This is my last blog post for 2022. (I always take the Tuesday between Christmas and New Year’s off, so next week will be an off-schedule Open Mic, and the count to the next one will reset on the first Tuesday of the year.) I asked a friend if she had a topic request, and she said, “Explain how you plot as if you were telling an eight-year-old.”
Um.
This is sort of like asking “Explain how your ESP works so that a physicist will believe it.” I think. But I’ll give it a shot.
First, of course, is “what is plot?” If I’m explaining to an eight-year-old, I’d try something like, “Plot is how a person, or a bunch of people sometimes, get from one point in their lives to a different point. Sometimes, it’s a new, better point; sometimes it’s a worse point; and sometimes it’s just different, even if a lot of it looks the same. I like happy endings, so most of my stories get people from a situation that is unsatisfactory to a better one.”
So when I am working out a plot, the first thing I want to know is who the people are and what kind of situation they are in at the beginning. That means things like where they live, are they happy or not, who do they like and dislike, and especially whether or not there are things about themselves (or other people who are important to them) that they don’t know. Usually, this means I also know a lot about their lives so far, but there are nearly always important things missing.
Then I think about how I want them to end up when the story is over, and how I want it to be different from where they are now. Not what the characters want; what I want to see happen to them, inside and out. Do I want to see the shy character learn to speak up, or do I want to watch them realize that they can do the things they want without having to be the outgoing person everyone else wants them to be? Do I want to watch the protagonist confound everyone by becoming the next king/queen by accident, or do I want to watch everyone else being confounded because the protagonist turns down the crown? Do I want to watch these people build a new country from scratch, reform a corrupt old one, or settle happily back into their original lives, knowing in the end why they’re important?
I do not think about what the characters want. That comes much, much later, and half the time (at least) what they think they want at the start is not what they end up getting. I think about what I want, where I want to see them end up. I also don’t worry about the details of getting there just yet. My first “plot outline” is more like a log line or an elevator pitch than an outline, often just a sentence, rarely more than a paragraph. It’s mostly just to remind me who I am writing about and maybe where I want them to go. “A minstrel has to guard a magic harp from the bad guys who want it.”
I don’t bother writing down the bits I am sure of unless I’m afraid I’ll forget them. I don’t have to say “A minstrel successfully guards a magic harp…” because I knew he’d be successful. I didn’t know exactly how he’d succeed—though I knew it would have something to do with playing the harp. I didn’t put that in the summary, because to me it was obvious; if I was writing a story about a magic harp, it was going to have to get played. If I’d known at this point what it would do and how playing it would save the day, I would have added that to the summary, but in this case, I didn’t know yet.
Then I look at my brief description and think about what I don’t know. Where did the minstrel get the harp? When and how did the bad guys find out about it? Who are the bad guys, anyway? And what does playing the harp do?
“The Harp of Imach Thyssel” was one of my first attempts at a short story, and it started with about three pages of summary that filled in some of those blanks. Which is why the editor I tried to sell it to told me “This reads like the outline for a novel. Write the rest of it and I’ll look at it again.” And I did…sort of.
I say “sort of” because it really was a novel outline, so a lot of the details changed. I have always changed my plots (and rewritten my plot outlines) over and over as I write. I don’t try to get the plot perfectly right the first time, start to finish. Especially the details. It’s the shape I want, not a point-by-point plan.
The details of the plot—the precise steps that get the characters to the kind of ending I want—come later, as I fill in the plot outline, start writing, and rewrite the outline over and over. It’s like driving to the grocery store on a foggy night. There are at least three or four different routes I know I can take, if I’m going to a specific store, and every time I come to an intersection and make a turn, I’m picking one route over another. I can see vague shapes in the fog up ahead; then I’m close enough for the car headlights to show them clearly and I know just what they are and right where I am; then I’m past them and they’re vague shapes fading in the fog behind the car, but now I know exactly what they are and where they were.
As long as my headlights—my plot outlines—show me the right shape overall, and the specific details for the next chapter or two, I can keep going. When I’m writing Chapter Two, I don’t need to know how my protagonist is going to beat her challenger in the magic duel in Chapter Ten; I only need to know that she will. I don’t need that detail until around Chapter Eight or Nine (and if I haven’t figured it out by then, I’m usually in for a couple of weeks of dithering about how to make it work). The same goes for the ending—I have a general idea from the start of where I want my characters to end up, but the details evolve as the incidents of the story nail down more and more of the steps for getting there. So my planned confrontation between the protagonists and the villain’s gang in a dark London warehouse becomes a much more amusing confrontation between the protagonists, fourteen other characters, and the discombobulated villain in a country hunting lodge—it’s still a confrontation, and the good guys still come out on top.
I have no idea if that is any help to anyone else. Everybody works differently; this is the best I can do at describing how it works for me, at the moment.
This is incredibly useful, and I wish more authors had something like it on their websites. I’ve been trying to figure out my process for a long time, and it is really useful to see what someone else does and have something I can try out for myself. While what other people do usually doesn’t work for me as is, sometimes I find something that helps me figure my process out a bit more.
Thanks for sharing your method!
This is definitely a worthwhile post.
I ****might**** have something you can use as well; I’ve written 28 entries that at least touch on plotting.
https://kevinwadejohnson.blogspot.com/search/label/Plot
I do hope there’s something in there that helps.
Thank you!
The problem is that there are different techniques necessary from the foundation to the roof, and it helps to know which is your problem.
Do you have an idea that doesn’t have a story? Or a story where you’re not sure of the events?
One aspect that sticks out to me by its absence in this post is that something interesting has to happen as the person/people get from one point in their lives to another. Or else it doesn’t count.
The “interesting” can sometimes be provided by Cool Bits of the setting being cool, in a slice-of-life sort of story. But in most cases there has to be a conflict or obstacle of some sort, and the protagonist has to be pushed into doing something unusual. That’s what has me muttering “Plot is Hard.”
I also need a more-detailed idea of what happens at the end than “there is a magical duel” or “there is a confrontation with the Evil Heir in the throne room.” If it’s a longer work, I also need some “way points” at a similar level of detail. But if I try to produce too much detail, I fail. And Plot is Hard because too often too much detail is simultaneously not enough and/or the wrong kind.
I can’t rely on my idea being what is at the beginning. I have to build back to that. Then I have to decide whether it goes into the story or into the backstory. . . .
The disadvantage of knowing the ending first is that you have to think yourself back into the mind of the characters who don’t know how it ends. The advantage is fewer false starts.
I love looking at other writer’s process posts! It often helps me solidify or add to my own toolbox.
Right now, admittedly, my plotting process is doing a bit of a revamp to enable handling full length novels that don’t outgrow themselves, since historically I mostly only finished shorter stuff, but it’s mostly just a case of making it into something scalable.
There’s a strong tendency by aggressive outliners to describe book-planning as outlining, specifically, and act like anyone who doesn’t outline is just winging it. But I plan stories so much more than anyone else I know while being one of those people for whom outlining (putting together the sequence of plot events in advance) kills the story dead, and not because I know the story already but because that’s actually entirely “dead” material to me. I don’t think chronologically, neither writing in order nor being able to use time or sequence as a useful frame of reference, even when time is involved, due to my particular neuroatypicality.
Instead, I meet characters within a fascinating world and learn about them through their emotional events and interesting interactions and very much out of order, and at some point, the key emotional events that intersect with the external event I’m trying to write about goes “Click!” and I’m off to the races, knowing which scene islands (groups of scenes all necessary to the payoff scene in the group) need to be in the book. At least, that’s what’s happening now that I started rebuilding my process from that wonderful “how do I carve a plot from a set of thirty characters who I know their entire life story and that of their grandparents, parents, kids, and grandkids” post.
For shorts, it’s usually enough to just snippet and sketch my way through my writer’s notebook then start collating and gap-filling when I hit a critical mass of material that clearly belongs together. Which is just a little too sketchy and haphazard for a novel, for all the novels I’m working on now did begin in just that way.
Love LM’s “scene islands.”
The most important thing, to my mind, about Ms. Wrede’s brilliant post is that a plot outline is dynamic; it constantly fills in and readjusts as the story gets written. This may be a partial answer to LM’s concern about killing the story by knowing it too well in advance. I may know where the story is going overall, but I’m constantly making discoveries about how things materialize and fit together (or don’t) as I go along. For me, that keeps it plenty exciting.
Rick
Thanks! But to be clear, knowing it too well is the only way I write it. Attempting to organize it into an outlined sequence is what kills it dead.
And yes, I relate so hard to that dynamicness.