“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”  – Anton Chekhov, quoted in Shchukin’s Memoirs

 At some point in their career, most writers have heard that quote, or one of the several variations on it. The idea is supposed to be that one shouldn’t introduce unnecessary elements into a story or play. It’s supposed to be about the importance of simplicity and not doing foreshadowing that you aren’t going to make use of.

In fact, what it’s about is audience expectations and the ways that authors manipulate them. You can tell by changing the supposed dramatic element in the quotation: “If you say in the first chapter that there is a fishing rod hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter, someone absolutely must go fishing” does not make me nod and agree almost automatically, the way “If you hang a rifle on the wall…” does.

Why? Because rifles are dangerous; rifles are dramatic; rifles sound as if they ought to be important, and if they turn out not to be, the audience is going to be disappointed.  Fishing rods, on the other hand, are not inherently dramatic, dangerous, or important, so the reader or audience is unlikely to take one look at a fishing rod and go “Ohmygosh, what’s he going to catch?” More usually, the fishing rod will just be part of the décor, something that hardly even registers.

That is, unless there’s something about the fishing rod that strikes the reader as unusual or out of place. A fishing rod made of solid gold, for instance, or an ordinary one hanging on the wall in a space station. Either one raises questions, because a solid gold fishing rod is impractical and there’s nowhere to go fishing on a space station (probably) – and the reader expects the writer to answer those questions before the end of the story.

The notions that a rifle is dangerous and interesting but a normal fishing rod isn’t, that a gold fishing rod is a peculiar thing, and that there’s not likely to be anywhere to fish on a space station all come from the reader’s experience outside the story. If you present something you know the reader will think of as dangerous or unusual, it raises questions: why is this here? Why is it so unusual? Is there an explanation? Will it be used somehow later? And as soon as you start raising questions, the reader starts expecting answers…maybe not right away, but at some point before the story ends.

Context also has a lot to do with the reader’s expectations. If there’s something unusual on the living room mantelpiece, the reader is going to expect the story to do something with it, whether the something is a rifle or a frying pan. If, however, the frying pan is on the kitchen stove and the rifle is in the gun room at the hunting lodge, readers are much more likely to just blip past them as part of the normal landscape. Similarly, if the mantel is occupied by a rifle, a frying pan, three slices of bread, a dirty sock, a 1911 edition of the Field Guide to Insects of the Amazon Rain Forest, a postcard from Paris, a machete, two fake diamond rings, and a trombone, the reader is not as likely to register either the rifle or the frying pan as particularly significant; instead, it’s the oddness of the collection of things that commands attention.

There are lots of ways writers can make use of this. For instance, the really important item in that miscellaneous list might be the postcard from Paris (which contains the clue to the murder), but burying it in the middle of a list of much more peculiar items makes the reader less likely to notice it. Conversely, if the writer wants the reader to notice and remember something ordinary, they can put it somewhere that’s not its usual context, or make it an unusual color or material. It depends on the kinds of questions and expectations the writer wants to raise.

But there’s one more thing, and that’s the spaghetti method (as in, “throw a handful of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks”). When you don’t know where your story is going – or sometimes, even if you think you do – you throw in some cool description or a character bit or a little razzle-dazzle that doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything. It’s just there because it was a fun bit. And then one of three things happens:

1) You get to the end of the story, and it was just a fun bit and doesn’t add anything really. It didn’t stick to the wall. So you cut it out when you do the revisions.

2) You get stuck a chapter or two down the road, so you go back and look at what you’ve already written, and there’s your cool bit, and it’s just what you need to get the characters moving, or get them out of the hole they’re in. Presto, you have just become a genius of foreshadowing. (Don’t tell anyone it was an accident.)

3) The little bit about the music box or the character’s fondness for pistachios crops up again a few scenes later, and then again, and then suddenly it’s become a recurring theme, or a setup for a key plot point, or a poignant memory for someone else, or the clue that proves the character guilty/innocent. You didn’t plan it, but once the pattern started to form, it was irresistible and useful. Sometimes, when this happens, you realize that you need to go back and mention the pistachios in Chapter One for just that last little bit of necessary backfill, and sometimes everything ends up in the perfect place because that’s just where it happened. You’re still a genius of foreshadowing, just don’t mention that you made it up as you went along.

Most of the non-writing folks who talk about that Chekhov quote only look at point #1, and argue that it would be easier not to put the “unnecessary” bits in in the first place. They don’t realize that the writer doesn’t always know what is or isn’t necessary until later on in the process. And that they don’t have to.

“Plot points” are one of those writing terms with no standard definition. I was a bit surprised to discover that some people use the term to refer very specifically to the events that mark the theoretical boundary between “acts” of a story. That is, if you’re using a three-act structure, your story has two plot points, one between acts one and two, and one between acts two and three. If you’re using a five-act structure, the story would have four plot points.

At the other end of the range, I found a definition that boils down to “anything significant.” That’s a little broad, but when you get down to cases, I find it a lot more useful than the extremely limited version above.

And then there are the folks in the middle, who define “plot point” as synonymous with “turning point” – a life-changing decision or event that opens some new paths for the characters and closes others. In Lord of the Rings, the hobbits’ meeting with Strider in Bree is one such event; Frodo’s decision to volunteer to be ring-bearer is another. This definition is in the middle of the range because it’s generally accepted that there’s a major turning point at the end of each act, but there can be lots of lesser ones along the way.

After looking at a bunch of different definitions and examples, the best one I can come up with is this: plot points are the information the reader must have in order for the story to make sense. That’s why general examples of plot points tend to include the word “significant” a lot: The characters perform a significant action, or make a significant decision, or discover significant information or clues; a significant character or place or question is introduced; something significant is set up or paid off or answered, etc.

In other words, plot points are things that move the story forward. They can be large and obvious (finding out that Bilbo’s ring is the One Ring, hiding from Ringwraiths on the road to Buckleberry Ferry), or they can be seemingly inconsequential things that set up a scene or situation or key bit of information for later (Sam remarking, very early, that he’d like to see elves one day). They’re not limited to life-changing events or decision, but they certainly include them (a life-changing event or decision is nearly certain to be “significant” to the story-in-progress, after all).

So what are the things the reader needs to know to make sense of the story? Who the central characters are, for one; what the key strengths and weaknesses and relationships are that will cause them to take or not take important plot-relevant actions. What information the characters need to have at any given point in order to move forward. How they get that information (and if it seems to come out of nowhere, all too conveniently, then the writer may need to add a plot point earlier to set things up so it’s not such a coincidence). What choices they have and what decisions they can make. What actions they take as a result of the information and choices they have and the decisions they’ve made. What things need to be set up, and what the payoff of each setup is.

Looking at plot points this way is useful from a couple of different directions. The first is that if plot points are things that move the story forward, that means they are the source of narrative drive, and a writer can theoretically control the pace and drive of the story by controlling how many plot points are included in a scene or on each page. If readers are complaining about a scene or story moving too slowly, maybe it’s because there aren’t enough plot points per scene to maintain the narrative drive.

The second interesting thing is that you can examine and create plot points from either direction. That is, you can write a story or plot outline and then make a list of what plot points are missing (what things need to be set up or introduced or clarified for the reader), so you know what to add/fix in revision, or you can start with an idea and a blank sheet of paper, make a list of possible plot points, and construct the outline from there. Or you can work from both ends toward the middle: start by making a list of key plot points, and add to it or rearrange it as you write and realize that things are happening in a different order or going in a different direction.

The last interesting thing about this definition (and most of the others) is that “plot points” are not necessarily strictly about plot. Bringing an important new character onstage is a plot point (Gollum, for instance); so is introducing the reader to a major new setting (Rivendell, the Mines of Moria, Edoras, Mount Doom). One could color-code one’s list of “plot points” in a variety of ways (blue for characters; red for actions/decisions; yellow for settings/information; or perhaps using lighter shades or secondary colors like green, orange, and purple for subplots…)

My point here is not to encourage people to waste time (though if you find it useful to your writing, it’s not a waste of time). It’s more to remind folks that the reader needs to know more than just “what happens next;” they need to know who and how and why and where, as well as what. So if you’re going to try analyzing your writing for plot points (it’s not required, and it won’t be useful to everyone), don’t limit your “plot points” strictly to the action.

A query letter is a one-page business letter that presents the author’s novel to an editor or agent in hopes they’ll ask to see more.

“One page business letter” means just that: one page, single sided. If you’re emailing your query, stick to one screen (less if you have a double-wide monitor, because many editors don’t). This means you don’t have much room, which is a Really Key Point.

Publishers’ submission guidelines trump everything else. Read them. Believe them. If they say they want to see three sentences scribbled on a Post-It-Note, send them that (but for heaven’s sake, don’t send it to anyone else!)

Query letters are mainly for novels. Short fiction doesn’t need to be queried, because it’s short; it takes the editor less time to read it than it takes him/her to read and respond to a query and then read the story. I understand that some markets want queries for nonfiction articles, but they should say that in their guidelines. I’ve done maybe three nonfiction pieces in thirty years, all by specific request, so I wouldn’t know.

Now let’s take apart a disguised mash-up version of the less-than-stellar queries I got sent recently. Here’s more or less what I received:

“This book is my attempt to write a story that justifies the longest and most detailed description of a forest in English Literature, which I hope is also enlightening and entertaining. It follows the development of an lumberman-turned-eco-activist in a world of magical realism, through his revelations and enlightenment over a lifetime, as he reflects on his mistakes and triumphs from youth to old age while he prepares to move out of the home he has lived in for over eighty years.”

This story may, possibly, have been a great one, though I have my doubts. I can, however, assure her (and everyone else) that “this book contains the longest description of a forest ever” is not going to be a big selling point for editors. Also, every author hopes their book will be enlightening and entertaining, so you really don’t need to tell the editor that.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to write the longest, coolest description of a forest ever, and taking that as the starting point for a novel. Editors, however, are not interested in what inspired the writer to write the book, nor in learning which aspects of writing the story were the most fun for the writer. Editors want to know why a reader – preferably a whole lot of readers – would want to read this book so badly that they will pay money for it. They want to know what came out of the inspiration or challenge or whatever. They want specifics. They want the story.

The “plot summary” above doesn’t even tell us the main character’s name, much less where the story takes place. (Is this forest in northern Canada, or a South American jungle, or perhaps Russia?) There’s some indication of change on the part of the main character, but nothing about the whys, the hows, the obstacles he faces, or the events that precipitate the change.

The things you need in a query letter plot summary are:

-The protagonist’s name, or the two (or three) most important characters’ names, if it’s an ensemble cast

-An explanation of the central story problem or goal

-One or two key obstacles the protagonist has to overcome

-How the problem is resolved (or the goal achieved)

Once you have these things, you then arrange them into two or three paragraphs, being as specific as possible (“his mistakes and triumphs” is not specific. “His success in the lumber industry” and “the suicide of his youngest son” are specific) and adding just enough detail to connect things together. There isn’t likely to be room for subplots or a lot of backstory, but if you have room, you can add a few more key details, like where the story is located and how the main character got into the mess he’s in. 

For this particular query, I’d have to make up pretty much all of the above. So I will:

1. Protagonist’s name: George Landin

2. Story problem: George feels his life has been pointless

3. Obstacles: Moving out of the home he’s lived in for 80 years makes George feel more depressed. In sorting through his stuff, he keeps running across reminders of his mistakes and failures, ditto. And since this is magical realism, every time he picks up an object, he gets to re-live a vision/scene/memory, which gradually become more vivid and begin showing him alternate lives as he goes on. George begins to be swamped by his possible pasts.

4. Resolution: George lets go of his stuff and all the possible alternate lives, and makes his peace with himself and his past.

Those are still pretty general, but this is supposed to be the guideline that I’m going to use to write the plot summary, not the plot summary itself. As long as the specifics get into the actual summary, I’m OK.

So I took the above key points and string them together, and this is what I came up with:

As George Landin prepares to move out of the home in which he has lived for nearly eighty years, he is troubled by the feeling that his life has been pointless. Each object he must discard or pack away recalls a memory: of his lonely childhood in the north woods of Oregon, of his marriage, of his early success in the lumber industry, of the tragic suicide of his second son, the subsequent failure of his business, and his attempt to reinvent himself as an environmental activist. The memories grow more vivid and develop into visions of the life he might have had, had he made different choices. George is nearly overwhelmed by all his possible pasts, until he finds a wooden statue of a meadowlark that was carved by his grandfather. The statue anchors him enough to let go of the alternative realities along with all his mementoes and make his peace with himself and the life he has actually lived. As he leaves the house for the last time, he gives the statue to his son.

This is just an illustration of how to go about coming up with a query-letter-sized plot summary; I very much doubt that this one is anything like the story the author of the original query actually wrote.

That seems like a pretty obvious statement, until you start looking at all the different ways of analyzing stories: the three-act structure, the four-act structure, the five-act structure, the four-acts-plus-teaser structure, linear, nonlinear, parallel running scenes, reverse parallel scenes…the list goes on and on, and people are constantly inventing new ways of telling stories and of looking at and analyzing those stories once they’ve been told.

Nevertheless, that basic beginning, middle, end lies behind even the most complicated story, once you untangle the chronology and the ups and downs of the various ways of presenting or structuring it. And every writer I know has trouble with at least one of those three basic areas. Which area is problematic varies from writer to writer and book to book, but for a whole lot of us, it’s the middle of the story that’s the slog, and it doesn’t seem to matter whether the story is a hundred-thousand-word novel or a two-page short story.

The middle is where things veer off course, and where seemingly minor oversights, missteps, and detours can ruin what should have and could have been a dramatic and moving endgame. Because the middle is where the characters grow and change; it’s where the plot twists; it’s where the characters (and often the writer) struggle to get somewhere, figure something out, make a plan or a decision.

Middles are vitally important to any story. In one sense, they are the story; going straight from setup (beginning) to wrap-up (ending) is rarely satisfying. How interesting would The Lord of the Rings have been if Tolkien had begun with the first few chapters in the Shire and then said “So Frodo left, carrying the ring. Nearly a year later, he and Sam approached Mount Doom…” and went on to the destruction of the ring? Not very; indeed, the ending would hardly make any sense at all without knowing some of the things that have happened along the way, like how he lost track of Merry and Pippin, who Gollum is and what he’s doing there, etc. The best opening hook won’t keep readers reading if the middle of the book bogs down, and the most amazing ending won’t salvage a dreadful middle because the readers won’t ever get to the ending.

Yet middles get short shrift in a lot of how-to-write books. Most of them spend a chapter or two on the standard plot skeleton (problem-complications-crisis-resolution), and then spend most of their time on particular elements like dialog, characterization, description, theme, style, viewpoint, etc. This strikes me as explaining to someone how to make lovely bricks without ever telling them how to put them together to make a sturdy wall.

To my way of thinking, what the middle part of a story needs is the sense that we’re getting somewhere. That doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a physical journey involved; “getting somewhere” can just as easily mean slowly whittling down the list of suspects in a murder mystery, or the deepening relationship between the main characters of a Romance novel, or any number of other things that make the reader feel as if something important is coming closer and closer.

(The somewhere the middle is getting to will, eventually, be the end of the story. This ought to go without saying, but it’s amazing the number of writers who find themselves heading in some completely unanticipated direction. When this happens, it is usually best to adjust the ending and pretend that is what you meant to do all along.)

Most often, the sense of progress in the middle of the story is expressed as an increase in tension – as time and the story go on, the situation keeps getting worse despite all the main characters’ efforts – but there are other ways to keep the middle moving. Increasing apprehension (where the actual physical situation is not any worse, but the characters are finding out more and more reasons to be worried) is one; increasing urgency is another (where there’s some sort of time limit: the cure must be found before the patient deteriorates past a certain point, the bomb must be disarmed before the countdown timer reaches zero, the dress must be finished by the afternoon before prom night). The main character’s emotional involvement with the problem, or with some other character, can increase over the middle of the story; his/her self-knowledge can grow; the amount of information the character (and thus the reader) has about the central story problem and/or its solution can grow.

Managing the middle of the story usually means paying attention to several levels at once, because everything affects everything else. The emotional level (how much the main character cares) affects the reader’s perception of the physical level (how dire the physical threat is). If the physical threat or the urgency keeps rising, but the main character cares less and less about whatever is being threatened, the middle will probably bog down. If the main character cares, but doesn’t appear to be learning anything despite repeated encounters, the middle will probably bog down. It’s like adjusting the sliders to balance the speakers on your car sound system; it’s not enough to get the treble perfectly right if the bass is way off.

The question “what’s at stake for the characters?” has been much on my mind lately, as it’s been at the root of some of the difficulties I’ve been having developing a plot for my current work-soon-to-be-in-process-I-hope. I have what I think is an interesting world, and a set of characters I like. I have some cool incidents and events. I even have quite a lot of plot-like stuff waving about in the breeze, looking for somewhere it can anchor.

The trouble is that the plot-stuff won’t anchor, because my characters don’t have enough of a stake in what’s going on.

What anchors a central plot-problem to the characters is a stake through the heart: something that makes the central plot-problem matter to the character in a deep and personal way, because that problem affects something that the character cares deeply about. Sometimes, the stake connects straight to the central problem itself; sometimes the connection takes a couple of steps to get from character to central problem. Ultimately, though, if there’s no connection – if the main character has no reason to care about the pirates or the murder or the Evil Overlord – there’s no reason for that character to get involved in the first place.

Years ago, I heard somebody on a panel say that there were two ways of getting a character moving: either find something really important that she doesn’t have and dangle it in front of her, so that she struggles to get it, or else take something really important away from him, so that he has to struggle to get it back.

The “something really important” doesn’t have to be an object; it can be something like “peace of mind” or “becoming a doctor” or “keeping my family/friends/country safe.” It can even be something that, from the outside, looks enormously trivial, like “getting my rubber duckie back,” as long as it’s a) really important to the character and b) seriously at risk due to whatever the central plot-problem is.

The first trick is finding that really important something. Because an awful lot of things that are Really Important on the grand scale that we like to read and write about turn out not to be important enough to a particular character to get him/her to work at achieving them or fixing them or finding them or getting rid of them. It took Tolkien seventy-five pages (in my edition of The Lord of the Rings) and the appearance of the Black Riders just to get Frodo to leave home, despite what Gandalf had already told him of the One Ring and the importance of getting it to Rivendell.

Whatever the important thing is, it is going to vary from character to character. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that some things are universal – that anybody would want to rescue their child, or be rich and famous, or be king/president/CEO. But in real life, those things are not always true, not even that first one…and any writer who wants to write realistic, memorable individuals needs to at least consider whether their central characters need to be the mythical average “everyman,” or whether something unusual and different might be at the center of their heart (at least for this particular story).

Of course, the more unusual the Thing That Matters is, the clearer the writer has to be about the fact that it does matter, and why it matters. It isn’t too difficult to get a reader to believe that a parent would leap into a flooding river to rescue a child. On the face of it, it’s a lot harder to convince a reader that a character would jump into a flooding river in order to grab a soggy McDonald’s Happy Meal that’s floating by. (And my backbrain immediately responds “The Happy Meal is the crucial piece of evidence in a murder investigation, of course; the character needs it to keep an innocent man from getting the death penalty” which just goes to show that it can be done if it’s set up properly.)

Some plot-problems are easier to give your characters a stake in than others, depending on context. If the dragon or the Evil Overlord’s minions or the plague strikes directly at Our Heroine, her family, or her friends, it’s easy to believe she’ll buckle down and do something about it. If the dragon is ravaging and destroying down at the other end of the country, it’s a little harder to come up with a reason why she’d pick up and go off to defeat it. If the dragon is several kingdoms or an ocean away, one starts to wonder why it should be up to Our Heroine – don’t those folks have their own dragon-slaying heroes?

Implicit in all this is the idea that the Thing That Matters is in some way at risk – that the character may lose it or fail to gain it – or that the character will have to risk other important things to end up with it. What the character is willing to risk ties back to just how important the Thing That Matters is to that character, and how much risk that Thing is itself in.

Putting one’s life in jeopardy is usually viewed as the ultimate risk, something that one does to protect equally important things (people, honor, country, freedom, truth…). Risking one’s life is, therefore, generally not common in sitcoms, domestic comedies, or comedy-of-manners, where what’s at stake is the characters’ social status, interpersonal relationships, or general happiness. (Which insight I credit to Beth, my walking buddy.)

All this is, at bottom, why stories about happy people happily being happy are generally unsatisfying. Nothing is at stake; the characters have nothing to lose, nothing to gain, and no reason (except perhaps insanity) to risk so much as a hangnail.

“Well, there’s this goddess, and she takes a vacation to the mortal world as a cat and meets this girl and…and…and they have adventures!”

“Um, right,” I said. “What adventures?”

“I don’t know; I haven’t made them up.”

“That would be why you’re having trouble writing them. That, and the fact that you don’t have a plot.”

Now, I don’t have a plot, either, but I at least know that I don’t have one. My friend, on the other hand, was so enamored of her vacationing goddess-cat and heroine that she hadn’t noticed that she didn’t. She had two characters (whom she loved), and a situation with plenty of potential, and maybe even an incident or two (she could describe the scene where the goddess left the Etherial Realm for the mortal world, and she knew exactly what happened when the goddess-cat met the heroine), but that was it. She had no central problem to be solved; she didn’t even have minor character problems to be solved. Nothing was at stake for either of her characters, and there wasn’t any urgency to the situation. Most of all, there was no big “why” – when asked, she couldn’t tell me why the goddess needed a vacation, nor could she tell me why the heroine decided to adopt the goddess-cat, let alone why she would get involved with whatever adventures were supposedly going to happen next.

Part of the problem was, she couldn’t decide which character to use as her viewpoint (and which one was the “main character,” and whether they’d be the same or not). There were points and possibilities on both sides, but which character she chose was going to make a huge difference in what kind of plot she could look for. A goddess, even one who is temporarily masquerading as a cat, is likely to have rather different problems than a more-or-less normal girl.

The other part of the problem was, she didn’t have a setting. It makes a huge difference whether the girl and the goddess-cat are operating in a near-accurate or totally alternate historical setting (be that Ancient Greece, warring-states China, pre-Columbus South America, Elizabethan England, revolutionary France, or modern-day Canada), or in a completely invented world (past, present, or future). The kinds of problems that could occur, which would eventually come together for a plot, are significantly different in each place and time.

In short, she had a whole lot of decisions to make before she could really begin to start writing even though she knew what the first couple of scenes were. She’d run into difficulty because knowing those two scenes (the goddess leaving the Etherial Realm in a snit and the mortal girl meeting the goddess-cat and taking her home) were so clear in her head that it felt like she knew enough to start writing.

And she did know enough…to write those two scenes. For some writers, that would be plenty; by the time she finished writing those scenes, she’d know enough more to write the next one, and the next, and eventually there’d be a book at the end of it. Unfortunately, she doesn’t normally work that way, and she had the brains to know that she couldn’t write those “perfectly clear” scenes without a bunch more work on the setting and viewpoint.

Lots of stories start life as a couple of characters in an interesting situation, and for “surprise me” writers (the sort who can’t do any planning, even in their own heads, without killing the story), that’s enough for them to take off running. Most writers, though, need a bit more than that (how much more, as I said, varies writer to writer). Half the trick is realizing when one still needs more – recognizing that the lovely idea is a situation or an incident or a couple of related events, but not really a complete plot yet. The other half the trick is developing the idea, incident, or events until one has enough (whatever “enough” means to the particular writer).

There’s also always the possibility that the story one has hold of is something picaresque – a “marvelous journey” story that really doesn’t need much of a plot except maybe “eventually, we need to get home or settle down somewhere.” That doesn’t mean the initial idea/characters/situation doesn’t need developing; it just means the kind of development will be a little different. A marvelous journey story has to be marvelous; the place the characters journey through and the sub-stories and other characters they encounter on the way have to be fascinating enough to keep the reader going even when the characters don’t have a central plot problem and/or steadily increasing urgency and tension to drive the story forward.

On the other hand, characters who make mistake after mistake, or whose mistakes conveniently occur whenever the plot needs a boost or twist, are equally unrealistic, and seldom work except in the sort of parody where the whole point is that they can never do anything right. Similarly, if the characters never face any consequences from their mistakes, or never appear to learn anything from those consequences, the story is unlikely to feel real or be satisfying.

So how do authors strike a balance between too-perfect characters who never make a mistake and unrealistically stupid characters?

First off, mistakes in a story work like coincidences, meaning that the bigger the mistake or coincidence, the fewer of them are likely to work in a story. A tale that opens with an enormous, life-changing mistake implicitly promises the reader that the rest of the story is going to deal mainly with the consequences of that mistake. That means that the author can’t use a second enormous life-changing act of stupidity in mid-book in order to change course; whatever happens has to flow in some way from that original giant error. If other characters make mistakes, it’s most likely to work if a) they’re small mistakes, b) they’re very different from the original giant error, and c) they don’t result in a major plot event or twist, but just push the story along in whatever direction it’s currently going.

If, however, the story doesn’t include one single, enormous mistake, the author can often get away with having two large-but-not-enormous mistakes, or three or four small errors of judgement, etc. One ought not to get too carried away by this, of course; there’s a point where one hits “too many” even if they’re all eensy-weensy errors.

Back to the large mistake thing. Once I started thinking about it, I could think of three or four novels that open with a ginormous mistake on the part of the major character, and they generally follow the same pattern. First off, the big mistake doesn’t occur on page 1; it’s usually near the end of the first or second chapter. This gives the author plenty of time to lead up to it…and they do.

In every case I could think of, the events leading up to the mistake are shown carefully and in sufficient detail to make it clear to the reader why the character made the mistake…and each of them has several points at which they could have backed out and changed direction. The characters hesitate briefly, but pride or inertia or drunken bloody-mindedness keeps them on track for the inevitable train wreck at the end of the first chapter.

As a result, the reader can see that the characters are being stupid, but they can also see and understand why they’re being stupid. For this one, it was a combination of being angry, drunk, and too proud to back down once he realized he’d dug himself into a hole; for that one, it was a combination of hubris and fear; for the other one, it was midlife insecurity combined with temptation and needing to prove something to himself. The reader can see and sympathize with the character, maybe even think “There but for the grace of God go I,” even as she’s shaking her head about the dumb decision itself. Yes, the decision is still dumb, but we believe that this character, under these circumstances, really would do it.

It is, admittedly, extremely difficult to do this kind of thing for mistakes that various characters made before the story even began. One can, however, show that they regret the mistake, and that they’ve learned something from having messed up so badly five or ten or twenty years before…and one can certainly arrange for them not to repeat the same mistake. A character doing the exact same stupid thing for a second time tends to really put readers off, even if the first time happened twenty years pre-story and we didn’t get to watch it.

If the pre-story mistake really is vital to the current plot, one can use flashback to show the circumstances and motivation, or one can have some really understanding other character explain it to everyone in the present story who doesn’t know.

In every case, though, it all keeps coming back around to making sure the reader understands the reasons the character made the mistake…and the bigger the mistake is, the more time the writer probably needs to spend setting it up. “Um, sorry, officer, I left my driver’s license at home” needs maybe half a line earlier about how fast she flew out of the house; “Er, I sort of told the Evil Overlord where our Sekrit Base is” needs a lot more advance justification.

About the only time this isn’t true is when one has a central character who is supposed to be an idiot – Bertie Wooster, say – and the whole point of the story is watching him bumble into trouble and watch Jeeves pull him out again. Which works in comedy, but seldom in drama.

I’ll start with what didn’t work and why, and the first thing I want to say is that I’m not talking here about the standard idiot plot.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, an idiot plot is one that cannot work unless all the main characters are idiots – if they acted or reacted like a normal sensible five-year-old, they’d solve the story problem on page two.

What I’m talking about is a bit more subtle than that, though it’s closely enough related that it could perhaps be considered a subcategory. In the case of the manuscript I mentioned, nearly every plot point and twist in the manuscript was the result of some character’s monumental bad judgment, either in the “now” of the story or years earlier. At least half of the bad decisions were due to impulsive stupidity on the part of the characters: “I think I’ll dump this bucket of fish slime over that assassin guy’s head and see what happens.” It’s obvious that the character is being stupid, but it’s not obvious why.

I can buy arrant stupidity on the part of one character, provided he’s been established as being, well, the kind of guy that would dump a bucket over an assassin’s head just for the heck of it. When every character in the story, including the putatively-wise old scholar, the supposedly-clever spy, and the kid who’s seen all the horror movies and who knows and says that it’s stupid to split up and explore, all make one thoughtless, impulsive mistake after another, I get cross.

I get even more cross when each and every mistake leads to another tense showdown and/or plot twist. I mean, if the author wanted a big fight with the assassin at that particular point in the story, couldn’t he have come up with a way of starting it that didn’t require one of the characters to do something perfectly idiotic? Or couldn’t he at least have shown some sort of chain of events that made his readers believe that the character really would make this particular mistake under these circumstances? Even a half-paragraph about how drunk he was, or how he never could resist a bet, would have done the job. The character would still be doing something insanely stupid, but I’d have at least understood, and maybe accepted, why he did it.

What really got to me in this particular case, however, was that in nearly every instance, the Giant Mistake scene looked initially like a mildly dumb but not unreasonable choice to make. That is, the mistakes didn’t appear to be on the order of deliberately annoying an assassin, but more on the order of pulling a stupid joke on someone’s obnoxious older brother. The trouble was that every time this happened, the author showed the incident, then showed the horrific and sometimes fatal consequences…and then, three or four chapters later, finally revealed to the reader not only that the obnoxious older brother was a highly trained assassin, but that the guy dumping the bucket of slime had known this all along.

In short, the author was trying to hide his characters’ stupidity from the reader by holding back information that the characters knew. In one instance, a character does the equivalent of deciding to explore the basement alone, when she and all four of the other characters present know perfectly well that the escaped serial killer is hiding somewhere on this block (but the reader hasn’t been clued in that there’s a killer on the loose). The closest any of the characters get to objecting is one of them saying, “OK, if you’re not back in an hour, I’ll call 911.”

There are several possible excuses the author might have made for withholding this kind of information from the reader, but that’s just what they are – excuses. If the viewpoint character and/or narrator has reason to think that the serial killer might be hiding in the basement, the reader ought to know. If all the characters have this knowledge, then one of them ought to bring it up. Hiding the information from the reader until the action is all over does not make the decision to go down into the basement less stupid, and it does not make the reader less likely to notice that it was stupid.

The one place where this kind of thing is sometimes (not always, but sometimes) justified is when a character has made a ginormous, plot-affecting mistake at some point in the distant past. In this case, the mistake is part of the character’s backstory (and the character is frequently ashamed of it and trying to keep the information from affecting his/her present-day life), so it’s frequently reasonable for the readers and other characters not to know about it until the mistake comes back to bite them all. Even so, it’s almost always most effective if the author at least hints at the fact that there is some mystery about the character’s past before it starts strongly affecting the current story. Once the critical incident happens – the plot twist or event that wouldn’t have happened if not for the character’s long-hidden mistake – the reader and the other characters usually need to get the explanation/justification as soon as possible.

That’s a good bit of what doesn’t work. But characters need to make the occasional mistake, even the occasional huge one, so next, I’m going to talk about how to make that work in a story without having all the characters look stupid.

Him: “That book is terrible. I shouldn’t have been surprised. It has a prophecy in it. Stories with prophecies in them are always horrible; they’re pretty much a sign of bad writing.”

Me: “Um, no. Really, really, no.”

If having a prophecy in a story were a sign of bad writing, Homer’s Illiad and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex would not still be read, watched, studied, and enjoyed over 2500 years after they were written. Yes, there are plenty of perfectly terrible modern fantasies that contain prophecies, but as with so many things in writing, the problem is not with the device or technique, it’s with the way the technique is employed.

What too many writers fail to realize, I think, is that from a story-structure viewpoint, a prophecy is a point of intersection between characters and plot. A plot-centered story can easily founder on a prophecy that makes the rest of the plot inevitable; a character-centered story can similarly founder on a prophecy that makes the characters’ actions appear pointless or turns them into puppets. Characters and the rest of the plot have to balance on the point of the prophecy, or the story goes lopsided and fails to work.

In most of the old Greek stories, the characters are usually struggling to avoid an unfavorable prophecy, but sometimes, they seem to see it as a deadline. Laius tries to avoid his prophesied death by disposing of his infant son (which naturally sets the prophecy in motion); Achilles, having decided to take the “die young and covered in glory” part of his prophecy rather than the “die old and unremarkable” part, seems to be cramming as much living as he can into whatever days he has. In both cases, this puts the characters in tension with the prophecy, pulling against it in some way, and that keeps things in balance.

Many modern fantasies, by contrast, have the characters struggling to fulfill a prophecy. This puts the characters and the prophecy on the same side, both pulling in the same direction. For this to work, something has to be pulling equally hard in the opposite direction, or the plot takes on an air of inevitability no matter how difficult the heroes’ tasks are.

There are several ways to make a story work anyway. One is to have an ambiguous prophecy: “If you cross the river, a great kingdom will fall.” Which kingdom? Maybe not the one you’re hoping for… Another method is to have competing prophecies, only one of which can be true, or a prophecy that predicts a confrontation, but not the outcome (or at least, not a clear outcome: “The armies of East and West will clash, and the victor will rule for a thousand years” leaves out one obvious and important fact – who the victor will be). Or have one like the one about Achilles that gives two mutually exclusive outcomes to choose between.

A prophecy that lends itself to misinterpretation, or to multiple interpretations, can provide all sorts of interesting plot twists. “The Red Dragon and the White shall battle, and at first the White shall seem victorious, but the Red shall conquer when the Boar comes out of the South” is the sort of thing that can be made either blindingly obvious or nearly impossible to interpret, depending on how the author sets things up.

What all these alternatives do is to lessen the obviousness of the “pull” of the prophecy on the plot and characters. If the prophecy says “whoso pulleth this sword from out this stone is rightwise born king of Britain,” the next step is obvious: line everybody up and have them tug on the sword. If it says “The rightful king shall be revealed under the sign of the dragon,” the next step isn’t nearly so clear…and the characters’ actions are less likely to feel scripted and inevitable.

In modern fantasy, prophecies are usually central to the story. There’s plenty of precedent for this, but it isn’t strictly necessary. It is perfectly possible to write a story set during the Trojan War that deals with the struggles of a merchant family trying to survive in a city that’s been under siege for ten years, in which none of the characters have much of anything to do with the prophecies about Achilles dying young or Paris bringing about the city’s downfall. One can also do what the Arthurian legends do: pulling the sword out of the stone is the start of the poor kid’s problems – now that he’s king, he has to chase the Saxons out of the kingdom and then figure out how to get a war-ravaged land back on its feet again, while also dealing with cutthroat court politics. Fulfilling the prophecy was the easy part.

One last key thing for any author to remember when including a prophecy in a story: the exact wording of the prophecy is the sort of thing that fans of the story will pick apart endlessly, given the slightest cause. It pays to be very careful about it, and to solicit advice and alternate interpretations from as many other people as possible, so as to catch and eliminate (or better yet, incorporate into the story) as many of the potential objections/alternatives as one can.

“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” – Helmuth von Moltke

“A writer should always reserve the right to have a better idea.” – Lois McMaster Bujold

Prewriting notes – whether they’re about plot, background, or characters – are the writer’s battle plan, and therefore exceedingly important. Lots has been written about this aspect of writing, but there are really only two things that are absolutely vital to remember:

1. Every writer handles prewriting differently, and
2. Nothing is ever written in stone until the book is actually in print.

If you look at those two things long enough, you start asking yourself “Well, then, why bother planning at all, if there’s no right way to do it and if it’s not going to stay the same anyway?” All I can say is that, of all the authors I know well enough to have some idea of their work processes, only one or two do no pre-planning at all, and even they at least think about their stories a little before they sit down and write. Empirical evidence indicates that for most writers, planning works.

There are actually a bunch of other things that you may find useful to remember about planning, but they’re not things that everybody needs to remember. I really need to remember to spend enough time on the background and worldbuilding; I don’t seem to be able to get started until I have a solid feel for the world and its culture and history, as well as the more immediate background of the characters (i.e., how they heck did they get into the situation they’re in at the start of the story, and where do they think they’re going from here?). It’s a bit like looking at a chess problem – you know that there have been a bunch of moves made to get the pieces into this position, and before you decide what the next move is, you want to understand how they all got to this point.

But that’s me. I know writers who really need most of those pre-book moves to be unknown or undecided. They tend to be folks who have trouble changing their minds about “what happened” once they’ve made it up, and they need to leave lots of room for the pre-book events to change, in case they get to the middle of the story and discover that they need the bad guy to have stolen the crown jewels ten years ago, instead of having kidnapped the diplomat’s daughter (or vice versa, or in addition to).

Exactly what you have to do for prewriting, and how much, depends on how you think and how you write. Some people can figure this out by thinking about what works for them with other things, like cooking or learning to ski or building/making a new house or a new dress. For the rest of us, there’s trial and error.

You might need to work out who the characters are (or could be), and what their agendas and plans are, while leaving the plot strictly alone. Or you might need to work out the worldbuilding first, or a lot of the key events in the plot. Or you might need to do a massive plot tree, where you sketch out as many different ways the plot could go as you can think of, starting with “hero runs away to sea; gets berth as cabin boy, or doesn’t get berth, or is taken on as assistant by cook/sailmaker/?, or is mugged before he ever reaches docks…”

A couple of my friends do “zeroth drafts,” or what one of them refers to as “pseudocode” – a 100 to 150 page “draft” of what will eventually become a 400-page novel, which they later revise into a real first draft by adding scenes and incidents to explain plot twists or change the level of tension when it’s been too high or too low for too long. Often, adding these scenes alters the whole course of the rest of the book, which brings me to that second point.

However carefully you plan during your prewriting, it is never sacred and unchangeable. This is obvious, if you think about it a little. When you’re prewriting, you’re making stuff up – collecting materials (characters, plot turns, background), some of which you’ll use in the actual story draft. When you’re writing a zeroth or first draft, you’re making stuff up – only this time, it’s the specifics of exactly what was said, by whom, in what tone of voice, or exactly what was done, by whom, in what manner, and with what consequences. In other words, your brain is in making-stuff-up mode in both cases. So it’s not surprising for a writer to suddenly have a cool new idea in the middle of the draft that unfortunately means you have to change the plot, characters, or background in major ways. In fact, it’s more than unsurprising; it’s downright common.

Unfortunately, there seem to be a fair few writers out there who were scarred by their middle-school writing classes, and who think that once they have written an outline, they must stick to it. But if you’ve just had a really cool new idea that is going to make the story you’re writing even more interesting…why not use it? A more interesting, more effective, more surprising story is usually more desirable than the less interesting, etc., one.

Whatever the writer decides during any stage of the writing process, including prewriting, is subject to change without notice at any subsequent stage, right up until the book is published. Of course, it gets harder and more expensive to make major changes when the book is in production, but it’s still possible right up through the page proofs. If there’s a particularly egregious error, you can sometimes even talk the publisher into fixing it for the paperback version (e-books, of course, are a whole lot easier to fix at pretty much every stage of the game).

This does not mean things have to change in mid-story in order for it to be any good, nor does it mean that what changes must be large and significant. It depends on the writer. If you’re the sort who puts a lot of thought into your battle plan…er, outline and prewriting, the new ideas that you have while working on the first draft or revisions may be small tweaks that leave the main plot/characters/etc. mostly intact. If you’re the sort whose prewriting consists entirely of something like “I think I’ll write a book about a pirate,” and then you make it up as you go along, well, it’s much less likely that you’ll come up with something that changes your prewriting (though it’s possible, as when the book turns out to be about the pirate’s robot servant, or the noblewoman he captured, instead of about the pirate you started with).