[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.

[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.

[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.