[Brainstorming]

[kalloway]

Welcome to the first 2015 Brainstorming Post! Feel free to use this space for any brainstorming needs you may have.

A couple of guidelines for this post--

• Everyone has a different opinion on spoilers and how long they stay spoilers before becoming public knowledge (Rosebud was his sled!) - if you are concerned with spoilers in your comments, feel free to use white-text, bumper comments, or whatever method you prefer.

• Nobody is under any obligation to use any suggestions made in this post or to credit any commenter if their suggestions are used (though perhaps if a long, productive exchange occurs, a short author's note might be nice).

• If you have any concerns with any content in the comments, please feel free to PM me.

(Basically, be good to one another. Happy Brainstorming!)

Comments

[alassenya]

I'm having difficulty with my Supernatural Sentinel-Guide AU series. The first story, Therewith Instantly (Sam/Gabriel) needs a complete revision of Chapter 4 and I'm having problems with it. Basically, Azazel kidnaps Sam believing him to be the sentinel who foiled his bomb plot, and Gabe of course finds them and (in the revised version) kills Azazel.

I need Sam to be very frightened and a bit hurt, but not deliberately tortured (this is one of the mistakes I made in the first version). The reason for this is that the second story (Dean/Castiel) opens with Dean having been tortured by Alistair. Sam has to be able to empathise and advise Dean later on, so he has to have had some damage and a mild traumatic stress reaction, but Azazel and Alistair are very different villains and I need to emphasise that in the way they treat their captives.

Alistair is a psychopath and a sadist -- everything he does is for his own amusement and that is relatively simple to portray.

Azazel, on the other hand, is a villain with a higher purpose. In the show, it's building an army to free X (where anyone who has seen Season 5 knows who X is) and for the life of me I can't think of a suitable equivalent to fit my story -- it needs to cover both the original bomb plot and whatever reason Azazel has for capturing Sam rather than killing him and Gabe outright. NB There is no place for X as a character in this series, though he might be an off-screen person/object.

Any help would be appreciated, since I've been sitting on this for six months now with no progress whatsoever.

[wordstitch]

I don't have very many ideas so I can't be of much help, but this is an interesting concept! Is Sam the sentinel and Gabriel his guide in this universe? And, respectively, Dean & Castiel? I love TS.

[alassenya]

No, in this series the angels (Gabriel, Castiel and Balthazar) become the sentinels. In the 'verse, though, it's more common for the sentinel to be the younger partner and to be bonded by the mid-teens, so it's not surprising that Azazel makes the mistake he does. While Sam is pretty happy to become a guide, Dean isn't, which leads to angst galore and a few plot points.

I love TS too and for some reason I seem to want to give every fandom its TS fusion (possibly because it was a H50/TS fusion that brought me into the TS fandom). When it comes to Jim and Blair, however, they niftily inserted themselves into a Pitch Black fusion that is on the WIP list for 2018 ...

[wordstitch]

*grin* Actually, Dean as a guide would be pretty fun. And I love Gabriel as a character, and think his dynamic with Sam would be interesting.

Aaah, TS, so nostalgic. I wish I could have been in TS fandom when it was at its best, but only found it after the fact when I was a curious teenager =P

[alassenya]

Dean as a guide will be fun when he eventually settles down and accepts it instead of throwing toddler tantrums *g* (though to be fair to him, he has legitimate concerns that are partially borne out in the story).

I'm really happy with the way the characters are turning out - Gabe is a bit too much "Sassy Gay Friend" at times but that's not too much of a step from the Trickster anyway. Cas is uber-serious and Balt (while remaining rather aloof at present) has backstory trickling in here and there and he gets his own story later on.

I just wish I could write the story instead of writing about the story ...

[wordstitch]

I just wish I could write the story instead of writing about the story ...

Then you should!! Write moarrr.

[adraekh]

More of a general "halp me, plz, I don't know what I'm doing" post, but ... how the hell do people write slice-of-life stories with some sort of story progression? I more or less write gallons of (AU) slice-of-life fic when classes are in session -- pointless, random drabbles are apparently all my brain can produce during this time period -- but I can never polish them or pull them together enough to make an actual story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Action plot is nearly nonexistent, emotional plot arcs are ... well, they're existent, but they're kind of little dips and rises rather than the typical Freytag's Pyramid, if you get my drift; conflicts in the story come and go with very little fanfare.

And I've never been able to figure out how to make them postable. It's not dire that I make them so, but I wish I could show something for months of apparent writing inactivity. I am writing! It's just not presentable.

[alassenya]

You could always try abandoning plot entirely as a patriarchal construct (/sarcasm) and post them as "Scenes from a [adjective] life". It's done in music when composers have the same problem. And you know, sometimes it's exactly what I want to read rather than a huge sprawling angst-ridden saga.

Edit: Sort of like petits fours -- those tiny little iced cakes the French have for afternoon tea. They have no substance and you couldn't eat a lot of them but sometimes they are just what the palate craves.

[wordstitch]

I agree with the other two commenters.

If you can order them chronologically or group them by theme, you could maybe write a small thing at the beginning or the end commenting on the theme, or on the transience of life or something like that? But you can definitely post them as a series of interrelated things either way.

[alassenya]

Does the hanger-on's father have a special skill or knowledge that would be required/advantageous in the rescue of A? Examples: lockpicking, medicine, language, puzzle-solving, weapon, villain's backstory (esp something small that might lead to them solving a puzzle/getting the lock combination), slightly extended senses, exceptional height and reach, authority/command that could legitimise their actions.

[retsuko]

Is the Minion absolutely, 100% sure that helping B is the right way to go? Could it be that Minion's ambivalence leads B into this conflict-laden trap?

Alternatively, is Minion rebelling because Villain doesn't share information evenly amongst minions, and therefore Minion thinks that the detour would lead them to another minion who knows where A is?

[the_rck]

Maybe there's someone supervising the slaves who might, just maybe, have information. It would be reasonable to have someone more mentally functional there to tell the slaves what to do if something unexpected came up.

[the_rck]

Rheotaxis is a Weiss Kreuz divergent AU-- divergent in that I'm ignoring the drama CDs, Gluhen, and Side B and that I've introduced an alien invasion. It currently stands at 190000 words and 23 chapters. It's dark, containing explicit rape and Stockholm syndrome.

I've been trying to get chapter 24 to work for over a year, and I'm really stuck. The previous 23 chapters have been fairly tightly focused in terms of location. I've given information about the alien empire that's preparing to invade Earth, but it's been background information, bits and pieces. I've been focusing heavily on what's going on with the canonical characters, and most of them simply don't have access to much information. They're prisoners and only learning slowly about the big picture. The story's not really about the invasion or the aliens.

The problem with chapter 24 is that one of the point of view characters (an eighteen year old villain) has been summoned to the aliens' home world for a few days of training. He will, eventually, be quite powerful in the alien hierarchy, and they want him to make social connections and learn how their laws work and all of that.

I don't feel like I can handwave this stuff even though it has little obvious bearing on the main story. This character's development is critical to how the story is going to come out, and this is an opportunity to throw him out of his comfort zone. That's important because he's happy with the status quo even though he's doing terrible things to one of the heroes. He thinks he's in love with that character and is willing to accept Stockholm syndrome in lieu of being loved in return.

I also feel that this chapter needs to be there to pay off all of what I've put in about the aliens previously. Readers are likely to want to know more about the aliens; at least, I assume so. The invasion kind of looms over the story in as much as it dictates a lot of the characters' options.

Unfortunately, this chapter has to be full of original characters, and I don't really see how to properly make it have bearing on the rest of the story.

A fair percentage of the aliens are, for all practical purposes, human. I haven't explained why that's the case (though I do have ideas. They're just not relevant to the rest of the story). Travel between worlds and between certain locations on a given world is pretty much instantaneous. A lot of the aliens have psychic powers (the villains, in canon, have psychic powers), and strong psychic powers tend to translate into rank and power.

[wordstitch]

Have you already posted the other 23 chapters? If not, I would consider inserting more bits about the aliens throughout those chapters instead (if the story structure permits), so that it's not just one big explanatory thing all at once. But if each of your chapters is a specific POV, or have already been posted, I suppose that's difficult to achieve.

In that case, I would consider saving some of it for future chapters and working it in slowly, if it's possible (and it may not be).

What is the motivation for the aliens to invade Earth? Are they just evil, or is there some underlying reason that we--or at least the main antagonist--might sympathize with, since I'm assuming that he's a human and not actually an alien?

[the_rck]

I've been posting as I go, and most of what I've written is from the point of view of characters who have no idea at all about the big picture. They've been finding things out, gradually, and I've written some stuff from the point of view of the villains who know all about the aliens because they're allied with them.

The leader of the group of canonical villains has precognition. The way I've set it up as working is that he foresaw that the aliens would be coming and realized that working with them would be healthier, in the long run, than fighting them. He also saw that, of the numerous factions of aliens that could find Earth, this lot is the best bet in terms of humanity surviving. He believes that successfully fighting off this invasion would lead to something much, much worse.

The aliens pretty much take over any new habitable planets they find. They're expansionist and pretty certain that their civilization is the best possible and that it should be spread to enlighten the barbarians. This particular faction of aliens believes in assimilating native populations. Some factions just wipe them out and resettle the world with their own people.

There's a good chance that, if the villain group plays their cards right, they can end up running Earth as the deputies of the folks in charge of the alien empire. To some extent, that will mean they can insulate Earth from some of the negative effects of having been conquered. The actual invasion will take a couple of decades because it will start with infiltration.

All what I've just laid out is known to my readers by this point in the story.

I'm not sure I can work this in gradually. Either I do a chapter set on the capital world now, or I don't do it at all. None of the other characters are going to go there during this story. The antagonist's personal development is absolutely key to how the story comes out, and his few days on this alien world are a good time to throw him off balance and make him think. My primary focus for the chapter would be on him and on how what he encounters affects him. I can't spare more than a chapter for it, not if I'm going to move the rest of the story forward rather than have it tread water, waiting for him to return. I can't do much with the other characters until after he gets back.

[wordstitch]

I think you've just hit the right idea in that last paragraph. This chapter, set in the capital world (since you have to do it now!) can throw your antagonist off balance and make him think, and also convey all the extra info you need to convey about the aliens in one fell swoop. You can explore his motivations and also create even more suspense about the aliens.

=D Sally forth to chapter 25!!

[alassenya]

From the brief description you've given, it sounds like a massive data dump and I think it's going to be a huge stopping point which might well provide backstory but will absolutely halt the action in the major arc and may well pre-empt your climax.

Can you get around it in another way? Maybe one of the other characters can comment that he has gone to that world for training (or even just that he is absent) and then you can pick up the story again when he comes back and gradually reveal what he's learned along the rest of the story.

If you really don't want to waste your world-building (and I know that feeling, believe me) you could make up a reference document and post it separately so that readers who are interested in that level of detail can read it but it won't break the main story.

[wordstitch]

I second the last thing about the reference document as a work-around. Like an appendix of sorts! You could post it as an addition after the last chapter to tie up loose ends?