Alright, I am not entirely sure of where this goes, but I suppose nice green people will move it if I am wrong.

Plot ballooning, as I define it, is when your novel takes one point on your hundred-point outline and turns it into 7,000 words. It's when so much more than you ever though possible is happening, yet you still need to go through all the plot points you originally planned.

The discussion started in the NaNoWriMo 2011! thread when Varon said, I explained the phrase plot ballooning and related my personal woes. Phila said she had the same problem. Then Vanya said, and I realized we were getting off topic and plot ballooning deserved its own thread. After a minor squabble of who should start it, here I am.

Do you suffer/enjoy plot ballooning or not? Like plot ballooning or not? How do you prevent or induce plot ballooning?

It just happens. I suffered it, but this was the first time I ever used an outline.

I'm immune to it, mostly. But that's because I have no outline.

I kind of suffer from plot imploding. Even when I have an outline (which I don't think I ever have? Well, sort of...) things that are supposed to take up 2-3 chapters come out as one.

However, I have started on ideas that I thought might be 3-4 page short stories become novels... but I always blamed that on the fact that they didn't tell me they were novels before I started.

I don't find this a problem, because though I outline, I try to let the story grow however it wants and refrain from keeping it tied down. I plot properly before the second draft.

I don't really outline...I sort of just guess. So I can't say I've really had this problem. Though, I had sort of something like that happen in my novel.

I thought I would be finished with the 'beginning' of the story by chapter ten, and it turned out that I wasn't finished until chapter eighteen. So I didn't get to the climax of my plot until later and my estimated 30K book, turned more into an estimated 50-60K novel.

But it was cool...not really annoying.

Well... I did outline my NaNo novel. But it kind of got off track when I added in more characters and put in a plot twist. (That was my characters' fault, though, not mine. )

*finally remembers to post on thread*

I'm an outliner, so I have this problem occasionally. Lately, it's not so much that my plot is expanding. In some cases, I'm not even adding a lot of scenes. Rather, my scenes are turning out a lot longer than I expected. They're going into greater detail, or else the style is more rambling, or there's two pages of character internal monologue before the action starts.

I don't think this is a "problem" as long as the extra words help tell a good story. If the words are warranted or necessary, they are not wasted. However, it can be extremely annoying to have a novel turn out significantly longer than you expected because it can upset your goals and long-term plans.

I had this issue with my NaNo novel. The style was a lot more verbose than expected, so instead of finishing my novel during NaNo, I only got about a half or two-thirds done. Peter's Angel just threw me for a large loop in this regard... My scenes are turning out significantly longer than I expected, plus I have more scenes than I estimated. Instead of 120,000 words, my book is threatening to be somewhere in the 200,000 range. To accommodate I have to set back my goal for finishing the novel by at least a month. I'll survive, of course, but it's a little disgruntling!

I don't outline so I can't say I've had much trouble with this, but I have had several characters develop backstories that I didn't count on and built more of their POV into the story than I had intended.

Inducing it is simple enough, personally, I work better with damaged characters, and so I just decide on how they are damaged and build the backstory around that. Other than that I just get a little loose and free with the keyboard and make the scenes a lot larger than I meant to.

That is quite an impressive expansion, Aubrey. I hope you get to make it that large, that would certainly be an epic.

Yes, it was a bit perturbing. But thank you!

This occasionally happens to me. Something I just wrote down very briefly end up having a lot more to them then I expected so it sort of happens. Usually in a good way.

This doesn't happen to me usually. Everything I write does end up becoming huge, but that's normally because I'm horrible at estimating how big my ideas are to begin with.
However, I've recently suffered from this balloon. Through our character fractalling system I discovered that Beorn's story needed to include a lot of information from Beorn's past I was only going to reference. The result of which is a poem at least a third longer than I thought it would be.


Suffer, but I try not to give my story the satisfaction of knowing that it's getting to me.
Not like it... in a fond sort-of way.
I do neither. The story holds the reins.

I'm not sure that I would call it 'suffering' when one of my stories 'balloons', but then, I hardly ever outline a story. Not until I already have the plot lined out in my head.

My first plot-balloon, and the biggest which comes to mind, is my first Nano, which I wrote completely from scratch. It started out as a really cliche story of this boy who lives in a city which is led by corrupted leaders who killed off the royal family. The boys finds out that there is an heir still alive and with some friends goes out to find this heir and some other minor adventures ensue.
That fifty-odd-thousand word story has now become a trilogy of books, each somewhere in the area of four hundred pages. And the plot is almost completely changed. The basis of it, what I just stated above, is still there, but it plays a much smaller part and all the characters have grown up. That story continues to grow, and sometimes that does worry me, but I enjoy it too.

I'd say that outlining is probably a good idea, but it just isn't something that usually works for me. I start with a minor idea, a first chapter, a fight scene and then--often very gradually--I build the rest around that little germ of an idea as it comes to mind.
So, I guess you could say that I have plot-balloons bursting into my stories all the time.