Question Attempting to start a new writing project

After reading Take Off Your Pants!: Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing: Revised Edition , I have decided to take another crack at writing. This time outside of Whateley. Times being tough for me I thought I would take a look at self publishing to see what happens.

That being said I also bought Scrivener and have been trying to implement the process from the book. So I'm still in the rough plotting stage.

Main character Alexandria Glover, the great grandchild of two different "heroes" one maternal one fraternal (ie one from each side of her parent's family trees. Neither parent are heroes or have powers. Alex has a skill with languages. She can pretty much read, write and speak any language.

Her Flaw is "living in the moment." Not planning ahead.

Her Ally at the start of the story is Elise Nielsen a girl she went to high school with and both have graduated.

Short term goal at the start was getting into college (her parent's wish)

The Inciting event is loosing her father to a heart attack and within a month loosing her mother. Faced with the financial burden of a house with a mortgage, Alex and Elise join the Navy.

So following the book, my initial planning looks like this.

1. Alexandra Glover a great grandchild of two heroes with a skill at languages.
2. Keep from being homeless while not being a burden to the rest of her family.
3. Antagonist to be determined
5. Become a planner and better able to deal with the results of her decisions, Becoming responsible.

Flaw: Living in the moment not planning ahead too far or thinking about consequences of her quick decisions

Ally: Elise Neilsen high school friend. Will probably change during the story.

Next comes creating the antagonist, fleshing out the Ally and then working on the plot of the story.

Per the source book Alex can either resolve the flaw in a single story or just make progress towards resolving it. Or it can be resolved and a new flaw defined.

I'm sort of publishing my steps going through this as both a way to keep me going and to give others some hints as to what I learned from the book.. Which I am going to have to re-read as I progress. Once the initial parts are defined, you use them as guides to what happens in the plot line. To be thorough I should repeat these initial steps with both the Ally and the Antagonist. Along with anyone else who develops into a major character in the story. This gives me at least an idea of what the other character's response might be to an action or situation. All the while, not having to delve as deep as we have with Whateley. Though Whateley is this complex because it's been around so long..

Okay I have my character created. At least partly. Thinking about it my external goal is weak because the Antagonist for the story needs to be the most heavily invested in achieving the same external goal. And becoming self-sufficient is really a bit weak of a goal. Perhaps I should work on Alex's family history to create a goal that there can be a competition in....

Now if one or both "Hero" relatives left an endowment in their wills for the next family member to "become" a hero.... With this change the whole character arc just got a whole lot longer and perhaps interesting as well. (I can't have "family relations" in the same chain of command, due to the incident with the Sullivan Brothers during World War II) Hmm further digging determined that there never was a "Sullivan Act" forbidding family members serving on the same ship or chain of command in a hostile zone, Though there is a military policy about it from before World War II. There can be exceptions to the policy though. So I guess I can have a cousin be in the same boot camp company or later training....

Time to ponder my characters again.

I have always seemed to create better when I'm socializing with the other Canon authors, This time is no different I went and hung out in our super secret chat rooms while the authors chatted and let it flow over me while I had Scrivener open and was working on fleshing out the two main characters. Don't get me wrong there is a lot of thinking going into this. But I've never really been good at what amounts to sitting at a keyboard with a blank piece of paper, waiting for stuff to come flowing out my fingers. This time it was nothing more than a description of one of the antagonist's character traits. "You could use her nose as a ski-jump" The descriptive picture of the antagonist, while physically makes her sound like a drawing of Bob Hope, (yeah I'm dating myself) is more a reference that she looks down her nose at others with the belief she's better.

This detail is going to color the path my antagonist is going to take through the story.

I've still not really set physical descriptions of the characters yet. Most of that I'm probably going to cherry pick from a random character generator from Seventh Sanctum It's a writer's site with lots of random generators for names descriptions, powers, etc.

This is the minutia that makes up a story but doesn't in my mind majorly contribute to the story as of yet. A physical description might hint at ethnicity and then to the name. But not much more to the character as of yet.

GrimGrendel: The flaw is something they don't really know they have. Though it is an important point in a story. So to drive the story the character must be confronted by their flaw repeatedly before they overcome it. Using the plotting system discussed so far, and using Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as a rough example. The main character is of course "Harry Potter, a boy wizard. His Flaw: Harry is meek and unsure of himself, and hasn't yet embraced his destiny as a powerful hero.

Harry doesn't actually resolve his flaw until the end of Deathly Hollows. But if you're familiar with the movies you can see the flaw across all the movies. Harry's story is about as classic-myth story profile as it can get, which is why it appealed to such a broad audience. The flaw was presented and explored many times in all the book series. Your character can have many flaws of various levels and you can attempt to work through them all. At this point in the character building/plotting, going lockstep down a plotted story isn't necessary yet.

Heck, I'm going off the reservation a bit and suggesting you go watch a movie you're familiar with what I've presented in my own exploration of the plotting book I linked above, and you'll begin to see the driving force in the background of the movie. Look at the Terminator franchise and Sarah Conner at the beginning of the movie and at the end. The T-800 amazingly enough is both the Adversary and an Ally in moving Sarah to resolving her flaw. In the rest of the movie franchise the T-800 is an ally while Skynet becomes the adversary.

I should go back and explain what the roll of the Ally is. It's not necessarily that of a buddy or friend. The Ally is the one who has the power to force the main character onto their correct path. Thus my earlier reference to the Terminator being both an antagonist and ally All of what I've been doing so far is just creating the character arc, not the story "theme"

The theme is the unifying concept. It can be simple like "a coming of age" story or a "road trip." as an example here the first Hive story theme would be Road trip. I was simply trying to present Hive's origin and get her to Whateley. Along the way I presented some of her powers and weaknesses.

The second Hive story was settling in at Whateley. Much like the other character's "Welcome to Whateley" stories. Sweet Dreams, was silly as it sounds, it's theme was "This is Your Life" which was a TV show back in the 60s which presented a famous person's past through the people they've known. Then there's "Who dun it?" which was a theme of "a murder mystery" As I started writing Hive I wanted to explore different story styles. Research into the different styles of writing definitely helped here. One of the guiding precepts in writing a murder mystery was "write the murder first" even though the reader might never read the murder story. Writing it gave a reference to look back on with an eye towards clues that might have been left behind. And even this could be brought into the plotting of the story to be written.

In discussing the story process with one of the other authors I used the term "building blocks" or "erector set" of story construction. Up until now all I've been doing, (and still am doing) is making building bricks to construct the story from. I have enough now to start fleshing out a few things further. Like the general plot and the opening scene general outline. Taking part of my general plot

Alex has graduated from High school, parent die before the next school year begins when she was to go off to college. (their dream) Faced with the no good income she joins the navy.

This and a few other things we know are going to help set the opening scene. I debated on when I could set the opening scene in that first summer out of high school. I decided to have it start right on graduation night.

Now the opening scene is setting the story's stage, It should introduce the world elegantly and clearly (NO INFO-DUMPS!) with action relevant to the main character. It should give a clear idea of when and where the story takes place, and what your main character is like in general terms. It's also a great time to address the character flaw or the theme of the story. Sometimes both can be fit in without making it look contrived. Presenting the character's flaw or the theme clearly very early in the story sets up a strong subconscious hook. It gives the impression that there will be a major problem explored in this story. This gives the reader straight away a sense that the hero's journey lies ahead.

Sadly we are still building blocks and writing in generalities. Sounds annoying but we are inching closer to the finished story with out a lot of rewriting or editing when we get close to done. So let's start with the opening scene,

---

Graduation. I need to present the theme or the character flaw.
Loosely
Graduation, Alexis promises Elise While they are waiting for the ceremony to start that they would party afterwords.
Ceremony: Not sure if I'm going to include this or use it as a small bit of background (city, state, year. That sort of thing)
End of Ceremony: meeting up with family. They get ready to head out to dinner and Alexis backs out having promised Elise.
Ending initial scene with family wishing her a good time but obviously "hurt" by her change in plans.
Next morning Parents ambush her at breakfast to talk about college plans. They manage to get it down to 3
A couple of days later Alexis accompanies Elise when she goes to the Navy recruiting office. (just to keep her company) Elise goes for Journalism (wants to get into TV) no slots until fall.
A couple of weeks later Alexis' parents are killed, Aunt fills Alexis in on the "family hero endowment." Alexis closes up the house and decides to join the Navy when at Elise's going away party.

---

As you can see the story is still very loose but now there are some bones to the beginning. The flaw will be presented, some of the back story will as well. I even presented one method the external goal could be achieved. I think I've also managed to hint at the overall theme of the story. And I have yet to get down to the brass tacks of the story (writing dialog and finished scenes) Yet I think I'm well on my way to building a good story.

Now I just have to keep at it.

I started working on a first pass at a rough story and got hung up for a while on the scene where the Main character's flaw is shown for the first time. My first shot at the scene had her coming off as an asshole and not really likeable. I didn't want that starting out. Frankly I don't think I could write a main character who's an asshole. I couldn't keep it up.

I am continuing to work on the "opening scene" of the plot. A few more bits and pieces to soften the dislike of the character. Next comes the "Inciting event" for the story And that is what will really set the story in motion. It's the event that sets the main character on the path to resolving their flaw.