My thanks to Lindsey for
allowing me to post this here, and please do take the time to head over to Twigs & Brambles
to read her post there, which should be going up soon as well. (Or even check
out the post she had there about two years ago, for a little
time traveling.)
Lindsey and I share a love
of odd story structures and stories that rise from strict forms. She has
a great flash fiction piece told in the liner notes of an imaginary CD, and
we've both discussed and enjoyed the series of posts from Bruce Holland Rogers on Flash Fiction
Online about writing short shorts in all manner of styles and formats.
It's easy to fall into a
romantic view of writing that holds any imposed structure as automatically
suspect, necessarily limiting the writing in some way. The truth is quite the
opposite. Not that an artificial structure is required, but as Italo Calvino
and the Oulippo group show in their works (as well as any poet who has made use
of any poetic structure), great stories can arise directly from the
self-imposed rules a writer creates. This idea fascinates me, and while I
don't always write with any sort of predetermined requirements, sometimes I do,
and in Spire City there were some specific rules I decided on before I began
for how the episodes would go.
The broadest way to look at
this is that it is episodic, which places it somewhere in between how
I'd usually approach chapters of a novel and how I'd do loosely related short
stories. Each episode is neither one nor the other, but aims for a balance
between standing alone and advancing the broader story arc.
For planning that structure,
I looked at how TV shows handle their episodes and longer arcs. There is a wide
variety of season lengths out there at the moment, but I settled on thirteen as
a relatively common number of episodes. That number imposes a certain feel
to the season-long arcs of the series. Frequently, new shows also are given the
first six episodes to establish themselves, and therefore have a definite
climax at the end of those first six episodes. So season one follows that, with
a major confrontation in episode 6 that forms a complete mini-arc while
pointing toward the longer arcs of the season and series as a whole.
The structure of each
episode has a large effect on how the story goes. Again I drew inspiration
from TV shows. An hour-long show will often have three commercial breaks,
dividing the episode into four sections. The Spire City episodes likewise
divide up in that way, so that each episode is made up of four 1,000- to
1,500-word sections.
What effect does this have
on the story? Each episode is different, so I tried to avoid falling into any
repetitive pattern. Even so, it does create a sense of increasing tension as each
section complicates the preceding one or expands its implications. It also
avoids falling too easily into the three-act structure that writing advice
often follows, which is good for making sure it's not taking a mindless way
through an event.
The strict word limit
also affected the writing. I wouldn't plan out the scenes until I was ready
to begin an episode. Then I would take out my note cards and jot down a quick
idea for each scene to give the episode direction. Sometimes as I wrote,
though, I'd find that the idea I had for a given scene was only enough to
sustain half the target word count. Other times, though less frequently, it was
cruising toward easily exceeding the target. So I had to work in new wrinkles,
or smooth out unnecessary complications to get the scenes to fall right. The
stakes went up, the problems increased, the characters were forced to face
greater challenges.
Those scenes, difficult to
work through at the time, often proved the strongest when I went back to
rewrite. The realization that my initial idea needed tweaking (or a complete overhaul)
forced me to rethink how I was creating the scene. But without that word count
miss, it would have been very easy to just wrap things up and move on to
another scene, never realizing (or not until it came time for rewriting) just
how much more of an impact a given scene could have within itself and on the
story arc as a whole.
At its heart, Spire City is
the story of a group of people faced with a terrible infection and fighting
back against the scientist who created it. Around that central story is all the
structure built from these episodes, which is to say all the crises and
adventures of their infected lives. That structure, arbitrary as it was,
helped to create the overall feel and focus of the entire story of Spire
City.
Episodes 1 and 2 of Spire
City, Season One: Infected are available now, and episode 3 is schedule to
come out on January 10, 2014. Thanks for reading, and thanks again to Lindsey
for hosting me.
Spire City is home to mighty machines of steam power and
clockwork, and giant beetles pull picturesque carriages over cobbled streets,
but there is a darker secret behind these wonders. A deadly infection, created
by a mad scientist, is spreading through the city, targeting the poor and
powerless, turning them slowly into animals. A group of those infected by the
serum join together to survive, to trick the wealthy out of their money, and to
fight back.
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