I want to write a story that is complicated. Meaning, I want it to have twists and a whole back story explaining why things are the way they are. I’ve already began a timeline, a plotline for my story, character developments, organization developments, etc. How else can I approach this?
Well, since I’m going through the same pains with writing my quite-complicated-and-unpredictable trilogy, I’m gonna offer you some advice.
First method you could use I call the Ribbon Technique. The RT is when you take in your entire story and you untangle each plotline, one by one, and work on each on its own. Say you have a plot that consists of a guy and girl colliding and as a result their lives are changed completely. What you do is you separate the guy’s story from the girl’s and you work on one story at a time, creating gaps or marking the places in which the girl and guy overlap.
This is quite the difficult method, since mistakes can be easily made. You can lose track of your plots altogether, but with this method you’ll be surprised how much you can learn about your novel. The characters in the Ribbon Tecnique unravel and live their own life, much like reality. Using this method, your characters are guaranteed to get that lifelike air to them.
2) The other method I use is the Rough Outline. You open a blank Microsoft Word (or whatever word processor you’re using) and you write whatever comes to your mind concerning the book. It doesn’t need to be in order. You can write:
John is tall, bald and usually smiling.
*and the suddenly you feel like writing:
It’s fall when Josie returns to college.
*or even character’s likes and dislikes or quirks:
Josie hates peaches because they leave a bitter taste in her mouth.
-Rough Outline helps you unwind your creative juices. After some twenty pages of writing tidbits about your plot and characters, or character background, you print it out and read it, re-read it, write over it with a pen or highlight what you like and cross out what you don’t like. You can do this over a cup of coffee, in the bath, on the couch or just about anywhere.
The neat thing about the Rough Outline is that it helps you develop characters. Once the character is fully developed it will talk to you and tell you their demand. I’m not kidding, mate. I have three or four fully developed chraracters in my novel and they talk to me and give me a good or bad gut feeling, telling me whether the scene I’m working on is good or whether it sucks.
That’s what I’m using.
Here’s a link to another method one successful writer developed. It’s called the Snowflake Method:
http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/snowflake.php
Consider using it if you don’t like my two suggestions.
Hope this helps. I got back problems looming over my laptop typing this up LOL
And it’s 6 in the morning 