I feel that "The
89th Key" was a good learning experience for me. I've organized some
of my thoughts about what I learned.
The Outline
I have used outlines for most of my stories and all of my
movie scripts. With "The 89th
Key" I put more effort into the outline. I think I put as much effort
into it as I did into the first draft and the rewrite.
This extra effort paid off for me. It made the first draft
go much smoother. I feel that it is at the outline stage that the hard work of
writing happens. One way to look at it is that the outline is the real first
draft of the story, and the first draft is a rewrite.
If you can work out the structure and action at the outline
stage, then you can focus on the actual wording when you come to write the
story. Many of the problems I ran into were because I hadn't done enough work
on the outline.
I want to work on how I create an outline. I have in the past
developed a grid in a Excel spreadsheet to help me develop my outline. With "The 89th Key" what I wrote
was more like a treatment or short story version of the tale.
Character Definition
One thing that helped me a lot was that the characters in
Doc Savage are well defined. They are not necessarily complicated characters,
or even very realistic. But, they have distinctive characters and I found it
easy to imagine how they would behave in different situations.
This definition of character made it much easier to write
the story. At times the characters seemed to come to life and all I had to do
was type out what they did.
I realize that most of the characters I create are not as
well defined. I can feel it when I have to force generic characters to do something.
There are exceptions; the characters in "The
Barrier" are all quite distinct.
I want to develop a check list of the types of things I need
to define for each character. In the past I've focussed on general descriptions
and didn't go into depth. What I think may be a better approach is to consider
how they would behave in different situations. For example, if some one
attacked them, would they fight back, surrender, run away or try to reason with
them.
Relationships between
Characters
This is something I've never given much thought to. A good
example in the Doc Savage books is the relationship between Monk and Ham. Their
rivalry is a bit cartoonish, but it adds something to the stories.
When I develop characters I need to consider how they relate
to one another. Do they like each other? Do they trust each other? Do they hang
out together after work? What do they talk about when they aren't talking about
work? What do they have in common?
These relationships can add colour to a story, but can also
help drive the story forward.
Like with the characters themselves, I want to come up with
a check list of the types of relationships that characters can have. As I
develop each character I can work how they relate to the others.
Number of Characters
The Doc Savage books have six on-going characters. Seven if
you include Doc's cousin Pat. There is usually one main bad guy with a bunch of
nameless subordinate bad guys. In contrast I usually have just the hero and his
sidekick, plus an equal number of bad guys. "The
Barrier" was an exception to this.
What I noticed was that when I had more good guys to work
with, it was easier to come up with things to happen in the story. On the other
hand, I found it hard to give some characters anything to do.
I think that while you can have too few characters, you can
also have too many. What the best number of characters is, I am not really
sure. If I planned to do a series of stories, I would want to have a few extra
around that could play a bigger role in later stories. For a stand alone story,
they would just be in the way.
I'm sure that there is more for me to learn, but I really
feel that this little project has been one of my more fruitful projects.
This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog
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