There are a couple of ways of looking at plot, ranging from the bird’s-eye view at a macro level to the order of scenes, and events and incidents within scenes. The one most people run across first — and one of the most useful ways of looking at it for many writers — is the macro level plot skeleton.
The basic plot skeleton works like this: your protagonist has a problem — solving the murder, stealing the Hope Diamond, restoring the True King to the throne, winning the love of a good man/woman, taking over the company. He tries to solve his problem: he interviews people in search of clues, he studies the security precautions around the diamond, he recruits an army, he sends her flowers, he starts buying up stock. What he tries doesn’t work, and may even make the situation worse: people lie to him, providing conflicting evidence; there’s a new top-secret security precaution that he can’t find out anything about; the usurper has a bigger and better-armed army; she’s allergic to flowers; the stock price rises so that he doesn’t have enough money to get a significant number of shares. So he tries something else: studying the physical evidence; talking to the last thief who tried for the diamond; sneaking into the palace through a secret tunnel; asking her to help with the Christmas toy donation program; undermining the Board of Directors’ confidence in the CEO. Which does or doesn’t work: the physical evidence combined with the interviews allows him to solve the murder; thinking that he knows, he tries for the diamond and gets caught; the palace coup succeeds; she admires his dedication to kids and falls in love with him; he manages to get himself fired instead of the CEO.
One continues this string of problem-attempted solution-worse problem until things are decisively settled one way or another: either the protagonist succeeds and the problem is solved, or (in a tragedy) the protagonist fails completely and perhaps dies.
You can start this string of events with anything. A character you find interesting — what does she want more than anything else in the world, and what’s stopping her from getting it? What’s she going to do to try to get it anyway? A place you find fascinating — what kinds of things happen in Hawaii and nowhere else? Who would be involved that you’d be interested in writing about? A situation or event — who was most strongly affected by the storming of the Bastille, and what happened to him afterward? A theme about which you care deeply — what people embody it, care about it, will explore it through their actions and problems?
But you can also dive right into a story withoutplanning any of this out in advance. Plot complications and plot twists — the problems and worse problems that are the “valleys” in the sawtoothed diagram that most people use to visualize a plot skeleton — can arise naturally from the characters’ actions (and often work better from a story standpoint if they do). And of course as soon as the main character finds another problem or obstacle in his/her way, she/he will start trying to figure out how to overcome it. All the writer really needs to do is to remember to frustrate the character at some point (usually just before they think they’re going to get what they want at last) in order to keep the story moving. (If this sort of thinking doesn’t come naturally, you’re probably better off doing at least some advance planning.)
If you’re having trouble with plot, and this way of looking at the basic plot/structure of a story or novel isn’t terribly helpful, then you probably need to look at plot from a different direction, or on a different level — scene by scene, maybe, instead of the whole story at once, or emphasizing causality or action/reaction, instead of obstacles and strategies for overcoming them. I think, though, that it’s still useful to start by looking at the basic plot skeleton, because it is a macro-level view and most of the other ways of looking at plot have to somehow add up to the skeleton sooner or later.
I’m a big planner and the more I learn about novel writing, the more I’m realizing that it’s not the scene by scene plans that matter – because they change as the writing goes along – it’s understanding the basic skeleton and the reason for the book that will carry me through the end of the book.
With my current WIP (of which I should have the first draft done by Friday), I struggled for months with writing it because it wasn’t until last month (and more than half the book) that I figured the basic stuff out.
I had everything but – the world building, the actions scene by scene, the emotional arc, etc.. – but I was missing thing that would bring the character back to the beginning changed by his experiences – the basic skeleton that all my other work would hang on to make a full, living breating book.
I think a plot’s skeleton is like the skeleton of a cat; it can bend in ways that make it look boneless.
I think it’s important to have a basic plot so you know what scenes you need, and what has to happen when in the story, but -at least for me- the story gets where it’s going in ways I don’t expect -rather like the way a cat’s spine curves, instead of staying strait like a human being’s.
Chicory – I think you’re talking more about structure, or maybe the flesh and skin and so on that goes on top of the plot skeleton. Structure is related to plot, especially when you’re looking at the macro level (which is what the plot skeleton is), but structure isn’t quite the same thing as plot. You can take the same basic plot – say, the plot of “Cinderella” – and tell it using an assortment of different structures: linear, circular, spiral, parallel running scenes, teeter-totter…but it’s still the same basic plot. (And most of those names aren’t official names of structures; but I’ll get to that in a different post.)
I much prefer a combination of small successes, new (and interesting) problems, and I like the progression you’ve sketched out.
If the plot is too linear, too obvious from the start, the setbacks move the character too far away. (There is one trilogy where around the end of book two the character died. After that – although he was resurrected -anything that could happen to him already had, and I did not think that he would succeed against the odds that had just clobbered him time and time again. (And he didn’t – it took a deus ex machina intervention.)
green_knight – not sure what you mean by “move the character too far away.” The example you describe sounds more like a writer who proceeded to dig his character’s hole a little too fast – the problems went from small to big to gigantic to impossible, without stopping at medium-sized, bigger, biggest, huge, or enormous anywhere along the way.
Of course, the escalation problem has for years been the bane of writers who’ve gotten conned into doing sequels. You write a book; main character saves the world; hooray. But everyone wants a sequel, so what do you do next? Save the universe? And then you have to fight the gods themselves… Because by the time the heroes save the world, they’ve nearly always accumulated enough power to do so a second time, quite handily, which makes for a repetetive “sequel” at best, and a downright boring “ho-hum, haven’t we done this before?” book at worst.
Hrm. I’m working on a sequel right now. But my characters didn’t save any worlds, and aren’t any more powerful now than they were in the last book, so as long as I’m giving them a *different* challenge, I don’t see why it needs to be bigger and badder.
Yesterday they were chasing interestellar jewel theives, today it’s a con man and a bunch of sky-pirates, tomorrow maybe they’ll break someone out of jail, or foil an assasination attempt, or stop a barbarian invasion… or all three. Who knows?
Michelle – You seem to be doing something more like a standard mystery novel or action-adventure series, where it’s the monster or murder of the week that’s the problem and no escalation is needed (or wanted). Most epic fantasy, though, does seem to go straight for saving the world…or if not, then at least the kingdom.
Pat, I was specifically thinking about Bickham’s example of the man who wants to climb a mountain and goes to the bank manager for a loan, and gets rejected, so he then plots ways to find the money and fails at _those_, so he then has to deal with his girlfriend getting annoyed with his obsession and moving out…
The problem is that if you keep doing that – have the character stumble at every step, you never get to the mountain, or you have to solve them all in quick succession. I much prefer it if the character gets stuck on the funding then makes a deal with the devil/gets corporate sponsorship that comes with strings attached/offers to test new gear/goes out with a second-hand job lot and starts climbing – and then has to deal with the new fallout.
And if I wrote the story it would not, in the end, be about who reaches the summit first, but about whether he should abandon his risky climb to come to the aid of an enemy who might no longer be alive. I like plots with a twist, plots where the character has to decide between the thing they fought for and something that’s more important and that brings less personal gain.
green_knight – Actually, I think the would-be mountain climber could make a perfectly good book…it just wouldn’t be one about actually climbing a mountain. Some readers don’t mind that sort of shell game switch – the one where what the character *thinks* he wants or needs isn’t the plot-driving McGuffin, because what he *really* needs is something else entirely. Your version – where the climber has to choose between reaching the summit and helping an enemy – is the same kind of thing, just later on in the process.
The would-be climber with his string of failures could make a great come-to-realize book (where the guy comes to realize that there are things more important than this obsession with the mountain), or it could be done as a terriffic comedy-of-errors (the sort where he gets the loan…just as the bank robbers arrive to not only steal his cash but take him hostage. Or where he doesn’t get the loan, decides to rob the bank, and the *real* bank robbers arrive in the middle of his attempt, etc.). In other words, you may not need to get to the mountain, because that’s not actually what the story is about.
Um, yes. An open ended adventure/mystery series — that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.
So I guess that doesn’t count as ‘getting conned into’ writing sequels, then, does it? The only time you need to ‘con’ someone into writing a sequel is when they probably shouldn’t be doing anything of the sort.
Michelle-OK, I had a whole long response written and then I looked at it and said “I could make this a post, and I probably should.” So I’m going to.
Pat, the example given – and I’ve read books like that – was where it wasn’t a book about a man with an obsession coming to terms with it, but still _about_ the mountain, and ending with him achieving his goal against all odds. If the desire to climb a mountain is merely an inciting incident, that’s fine, but if the story continues to be _about_ that, while making it less and less likely that he’ll get there… no thanks.
green_knight – What that sounds like to me is very much a problem with the plot skeleton. Instead of having the zig-zag normal plot-skeleton diagram, with higher highs and lower lows each time, I’d diagram this as a nice, even slide downward, with a sudden jump up to success at the end. My point, though, was that something like this could be made into a fine story…if the story is actually about something other than climbing the mountain. But if the goal really is climbing the mountain…well, that’s a little harder to make work.
Although now that you mention it, I am suddenly thinking of the documentary/recreation movie, “Into the Void,” which could very much be described as a series of disasters getting farther and farther from the ultimate goal…except that you know from the interviews that both climbers make it down. The thing that makes it work is precisely that – since you know that they both come back, all the tension comes from “OMG, how are they going to ge out of THAT?!?” “Apollo Thirteen” was like that, too…at least for those of us who were there for it in real life.
The thing that makes it work is precisely that – since you know that they both come back, all the tension comes from “OMG, how are they going to ge out of THAT?!?”
But isn’t that the … helpful elephant in the room in most genre books? We know in general what the ending will be, so the question is not What? but How?
Tess – I don’t think that knowing in general that the ending of a book is going to be happy or sad isn’t quite the same as knowing specifically how the story comes out, which is pretty much the case with the two movies I cited. It’s a good point, though – obviously, for some genres, you do have a fairly good idea how the basic plot is going to come out (I’m thinking of Romance and Mystery, where +95% of the books end with getting the guy or finding the murderer, though even there, you can find books that play against the pattern).
I don’t think that’s anything like as true for fantasy or SF. A fair amount of the time, you don’t even know what the actual objective of the book is until halfway through – the characters start out trying to do one thing, but in the process find out they really, really need to do something else. And you can’t even depend on a happy ending; a lot of SF and fantasy these days is very dark.
Pat & Tess, the fact that I *don’t* know where the book will go is one of the things that attracts me to the genre, or to Westerns for that matter (not that I read many of those or that I’ve seen many good ones lately) – but even if you assume an upbeat ending, there are many ways it can play out.
I am bored by most books who pose the main questions within the first ten pages and then continue to play that out until it’s solved. (And no, I don’t read Romance, either.)
Over at Tor, there’s an interesting article, “Re-reading Sandman: An introduction” by
Teresa Nielsen Hayden, which makes Sandman sound like quite a different kind of thing. At least the part she’s covered here: http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=49187
I’d keep wondering when the actual story was going to get going.