Hey y'all.
First of all I'd like to apologise for the long text that's coming. Even though there's a lot of explanation forthcoming it's still open ended. And I'd like to hear your thoughts on it. And part of why the text is so long is because I'm quite confused.
There's one particular problem I'm struggling with which might apply to many of you as well, and I'd like to hear your way of handling it.
The problem is:Complexity
What I mean by complexity isn't how complicated the story feels to the reader, but rather how hard it is for the writer to develop his story.
Obviously the story shouldn't feel too complicated so that the reader can still follow, but it can still be an arduous task for the writer to come up with it.
A story is always about some kind of change. That change can either be some change for realz or some new information that changes your perception or that of the characters involved. Stories are typically about plots and characters, and these are thus in need to be developed for the story to work.
That development can either come from within the plots/characters or from their interactions.
Moreover, most, if not all, writers tend to only have a rough idea about their topic when they start writing, and what they write changes as it's being written, as the vague notion they started changes into something more concrete.
So many stories tend to start out rather simple, but become more and more complicated as new characters and subplots are being introduced.
And the more elements you have, the harder it gets to align them all and make sure they have some interesting development that fit well into the story (timing & pacing!) and also have a satisfying end.
That can be extremely hard, and the easy fix tends to be to introduce more characters to resolve old conflicts. But that fix tends to be shortsighted and exacerbates the problem long term, as you have yet more characters to think of.
All of this can result in plotholes or even writers being unable to finish their own stories, and I think George R.R. Martin is a prime example of this.
You can even express this complexity problem mathematically:
Let's assume that a) you want to develop each element (character, plot, or other), and b) that this development as stated earlier can either come from within or from their interactions with another, having 2 elements would give you a complexity of 4. Each element you want to develop can change from within itself, and/or through interaction with the other.
Let's say you have 3 elements, and you want to develop all 3 of them, that gives you a complexity of 9, as each element can change on its own and/or through 2 interactions. That's 5 more problems than if you only had 2 elements.
For n elements, the complexity is n². The complexity increases exponentially.
Let's say you want to keep some elements static and without any development, the complexity would be n*m. n being the number of elements you develop and m the total number of elements including those that you don't want to change at all.
Obviously, it takes an engineer to formulate it mathematically, and I'm pretty sure no writer thinks about his story this way. But the problem at the heart of it is quite real.
All elements in a story should form a unit and contribute to the main story. They shouldn't be in it if they don't further the plot.
I think most writers will experience this problem in one of two ways, depending on their writing process.
If they plan ahead before they write their story:
"For this to happen then this needs to happen and for this 3 other things need to happen, and for those 3 things to happen, 9 other things need to happen and for those 9 things to happen..."
If they don't plan ahead before writing:
"Damn, the thing I originally wanted to happen can't happen anymore because I made this other thing happen to resolve the other thing that happened that I wrote to make the other thing happen."
The obvious answer to it is to try to keep the number of elements as low as possible, but that isn't exactly easy either and requires a great deal of planning.
Let's say you have two characters, but you only really need one of them, then it's best to leave the other one out.
But that results in a humongous amount of planning.
So as I stated earlier this problem is something I'm struggling with. Particularly with my own AAR. The second chapter of which I hope I'll be able to begin posting within a week. One of the reasons why this complexity problem is so significant to me is that I try to align real history, ingame events and story pacing as perfectly as possible.
I'm probably making it harder for me than it has to be. But it's also necessary to a certain degree, to make sure that everything fits. It's really like drawing a puzzle. It's easy enough to come up with the individual pieces, but it's hard to put them together in a way that makes sense.
Derc put it well once when he said it's best to limit oneself and try to not make it about everything.
I'm no good at that. And I'm not willing to give up on my fantasy of a perfect plot even though I know it's unattainable.
There are lots of things I want to include and I want to do so in the most efficient way possible, so readers don't get confused.
With chapter 2 I'm already feeling this increased complexity, but with the plot for that chapter mostly planned out I'm mostly concerned for what lies ahead.
I've experimented with mind maps and recently thinking about making an offline wiki to organise my thoughts.
Do you guys have any experience with these or do you have any other tools you use?
And how do you try to keep your story together and avoid plotholes and corners?