And perhaps most importantly, we need to be able to tie it all together with a pretty bow on top.
That last part, though, is also a skill in and of itself. And like any skill, it's something you will get better at with time and practice... but you need to train your brain to recognize, and create, patterns in your work to make sure everything hangs together.
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| It only looks easy if you don't see all the learning that went into this. |
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Pulling Disparate Elements Together (As If You Meant To)
As an example of what I'm talking about this week, I want to share a story from last year when I was running a live action game for Changeling: The Lost. For those who aren't familiar with the game, it's a modern fantasy roleplaying game where you all play changelings; humans stolen by interdimensional, god-like beings known as the True Fae. They tore out your souls, replaced them with magic, and altered you on a fundamental level. You escaped from their realm of Arcadia, and now you are trying to exist in the real, modern world. Your magic hides your supernatural nature, but you always have an eye over your shoulder, watching for your old Keeper to come back to reclaim you.
Anyway, I had between 11-20 some odd players in this game... that's 11-20 odd main characters whose goals and aspirations are what shapes the plot of the story we're all telling. So I had to balance out trying to make everyone's actions matter, giving them freedom and agency, and then making it seem like everything was part of one, cohesive whole.
In short, I was co-authoring a novel with nearly two-dozen people, and I had to make all of them feel like their contributions were seamlessly woven into the whole. Piece of cake, right?
In the first session of this game, I pulled several, random incidents out of my game supplement 100 Strange Sights To See In The Hedge. These incidents are totally random, and are simply meant to be filler for your story. But based on how players reacted to them, several of these incidents became canon to the unfolding story. The threads I wove together include:
- A small, fantastical bird alighting on a branch and croaking, "The Ashen Lord Will Devour Your Soul!" which startled one of the players.
- A hobgoblin is crucified on a tree bearing a sign that says Ironmonger, identified as a victim of The Ashen Lady
- A penguin in a Hawaiian shirt wanders down the forest path, roasting alive a fearsome briar wolf who tries to attack it. The penguin then begins eating the roasted wolf.
These three threads, for some reason, are what players decided to latch onto, and follow-up on, so they became the story threads. Worse, I actually misspoke when I said the Ashen Lady instead of the Ashen Lord in the second thread. So now I had a fresh element added into the mix.
That was when I got out my loom, and I started trying to pull all these disparate elements together into a singular whole.
The Ashen Lord and the Ashen Lady were True Fae who appeared to be contesting their shared title. There could be only one victor, and whoever wrenched it away would be the one who would walk away with the power. This created a political struggle between god-like creatures going on right at the doorstep of all the other players. Some wanted to ignore it, and some wants to join in. Some wanted to try to sabotage it so that both of them lost. But as they researched, delved deeper, and sought more knowledge about them, they uncovered more story.
The Ashen Lady was a recent upstart, and it's said she had stolen her part of the title from the Ashen Lord. More importantly, they found that the Ashen Lord had once been the Lord of Night, and that he had ruled alongside the Lord of The Sun. In an act of betrayal he had tried to slay the Sun King, throwing his realm into chaos as he usurped his power. Of course, True Fae are difficult things to kill, so it was likely that the King of The Sun was not dead, but merely hidden, or banished, and would remain so until his title was returned to him, or the conditions of the Ashen Lord's binding were broken.
What they found in the end of this plot arc was that the King of The Sun had, the entire time, been the penguin wandering the local Hedge! He had steadily been regaining his sentience, and some semblence of his power (hence his ability to breathe fire), but he could not speak or communicate who he was until his title was once again bestowed upon him... something the Ashen Lady had been attempting to do by stealing power away from the Ashen Lord.
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| Again, grab a copy if you're interested! |
This is the kind of exercise that can help you, as a writer, weave together seemingly unconnected plot threads. Even if you don't finish an idea, the exercise of taking 2-3 different elements and pulling them all together into a cohesive whole is a way to train your mind into spotting and identifying patterns. Because even if a story has a twist ending, or a plot that seems to turn circles upon itself, pattern recognition helps us identify the structure of a well-told story.
This isn't the only time reaching out to earlier elements and building off of them in unexpected ways has featured in my work. I have a new upcoming addition to the Warhammer 40K fan series Gav and Bob (check out Part Four, The Emperor's Hand, and Part Five, Faith and Martyrs if you haven't yet) where I tie the whole plot up to this point together into a neat little package, for example. I also have an entire third novel for my hardboiled cat series which is all about tying up the loose end I left dangling in the original short story Leo debuted in.
When you start weaving something as complicated as a season of an audio drama, or a plot of a novel (or novels), this is an extremely useful skill to have... because you never know when that old, dangling plot thread is going to come in handy for you to tie up the current plot nice and tidy, or when Chekov's Gun is finally going to go off!
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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!
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