Usually when I plot a story I try to reduce every decision to an either/or.
If you’re writing a story or working out what should happen next in a story-plan and you think you’re stuck, you can always reduce your choices to two. Things become much simpler that way and can stoke some great imaginative leaps.
At the very simplest level, you always have the fundamental choice: either my character dies now or doesn’t.
Most of the time you’re going to choose to keep your main character alive, I would have thought, though there are plenty of examples of dead protagonists, or main characters who die at unexpected moments half-way through a story.
Writing the Jimmy Coates books, I’m always reducing my plot decisions to either/or. Either Jimmy finds out that someone has betrayed him, or he doesn’t. Either Jimmy escapes with a computer chip intact or he doesn’t. Either NJ7 track Jimmy down and trap him, or they don’t.
You get the idea.
Then I explore the consequences of each choice, following each potential branch of the story into other branches until I get to a point that doesn’t work, which means I can eliminate that branch and go back to the ones that are left and haven’t reached a dead end yet. Or I might reach an unexpected consequence that I find particularly exciting, which means I’ll immediately discontinue all the other branches and stick with that one.
The other thing you have to add in to this system is that I always know where I’m heading, because I plot out my climax points first. So the splitting branches are simply offering me different paths to the points I know I’m ultimately trying to reach.
The reason I’m telling you this is because something interesting has come along.
I find myself working on a story where I have to pursue ALL the branches – fully. I have to keep all of the options alive and make each of them as exciting as any other.
This is not easy.
I don’t want to explain what this project is yet, I just thought I’d share with you the concept, and the basis of my new challenge.
Every moment is a potential choice. What if every possible choice were fully explored, leading to an infinite number of other choices, and each of those were also fully explored?
There’s a school of thought that believes this is what happens in real life. Alternative worlds, parallel universes… they all exist, branching off from each other, exploring every possible scenario that could ever exist in the universe.
It’s a tricky thing to try to write.
Congratulations to Anthony Browne on becoming the new children’s laureate. I’m looking forward to seeing how he continues the wonderful work of Michael Rosen (and whether he has a plan to get the eight of us out of here!)