Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos

Writing Prompt 40

Minor changes to the blog. There’s a static homepage now, where I show my published work. Yes, I know. My web design skills are appalling. On to the writing prompt then.
Barry rushed to the living room.

Little Cathy removed the hand axe from Mr Wilkes’ chest. She titled her head to the left a little and let the heavy killing thing drag her arm down.

Barry’s face turned ashen and his mouth opened for a scream that never escaped his mouth.

Cathy smiled. “What? Oh, this?” she said. “That’s nothing.” She took a step closer to him, dragging the axe on the floor where it left a trail of blood. “Did I tell you the story of how I finally became an only child?”

Little Cathy’s Story
Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos

Inspirational Prompt 36

Destroying the world seemed like the best option at the time. It should’ve worked. But she survived. Again.

I thought I should make today’s prompt a little different, but I’m not sure I succeeded. The idea is that if you remove one or more sentences from the given prompt (except the first one), you should get a completely different idea for a story. For example, if you choose to go with “Destroying the world seemed like the best option at the time. It should’ve worked,” you get something different than if you used all four sentences. Likewise, if you go for “Destroying the world seemed like the best option at the time. But she survived. Again,” should allow you to come up with something different. Each sentence adds a little bit of backstory or underlying conflict between characters.

I hope I did a good job. I’m burning in fever, so I may have messed it up royally. How many stories can you come up with?

Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos · 2 Comments

No mistakes, only happy accidents

A few days ago, I twitted about a mistake I made (Ok, maybe not a mistake as such – to quote Bob Ross, “there are no mistakes, only happy accidents“) and neglected my outline for just a little bit. By a little bit, I mean a large part of a scene. The result was almost a thousand words of half-decent first-draft quality prose with very interesting character interactions. Alas, I had mixed the characters up. Shameful, I know. In my defense, it was an easy mistake to make, since I almost never name filler characters when I outline, and the two characters shared a few things, like age and lifestyle. The only difference is the character I intended to write about was supposed to have no more than one line of dialogue and appear for maybe half a page, and the one I ended up writing about is an important character, which made the first one a filler, or rather an obstacle to the MC’s progress. A nameless character. Of course you might say that a thousand words for a filler character are too many, but keep in mind there are descriptions, POV character’s thoughts, reactions, and of course the stuff I had on my mind about the important character. Plus, the POV character and that filler one ended up having a long conversation, which was not part of the original plan, but stemmed of how I pictured the important character. My face once I realised what I did was like Arnold’s.

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I don’t know how many of you have read G. R. R. Martin’s book, A song of Ice and Fire, but those of you who have, if you watched last week’s show (season 6, episode 1), would probably have something to say about it. Actually, if you have read the books and watched the show, you probably have a lot to say, but that’s a different story. I’m not going to go into it. I just wanted to point out how easy it is to lose track of something planned in advance, if you miss or change one little detail. For Game of Thrones, it was Martin himself, if I’m not mistaken, when he mentioned of the butterfly effect and how the show and the books have diverged because of them. I had read that blog post earlier in the year, and I know he considers himself as a gardener-writer rather than an engineer-writer, but only after my mistake did I appreciate how easy it is to deviate so exponentially by one single mistake, like a few lines of dialogue.

So, any happy accidents you made throughout your writing career that changed things so much for your stories, you had to change everything and rewrite them?

Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos

Outlining methods

Are you a writer who outlines or a pantser? I’m not going to go into which method is best, and certainly nowhere near things like “do this” or “try that.” Whatever method you have chosen, as long as it works for you and you and you’re productive, keep it. For those who prefer to outline (like myself) or those pantsers who would like to have a try at outlining (for whatever reasons that may be), I think this post by Now Novel may be informative and helpful. Keep in mind, these are just some of the methods. I know people who use nothing more than simple bullet points. I know others who mix two or more of these methods, like I do (7-point system and snowflake method). I also use different methods depending on the length of the story I’m dealing with. For example, I use the 7-point system for almost all my short stories, but a combination of snowflake (not all the steps) and 7-point system. I have found these two to be the most helpful when I need to get a better feel for a story. For the current novel I’m working on (Through Stranger Eyes), I have also employed the use of character sheets that allow me to delve deeper into a character and come up with answers about speech patterns, clothing, catch phrases, and even go as far as figuring out MBTI personality types, though the information on these sheets is not directly related to the plot. They do help a lot, however. So keep in mind that more than one method may serve your needs. I hope this helps you as much as it has helped me.

Plot outline creation: 7 smart methods

Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos

Page changes and other news

I have added a new contact form in case any of you, devoted readers, wanted a more immediate method of communication. I know the comment system is not very convenient for some of you. You can find the contact link at the top of the page.

Also, I decided to have a go at twitter and now I have an account there as well. You can follow me, or even better you can help me figure out how twitter works, ’cause quite frankly, I can’t understand it. Now, before you point your finger and roll on the floor in a fit of side-clenching laughter, let me assure you that there was a time when no program or electronic device hid its secrets long enough from me. And by long, I mean I had mastered it within a day. And, no, I’m not referring to a bygone decade when I still had hair on my head (haha, funny you who thought of pointing that out, haha… NOT). I’m talking current stuff. But this twitter thing is… is… an infernal and alien machine designed to drive me nuts! I’m trying to follow a simple # thingy (tags or whatever they’re called), which is why I joined in the first place. #Pitmad (or #Pitchmad) will start in a couple of weeks and I was thinking of participating. Alas, I can’t save or follow said tags. I have to type a query and do a search every time I want to see if something new is happening related to it. For the record, I did check their help page; I might as well have tried creating energy out of nothing. It only left me with more question marks dancing mockingly around my head. I have figured out how to make lists, but that’s not what I was looking for. I also found out how to comment publicly mentioning someone else (the use of the @ symbol). But I knew that from Facebook, so… I just want to be able to follow a # tag. Is it even possible?!
Anyway, if you want to follow me on twitter there’s a link to the right of the page. Hope to hear from you.

In other news, outlining the next story has proven to be harder than expected. I thought I had everything, the main story, the characters, their background stories etc, but I can’t shake the feeling the story is too short, that the plot is somehow insufficient. I have about 30 scenes, but when it comes to chapters, I fear I will have around 20. Now, of course the number of scenes or chapters has nothing to do with whether a story is the right size or not. The problem is I keep feeling the plot moves too fast. I thought about introducing a second POV character, one that already had a somewhat significant role in the story, an investigator. I figured I could have him relating information, through his investigation, to the reader, information the main POV character wouldn’t know. The investigator was originally supposed to attempt to apprehend the protagonist, so why not allow the investigator some space to grow and show his side of the story? It makes sense in a way, but when I sit down and try to write some scenes about him, it’s like I’m slamming my head on a concrete wall. With spikes. Which could mean the idea of introducing a new POV is wrong, or that I’m not fully convinced, and my gut feeling is telling me to stop. Perhaps it’s because I’m meddling with a genre I’m not very familiar (mystery).

Here’s a question for you: do you think it’s structurally acceptable to have a second POV character if that character is not the protagonist (or one of them) and his/her chapters are not equal in number to the main character?