And neither does it in a book. Of course, as any great jelly-connoisseur could tell you the perfect ‘en tremblant‘ morsel of succulent elegance is nothing without the flavor. Jelly is the carrier not the end. Of course, it too can ruin a great dish – turning it into tasteless chewy rubber or failing to set at all. For those of you who who are saying “I don’t like food which doesn’t have the decency to stand still while I am trying to eat it, I think it’s one of them alligatery things they teach you about in literature. I believe they are possibly related to that meta-four thingy. I think in the case of alligatories meeting (or meating) one would be enough for me, unless they were already in aspic. Ok, forgive me, I am very tired – I have slept about 4 hours in the last 3 days (chest infection, full of antibiotics now) and that makes my brain play with its food – words. This was actually a serious writing discussion, which came up from something Rawle Nyanzi talked about on X… which gelled into this.
So many writers (me too, said the hashtag) come up with a brilliant setting or concept or even scene… and think that is the story, done. It would be nice if it was that easy that ‘the big idea’ (We’ll make spaceships out of Chinese food’ . “We’ll have dinosaur overlords coming out of stasis and ordering their foul descendants to war.” “We’ll have a militant brussels sprout stick in the craw of the Azeri ambassador and have the backslap that saves his life expel it with such force that it splits the emperor’s skull, starting bloody war and crucifericions”). At every con I’ve been to – and quite a few occasions between I have been buttonholed by ‘big idea’ people who think that is a book. They’ll tell me, if I agree to just write (or would that be wright?) it and give them half the money.
Look, these things CAN be story germinal. But really, seeds is what they are. A germination point, maybe. Sometimes, if you’re a pantser, you’ll run on from there. But mostly – says the guy who has at least 100 of these ‘seeds’ in files on his computer, on notepads etc, you need much more. What you have is possibly great, and possibly what people will remember about your story, they are not a story in themselves.
Now: the question is how do you make it into one (besides with startling speed and pulling it underwater until it drowns, as any good alligatory would.)
I think I had better go to bed. Good night.
Mad Genius Club 
6 responses to “Jelly – the setting doesn’t make it.”
Until the past couple of years or so, I’ve always thought of myself as a character/situation kind of writer who tended to extrapolate outwards from the character/situation, but starting a new series in late 2022 and looking back over my origin notes for my previous series instead convinced me that this was not the case. In all three cases, I started with a vague general idea of the type of setting I wanted, and started mentally checking out characters and situations until I found something I was willing to write.
As I get into a series and the characters become active in my head, I find that I come up with scenes or fragments, and wonder what series-story they’re part of. Are they the mid-point crisis (Bk 1, 2, 3, 5) or a comic insight (Bk 1, 2, 4, 5), etc.? It’s a bit like dreaming ahead of the plots, but for my characters, not me.
It partly jelly, looking for attachments, but it’s also often the underpinning of the mechanics of the plot structure flex points. (“Oh, of course! That’s how that’s going to set everything up…”)
Randomness (and character/world familiarity) set up the snippets (like playing sleepily with one’s dolls); the snippets set up some of the emotional beats; some of them become story architectural hinges; some of them suggest actions for later books.
It’s a part of the process I really enjoy.
I add a “What if?” to the setting. What if … the descendants of dinosaurs ruled a planet via a quasi-meritocracy, and then an intelligent, competent female mammal showed up? What if … a group of people decided to settle a planet even though the terraforming went wrong, but the bureaucracy that followed them had a collective dummy-spit over the “changes”?
Setting + conflict + characters = story.
Research. Looooots of research. And gaming “what-if-then?” in my head, and trying for the variant that has the characters that seem best.
…Best for what, may be determined over time….
Blast it, now totally-not-snow-white is trying to make jelly.
Thankfully ‘most’ of those random ‘seeds’ don’t germinate… LOL