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sineala · 7 years

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Hi Sine! I recently re-read your Star Trek AU--which is BRILLIANT--and I noticed that it's got a pretty complex plot. Then I thought about it, and a lot of your fics have multiple things going on in them at once. I think Living On Your Breath has something like four plots: Steve's personal, Tony's personal, the villains, and then Carol&Wanda's. Plot complexity is something I'm trying to get better at, so I thought I'd ask how you come up with and manage everything! Thanks for writing!

Thanks for asking! I had to think about this for a bit, but I came up with a few rough guidelines for how I handle plot. I’m putting this under a read more because (1) I am wordy, and (2) I don’t want to spoil either of those stories for anyone who hasn’t read them.

A disclaimer: I am entirely self-taught in that I have never had a writing class in my life and I don’t really do well with those writing help books. So basically what I have learned has been picked up by reading a lot of books, reading a lot of fanfic, and writing a lot.

This is not so much a plot tip as General Writing Advice, but there’s an Ira Glass quotation that circulates Tumblr every so often that I really like:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

I’ve certainly had this problem; I’ve spent years not writing because I’ve come up with ideas I knew I couldn’t execute to my own standards. And then I did it anyway, and eventually I got better and now I’m at a point where if I have an idea for a story it is probably something that I feel like I would enjoy if I wrote it (as opposed to “God, I can’t pull that one off, I hope someone else writes it”). It does make leaving exchange prompts kind of tricky because I think one up and then NO I WANT TO WRITE IT MYSELF. (The Jar is a Cap-IM Holiday Exchange prompt I nearly left before deciding I wanted to write it myself.)

Anyway. Plotting long stories. The big difference between a long story and a shorter story is that you need to be conscious of the overall structure and where you are going. You know all those rising action/climax/falling action plot outlines? Take a novel you like and think about it like that. Break it down. If you want a long story that feels cohesive, you’re probably going to want to adhere to that basic structure. You don’t necessarily need to make an outline of that form – I don’t bother – but you should have in your mind the idea that three-quarters of the way through (or so) is the Big Important Scene that your story has been building towards, and then the rest is cleanup.

I am generally writing romance stories, and the tropes of the genre are such that there are often a lot of shortcuts I can take when I am trying to work out what’s going to happen, especially if these are first-time stories – the big moment is the characters declaring their love, finally getting together, and so on and so forth. So you ask yourself, okay, what are the obstacles to their love? Why didn’t they get together before? Maybe they have to learn to love each other. Maybe Steve doesn’t know Tony is Iron Man. Throw the obstacles in their path! Make them get over them!

But the reason these stories get so long on me is that that’s not usually the only plot. The other plot can be personal to the characters (say, Tony’s drinking problem) or involving the personal lives of the other characters, or, heck, maybe they even have to save the world. Basically I just… intersperse the development of both plots, and I try to make sure that every scene is furthering something: either plot or characterization. (When I am outlining the story itself, I try to keep tabs on this.)

Because these are generally romance stories, the A-plot, the one I give the most weight to, is probably going to be the romance plot, and the B-plot is going to be whatever else happens in the story. The absolute best way to join these plots together is to make them both build together and then hit their respective plot climaxes at as close to the same time as you can manage. If the B-plot is saving the world, Tony is tragically injured in the fight with supervillains, and that’s when Steve tells him he loves him. If the B-plot is personal discovery, Tony gets sober and decides he can be with Steve. Something like that.

How do I keep track of this? I used to do it in my head. I don’t recommend that part. I know some people can handle writing novels by the seat of their pants, but I work a lot better with outlines; I have a lot of abandoned novels where I basically didn’t remember what was going to happen next, and… whoops. I actually do all my outlining and writing (of long stories, anyway) in Scrivener (which is the best program I have ever spent money on). I like Scrivener because it’s set up to handle stories with a lot of ancillary research material, and furthermore it’s organized by scene, which makes a lot of sense to me.

First is the brainstorming. I like to bounce my ideas off other people when I am still in the thinking stage (like “hey, would you read a story about X?”) and then I spend a while mulling over The Scenes That It Makes My Brain Really Happy To Think About, which are usually (for me) probably the climax of the story. (This might be Steve And Tony Finally Get Together or Steve Finds Out Tony Is Iron Man or Steve Cradles Tony’s Broken Body In His Arms.) In my current WIP, it’s probably Steve Realizes He Loves Tony After All.

And then eventually I make an outline. The outline is basically a complete synopsis, scene by scene, of everything I want to happen in the story, with as much detail as I need. Sometimes there will be bits of dialogue, sometimes it will be OH FUCK SOMETHING PLOTTY HAS TO HAPPEN HERE, FIGURE OUT WHAT IT IS. Because generally I will know that the non-relationship plot must advance before I know exactly how. (I revise it as I go.) The outline for the Trek AU is about 1500 words. (The outline for its sequel is 3000 but it uses more complete sentences as it was intended for other people to read.) I stick this all in the Research pane of Scrivener along with my canon notes and whatever else I need to refer to while writing. This is a good time to stop and make sure that the outline feels like a story – all the emotional beats are in the right place, there’s a good mix of A-plot and B-plot. and so on and so forth. I just squint at it and wing it but I’m sure there are various exercises you can do if you like that sort of thing.

Then I do the actual scene breakdown. Because I’m using Scrivener, it has this very cool functionality whereby every scene has an associated “notecard.” You can give each card a title, organize them in folders by chapter, reorder them, and write up whatever you want on the notecard; I fill it with a description (expanded from the outline) of what’s going to be in each scene. Sometimes if I have multiple POVs I will color-code each scene.

As for specific complex plots, let me tell you about how I came with the stories you asked about.

Living On Your Breath was easier because it was for a RBB, and the artist (Phoenix) had a few suggestions about canon, and from there I let canon help guide me to filling out the plot. The art that went with it was Tony in leather and fishnets, choking Steve out. Which is, you know, evocative. Phoenix had suggested that the plot involve mind-control (which seemed reasonable as Tony looked pretty evil in the picture) and also she wanted to know if I could write a story set in Avengers v3, which I had never read, but I was game.

So, I thought, okay, this was going to be a story where a mind-controlled Tony had somehow captured Steve and decided to choke him. How could I get a plot out of that? Well, I thought, what if the drama of the story isn’t just about Tony being villainous? What if it’s a story about kink and consent? What if maybe Steve would have wanted Tony to choke him out when he wasn’t evil? What if Tony secretly wanted that too and Steve had no idea? Well, that seemed like a decent amount of angst to me.

And that right there suggested a basic plot structure. Steve and Tony would get together at the beginning, and we would establish that Steve had these unfulfilled kinky desires, and they would be happy together but not A+ perfect because they are not talking about all their unmet needs because, let’s face it, they have communications problems. Then Tony gets kidnapped and mind-controlled, and kidnaps and tortures Steve, and he does everything Steve wants except it’s fucking terrible because, well, Steve didn’t so much want Tony the supervillain to whip him. Just regular Tony. And so the rest of the story was going to be about them healing and putting themselves back together (although getting worse before they get better) and reclaiming everything they did and admitting their secret kinky desires and having Tony choke Steve out in a truly wholesome and loving way.

I knew that there was going to have to be some kind of plot involving villains – I mean, someone had to do the kidnapping and mind control – so I went looking for obscure villains (since I’d had enough of AIM and Hydra) with a grudge against Steve and ended up, unfortunately, with the Secret Empire. They were so obscure, I told myself! Surely Marvel wasn’t ever going to use the name for something big! Ahahaha. *sobs quietly to self*

I also decided that it might be nice to have the events of canon going on as a backdrop to the story, and as soon as I read v3 I knew exactly what I was going to do because, see, I fell in love with Carol’s drinking arc. Avengers v3 starts out so sweet and the team loves each other and then… it kind of starts to fall apart. Not that they don’t love each other, but it’s apparent that several of them have Problems, and Carol’s drinking is the definition of a Problem. So I wanted to have the team start to go along perfectly and then break apart as Carol does, with Steve and Tony’s post-mind-control relationship along for the ride at the same time. Suppose it all comes to a head with Steve and Tony on the same mission that gets Carol kicked off the team? And then, well, we know Tony goes up to Seattle in canon for recovery from a fight in canon – what if, in this version, he brings Steve with him? And later on, when Carol drop-kicks Tony through a jet and finally sobers up, what if Steve is there too? So that way both Tony and Carol get to get better at the same time. Recovery arc for EVERYBODY.

Honestly I added Wanda because I figured that Carol needed SOMEBODY to be there for her (it really irritated me that the team basically just kicked her out on her own, in canon) and she and Wanda clearly like each other a lot. Having said that, about 50% of Carol’s plot is straight out of canon, dialogue included, although I played with the timing, added Wanda, put Carol in the Blue Area mission, and gave Steve and Tony a massive breakup in the middle of the mission.

The structure of this one was pretty simple – before, during, and after Steve’s captivity. Every scene in the During section was one of Steve’s days. During the After scenes I was basically trading off Steve/Tony and Carol & Wanda plot development.

Straight on till Morning was trickier to plot. For most of its imaginary life, it didn’t have a plot; it was me sitting around and thinking, “Gosh, I like the Avengers and I like Star Trek and I want to imagine the Avengers in spaaaaace.” But that wasn’t a plot. That wasn’t even anything close to an idea for a story. So it just kind of sat there for a couple years rattling around my brain. And, really, the backstory all came first, and the plot kind of sprung out of everything there had to be in order to put the backstory in play.

One day I was sitting there thinking about what the Avengers would be in the Star Trek universe, and I thought, “Well, obviously Steve is a starship captain and OH MY GOD STEVE IS A GENETICALLY-ENGINEERED SUPERHUMAN FROM THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.” I had been thinking of the story as a complete fusion, where no one existed with their regular Marvel identities, but suddenly it occurred to me that if Steve existed in the Star Trek universe and had still been Captain America in World War II, things could get really interesting – because the Federation, bastion of diversity and tolerance, is fully prepared to hate the fuck out of you if you are genetically-engineered. Especially, and I am just guessing here, especially if you are from the twentieth century. Steve would predate Khan and the other supermen, but, well… maybe Steve was the first Augment. So that’s an interesting idea! The one universe where being Captain America would actually be reviled!

So that’s not a plot, either, really, but that’s part of a plot: Steve has a Terrible Secret. He is an Augment. What’s going to happen when Tony learns his terrible secret? Well, he’s probably going to take it pretty badly.

Steve’s backstory was pretty much a direct port of the Cap stuff plus making him frozen twice so that (1) he could have prior starship command experience and (2) I would throw off everyone who assumed that him being frozen once was the way I was translating his comics backstory. At least until the scene where Tony gets out his Cap poster, anyway.

Tony’s backstory was a little more complicated. Because the thing about an AU is, you have to ask yourself which elements of a character and their backstory are 100% essential. And the weird thing about Tony is that a lot of the things that are key components of his superhero life don’t really translate to Star Trek. Like, take Tony’s famous MCU line, “genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist.” Welcome to the post-scarcity economy, Tony; there’s NO MONEY. That knocks out “billionaire” and “philanthropist.” “Playboy” is, let’s face it, probably also linked to “billionaire,” and for 616 Tony it gets use as basically part of his intricate layers of personal masks where he doesn’t sleep with nearly as many people as he wants you to think he does. That leaves “genius.” And we’re gonna make him a Starfleet engineer! Everyone’s a genius there!

The Iron Man suit, likewise also out. Because, yes, it’s cool, but it’s not Star Trek cool. A flying suit? Try a starship. Maybe he designs starships, I said to myself.

So what are the key qualities of Tony? His genius, his engineering aptitude, his general personality, let’s throw in his former alcoholism, and of course his Vietghanistan trauma leading to heart injury. So something happened to him on Planet Vietghanistan, obviously, and whatever it was hurt him, but it didn’t lead him to make Iron Man. But he still needed to do something heroic, but it had to be Trek-style heroic. What if he saved a bunch of his shipmates? What if he saved a bunch of his shipmates and built a ship to rescue them and Captain Yinsen died tragically in his arms? And what if Tony was so fucked up by all of this that he decided to quit Starfleet? Until, of course, he meets Steve.

This suggests an arc for Tony’s character, the same way Steve’s backstory suggested an arc for him: Tony learns to love himself, Starfleet, and Steve. Maybe not in that exact order.

And remember, Steve has A Secret. Well, that’s going to interfere with Tony learning to love him. Obviously Tony will eventually come around. So from there you can see where the major obstacle to Steve and Tony’s happiness is going to be.

The first third-to-half of this story was therefore pretty easy to write, because it was just a matter of introductions and shoving in all the backstory. Meet Tony. Meet the ship. Meet Steve. Let’s go to Starfleet Academy and learn a bit about the Prime Directive and Tony’s tragic backstory. Meet the crew. Set off on a maiden voyage. Tell Steve about Augments, watch him freak out, and watch Tony have no clue why.

And then, of course, there had to be A Plot. Every scene basically advances the worldbuilding, Steve’s character, Tony’s character, or the plot. This was also pretty easy to come up with, because it’s Star Trek, and if you want to make your Star Trek story feel like Star Trek, steal a Trek plot. Of course they beam down to a planet and meet some aliens. Then something goes terribly wrong, something bad happens to the ship, but it is all fixed just in time and they sail on. You know how it goes. There is a pre-existing structure. I had actually been joking that if I couldn’t think of anything I’d just sex pollen Steve and Tony and well… I couldn’t think of anything else. Sex pollen it was!

I think sex pollen actually works well, because it is a very Star Trek trope (quick, count all the sex pollen episodes; you might need more than one hand) and also because the absolute worst time to find out that your captain is an Augment is after you’ve been forced to sleep with him to stay alive. I figured that scene was going to be one of the super important plot moments.

I debated using a Trek alien race or a made-up race but decided to go with Skrulls, on the grounds that evil shapeshifters are also very Star Trek and also I thought maybe I could fool people into thinking I made them up as long as I didn’t bring in Veranke until after the Skrull reveal.

And then, well, the ship is in danger, Tony nearly dies (you can tell that Star Trek II is one of my favorites) sacrificing himself to save the ship, gets his heart injured again, decides while he’s dying that he was being an idiot about Steve, and lets himself actually love Steve.

Basically, it is literally several actual Star Trek plots mashed together with Captain America’s backstory and a lot of infodumping. It is honestly way simpler than it looks; there were plenty of existing models for How To Tell A Star Trek Story and I pretty much just stole them.

I hope that helps.

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