Handling Byzantine plots

[limyaael]

I’m really going to try to keep myself from ranting about just political fantasy here, because gods know it’s not just political fantasies that can lose their plots.

Comments

[wanderingbhikkh]

WOOHOO!

GOT EM! GOT EM ALL!

Which is important, I'm writing political fantasy.

[sanguimane]

If I write it them it is going to be Byzantine, I have to accept that now... sigh! The brain doesn't work any other way. Unless we have a cast of three hundred and each one with a separate plot then I get light headed.

The secret I think is to allow motivations to coincide and conflict naturally and not as commanded by the great god CARDINDEX. It is so much easier when the characters lead the way.

The really tricky bit is keeping track of where everybody is and who has met who before! I wrote a whole scene of two people meeting for the first time until I recalled that they had already breifly met in Novel One! I also ressurected a character that I forgot was dead and swapped over two other characters Mothers! This last was deliberate but transposing every reference to these Mothers over 4 novels was nightmarish.

[limyaael]

I think that if the author starts losing track even with an outline and list of the characters, the plot is probably more complicated than it needs to be. I've seen books with 10 pages of Dramatis Personae. And maybe half of them actually mattered to the plot. Is there any way that you can reduce the number of characters that you're handling?

[sanguimane]

I had neither outline or list of characters! It was all kept in a grey retreival system located between my ears. Very unsafe place!

Three gaffs over 2400 pages isn't TOO bad though?

I've never actually counted the named characters in it... I guesstimate between twenty and thirty in each novel some of which carry on through all four and some of which pertain on;y for a while. The plot is planetary in scope and so is bound to involve a few persons.
The whole thing was finished a year or two ago so taking people out of it will be tricky! It is currently 'under consideration' (In the bin) at some publishers or other.

[the_s_guy]

I roughly plotted out a movie script like this once... one Evil Overlord versus dozens, if not hundreds, of Heroes. Each of whom had been trained in the Hero Academy, or by a Wise Old Mentor, or had followed a Mysterious Apparition or Map or Amulet, or any one of a number of such cliches that kept bumping into each other. All this training and quest-fomenting was being co-ordinated by a bunch of ageing Heroes who were too caught up in their own pasts and the ideal of the Hero's Struggle Against The Evil Overlord to wonder why none of their students ever lasted more than a couple of months after graduation.

The students, of course, had heads full of Hero Tradition, which made them easy pickings for the Evil Overlord. The Overlord had indeed read the Evil Overlord List, or that world's equivalent, and even contributed a line or two himself. It wasn't the only writing he and his predecessors had done, either - after all, someone had to write all the Heroing and Mentoring Manuals

[blunder_buss]

Wow. That actually sounds like an awesome idea. If the writer can get me to like the anti-hero, I'll cheer for him all the way through.

[limyaael]

*grin* That would be fun. I did have one country in my parody stories accept the rule of the Dark and see them as liberators, since their Queen had been, um, fucking nuts and tortured people to death constantly under the illusion that there were servants of the Dark in the country. (There certainly were when she was done).

I know who Jack Vance is, but haven't actually read anything by him.

[jhiday]

Ok, checklist

[limyaael]

I did do one, back in the day, but it was mostly on things like the heroine opening the door just as the villain was getting ready to let his evil plot fly. I might do another one, if I can think of enough points for it.

[avrelia]

I enjoy a well-done Byzantine plot, but the interweaving of many different plot threads seems an awfully hard thing to do.

Ripples are important - maybe one of the most important thing in handling such plots.