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Monday, December 30, 2013

Giving Plot to the Plotless (Part 2: The Love Kite)

Hey everyone! Its been awhile hasn't it? Finals sure do make updating difficult and the holidays are surprisingly busy so I haven't gotten time in awhile. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. But, without further ado: Part 2 of Giving Plot to the Plotless!

Alright, so if you've been following the last posts, you know that character A and R decided to have an affair behind my friend and I's backs. And when we tried to restrain them, they basically gave us the literary middle finger and took over our typing fingers, forcing us to write more scenes.
But of course they were not only screwing us over but also their original literary partners. We'll call them characters L and T. What were we going to do with them? I mean they had to find out right?

No, of course not. We were just going to keep it a complete secret from them and--

Just kidding, they found out pretty quickly. In fact, L and T only ever met because the original affair happen. And that eventually resulted in them getting together as revenge.

And then they kept getting together. Just as A and R kept getting together.

Inadvertently, with our anger with A and R, we made an entirely new affair that lasted a lot longer than it should have. You've heard of love triangles? Well, this was a love kite. All the characters were torn between two different people.

And I was freaking out a bit. I mean, what the heck were we doing? Neither of us liked writing romance that much. It's not our genre. But the couples were just so FUN to mess with. How would they react in this situation? Let's try it. What if we put them here with these characters? No harm in that.

And the scenes between the rebellious, unofficial, totally-not-an-actual-thing couples continued. They continued to develop and expand and before long we had a LOT of scenes written. Three months after we first started we had almost 200,000 words worth of material. All completely plotless of course.

That's not to say that only A, R, L, and T were the focus of these scenes. We started tossing in more of our characters and experimenting with how they would react to certain situations. We explored a lot of our characters insecurities and fears and discovered some new ones.

Before we knew it we had a network of characters on our hands. It kind of seemed like the building blocks for a plot. Possibly a new book that was a completely original thing. All we had to do was change a few names at that point because our characters really had developed into completely new entities. R, L and T were especially different than who they were at the start.

So, one day, in the library, I pulled open my laptop and started brainstorming a new world for our characters to fit into. And that, of course, is where the real challenge began.

Join me next time for Part 3: A Whole New World...hopefully it will not be as delayed as part 2. *Hangs head in shame* The holidays really do make things busy don't they?

Til next time!

~Aimee