Blueprint

Hey. It’s ya boy.

I had a cool idea for Illuminations this week. I was going to write a pseudo-poetic prose piece probably titled, “Nice and Accurate Minutes for the End of the World,” or “An Orderly Timetable for the End of the World,” or some combination of the two. The format of the post would be that of a timetable, but it’d be a time table of, essentially, traumatic moments that make up my entire life. At the end of each entry of the timetable, I’d say “from this point forward, ______ is stricken from the record,” or some variation of that, and then in later entries any mention of that thing would be blacked out. Towards the end, I would strike first poetic language from the record, then words (the next post would be in binary), then numbers (the next post would be in Morse code), before finally striking myself from the record.

This kind of blueprint

For an example of how this would work, let’s refer to a potential entry. When I woke up on my fourth birthday and went downstairs, the first person I saw was my Mom’s new boyfriend and later husband, Ron. I said, “I’m four today.” He replied, “So what?” And from that point forward all mentions of birthdays would be stricken.

Sounds cool, right? Thanks. Now forget all of that. I’ll probably never write it because I started writing a short story for class and now I spend every waking moment of my life thinking about that fiction piece. I can’t really switch gears at this point.

Instead, I’m going to write in detail about my writing process. Or, how I “grow” a story.

Is this going to be a long post?

Probably.

Am I writing this just for my own satisfaction?

Entirely.

Will anyone want to read the entire post?

Unlikely.

(This is my third time starting this section of the post, and it’s seemingly very hard for me to talk about how I develop a story without it being very long-winded and boring.

Third time’s the charm.)

The introductory paragraph I just wrote serves a second purpose. In it, you’ll notice that, more than content or character, what I really wanted to do was  execute some kind of concept. In that case, it was the gimmick with striking things from the record. In the short story I’m writing right now, the concept was that our protagonist was unable to “let go.”

Here are some photos of my basic outline, but I’m going to talk about it anyway. The emotional plot of the story I had all mapped out: I would plant that the protagonist has trouble letting go of things, introduce a situation where her failure to let something go caused a problem, have her obsessively try to fix it, which makes it worse, and then finish with a situation where she has to finally “let go” or something bad will happen. I didn’t know whether she would let go or if the decision would be made for her.

I’m really self-conscious so keep in mind I’m skipping lots of little notes about where to insert world-building or character moments in the following narrative arc of the story.

The setting is in a world where people have to travel between heavily fortified cities in armored, self-sufficient trains. The people have to do this because of [monsters]. Our main character is really good at engineering, which is how she got a job on the train. She’s also finagled herself her own car (one of the engine cars) because she’s so good at doing mechanic stuff.

It would turn out that this jerk Shane is dating Clover, protag’s ex. Protag broke up with Clover, but can’t get over the fact that Shane is now dating her. At some point, she’s called to some kind of commanders office, where she’s told that [passenger], who’s also a mechanic, is going to be given her room because his family just had a baby and they need the extra space.

Protag can’t let go—the protag’s name is Rhea—of her room, and so she does something to the train that was supposed to inconvenience the new people in her car, but not sabotage the whole train. The train breaks down because of what she did (people don’t know she did it), and they have to make a difficult choice: go to a “dead city” to scavenge for mcguffin part, or cut through mountain tunnel. People don’t want to go through tunnel because it’s dangerous for [reasons]. They go to the city.

Rhea is eager to fix her mistake, but is too fixated on the mcguffin, which is just out of reach. She insists that she can get it (and eventually does), but has taken too long, because now it’s night time and the [monsters] are out. She books it back to the train and they get away, but [monsters] are on the train. She has to decouple the last few cars of the train where Clover is so that everyone else can live.

I wasn’t sure if she could actually do this, so I was planning to have Shane be the one who actually decouples it when Rhea hesitates, setting up a dynamic where Rhea feels Shane is a monster for “killing” Clover, while also blaming herself since it was her outburst that caused the train to break down in the first place.

I need everything to “make sense,” and I mean this in the broadest, most world-buildy way imaginable. Why are people trapped in cities? How is this dead city infested? Why is the tunnel dangerous? Why do the [monsters] only come out at night?

I was really struggling because I needed the [monsters] to answer those questions, and the monsters I found popping up in my head over and over again were [zombies].

But I don’t want to write a story about zombies.

I want to write a story about a mechanic girl who lives on a fortified train that travels between heavily defended cities.

And I really wanted that ending, but I had to let it go.

I don’t want to go through the effort of explaining all the changes I’ve made to the story and how I’ve answered those questions now that I’m in the process of writing it, because they could change again, but I’ll confirm that the entire plot, including the letting go theme, is gone. I may post it here somewhere after I do finish it, so that you can see how a story that started like that somehow ended up as this.

When I set out to start writing this piece, my intention was to look at every single story I’d ever written, explain the reasoning behind every single change, and look at every single evolution or writing choice I made. Three attempts in and I realize how tedious and boring that is. If you’re interested, just ask me in person and I’ll spend two hours talking at you about it.

Also, I enjoy writing in threes.

-M.C.