Plotting

I hope you didn’t think we were going to daydream our way to a complete novel.

Too many excellent books suffer from lack of plot. They’ve got fascinating characters moving around and doing things in a vivid world, but they have no plot.

It sounds ridiculous to say it, but as a writer who focuses on characters and worldbuilding, it’s a lot easier to write a book without a plot than you’d think it is.

You can even write a GOOD book without a plot. Happens all the time.

My Goals

I, however, am not going to do that. I am not aiming at a GOOD book. I’m aiming to learn as much as possible through the building of this book, with a possible marvelous outcome of having a GREAT book.

With that in mind, I am going to specifically address and spend a lot of time on PLOTTING, as I know it is something I am not naturally very good at.

Aim For Your Weakness

Although I know that some of you are in the same boat as I am – characters and scenes come to mind easily, but the book itself seems to weaken and fall apart once you get past the opening scenes.

Not all of you do, however.

Find the thing that you are weak at – that you have trouble with. Seek out that weakness and confront it directly.

If I sit down and start writing, I can be pretty sure my world and characters will turn out okay. My plot, however, is going to royally suck.

My solution? I will have a plot in mind before I start writing. Of all the aspects of writing that I could plan out ahead of time, I WILL have a plot. I may not know my entire cast of characters and I won’t know every conflict and scene before I get started. I want to leave wiggle room for my writing to grow in unexpected places.

Climbing Plants

My plot, however, has time and time again NOT grown independantly as I wrote. To make a somewhat apt analogy, writing is like planting a seed and nursing a climbing plant (morning glories or cucumbers come to mind) into fruition. You can let it grow wild and tangled and crazy. You can trim it carefully as it grows to make sure that it doesn’t collapse under its own weight. You can give it a trellis to grow on. You can even tie bits of it to the trellis so that it knows which way to grow (sometimes they don’t like to climb even a convenient nearby trellis).

My seed is what we’ve done so far. I have a concept, a character, and some fun scenes I look forward to writing.

My trellis will be my plot. I will allow my plant some room to grow and expand within that trellis. I will carefully tie the growing stems to the trellis when it looks like it won’t do so on its own. I will trim back any bits that expand too far past the trellis.

Without that plot backbone, my flowers may still be beautiful, but they will be scattered and haphazard. They will overrun the garden. Worst of all, they will not bloom to their full potential – they will get less sunlight, they will have fewer and smaller blooms, and those blooms may be crushed beneath a tangled network of leaves and stems.

I want more than just to have a garden and grow plants. I want my plants to be beautiful and enjoyable to visitors. I want my plants to be as healthy and full as I can make them.

Back to Plots

Okay, okay, so I’ve yammered on about why I think pre-planning a plot is vital. HOW do we do this?

Well, the first thing we do is define what a plot IS. How is it different from conflict, theme, and all those other fun writing vocabulary words?

Let’s do some ground work.

Example

Let’s say that Jim wants to date Samantha.

Scenario 1:

Jim asks Samantha to go steady. She says yes. They kiss.

Zero conflict there, folks. None. That is one heckuva boring scene.

To ADD conflict, you need to throw some roadblocks in there to keep Jim and Samantha apart. Temporarily, of course. The kissing can happen later.

Scenario 2:

Jim is a soccer jock. He’s gotten everything he’s ever wanted. Rich family, loving parents, good looks, athletic ability…but then he meets Samantha. Samantha is smart, witty, confident, and cute. She’s also his lab partner and completely uninterested in him. The first time he asked her out, she rejected him. Every time they meet, sparks fly. He’s attracted to her on an intellectual level as well as a physical one. He’s also not the only guy interested in her. The soccer team even started a betting pool to see who she’d go to the prom with, though he doesn’t know about it because he’s skipped the last two practices to meet with her to go over their science project instead.

The science project is about to end, though. Once it’s done, he’ll be out of reasons to spend time with her. He decides to ask her to the prom. Nervous, he doesn’t ask her in science class, because he’s afraid she’ll turn him down in front of the other students. He decides to wait until after class, but the soccer coach corners him in the hallway and gives him a pep talk about his missed practices. He sees her leave the building. He’s got to hurry, or he’ll miss his chance. He knows of at least two other boys who want to ask her and he doesn’t want to be too late.

He cuts off the coach and bolts through the doors, but he can’t see her in the press of students. The red scarf she was wearing gives her away and he sees her board one of the busses. Dodging and weaving, heart pounding just as much as it ever did for a soccer game, he sees the bus pull out. Frantic, he chases it, pounding on the door. The bus driver takes pity on him and stops. He stands on the yellow line and realizes that he’ll have to ask her now, in front of all of these people, after stopping their bus and ignoring his coach.

Gathering his courage, he finds her, near the back of the bus. He asks her out.

Knowing about the stupid bet from the soccer team, she’s hurt, thinking that is why he asked her.

She says no.

She says NO.

And she says it in the most hurtful way she can, lashing out because she believes their growing friendship has been a game for him.

Slowly, he makes his shocked and mortified way to the front of the bus, the other students laughing and jeering at him.

Conflict

Hellooooo conflict! Conflict is anything and everything thrown into a character’s path to keep them from easily reaching their goals.

The main character is Jim. He wants to date Samantha. Road blocks we’ve added include:

• She’s already rejected him once, meaning she’s likely to do so again, so he’s nervous
• The coach stops him in the hallway, delaying him
• He misses the bus
• The soccer betting pool gives her a reason to say no

Nobody wants to read about a character that always succeeds and never has his desires or goals thwarted. What we want to read is about characters who succeed DESPITE being thwarted or rejected.

Although conflict CAN be a physical battle or competition, it is more often internal. The inner turmoil Jim felt when faced with asking Samantha on a date is crutial to the success of this scene. The goal, as a writer, is to make the reader CARE about what’s happening to Jim and his reactions to those conflicts. Samantha saying no should be a sucker punch to both Jim and the reader.

Stakes

Stakes are a way to raise the impact of conflict. If nothing is at stake, why should the reader care whether the main character wins or loses? Why should the man character even care?

Back to our example. What do either characters stand to lose in the first version? Not much. With the second version, however:

• Jim is skipping soccer practice for her. If she rejects him, he’ll have hurt his soccer career and scholarships for no reason.
• Jim’s reputation is on the line. He’ll be a laughing stock if she rejects him publicly.
• Samantha’s pride is on the line. She may think he’s cute and all, but if he’s only going to ask her out because of a stupid bet, then accepting his date would be a joke. SHE would be the laughing stock then.

We’re not saving the world here, but then again, not every book needs to have intergalactic meltdowns as the stakes.

Pace or Tension

We’ll be talking a lot about conflict and stakes. Especially in revision, it’s useful to evaluate every scene. What’s the conflict? What are the stakes? Are there any ways to raise the stakes? Can one character have more to gain or more to lose?

Manipulating your conflicts and stakes allows you to control the PACE and TENSION of the novel.

Traditional novel pacing is often illustrated by a graph, such as THIS ONE from wikipedia.

That graph is wrong, though not in concept. The peak or most exciting, tension-filled bit of your book should not be in the middle, but rather farther toward the end of the book.

A much better graph can be found on Jodi Meadows’s site on her Challenging Characters post. You could probably go read that whole post and get more information than I’m about to give you, but I never pass up an opportunity to expound on an idea just because someone else has already done it better than me. *winks*

You want your tension to build on itself, growing to the point where the conflict and tension are at their height. Your book should ramp up not with a smooth, glossy arc, but in jagged, conflicty sections that never quite relax down to the point they were before.

If your novel’s getting a big saggy and limp, you need to inject more conflict and heighten the stakes.

Primarily, I want to keep a mental image of Jodi’s graph in mind when I’m plotting my novel. Back to our plant analogy, she’s given us an excellent blueprint for the trellis we want to build. We can modify it to suit our needs and the materials we want to use, but it’s the best base for a novel’s conflict arc that I’ve ever seen.

Theme

While we’re building a terminology dictionary, let’s touch on Theme, too.

A theme is the moral or underlying message of your book.

The theme of our dating example above may be “Never Give Up” or “Pride Cometh Before a Fall” or “Communication is important” or “Love Conquers All”.

Knowing your theme is important because you can use it to drive your conflicts. If, for example, your theme is “Pride Cometh Before a Fall” then you know your characters will have to risk their pride and reputation in order to find their resolution. Typically, the theme is expressed through the method in which the final conflict is resolved. What do you want your readers to take with them when they’re done reading the book? What lesson would they (ideally) learn from your characters?

Oh, and please don’t beat us upside the head with the theme. If you have a character baldly stating the theme, you’re doing it wrong.

Plot

Okay, so we’ve covered a lot of terms in our journey to find out what a PLOT is.

A plot is the sequence of conflicts which brings a story to resolution.

A plot has a beginning and an end.

A plot will follow a tension arc such as the one in Jodi’s graph.

A plot will drive the theme of the book.

In short, the plot is all of these things combined. The whole enchilada.

When I say that I’m “working on the plot for my book,” I typically mean that I am working on the sequence of events which drive the story. I cannot build a great plot without tension, theme, and high-stakes conflict.

Homework

Learn your vocabulary.

I -think- I have these definitions and examples correct. If I am wrong (and I expect some of you may be able to correct me) please let me know in the comments and I’ll edit this.

For now, I want you to read up on conflict and stakes and tension and story arc (I really do recommend that post by Jodi Meadows VERY highly. Here, I’ll link it again).

We’re getting ready to build our plot – I want to make sure we understand what all the stuff on the blueprints mean.

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