Breaking the Rules

I've probably posted about this before. It's a problem I have that is not going away with experience. I am the master of making stupid (cliched) plot decisions that cannot be undone.

First example: In SPOTD, each day starts at the start. For 30 days in May, Chase Cooper 's alarm rings and he wakes up with a new superpower. Because the new powers kick in overnight, there wasn't a way around this problem. And it IS a problem.

I tell my writing students all the time, "Start in the middle of things. Start with action. Don't start at the start."

The only way I could have solved this was to make his powers kick in either at a fixed time during the day (I can't imagine all the rewriting that would have entailed) or randomly (kind of kills the whole SPOTD premise). So I just embraced my faux pas and made it work. It became the story.

Second example: In SPOTD, I needed a more exciting start. I added a dream scene. It showed Chase's inner desires (to be a hero) and allowed me to write a huge action sequence. And although the diminishing of Chase's superhero dreams is important to his character arc, they were definitely a ploy on my part.

I don't allow my students to write stories where the main character wakes up at the end. It's too overdone. I tell them to just make the plot really happen. The problem with "It was all a dream" is that it robs the main character of agency. Once they wake up, readers realize the characters they were so worried about were mere bystanders all along. The danger of the dream plot wasn't real danger after all. It says to the reader, "Haha! Gotcha. You felt the feels, but it wasn't even real!" That's pretty rude. It makes the reader disconnect in the future, not wanting to be fooled into caring twice. And although the character may wake having learned a lesson, if the story ends there, the reader doesn't get to see the change/growth in action.

The kicker: When I am reading stories where characters dream, I hate it. I usually skim over those paragraphs.

And does this stop me from having characters dream in my new series? Nope. I keep their dreams as short as possible. But I have no excuse for not cutting them.

Last example: Who on earth wants to read an action-packed adventure story starring... a shy, not-that-attractive pregnant girl? And then, a formerly pregnant girl on the run. With babies. And her grandpa. Seriously? Adventure stories are supposed to be centered on young heroes. Teenagers. Maybe they age into their twenties, but rarely past that.

I never pitch that angle when people ask what my new series is about. I don't talk about the escape/pursuit plot of book 1, I talk about book 3, which is basically Agatha Christie in a castle. THAT they "get."

And what is book 1 except another case of me starting at the start? Like, THE START. I skipped a conception scene, but just barely.

In any case, I wonder what other cliches and bad plot turn offenses I have committed or risk committing in the near future...

* Hero evades certain death
* Villain is actually good
* Actual villain was pretending to be a good guy
* Dead character is miraculously alive
* Deus ex machina ending

I have no plans to incorporate any of those, but my track record says otherwise.

Note: As a writer who prides herself in smart, tight plotting, I do work especially hard to specifically avoid the last one. I think I'm quite good at subtle foreshadowing and building to an ending that is logical.