It's All About The Plot III

I ended my previous blog on my approach to plotting with a mention of the secondary plot. When I write there’s always something else going on to distract our hero. Our hero has to save the world from nuclear destruction, while at the same time keeping his wife from running off or keeping his kid from using drugs or studying for that test so he can finish his degree. This is the human drama that goes on in the shadow of the larger mission. This makes it easier for the reader to relate to our hero because whatever it is, the secondary plot is something they’ve had to deal with too. It helps to complicate our hero’s life while making him a bit more human.

With all the major plot objectives in place I begin to flesh out the outline by creating a number of events I call beats. Beats, because like music and comedy, novels have a rhythm to them. Our hero faces a barrier, climbs it, rests, faces another barrier, breaks thru, rests, etc. This is how you control the pace. Moments of high tension alternate with moments of taking a breath.

Each beat is a scene, like in a play or movie, with a definite when and where the event takes place. They are the challenges our hero must face to attain his goal. They must appear in a logical progression, each leading logically to the next. They must each offer a real challenge to our hero, and they must get harder as he goes. Each time he is less sure, or at least the reader is less sure that he will succeed. 

Remember, the central conflict runs through your whole story, but it can’t be in every beat. Still, there should be conflict in every scene. So in addition to the central conflict, it’s good to have a chronic conflict. This underlying conflict can provide the opportunity for beats that don’t grow from the central conflict, offering a rest from the big picture. Chronic or underlying conflicts don’t necessarily have to be resolved at the end of the story.

You’ll also want to add internal conflicts. These scenes can really help characterization. Other beats can grow from transient conflicts. Even in scenes that require boring background exposition, transient conflicts keep the scenes from being boring.

So that’s it. I plan the order of the actual events that will take place during my hero’s journey toward success. It doesn’t need to be as obvious as The Odyssey, but that is the basic pattern. When I have enough beats to take up about 80,000 words, I’ve got a plot and it’s time to start writing. I start with a good strong hook that gets readers’ attention and tells them what kind of book it is. At the end I wrap-up of all the loose ends.

It’s as simple (and maddeningly difficult) as that.

It’s All About the Plot – II

Last week I said I’d explain how I go about plotting a story. Let me remind you that this is MY approach, and it may or may not fit your writing style.

My plots usually start with a “what if” idea. For example, the big idea for Blood and Bone came from a news story I was working on about a bone marrow donation program. I thought, “what if” someone needed a transplant and the only possible donor was missing?  My detective Hannibal would have to find the missing person.

So I have an idea of where the plot starts.  Hannibal needs to find a missing person. And I know where it ends.  Hannibal will find the missing person in time and save the day.

Now you may not have noticed, but I just gave you the outline of a story. 

Hannibal is asked to find a missing person =è Hannibal finds him and saves the day.

If I was writing something simpler, say, a fairy tale, the outline might be:

Hansel and Gretel get lost=è Hansel and Gretel get home.

This is the basic outline and from here I just add more and more detail until I’m ready to write. Notice that the story starts when the normal state of things is disturbed, and ends when the normal state is restored.   

The next step is to fill in a slightly more complex diagram:

                          Now what?                                             What now?                       

Problem presented==è much bigger problem appears --à  high speed finish=è hero saves the day.

The “problem presented” section is about a quarter of the book.  It only looks like our hero has a big problem until the second bit.  This is what I call the “now what?” point, at which our protagonist is temporarily at a loss for what to do next. (Goldfinger’s not just smuggling – he plans to rob Fort Knox.) That second bit is around half the book. At the end of that point it what I call the “what now?” point, or better yet, the “we’re doomed!” point, when all appears lost. (The Death Star is moving in and powering up!) Then the hero figures out the solution and it’s a race to the finish.  If you watch Hollywood movies with a stopwatch you’ll see they almost always use this three-act framework. For our familiar example it would look like this:

                    

Hansel & Gretel are lost=è  h & g are captured by a witch ===è  h & g escape & kill witch =è 

h & g get home.

Once I get this far I start looking for the secondary plot. Why? Well, that’s the topic for next week.

It's All About the Plot

Last week I discussed some of the elements of writing fiction, and today I'll start sharing what I've learned about one of them.

For some writers the most fun part of writing is creating the plot, the actual series of events that take place in the story. The basics seem so simple. A good plot starts with conflict and ends with resolution.  So the first thing you need to know is, what is the central conflict?  What is it that my protagonist wants? And what are the obstacles to him or her getting that thing. For example, in the film Rocky, the title character wants to be a successful boxer. The current champion wants to stop him. That’s where the plot begins.

The plot starts with someone who wants something important, and follows them as they strive to get it. They need to do that striving themselves, and they need to learn something from the effort.  What matters in plot, unlike football, is not whether you win or lose but how your hero plays the game.

In a really good plot, each of the lead character’s successes leads to another failure, and each of the character’s failures is somehow caused by his own flaws. You can see these points in every bible story, every fairy tale, and most classic long poems like, say, the odyssey.

The protagonist is the lead character whose plot we’re following.  The antagonist is the person or force trying to stop our protagonist from getting what he so dearly wants.  it could be Goliath or Goldfinger or Mt Everest if your hero feels the need to climb it. The antagonist – the bad guy – has to offer serious competition, maybe appear from the beginning to be too much for our hero.  And the barriers our hero faces have to be logical and believable.

How does a writer make sure his novel captures all those elements? For me, the only way is to outline the plot before I being writing.

But my outlines are not like the ones they taught me to make in junior high school. I’ll walk you through my style of outlining next week.

What's It All About?

I’ve been contemplating some of the questions I am often asked at writers’ conferences and clubs. It seems to me, contrary to obvious assumptions, that the simplest questions draw the most complex answers.

For example, there’s “What should I write?” If the person asking is seeing me as a fellow writer, they might really want to know what books are selling right now. If they see me as a publisher, they may really be trying to find out what my company is looking for. Either way I tend to take the questions literally. Therefore I answer the question with a question: “What do you read?” When I get a quick, strong response the rest is easy. If you’re an avid reader of romance or legal thrillers or horror tales, that’s what you should write. Write that book you really want to read. Occasionally someone is honest enough to admit they don’t read much. In which case my answer is: “Don’t write.”

Almost as often I’ll be asked something like, “What’s the most important part of a story?” Among fiction writers, this is sometimes a confusing issue. The person I’m talking with may want my take on whether fiction writing is an art or a craft (of course, it is both, and they are equally important.) Or they may be focused on the so-called elements of fiction. Perhaps they’ve written a character driven novel and are being told that a story is all about the plot. Or they have something to say, a strong theme but their first readers say it’s the dialog that pulls the reader into the story. Or they’ve created a wonderfully complex universe in their speculative fiction story, and a good friend has tried to help them by explaining that world-building isn’t what people want. They need to have a unique voice.

I get it. We all want to assemble the parts and build a sturdy novel or short story, and we want to know what part to focus most on. Sadly, the true answer is to the “most important part” question is: “All of them.” A great story with weak characters is as big a fail as wonderfully developed characters who spout weak dialog. Every one of those elements is vital to a great story. And the worst part is, you can’t even develop them separately. Those elements grow organically, like crystals, and rely on each other to grow strong. The setting helps shape the characters whose actions drive the plot that expresses the theme revealed in the dialog IF the story is being told from the right point of view.

That said, the elements of fiction can be discussed separately, and I’ll try to do some of that in the next few blogs.