Rantings: Ode to Plot Judo

I remain burned out on writing, and events of yesterday have left me a bit shaken anyway. No, I'm not talking about the primary; at least not much. I mean that yesterday, we lost an icon. This isn't really the time to discuss it, but I can tell you I already have my next Inspirations topic plan. For now, it will have to be a Ranting, which I'll dedicate to another deceased idol of mine who earned an inspiration blog some day as well. That idol is Douglas Adams, the work in question worth idolizing is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the design concept of his that I would like to champion is Plot Judo.

Adams described this in the script of the radio play that launched the multimedia series. He described a problem he had with his script, which was like all Adams products done notoriously close to or well past deadline. In this case, he wrote himself into one hell of a cliffhanger. He had his characters thrown out of an airlock by hostile aliens, where they faced certain death. There was little he could do. He could have them get rescued, but the odds of a passing ship finding them in space before they died was astronomically small.

He was stumped, until he saw a television show about the martial art known as Judo, which let its practitioners use the strength and momentum of their opponents against them. This skill with counters inspired Adams. Instead of fighting the sheer improbability of the characters in the story, he used this potential plot hole against it and created one of his greatest ideas: Improbability Drive, a method of spacecraft propulsion that ran entirely on unlikely odds. It was amusing, let the heroes get rescued (this time,) and set up constant scenes where the inherent chaos the ship's engines released affected the people around them. It even saved the ship from a missile attack later in the plot, by conveniently and very improbably turning the missiles into a whale and bowl of petunias.

I love using this method, especially if you have the time to really ponder the problem. Or if you have so little time that it's your last hope. Either way, it's good. Because the work I revealed to you people are so ancient, I can't use many examples, since I didn't really practice Plot Judo when I made them. Really, they were so simplistic I rarely had to, though you could argue that solving the problem of having too few characters by tossing in a pile of homeless characters might count.

Instead, I'll use some limited examples from more complex "investment" works. One of these was a long-needed revision of an action-rpg made in college. It's very close to my soul; I first made the thing when I was 12. No, I don't know why these two time periods specifically pop up so often. I guess I was in a creative slump when I was 11 and 14. Anyway, despite it being close to my soul and already on its third major revision by the time I was in college, it was also incredible tripe. It was clichéd up in every possible way. This wasn't entirely my fault. Months after I started working on it, Final Fantasy Seven came out, and that game altered everyone's perspectives on what a role playing game could be. Hell, it even used one of the same climatic plot-based dooms that I had planned for my game, which annoyed me at the time.

When I wanted to revise the game to match up to my current standards, this became a problem I had to work on. I couldn't remove the clichés completely; they fit the plot and setting too much. So I made them my weapon; I made the game into a bit of a deconstruction of the fantasy genre my making the world one where the clichés often spring to life. Yes, it's a bit like Discworld, but different enough to give it its own voice. More importantly, it offers a sort of counter-argument to the idealism of fantasy. This is especially true by making the fantasy elements not an inherent part of that world's scientific law, like it is in Discworld, but rather something planned by imperfect and potentially sinister forces.

Another example of how this works is in character development. Often, a plot develops in a way that forces a character to do something stupid or requires incredible coincidences, as it did for Adams. Instead of trying to work around it, Plot Judo suggests that the weakness of character be studied. No character can ever be completely explained, detailed, or rendered. There are also facets to explore, psychological issues left untapped, and secrets to reveal. These moments are perfect to expand the depth of a character. I can't tell you how often that's worked for Dot, just to use one example. Coincidences can become conspiracy, moments of weakness can show hidden phobias and traumas, and annoying character traits reveal facades the character keeps up or just leave a new opening for development.

Hell, technically, every example of Plot Judo is not just a way to explore your writing's weakness, it's a way to explore your own. If you were really a perfect writer, you never would even get yourself into these sorts of messes. By engaging in this sort of thinking, you can use it to explore your own weaknesses, discover new things about yourself, and develop your own personality at the same time you do it to your characters.