Tag Archives: Donald Maass

Plan for the Sequel

27 Friday Apr 2012

Posted by in Advice, Mike, Theory

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You’ve finished your story. You got it published in your medium of choice. Now you’re sipping a mai tai on some tropical beach, basking in your success and struggling only with those little umbrellas they put in your drink.1

Congratulations!

Then your representative calls (agent? editor? director?). The company that put your story into the mass market wants a sequel.

Superb!

Just one problem: You told your story. It has a beginning. A middle. And most importantly, an end. The hero wins. The bad guy loses. All the loose ends are tied up neatly with precise little bows.

You left yourself nothing to build a sequel off of.2

So you set to work creating a new antagonist and try to recapture the excitement and tension of your first story. You know, because like me you’re a student of the Maass school of storytelling, that you need to up the tension. That means making the new antagonist worse in some way than the one in the first story.

I think we can all think of sequels that work like this. Where the storyteller didn’t leave an out. A way to continue the adventures of the popular protagonist after the conclusion of the first story.

When you’re telling your story, leave yourself an out or four. Just in case. This ties into the general advice of using foreshadowing. Let us know there are other concerns in the world you’re building besides those of the immediate story you’re telling now. You needn’t do more than drop a name or mention of something else, something bigger, that you can then bring up in a later story if you need to.

Don’t get ahead of yourself, of course, if you’re proposing your story as a single tale there’s not likely going to be a sequel. But that doesn’t mean for sure there won’t be one. Prepare for the “worst” and hope for the “best,” which in this case is the same thing.

Want examples of what I mean? Rather than harp on the stories and storytellers who get it wrong, let me point out a few examples of those who get it right.

Let’s look at two popular examples from genre stories: The original Star Wars and the first Harry Potter book.

In his first Star Wars film, George Lucas (yes, I’m praising Lucas’s storytelling; don’t get used to it) does a good job of both telling a good, complete story and of leaving room for additional tales in the same universe, with the same characters. Think of the conclusion of the first story: at the end of it, the good guys blow up the immediate threat to themselves and their entire universe. The story could end right there and it would feel complete. On the other hand, Lucas leaves plenty of room for continuing the saga if it proved successful (and, well, it did): the Empire still exists, even though its big toy is destroyed; Darth Vader (the face of the antagonist) is still alive; Han Solo still has a big price on his head. Threads to tie the story into a greater tale, if one could be justified (and it was, obviously).

JK Rowling did the same thing in the first Harry Potter book. At the end of that story, Harry has defeated his arch nemesis, Voldemort. Is Voldemort dead? Who knows? There are hints that, although defeated, Voldemort is still around. Plus, there’s the matter of the ongoing dislike between Harry and Snape. Oh, and Harry’s six more years of school, of course. Lots and lots of threads JK could use to continue the story if her book proved successful enough to warrant sequels. But like Lucas did, she also wrapped up the story nicely. If the book flopped, well, at least those who read it would have a complete story.

So while you’re working out your plot and trying to work in foreshadowing for the conclusion of the story at hand, also try to spare a mention here and there of something else you can build more stories on later. One of the easiest ways to do that is to use the Star Wars example3: make the antagonists more than one person who can be overcome in one simple story, but make sure to give them a face whose defeat definitely creates a closure for the story.



1 Or more likely, sipping wine in your dining room. Stories don’t pay that well. ;)
2This is largely an issue in genre fiction. If you’re telling a traditional romance story or something literary, a sequel is rarely appropriate.
3I only call it the Star Wars example here because I already talked about the saga earlier. In truth, it’s a very common storytelling technique. My current-obsession of The Hunger Games trilogy uses the technique. And earlier this week, Mark Rosewater (head designer for Magic: The Gathering; full disclosure: I work on Magic’s website) answered a question on his Tumblr blog about creating whole races or armies of enemies, instead of focusing on a single bad guy. Also: If anyone can find the Stephen Moffat interview mentioned where he talks about creating groups of enemies for Doctor Who, I’d love to read it.

Lists and Possibilities

24 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by in Ann, Inspiration

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“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” -Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

We use lists all the time–to-do lists, shopping lists, bucket lists, etc. But what about lists as a set of possibilities for your story?

When I’m feeling stuck on a certain situation or character in my story, I oftentimes just start rapid-fire listing all the possibilities I can come up with. All of them–good and bad, serious and silly–and seeing which strikes me the most.

For example, if I’ve created an event in a story, but I’m still not sure who is responsible for it, I might start by listing potential suspects. (I’m notorious for coming up with problems before I assign people to cause them.) Or, in reverse, I have this cool antagonist group, but I’m not sure what to do with them, I might start listing ideas about them–their wants, their motivations, their fears….

Perhaps I’ll do a list for my protagonist, too. If I later compare those lists, I might find intersecting points in which their interests cross or conflict, which will be the impetus for a story to happen. This might even happen between two protagonists and two antagonists, depending on the depth of your story’s characters.

Listing can also be used for plot points–simply writing out all the scene or moment ideas you have and figuring out how or if they fit into the overall story you want to tell. One exercise in the Donald Maass Breakout Novel series (which I highly recommend) has you listing out the stakes of a story, and then, when you think you’ve thought of all the ways the situation can get worse, to list out even more things. And when you think it can’t get any worse, think of even more things that will make it worse. It’s quite the exercise, and I’ve applied it to other parts of my storytelling as well.

There are a hundred ways you can use lists for your writing–but I think one of the most important things to remember is that you don’t have to keep anything on your list. It’s an exercise, not a contract set in stone. By using lists and whipping out ideas in short form as fast as you can come up with them, you’re able to exhaust your possibilities and find the ones that work best or are the most exciting among those that might be bland, predictable, or otherwise undesirable.

When you are listing, I suggest free-forming it. Don’t bother with what kind of numbering or lettering or which bullet-points you should use (unless that will help spark your creativity). Possibilities might be as serious as the death of a protagonist’s loved one to as whimsical as unicorn farts. All that matters is that you exhaust your ideas, and when you think you’re done, come up with even more. Anything. Everything.

Ideas are a dime a dozen and we’re under no obligation to use every idea that flits across our imagination (I suspect even the most prolific of storytellers would have trouble doing this). For all of the awesome ideas we have, we usually have had a thousand zip by. But sometimes all those extras come in as noise that block us from hearing another possibility (or they might even belong in a different story). Use your lists to get everything out–the good, the bad, the irrelevant–and then keep only the ideas that really sing for the story at hand.

And don’t censor yourself–you’re the only one who is ever going to see it, and sometimes our best ideas are the ones we’re afraid to write down. That might not be the case every time, but you’ll never know if you don’t try it, right?