Too Many Concepts in the Kitchen

Last week when I made my outline, it turned funny pretty quickly and I started thinking about this blog post.  Thankfully, I've made some breakthroughs since then and I get to ultimately talk about those.

A while back, I had a premise that was not enough to support a whole novel.  Then I had another idea, and again not for lack of trying) I couldn't extend it into a novel.  Maybe a short story.  Or a song.  And THEN I had a third idea for a novel that I probably could have written, but it turned boring what with being so flimsy and I lost interest.  Even after weeks spent flushing out motivations and back stories, side characters and wold building, these ideas stayed skeletal.  I had a surplus of ideas and I kept shifting them to the back burner in hopes one day a brainwave would strike to flush out one of them.

And a brainwave I got: what if I rolled them all together into one story?  Ben from story 3 replaces Hank in story 1, changing his motivations and changing his name to Trip.  Hank from story 1 then becomes a side character named Ben.  The guy from story 2 gets genderbent and the little girl from stories 2 and 3 get melded together.  Then I do all the plots at once.  Now that's a story!

I'm sure you will spot the problem I ran into faster than I did.

The first thing I did while outlining was to make a chart, diagramming the story strands, giving each storyline its own color of gel pen, putting each in order, then grouping them with events from other storylines that happen at the same time.

This is madness.  Cthulhu wrote this.

It was at this point that I realized that I had five stories going at the same time and aside from being a logistical mess, they felt wholly separate from each other. Each story arc happened to the same characters at the same time, but they had little effect on one another.  One had a mythical monster; one had a serial killer.  Even if I wrote it all in the same book, it wouldn't be one story.

I actually didn't set out to fix this immediately.  

I set out to fix a list of plot holes and things I hadn't settled yet.  Why is the plot line about the curse even happening?  Why would the serial killer show up at the climax?  Big problems, but almost expected at this early stage.

My breakthrough was this: I started fixing these plot holes using the other plotlines.  Why is he cursed?  Because a mythical monster hates him.  Things got knotted together.  Then things got streamlined.  The little girl(s) became a dog.  A big chunk of the serial murder story (including the woman who was the serial killer) got scrapped and replaced with "that guy from another plotline did it."  

Furthermore, while thinking about these plot holes, I started to see thematic similarities across story arcs.  This makes sense as I came up with all these concepts during the same period of my life.  These similarities could be expanded upon to bind them tighter.  Then I thought about the tone, how the main character is purposefully taking on too many things in order to stay busy and distract himself.  So I can use that chaotic feeling of jumping from one issue to the next to drive that home before the plotlines start interweaving.

In short, all the different branches of a story have to support one another.  They can't just come together, but they have to work together like a great sport team or the members of an orchestra.  I think I've got this in good shape, or at least in good enough shape that I can work on it.