Weekly Plot Help - Week of October 27th

[alison-sky.livejournal.com]

Wow, by Saturday NaNo will have begun and we will be heading into the craziness. Are you ready?

... come on, that was weak. ARE YOU READY?!

*grins* Ok, that was better.

Anyway, here's your plot help post for the week. Simple as always.


Add a comment with the help you need. Don't be shy. We're all writers here, and you never know, someone might give you a new plot bunny to add to your NaNo.

Reply to others and help them. You might be the one holding that bunny.


And just be awesome :)

Comments

[meretia]

I have a sort of soft science fiction thing I'm working on. It's set in an alternate modern America that figured out genetic engineering four or five generations before we did. The plot involves a geneticist who's holed himself up in rural Pennsylvania with some other genetically engineered folk and they're talking all kinds of apocalypse and New World Order for the "improved" people. They're probably behind some attempted biological attacks on cities along the East Coast. My main characters in this story are a relatively new field agent in the federal bureau that regulates genetic engineering (Kate), and a genetically engineered man (Daniel).

At the end of the first act, Daniel, who was pretty much threatened into helping them with an investigation, has been stalling and screwing around most of the time he was supposed to be helping. He knows what's at stake here but doesn't care. He's pretty sure that he's going to end up hurt or killed if the geneticist finds out he was cooperating with the feds. I think that he may even be playing both sides, deliberately trying to keep the Genetic Regulation Agency from digging out the compound in Pennsylvania.

Just at the end, he deliberately turned the attention of the GRA office he'd been working with to a false lead and then skedaddled. While they were paying attention to that, the crazy separatist geneticist and his hangers-on send a mail bomb that went off the way it was supposed to, and has caused a lot of trouble in whatever city that was (I haven't quite worked it out yet). A few days later, Daniel comes slinking back claiming that he's really sorry, he hadn't realized how serious this really was. To prove his sincerity, he comes bearing some information he was holding out on sharing with them earlier. He's a self-centered, underhanded thing. He was ready to book just from being asked to get involved in this.

Does something happening to people he doesn't know way far away from him sound like it would be enough to make him decide that getting this mess shut down is worth risking his life?

In the second act, Kate's team of investigators has gone out to Pennsylvania to help with the effort to root out the stragglers who escaped when the compound was raided and are hiding out in the woods someplace. They bring Daniel along with them. He was designed as something like a human computer--can store lots of data and calculate quickly, but human enough to fill in the gaps where artificial AI traditionally fails--and worked with Dr. Albrecht at one point. The government agencies who are already there are content to treat him like a piece of equipment instead of like a human informant like Kate's office had been doing. This leaves him in pretty rough shape. Kate is really bothered by this, but is it believable enough that she'd be willing to say "look, if you want to leave, I'll look the other way"?

And in the third act, Daniel has already decided from the cumulation of events that he's probably going to die, but he still has to see this through. Is that enough for him to turn down the offer to escape? He even, when told that whoever's planning the strategy here intends to offer him to Dr. Albrecht and see if that brings the fugitives out, volunteers to pretend that he's returning to the fold (oops, he forgot to tell him that he was briefly part of this organization in its early days). I have no idea what could make him willing to do that. There's a vague scene in my head where he's talking to an agent who lost family in that attack in Act I and Daniel feels guilty about that, but I don't think that would do it. What would believably motivate someone to do that suicidally dumb?

[alessandriana.livejournal.com]

For the first question, perhaps he lost someone in the attack as well? That might motivate him to return.

Otherwise, you're going to have to set up his character so that it is believable that he'd be willing to risk his life. Maybe have him be selfish and unwilling to risk his life only up until a point-- and then make the attack so terrible that even he can't condone letting these people go. He has a set of core morals (buried deep, perhaps) that won't let him sit there and do nothing about it.

[captain-emily.livejournal.com]

Since Daniel starts out as such a selfish person, you will need a very powerful emotional scene to make it believable. It might be difficult, but it can be done.

Have you seen the movie Schindler's List? In one scene, Schindler is looking over a city being ravaged by German troops. Amongst the sea of black and white faces, there is one little girl--probably four to six years old--wearing a bright red coat. Schindler watches her, tracking her progress through the troops, gunshots, and smoke of the town. He loses track of her, and we don't find out what happened to her until later, when Schindler spots a bright red coat amidst a pile of dead bodies. This scene marks the turning point for Schindler, and it was done simply by humanizing the war.

Now back to your Daniel. If he views the conflict between the two factions of mankind as some distant battle, he probably won't hesitate to help the geneticists. But if you give the conflict a face--such as news images of the bombs aftermath, complete with dead or scarred men, women, and children--he'll have a much harder time ignoring it. Perhaps you could even let him witness it first hand, returning to the scene of the blast after the bomb has gone off.

It really won't take much. You won't need pages and pages of prose. Just a simple image will do the trick. Imagine Daniel coming upon (or viewing on the news) a little girl lying on the sidewalk. She's curled-up, crying, and clutching a teddy bear--and also missing both of her legs from shrapnel. Just make him realize that he is partially responsible for this--even if only indirectly. Guilt can be a great catalyst for change.

As for your second question, I'm afraid I can't help much there. I don't know Kate's character. Play around with it. Imagine the scene both ways--one in which she sees his condition and offers to let him escape, and one in which she turns a blind eye for the sake of the mission. Which one feels right for her character? Also, which one fits better with your plot?

As for the last question, guilt can not only be a catalyst for change, it can also be a powerful motivator. If you've made the reader understand that Daniel is truly sorry for his part in the explosion and that he will do anything in his power to make things right again, then yes--it would be natural for him to risk his life.