I realized I’ve been neglecting this site for way too long. Aside from my life having a lot of chaotic, anxiety-inducing interruptions, I’ve just been posting more on Patreon. I’m going to get back into the habit of posting here, starting with some of the posts that got early releases on my Patreon.

Not unlike with TTRPGs, I’ve wanted to write stories pretty much since I understood that they’re a thing that a person can write. People seem to think I have a certain talent for dialogue, but I’ve always struggled with plotting. Not every kind of prose writing depends on plot, whether it’s nonfiction or literary fiction that emphasizes other aspects, but a lot of what I want to write needs good plotting. I have ideas for stories that involve adventure, sci-fi, and fantasy, even if I also want them to include some poetic prose and explore deeper themes. I need a way to think about what happens in the story.

Despite many attempts at using or even creating systems to help with plotting, I’ve resolutely remained more of a “seat of the pants” writer, which is to say that somehow putting together detailed outlines doesn’t seem to work for me. I still have to stop and think about where the story is going, but my attempts to use methods like those outlined in Save the Cat and Rock Your Plot never led to any finished stories. Likewise, I bounced off of Scrivener and other more systematic writing tools, and I pretty much just write in a Word document, maybe with a second Word doc for notes if there’s a lot of setting and such to keep track of.

I don’t think there can be a single silver bullet to writing fiction—Save the Cat has worked for a lot of people, maybe too many, but not me—but I finally hit on something that does work for me. Creative advice isn’t universal, but I think I have something worth sharing, if only because I haven’t seen it outright stated anywhere else.

I really enjoyed the Disney animated series Star vs. the Forces of Evil, and the last time I re-watched it, I was left wanting more, so I ended up trying out Amphibia and The Owl House. (I’m still annoyed that The Owl House got an abridged third season apparently because Disney executives are cowards about LGBT representation, but that’s beside the point here.) Both series have young, plucky heroines thrust into weird other worlds where they make friends and gets into all kinds of trouble. And I realized that at the heart of each episode there’s something that the characters need to learn in order to grow and to resolve the conflict in front of them. It’s a bit more blatant in Amphibia, and in that show (I think) the characters growing and learning is the main through-line in the first place, taking them all the way from Anne emerging from the wilderness near Wartwood to the series’ epilogue.

In The Owl House, Luz is a plucky middle school girl with an overactive imagination and an obsession with a series of trashy fantasy novels. In the first episode she finds herself in the magical land of the Boiling Isles, living with a witch named Eda who’s a cynical scammer with a heart of gold (if you look hard enough). In the second episode, Luz accepts an epic quest from a wizard, and learns the hard way that no one’s going to hand her a grand destiny or epic quest on a platter when it turns out the wizard is a puppeteer monster and everything in her quest was fake. The world is weird and at times cruel (but with its own kind of beauty), and the only destiny she has is the one she makes for herself.

That kind of plotting can get a bit trite and PSA-ish, but for me it works.  Asking myself “What is the conflict here?” just doesn’t seem to get me anywhere, whereas asking “What do they learn here?” has yet to steer me wrong. It forces me to have the characters be more proactive and to have them display faults and get into trouble, and the conflict naturally flows from setting the characters up to learn and grow.

There’s a concept in sitcoms called the “idiot ball,” from when Hank Azaria observed how it seemed like each week one character on Herman’s Head would temporarily act out of character and become an idiot in order to drive the plot, as though some force were moving an invisible ball of idiocy around the cast. I mention this because it feels like a natural pitfall of the learning-oriented approach. If a character needs to learn something, they have to be ignorant or wrong in some way, and a writer has to be careful to have that deficiency be something that feels natural rather than a contrivance to drive the plot.

Lately I’ve been putting in a lot of work on Memes of the Prophets, my isekai series. Erica started as something of a self-insert, which is a problem in that I’m introverted, conflict-averse, and often just plain passive. The major theme of my therapy sessions so far has been that I’m too hard on myself over my possible faults, but Erica needs to be something other than “Ewen as a catgirl.” The lesson-based approach to plotting, combined with having her collide with a weird fantasy society, has made her a lot more proactive and outspoken, even if she’s nowhere near as boisterous as the protagonists of the cartoons that inspired me. Still, so far she’s ended up riding a unicorn, introducing the world to tic-tac-toe, and throwing the art world into chaos by exposing them to abstract expressionism, and I’m leading up to her accidentally sparking Eitania’s first anti-war movement.

We’ll have to see how this approach actually works for me as I continue writing. Much as I like randomizers and other tools to spur creativity, right now what I really seem to need is just a card that says, “What will they learn?”