way they are
attacked by an ancient group of Viking pirates who have come back in time on their
time-travelling boat.
They are held captive
by the pirate captain of the boat, who looks oddly familiar. Turns out he’s
come to this time period before, seventeen years earlier and is our girl’s
father!
His men are planning a
mutiny, so they kidnap our girl and her friends, from the place they are
already kidnapped and take her to a cave.
In the cave is a dragon
who is none other than our girl’s mother.
She is now the last of
her kind thanks to small secret order of gypsies who betrayed her kind and have
secretly been killing off the dragons and have her chained up in a magic cave.
Turns out the leader of
the secret society is… the hot gypsy boy’s father! But he has fallen in love
with this shape-shifting dragon and cannot bring himself to kill her or left
her go.
While all of this is
being discovered, the pirate Captain is closing in on finding not only his
daughter, but his former mate shape-shifting dragon ex-lover. Meanwhile his
shipmates are hot on his trail meaning to hunt him down.
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Turns out the band of mutinous
pirates is led by none other than our girl’s half-sister’s father (Mama
shape-shifting dragon got AROUND the last time the time travelling Viking pirates
made an appearance apparently).
Just as the band of time-traveling Viking pirates are closing in a dragon IDENTICAL to the mother dragon drops in and scares all the pirates away and saves our girl and her group.
Turns out that the last time the Viking pirates visited one stayed behind, became a scientist, and found a way to clone the last remaining dragon.
And THEN…
Wait… What is this
story about again?!
If you haven’t guessed
yet, the way I kill my WIPs is with over-plotting. I take a simple idea,
something totally do-able and then I start adding subplots (often by the
dozens) until my outline is so incredibly complex (and often ridiculous) that I
either a) have no idea where to start or b) get so bogged down in adding complexity
and inter-connections that I can’t ever get to the point where I feel ready to
write.
This has killed a
number of perfectly good WIP in my writing journey. The funny thing is I didn’t
even notice I was doing it until I started telling Danielle about my current
idea (way back when I originally had it) and she was like, “Well… it’s good…
but you just told me about 8 stories in one. You’re going to need to take out
some of those subplots.”
She then challenged me
to tell her about my story in one sentence. To think about what it was at its
core. It didn’t occur to me until I couldn’t do this easily that I had forgotten
WHAT THE STORY WAS ACTUALLY ABOUT lost in the piles and piles of subplots I had
created.
The subplot game is
kind of like a really frustrating game of telephone, by the time I get to the
end of the game the story it rarely resembles my original idea. Worse than
that, sometimes the end result has taken me so far off base that I can’t even remember
what my original intent was. And sometimes, I start out writing about an
ordinary girl and end up getting so confused by the backstory between her time-traveling
Viking pirate father and her supposedly promiscuous, shape-shifting dragon mother that I shut the
computer and don’t even know what to do.
Do any of you have this
problem? How do you handle reining in your imagination when it’s time to
start plotting without losing the parts of your idea? Are you ever overwhelmed by your
own ideas?
*This outline is an example, not an actual WIP. I know... I'm disappointed too. ;)
I do that too! In one of my stories, I have a ton of subplots. But surprisingly, I'm able to keep to the original intent AND keep track of the subplots. If there's a character with something else important and its not totally crucial to the story, I'll briefly explore it, mention it, or just give it its own book. That's how my series came about. Really interesting subplots.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, this story sounds pretty cool. Until there was too much going on and I got lost.