A-Sentence-A-Step Plot Exercises.

[magistrate]

I mentioned this over at allbingo, but I'm working on a bunch of challenges to get me thinking about short-form plot. Basically, I'm taking the following plot structures:

Six Short-Story Beats

1. A situation
2. A complication
3. A sense of motion
4. A crisis (which defies some expectation)
5. A change in direction
6. A resolution

The Seven-Point Plot Structure:

1. a character,
2. in a situation,
3. with a problem,
4. who tries repeatedly to solve his problem,
5. but repeatedly fails, (usually making the problem worse),
6. then, at the climax of the story, makes a final attempt (which might either succeed or fail, depending on the kind of story it is), after which
7. the result is “validated” in a way that makes it clear that what we saw was, in fact, the final result.

The Hero's Journey:

1. The hero is confronted with a challenge,
2. rejects it,
3. but then is forced (or allowed) to accept it.
4. He travels on the road of trials,
5. gathering powers and allies, and
6. confronts evil—only to be defeated.
7. This leads to a dark night of the soul, after which
8. the hero makes a leap of faith that allows him to
9. confront evil again and be victorious.
10. Finally, the student becomes the teacher.

Three Short-Story Essentials

1. Require the character to make a choice,
2. show that choice by actions, and
3. those actions must have consequences.

...three of which I found discussed at Philip Brewer's blog, and one of which I put together after thinking about successful short stories on my own.

I'm trying to take these structures and write extremely short stories/synopses with them – using one sentence for each point in the list.

I'm also finding it surprisingly difficult.

But I figured that while I was striving and trying new things, I might as well put the results up for people to see (and quite possibly best :P ). Just to keep things organized in this post, the card I'm using is below, and I'll link my fills for the squares.

Situation: Deliverance Setting: Forbidden Zone Complication: I Told You So	Situation: Revolt Setting: Spy School Complication: Out of Ammo	Situation: Abduction Setting: Bug War Complication: Hopelessly Outnumbered	Situation: Self-sacrifice for kin Setting: Torture Cellar Complication: Keep It Safe from Them	Situation: Daring enterprise Setting: Elevator Complication: Something Went Click
Situation: Self-sacrifice for an ideal Setting: Genius Loci Complication: Are You a God?	Situation: Pursuit Setting: Inside a Computer System Complication: Stranded in a Blizzard	Situation: Obtaining Setting: Underground City Complication: Caught in Bed Together	Situation: Ambition Setting: Abandoned Laboratory Complication: On Fire	Situation: An enemy loved Setting: Hotel California Complication: It Looks Hungry
Situation: Crime pursued by vengeance Setting: Red Light District Complication: Everything Is Spiders	Situation: Involuntary crimes of love Setting: City of Canals Complication: Pinned by a Boulder	Situation: Recovery of a lost one Setting: After the End Complication: Hull Breach	Situation: Conflict with a god Setting: Prehistory Complication: It's a Bomb!	Situation: Remorse Setting: Youth Center Complication: Stumbling in the Dark
Situation: Crimes of love Setting: Golden Age of Piracy Complication: Snake Pit	Situation: Adultery Setting: The War Room Complication: It Happens to a Lot of Guys	Situation: Slaying of kin unrecognized Setting: Last Fertile Region Complication: I Thought You Brought It	Situation: Rivalry of kin Setting: Opium Den Complication: No Parachute	Situation: Enmity of kin Setting: Sapient Ship Complication: Falsely Accused
Situation: Discovery of the dishonour of a loved one Setting: Herland Complication: Knife in the Back	Situation: Supplication Setting: Cardboard Prison Complication: Locked in with Monster	Situation: The enigma Setting: Galactic Sargasso Complication: Only One Spacesuit Left	Situation: Erroneous judgement Setting: Death World Complication: ... 05 ... 04 ... 03 ...	Situation: Fatal imprudence Setting: Bazaar of the Bizarre Complication: Naked in Public

Comments

Deliverance - [Hero's Journey - 10 Sentences, flubbed the 10th]

[magistrate]

Here was the selection, then: Vanja woke with symbols tracing the channels of blood on his left arm, gleaming gold even in the low light of his tent: a call to die for God. He could feel death stalking toward him through the halls of time.

But from the side of his bedroll, the bonesetter said "Vanja, a pack has been prepared: you must go and plead your case."

Because he owed the bonesetter more than he could repay, Vanja ghosted past the sentries in the camp; he climbed the slopes to the cleft in the earth; he fed the thorns his blood until they parted for him; he passed into the meadow lit by a false and golden sun. At each step the symbols glowed brighter, as though they bore witness to his travels.

Trespassing upon the meadow, Vanja was struck down: "Who are you," asked the hawk of god, with its talons in Vanja's shoulders, "to come to this proscribed place, to ask that your blood be spared the sacrifice?" And Vanja thought, Who am I to ask, when better and greater than I have gone willingly to die?

But he thought of the bonesetter, and said "My life was given back to me for another task than this. Set your mark upon me the day it is done, and I will go willingly to the stone of sacrifice."

And the hawk of god looked at him and considered, and said "Fair, Vanja – but I shall levy yet another price."

Recovery of a lost one - [6 Beats - 6 Sentences]

[magistrate]

The miasma of the atmosphere wended in through the rent hull, mingling with the smoke and ozone of that final blast, and part of Coda was amazed she was there to see it: the careful geometry of the colony sagging into ruin, the wide-spectrum lights illuminating the sulphurous air, alien shadows moving across a place that was no longer human in any sense but the archaeological. But she also saw that Ayomide was gone.

That, more than any sense of obligation to see this through to the end, got her moving – out from under the desk which had fallen across her, limping each step to the habitat control panel and the cracking viewscreen which had only ever shown the clouds.

There, though, the status monitor was up; she could see, dimly, the dome of another habitat through the clouds, as though they had thinned, or some alien will-o'-the-wisp had painted shelter in the distance to tempt her. She turned: in the maintenance supply, by the airlock (now sparking and smoking and purposeless anyhow), one of the short-term atmosphere suits was missing.

There was little air kept in the suits, and little chance that Ayomide had found safe shelter – but Coda was not dead yet, and took a suit, intending to follow her.

Pursuit - [Seven Point Plot - 7 Sentences] - liberties taken with setting

[magistrate]

Sareh couldn't actually feel the chill of the blizzard that swirled around her HUD – she got images and sound through the VR, not temperature or force or anything like that – but just the sight of it was enough to make her feel cold, and all she wanted was to get her goddamn drone down off the cliff face and back on Target Red's tail.

She'd already abandoned stealth for expedience and fired the combustion thrusters; all that had got her was meltwater and a layer of ice forming underneath the thing. Now she was reading off temperature reports, coefficients of friction, information on the weight and orientation of the drone, matching it up with the visual data, trying to work it into a lateral slide.

Which worked – briefly, and almost catastrophically, as it came free and went spinning against another jutting rock too fast for Sareh to correct attitude, jarring one of the manipulator arms and cracking one of the more sensitive lenses.

"Shit," she snapped, and got the drone oriented and flying again – just in time to read heat signatures and EM transmissions, probably from Target Red's people, come to see if a drone had been trapped or damaged.

Serah killed all movement, and let the drone fall. She'd expected to hunt and hound these people, but it was better if they came to her.

Self-sacrifice for an ideal - [Hero's Journey - 10 paragraphs]

[magistrate]

The water which had carved this channel in the red rock had evaporated – perhaps once, finally, or perhaps a thousand times over, vanishing after each rain swept through the painted lands. Now, Saquelem went barefoot along the rock dust at the floor of the canyon, with the sky up above as thin as a bolt of lightning, blue as lapis against the sandstone. Ahead, narrow stairs had been carved into the rock face: the ascent of wingless birds, of the stewards of the spirits of wind.

Saquelem had walked past it thirty-one times: once each year since she had been old enough to come to this canyon alone.

Now, though, with bone beads tied up in her hair, with dust in the cracks of her palms and no more water in the water bladders at her hips, she turned her steps toward them. Some few ascendents lost their footing every year and fell; so be it, if that was her fate. She had never been nimble as a goat, never shot up trees or boulders like a squirrel, and her hands were more used to wielding adzes, her shoulders more used to taking up the harness to haul trees out into the dry lands. But if she joined the scattered bones at the bottom – and look how far they scattered; some, undoubtedly, found their ways to places Saquelem would not have imagined – then that was where her body would lie, for a while, while coyotes and ravens and skittering bugs had their fill. Saquelem, who had split her son's head open, felt no desire for death. But she could regard it like the rain or like the occasional wandering: if it would come, it would come.

She climbed. At first on two feet, then, quickly, on her hands as well. Perhaps she should have felt foolish, but there was no one here to see her. And if there was, what would they see? Another animal, a creature of flesh and blood.

The stairs narrowed. They twisted in and out of crevices, and several times, Saquelem paused and panted and wished she could lay down her body against the stone. But there was no place to lie. There was barely enough space to put one hand beside the other, and her body pressed into the canyon wall. Perhaps, she thought, I will become as nimble as a goat, and something called her name out of the singing canyon wind: "Saquelem! Are you climbing up so high to become a god, Saquelem? Will you steal the shining spilled maize from the night sky?"

Saquelem knew not to answer the voice of the wind – but she had not come here to be wise. She had already cast off the expectations of motherhood and moral law; she had confronted an evil that sprang from her flesh, and she felt somewhat more story than woman. "I am–", she began, and the wind roared and cast her down.

She caught herself, barely, on a ledge, the force of her fall wrenching her wrists and scraping the skin from her forearms and shins. The pain was as bright as the sky above, and something earthly: it reminded her that she was flesh and blood, a woman as well, for all that she had placed herself outside the definition.

Are you running, Saquelem? She had felt nothing when her son had fallen, her adze glistening with blood. Too much nothing, when the staff he'd thought to rule with hissed and smoked and burned to nothing on the ground. She'd told herself: It's because you knew it was coming. You knew already what you had to do. When you have prepared yourself so much, when you have dreamed so many times, at last when you had failed to dissuade him what else was it but another story you imagined before your eyes? But now, for the first time, she felt something: fear of the drop, though not of dying. Remorse for the end of this story, if not her actions. And the feelings sat strange in her belly; they hurt, like a sharp swallowed stone.

"How long have you howled through the canyon?" Saquelem called to the wind. "What are you mourning? I want to add my voice, not steal the stars from the sky."

The wind came close in around her. It asked her, "Do you aim to become a god, Saquelem?"

[elizabeth_rice]

This is really creative. I love it when writers experiment and create the world's shortest stories and while the process itself is very frustrating, the result makes one feel good or great depending on quality of work one produced. ;)

Your experiment with the Hero's Journey structure was a really good idea because it proves to beginners (meaning me) that with practice anything is possible. I liked all four of your fills.

[magistrate]

Thank you!

It's interesting to me to work with these forms, because coming at things from the direction of plot ("Okay, I need to think up a sequence of events to fill all these roles") is so opposite of the way I usually approach fiction. (I usually come up with a character, maybe a problem, then some other characters, some neat facets of worldbuilding, and then I just shake them all together and hope that an arc will result. Often, an arc does not result.) Plus, writing at these lengths is completely foreign to me; I naturally write stories around 5000+ words, even when I'm trying to make them short.

I'm also learning some interesting things about how I think of plot, even when I'm working with these forms: for example, every single one of those fills has an open-ended ending. Even the "becoming a god" one, where I'd sat down and thought "I have a resolution in mind for this, which fits exactly into the structure – the 'student becomes teacher' beat works perfectly with a transformation into the spirit of the canyon," ended on an open note when I wrote it out.

The process is, as you said, very frustrating. But it is teaching me a lot. And I think that playing around with things like this is one of the best ways to learn how to do things, even if you end up totally falling on your face during the process.

(I credit a lot of the skill that I have now to getting involved with fanfiction at a fairly early age, and getting a lot of family, peer, and fandom encouragement from it: it let me try out a ton of new forms and new ideas in a really warm and supportive environment, and even when I look back and go "Wow, I did not pull that one off," I still got to try new things and stretch my muscles. Practice makes perfect, and practice is perfect.)

[elizabeth_rice]

You chose excellent ending points for all of them. Additionally, flashfics and other short story forms are definitely the best forms for open-ended endings.

I have the same experience but with art. Professionally I'm an artist, which helped me when I started writing fanfiction in some ways because I'm already familiar with the creative process. But writing is really tough. With art, I can see when I'm not getting the shape of my object right and correct it. But with writing it's so difficult to tell in which areas you need to improve.

Obtaining - [3 Essentials - 3 Scenes]

[magistrate]

[Written to follow up on the extreme winter snows prompt fill from the Shared Worlds crowdfunding prompt call. Not sure if I want to release this one into Shared Worlds canon – I may want something that stands on its own as a story better, or I may just flesh out the prompt response and add it to the beginning of this to make it more comprehensible.]

---

Those few who would speak to him told him that Enja was her own sort. Not a mystic, as his city would have had it, but things swirled around her that did not around others in the city of caves.

But it was only Jakob who explained Enja to him, as they tested the lines. Jakob's hands were quick, finding those hooks that held fish, extracting them and tossing each onto the basket.

"She unsettles," he said. "She makes knives, and she also cuts like one. Her mind is like a knife. People bring her disputes; she sees past them. They bring her omens; she explains them. On occasion, they bring her themselves."

"And then what does she do?" Berun asked.

Jakob tugged the line. "It is not for me to say."

He said nothing of whether he knew and would not tell, or whether it was a mystery to him.

Instead, he drew in one of the lines, slowly, gently, and began unhooking fish from the lures. "Ah," Jakob said, pausing on the third – one unlike the fat, pale fish they subsisted on. "These are good ones. For you, in any case."

A flat wide body, eyes black as beads, a jaw that hung down like a coin purse's mouth. Jakob set it aside with something like reverence.

"Here – you see," he said, and rested two fingers behind its eyes, pressing down exactly. Color and light flowed from beneath Jakob's fingers, beneath the fish's skin.

"What is that?" Berun asked.

"A way they attract prey in the depths," Jakob said. "But Enja – she cuts the fish open and takes out these glands. She makes the fishlights you've seen hung about. It's a way to stretch our oil, even if it's not the best light to see by."

"She sleeps with – she sleeps beside two men," Berun said. "I stumbled upon them."

Jakob regarded him. His eyebrows were raised. A silent, Yes, and? which Berun did not know how to answer. He did not know the questions to ask.

At length, though, Jakob exhaled. "They are a winter family," he said. "More, you would have to ask them."

And that closed the topic between them.

Jakob might accept his company, might not look at him and see only his crimes, but he was still not about to invite Berun to share his bed. Even when it was a simple sharing, warmth and companionship, and no bond or covenant between them.

Unless the winter family was a covenant, and Berun was too foreign to this culture to know.

Back in his own home, a woman would only unabashedly sleep with her husband, and a woman with two husbands would be a wealthy merchant, at the least – perhaps a queen. Here, Berun was told, winter made its own families, and they piled together like dogs. Some winter families might sleep together as he would think of it: shed their clothes, delight in each other's flesh. But others were collegial. Jakob slept beside his wife, but also his brother, and thought nothing of it.

Berun had not inquired as to whether Jakob slipped off with his wife for lovemaking, leaving his brother in darkness and cold. And he had not inquired as to whether Enja lay with her men, broad Sazca and dark Ravnik, as lovers or as kittens would. Though even from half-glimpsed motion in the darkness, Berun had trouble thinking of Enja as kittenlike in any way.

A cat, though, perhaps, like the cats on the steppes. Calm assurance and a piercing gaze.

He brought her a basket of the flat fish he'd plucked from the line, and saw the calm economy of her hands. She sat at a low table in one of the central caverns; close enough to the cavern entrance that Berun thought he could feel the weight and chill of snow blanketing them. Enja sat under an oil lamp and before a girl, too young for her body to change, and showed the girl how to strike shards of flint from the tool stone in her palm. Berun had seen metal tools here – but in the fishing caves, Jakob had pressed a flake of flint into Berun's hands, had shown him how to glide it through the leathery skin. They might be fragile, they might not keep an edge, but a flint flake was sharper than the finest knife Berun had ever held.

"Feel this," Enja was saying, moving the girl's thumb with her own. "That concavity. Can you feel how the strike goes into it? It presses out the flake from within."

Berun watched them, the girl striking the flint with a copper-capped bone and Enja encouraging her, until Enja looked up. By the angle of her head, she had been aware of him for some time; had simply chosen to focus on this – student? Apprentice? Daughter, perhaps? – for a while, instead. Then she dismissed the girl to another lantern, and gestured Berun to the place where she had sat.

He sat, though he was uneasy.

"Well," she asked, "have you decided?"

---

Berun held the fish steady as Enja cut out the light-glands, soft marbles in cavities beneath its eyes. Her fingers were so precise with the flint blade that Berun could imagine her as a surgeon of people as well. Her hands were also warm; he could feel them, despite the fact that they did not touch each other, despite the unchanging cool of the cave.

"Why me?" he asked. "There's no status to be had from me. You've got two men of your own already."

Enja canted her head, though her eyes remained on the fish's flesh. "What is it, where you're from, when two people share a bed?"

In a place where he could see the sky, where the city was paved in cobble and not stone roughhewn floors, where winter was not like this, he would have found the question nonsensical. But here, dreams made as much sense as waking hours. His eyes had gone mad. He would have explained why he kept his fingers on his hands – and half of them on each hand – if she'd asked him to.

"It's either that they've been consumed by lust," he said, "or that they want to build their lives together."

"And that is all?" Enja asked. "There is no convenience in your land? No love?"

"I would say that they are both love," Berun said.

"Hm," Enja said. "Love of certain kinds. Consider this a love of another."

Perhaps before coming here, he would not have understood that. But now, he felt that he could begin to.

"Who are your men – this Sazca and Ravnik – to you?" Berun asked.

"Family," she said. "Not blood family, but the family of warmth. Who are they to you?"

Berun hesitated.

Enja made another cut in the fish, then took a long needle, inserting it beneath a nerve. "You have talked to them," she said.

"Aye," Berun answered. "After we ate this morning, before I went down into the fishing cave."

"And?" Enja said.

"I have hardly met them."

Enja laughed, as though he'd unknowingly echoed a private joke. "Well enough, then. Who do you think they are to me?"

His first impression of Ravnik by daylanternlight had been of imperiousness and disdain. A frown carved into the lines of his face, an unblinking stare that had fixed on Berun as soon as he approached. Stillness that was not the stillness of a cat waiting to strike, but of a pool waiting for a coin or a pebble to vanish into its depths.

"It must be hard for you," Ravnik said, not unkindly. Berun had been taken aback. "I was from another place, too. Come here."

Berun had approached, and Ravnik had taken Berun's hand in his. Two hands, a cage of flesh and elegant bone, and warmth that could have reduced Berun to tears. There was no warmth of the sun. Precious little warmth from flames; even the cooks with their cookfires cooked little. Carved passages up into the blanketing snow so that wanter came in, tasting of soot. Served much of their fish and stores cold.

Here, there was the warmth made by one's own body, and the warmth made by others'. Berun had resigned himself to waiting out the winter alone.

He had known about the winter families, but had not seen one at rest until he saw them in darkness, by fishlight. Enja, the surgeon, was allowed to keep some light for herself.

Fishlight was a pale light, but enough for the residents of this twisting, honeycombed cave. Berun kept to the common areas where lanterns burned; when the communal night fell, he went blind. He lay down shivering to escape the darkness in sleep; he woke in panics, the darkness infiltrating behind his eyelids and filling his eyes, his lungs, whether or not he dared look. Sometimes lights would hang in the ink-black, and part of him quailed for fear they were ghosts. He knew there were no lights to see.

And then in the morning, someone would walk by with a lantern, calling the city up to break the night's fast.

He had started wandering, weeks ago, in the night. Feeling his way through the caverns with one hand on the wall, stopping when he heard the breathing of other winter families, and turning back. Somehow, all these nights, he had found his way back to his own little spot in the honeycomb, where the heat of his body was trapped by an overhang, and his elbows and back hit the stone. But he waited for the night when he would become lost. He wondered if it would feel like ice giving way beneath his feet.

But instead, what felt like a shattering was following the curve of the wall into a fishlight-tinged grotto, where he'd thought the sights illusions at first: his mind, starved for images, could cook them up without need for their presence in the seen or unseen world.

Sazca with his pale hair catching the light, Ravnik a shadow inside the shadows, a slim form moving in the darkness. And Enja, uncurling herself from their company, her body like a rising snake.

He wondered if Enja knew of snakes. Sazca, who knew so well the anatomy of the fish swimming beneath them. Did snakes live in this frozen land?

Sazca would know.

His first impression of Sazca by daylanternlight had been of satiety and reserve, perhaps with boredom to smooth out the edges. He was a big man – almost as big as Berun. His hands were still. He watched the caverns as though they had nothing to do with him. Berun had approached him.

"You set the fishing lines," Sazca had said, not incuriously. Berun had been taken aback. "Well, thank you, for your part. You know, I hate fish until the snowmelt starts threatening. Then, I can't eat enough. I never want to eat red meat again. I think the reason I can go and caretake the wild herds is because until late summer, I hate them so much that the thought of carrying back their flesh makes my stomach punch up."

"You're a hunter," Berun said.

Sazca nodded, languidly.

"Not much for you to do in winter," Berun said.

"I rest," Sazca answered. "That's enough."

Berun had sworn that Enja's eyes gleamed in the darkness, when he had stumbled upon them in the night. Sazca resting, Ravnik asleep, but Enja turning toward him as though she had expected a visitor all along.

Berun had walked away. These people found nothing indecent about the winter families; neither when they made love, nor when they simply lay beside one another, human warmth in the darkness and the enduring chill. But Berun had felt the hand of trespass curling around his throat.

But he had not walked away until Sazca had called out to him – and he, startled, had fled.

Into the darkness of night underground, into the cool cave air. Back to his pallet, where he would not freeze to death, but felt half-frozen anyway.

Even now, under the lantern, feeling the warmth of Enja's hands, he felt as though part of him would never be warm.

"Life, I imagine," he said – and Enja raised her head, just long enough to give him an appraising look. Neither approval nor reproach. As though the question she'd asked – Who do you think they are to me? – had no answer, and the only purpose in asking had been to unlock the workings of his mind.

Still. Berun felt there was an answer, and he reached toward it.

"Summer," he said. "Fire. This–" he passed his hand over the fish, "–gives no heat. There's not enough fuel for a hearth – and smoke escapes too sluggishly to have one. This place feels like the land of the dead."

"Yes," Enja agreed.

"But you live," Berun said. "All of you – all winter. Every winter. You make hearths out of each other. You don't go mad."

"Yes," Enja agreed.

"So," Berun said, "why invite me to your hearth? Pity? Mercy?"

"Would you refuse that?" Enja asked. "If that were, in fact, my motivation?"

Berun thought of the nights. Night after night, sleepless nights without warmth, a winter without warmth. He had not been so proud to stay in the south and die for his crimes. No, he was not too proud now.

Even if the question was, How much of myself must I give you? The answer could not deter him. Not here, when he missed the sky and the distant, cool sun. A hearth was a heavy thing. Enough to anchor him.

"I would not refuse for anything," he said.

---

Every night – and Berun still wondered how night was decided; if there were hour-markers in this place which he had not yet seen – the lanterns went out, one by one. In another branch of the cavern, Berun could hear the strains of evening song. Songs and tales, those things that did not need light to live by, survived the winter well.

This night, as the light dimmed throughout the cavern, Ravnik appeared beside him. His footsteps were quiet.

"Come," he said.

Berun looked at him. He felt as he had when he'd left his home: a decision had been made, and now it was left to him to see it through, but he had no idea what its final shape would be. He could not have predicted this strange, buried city. It would be a fool's quest to predict what it would mean to share Enja's bed.

"You don't resent me?" Berun asked.

Ravnik laughed. "Come along, southern man. You know as well as I do how cold it gets at night."

No colder than the day, this far below ground. But yes, Berun knew. There was chill, and there was chill.

Perhaps he could escape both.

"It is this way," Ravnik said, and turned to lead him back into the darkening corridors. And Berun followed, step by step, to the family that had claimed him.