Post by QHi all. I'm working on a story but I need help with the plot.
Basically the main character travels through time to meet renaissance
men (scientists/artists) to gather items the have made. These items are
components to a bigger machine. What should that machine be? What
should the components be? What sort of trouble should the character get
into while he is in the past?
Thanks!
Q
Not to be too discouraging, but I think that your problems with the plot are
rather major. It sounds as though you have not yet decided why you are writing
the book. Usually a writer has a point to get across, then decides on the
method to achieve that point, and the structure of the plot follows.
Then there are the technical questions, such as why a time traveler would need a
machine from a previous era in the first place. It would seem that the time
traveler comes from a society where such a primitive machine would be easy to
construct.
As to the "sorts of trouble" for the TT to get into, that indicates an episodic
approach to the story, rather than an integrated one in which problems would
evolve out of the nature of the undertaking.
Then one has to ask, why is the time traveler necessary to the story? Could it
be written in the renaissance era without a time traveler?
Finally, the framing of the question would indicate that you have not yet done
your research on the Renaissance. A good author studies all he or she can find
on the history of the era and place the story will be set. An author in
Connecticut I know who is writing an historical fiction work went to England to
see the personal documents of an 18th century earl she is writing about. She
got permission of the family AFTER exhausting all of the publicly available
records in archives and libraries.
There is no substitute for research. And there is no substitute for having a
strong purpose to the novel before writing a word.
Francis A. Miniter