I was tootling through a how-to-write site the other day going “yep, nope, nope, yep” when I got to the part where they talked about plotting, and found four pages of questions to help writers “get unstuck” and “come up with great new plot twists.”
Now, when I am plotting, I ask myself a lot of questions. And when I am plot-noodling for other people, I ask them a lot of questions. So the general idea of four pages of plot questions was not at all problematic for me.
The problem was the kind of questions the site was asking: “Has the protagonist misinterpreted an event? Has someone else?” “What will get a character in more trouble?” “How can you thwart the reader’s expectations here?” “Is there a temporary success?” “Can you deepen the mystery or raise the stakes?”
They aren’t bad questions, per se. They’re just not pointed. They can’t be pointed if the list is supposed to be useful to all fiction writers, no matter the genre. Generic questions are the only ones that have a hope of being helpful to both a writer of adult police procedurals and a writer of middle-grade fantasies.
There are a couple of generic questions that are broadly useful – “Your character has a plan. What is the smallest thing that can go wrong that will have the biggest impact?” is the first one that leaps to mind – but for most writers, poking at their imagination with broad, generic questions is like trying to pop a rubber balloon by poking it with a hard-boiled egg: You may bend the surface a little, but you’re not going to get the dramatic change you were going for.
You find slightly more pointed questions in places that are dealing with a particular genre, because the questions can be sharpened up by the constraints of the genre: “Has the detective missed a clue?” “What misinterpretation would lead the heroine to reject the romantic hero?” “What new scientific discovery could send the story in an unexpected direction?” But these are still pretty generic, and (at least for me) do not work as balloon-popping triggers for story development.
The questions I want – and that I ask – spin off from specific details in that particular story. If the writer is writing a story set in ancient Greece where the gods of Greece are real and interfering like mad, I don’t ask “What would get your hero in trouble?” or even “What could the gods do to cause trouble for your hero?” I say “Your hero just dug up a mysterious ancient temple. Whose temple is it? Is Zeus going to get angry about it? Or is (insert list of every Greek god I can think of) going to be really pleased? Are there differences of opinion among the gods that will cause trouble – how does this discovery play into divine politics? Are there other pantheons – Persian, maybe? – that would be pleased or mad about this temple? Are there worshippers still around who would be pleased or mad about the rediscovery/desecration of this temple? Are there human-level politics that this affects?”
Even with those questions, you can see them getting more general toward the end, because all I gave myself to go on was “real Greek gods; set in Greece; mysterious ancient temple discovered.” In real life, the author would probably know things like whether Our Hero was from Athens or Sparta, whether he was a scholar or warrior or priest, what let him to discover the temple, whether he (or his city) worships the god(s) of the temple or considers them evil, etc., all of which would let me ask more specific questions than “Are there human-level politics that this affects?”
Plot-noodling is about asking the writer – or yourself – pointed questions about the things you don’t know yet. It helps to have someone else doing the asking because when one is head down in a story, there are often a bunch of things that one doesn’t realize one doesn’t know … and it’s those things that, when one stops and looks at them, tend to set off the mental explosion that moves the plot forward (or sideways) in a useful way. Someone who doesn’t know anything about the writer’s plans is more likely to ask the questions the writer hasn’t thought of.
It’s possible to start with the generic questions and make them more pointed on your own, but it takes practice. To turn “Has the protagonist misinterpreted an event?”, I’d start with what I know about the protagonist – who he/she is, what his/her background is, what kinds of assumptions I already know he/she makes. Then I’d look at all of the recent events in the story for the last couple of chapters to see if any of them are subject to alternate interpretations. That near-miss lightning strike that Our Hero thought was Zeus being angry … maybe Zeus was forcing him to take a different, safer route? Or maybe it wasn’t Zeus? Then I have to go look up other storm-gods from that era and figure out how/why one might be involved (if that seems the way I want to go).
It’s often simpler to play “what if that wasn’t really what was going on” with other people’s fiction. Getting a group of writers together to go through a really horribly plotted published work and offer ideas for improvement can be a fun game (as long as everybody agrees from the start that the work in question has a horrible plot). Plot-noodling for someone else can also work, as long as you don’t get attached to your own ideas and/or start making pushy suggestions. When the writer says irritably, “No, that isn’t how this goes,” you have to remember that it’s their story, and drop that line of questioning and move on. Which is also excellent practice for not getting hung up on one direction before you have explored a bunch of others.
What I find annoyingly useless about such plot-question and story-prompt help sites is that they all seem to be about helping with beginnings. At sparking ideas on how to start a story or how to get the protagonist into trouble. But that’s not what I need help with. The hard part that makes plotting Hard for me is coming up with endings. I want story prompts for how a story might end, and questions and things to spark ideas of how a protagonist might get out of trouble.
In particular, the Hard part is how do I have the protagonist succeed at the end after he has not-succeeded at the beginning. (Because he does have to not-succeed at the beginning or else the story is a short circuit: “The protagonist achieves his goal right away. The End.”)
Or to use the barnacle analogy, I can produce lots of beginning-barnacles and some middle-barnacles, but ending-barnacles are rare and hard to come up with for me. Do the people writing the advice sites also have this problem? Is this why I see lots of beginning-advice but practically no ending-advice?
I’ve noticed that too, about beginning-help. And I’ve asked those same questions.
For me it’s usually middles that are hard; I’ve got my initial set-up, I know roughly where it needs to land… how the bleep do I get there? Or to use your terms, what are the not-succeeding things the protagonist tries? Or things that succeed at what he’s trying to do, but reveal in the process that he really needs to be trying to do something else?
Which is sort of the flip side of your difficulty: “There are things the protag tries that don’t work. There is a thing the protag tries that does work. Go.”
By the end, the questions would have to be so pointed as to make any general list silly. All the forces of the story have to point to the end, and so the questions have to be about them.
True, but there seems to be a dearth of advice out there even about how to think of ending-questions, though it’s an area more than one writer struggles with. Our Hostess has done a few posts in the general subject-area, IIRC, but I can’t offhand think of another source that even tries to get at the how-to of it.
This. Also, there’s an abundance of story-prompts for how a story might start but a lack of story-prompts for how a story might end. Story questions might need to be more pointed for story-endings, but I don’t see story prompts as needing to be any more specific for story-endings than for story-beginnings.
What would a story ending prompt look like?
(Posting here since I can’t reply directly)
Mary Catelli: “What would a story ending prompt look like?”
Um…
“The story ends with a cooking contest.”
“The story ends with the protagonist shooting his dog.”
“An ending involves smashing a musical instrument.”
“An ending involves discovering that one of the villains is actually a loyal mole for the good guys.”
Endings are a lot tougher than beginnings for me too! I suspect one reason is that I have way more practice at beginnings. Even if I abandon a story, I still probably started writing it and got some beginning practice (even if just practice on how NOT to start a story) but if I abandon a project before I reach the end I don’t exactly get ending practice from the stories that just didn’t work out.
Now, I don’t have that much trouble with endings, once I get moving. (I have a lot of beginnings that never get anywhere.) I like Brenda Clough’s analogy of the python in the zoo: the python will grow every year, so long as it’s healthy, so every year the keepers have to go in and get it out to measure it. Somebody has to go in and grab the head; somebody else has to go in and grab the tail, and that’s the harder part. Once you have both the head and the tail pinned down, you have a fighting chance of getting the other keepers to grab the various other parts of the python and get it measured.
I knew what the effective end of _The Interior Life_ was going to be almost at once; the heroine was going to drop something fragile and step on it. The current WIP not only has an effective end, but I’ve almost reached it: a humongous great battle in which the protagonist slays the chief bad guy and changes the course of history and, incidentally, grows up a bit (he’s only fifteen).
But it’s taken me years to get there.
(By the way, by “effective end” I mean the resolution of the plot; I’ve been known to add a coda in which everybody is quietly celebrating.)
I don’t start writing until I know the opening, the (approximate) ending, and usually the theme. Of course, it took me decades of practice before that became anything like easy.
Since all my novels ultimately are the protagonists figuring out who they are, what they can do, and what their place in the world is (which includes who’s opposing them and how to get past those antagonists), plotting for me is essentially what do I want them to figure out when.
Not that that’s going to work for everyone…
Actually, I found several of those generic questions potentially helpful. (Okay, not “raise the stakes”, I’ve never found that a useful way to think about stories. But “misinterpreted an event”? Oh, yeah, I can definitely see possibilities in that. And “What will get a character in more trouble?” is a standard decision-making tool in my toolbox.) Any chance of a link to the source?
Specific questions would also be helpful, but for me they need to be more specific than genre — they need to pertain to the exact story I’m writing, which means the person asking needs to have read the story-so-far. And the questions need to pertain to the story I’m trying to write — not the story the asker wishes I would write instead, or the story they’d write if they were doing it. But they still need to be questions I wouldn’t think to ask myself, because if I knew the right questions to ask, I wouldn’t need to be plot-noodling — I’d already be writing the answers.
The advantage to more generic questions is that they have the potential to get me to think about something I otherwise wouldn’t, or from an angle that I otherwise wouldn’t. For example, “Has the detective missed a clue?” is going to start me thinking about things I specifically identified as clues, in my head if not outright on the page. I’m not going to come up with new clues that way. But “Has Joe misinterpreted an event?” might get me thinking about that conversation in the diner, and the odd way that one woman kept phrasing things, and that might lead to her being the aunt of the henchman of the villain, who doesn’t know what’s going on but is talking around some peculiar behavior on her nephew’s part….
(I’d better stop before I come up with another novel idea.)
Awww, come up with the idea, and save it to disk for later. Then get back to the WIP. 🙂
LOL! With all the other ideas; it’d have plenty of company, at least. 😉
I find “That thing I’m thinking of having happen next – that I’m stuck on – what if the EXACT OPPOSITE happened instead?” is often useful. And if I don’t have that much, I try “What would be the genre appropriate having a man come through the door with a gun in his hand be?”
Ooh! Thank you; I’ll try the exact-opposite trick to shake up my work-in-progress’s currently stalling scene…
As for completely-off critiques from people who really wish that one was writing a different story – they often irritate me at the time (e.g., “So *your* story is entirely about dinosaurs, from their third-person-close perspectives, but *I* don’t believe that any animal other than a human can have a personality or basic intelligence. Why don’t you rewrite your book to fit my worldview?”).
However, I’ve also received a few somewhat-off critiques that function as extremely pointed but backwards plot/characterization/worldbuilding questions. I have to figure out why I’m so upset by the critique, which forces me to understand the story better. This tends to happen to me when I’ve left important details in my brain and not on the page, or have accidentally thrown a useful weird inconsistency into the story without realizing or exploiting it; without deliberate incorporation into the plot, the inconsistencies just weaken the story and annoy my beta readers, but with some deliberate expansion, I think they’re going to serve my current WIP very nicely. (To my characters’ detriment, as usual.)
That’s the best-case scenario, though. Sometimes, the answer to the off critique is unfortunately obvious – “I am not rewriting this to eliminate the characters, because you’re wrong about animals’ brains and this story makes no sense without characters!”
The most-useful question I’ve found for a bogged story line is “What is the worst thing that can happen/you can do to your character?”