Plots and Projects

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

A few years ago, I was talking to a businessperson at a family gathering, and I made a comment about my then-current work in process. He immediately assumed that my “project” (writing a book) would be “done” once the book was published and on the shelves for people to buy. I objected automatically, and only later realized that my knee-jerk reaction came because I consider writing the book to be a completely separate project from revising and editing the book. And while publishing the book—that is, designing the interior layout, cover art, getting it printed and bound, and out to the readers—is certainly a project, it’s not really my project. I don’t self-publish, which means I also have little, if any, control over the cover art and interior design, let alone the printing, binding, and distribution.

Stories can be broken down the same way, and some writers find it extremely helpful to do so. Thinking of the action plot as a project the characters have been handed, and breaking that down into sub-projects or sections, can help identify where a novel starts and ends, and where the next story-section picks up and ends.

The project that a character has to deal with in a story is usually not a major life goal, though it may be one of the steps along the way. Often, the character’s project is something that only just came up—“catch George’s murderer” isn’t a project until after George’s murder; “survive the nuclear war” isn’t a project until the war starts. Other times, the character’s project is something they’ve been putting off for a while that is becoming urgent—“I want to get married by the time I’m thirty” for instance.

Because plot-projects aren’t life-goals, they usually take somewhere between a couple of days to, at most, a couple of years for the characters to finish them. If the project is “evacuating our species to a different star system before the sun goes nova,” the time-frame may be longer than an individual human lifetime, which would require either one epic novel or a multi-book story arc.

Plot-projects tend to be more compelling when they either move the character closer to achieving a life-goal, or when there’s some urgency or a specific deadline to meet. “Becoming CEO of the Interstellar Terraforming Corporation” may be someone’s ultimate life goal, but the plot-project for this story is “bringing a tricky project in on time and under budget so the character doesn’t get fired” (which has both a life-goal contribution and a deadline).

The obvious assumption is that stories start when the protagonist takes on a project and end when the project is completed, but that point is often not quite as obvious as people think. Stories often begin with some set-up showing why the project is needed now—“evacuate Earth to a safer planet” often starts with someone discovering that Earth is going to be uninhabitable within X years; murder mysteries often begin by showing the events leading up to the murder.

Endings are even more flexible, because the project the protagonist has may be only one part of a larger and more complicated project. Murder mysteries are a really good example of this.

In a murder mystery, the overall project is to put the murderer in jail. Since the detective is usually the protagonist, their project is the investigation part—figuring out whodunnit—not the courtroom aspects involved in trying, convicting, and sentencing the murderer, so the plot-project ends with the revelation and arrest of the murderer. However, in some mysteries, the revelation of the murderer is part of the courtroom drama (e.g., Perry Mason books). In others, the protagonist is responsible for the entire project of getting the murderer caught, convicted, and locked up (they’re a special counsel or district attorney running both the investigation and the trial), so the story doesn’t end until the criminal has been incarcerated.

If the author wants to focus on the entirety of a large plot-project, they can also format their work in multiple viewpoints, sections, or novels, where the first one covers the investigation, or planning the evacuation, or surviving the initial super-volcano eruption, while the second viewpoint/section/novel covers the trial, or the race to organize and build spaceships, or starting to rebuild.

In other words, authors have considerable flexibility in determining where the end of the characters’ project is, because “the end of the project” can vary depending on both who the protagonist is and how much of the larger project they’re responsible for, and on whether the author wants to follow the larger plot-project, or stick with the protagonist’s piece of it. In the sort of murder-mystery that ends with the revelation of the murderer, the rest of the project (the trial, sentencing, and incarceration) are usually taken for granted; if the writer mentions them at all, it’s as validation and confirmation that the detective got it right and order is restored. But it’s perfectly possible for the author to choose a protagonist who has a stake in, or responsibility for, the entire large project, in which case the novel usually ends with the conclusion of the trial or the sentencing.

The author has to decide where the plot-project starts and finishes. This issue can lead to two sorts of problems for writers: 1) The protagonist’s story-project-plot is a segment of a larger arc (as with the detective’s investigation), but the writer is so caught up in the importance of the larger plot-arc that they overshoot their story’s ending, or 2) The writer gets so caught up in the protagonist’s segment of the larger project that they leave too many things hanging, or don’t provide enough validation for the reader to feel satisfied that the story-project-plot really is over. Which is why treating plot-management as if it were project-planning can help focus these writers when the overarching problem or situation is too large for one protagonist (or for one novel).