A Plot-noodling How-to

“Plot-noodling” is a term I came up with to describe a … thing … that I and some of my writer friends do when one of us is stuck; it involves the writer sitting down with one or (rarely) two other people, who ask the writer a bunch of questions that, everyone hopes, will lead the writer to an “aha!” moment about where the story will go next.

It sounds fairly straightforward, but when it comes to specifics – like, exactly what questions I ask when I’m plot-noodling – it’s more difficult to explain. I don’t run down a pre-set list of questions. Every book and every writer is different, which means that the plot-noodling questions have to be different. The questions I ask depend on what the writer already knows about the characters and plot, what they think they want to do with the story, and where the holes in the overall development are. It’s not a terribly methodical process; I tend to skip around a lot, especially when it looks as if one particular line of questioning isn’t getting anywhere.

While I can’t give people a list of plot-noodling questions, I can identify a process, and a few dos and don’ts. The don’ts are pretty easy:  First, “And then what?” or “What happens next?” are almost never the right questions. If the writer already knows the answer, they don’t need to plot-noodle that part, and if they don’t know the answer, asking the question doesn’t elicit anything useful.

Second, if the writer keeps answering “I don’t know,” I probably need to back up to an earlier stage of the story-development process. For example, if I asked, “Why does your protagonist want the Ultimate Gizmo?” and the author says “I don’t know,” I may need to back up to “What does your protagonist want?” Or even  “Wait, why is this character the protagonist? Could they be just the viewpoint instead, like Dr. Watson?”

The “dos” part is more of a pattern than a set of specific questions, because as I said, every writer and every book is different. I start, not with the plot, but with what the writer already knows about the story they are trying to write. This is true even if I’ve read some chapters, because the writer always knows more than is down on the page, even if it is just that the protagonist hates onions. If I’m starting off cold, I ask the writer to tell me what they know so far, and what kind of stuff they still need to know. Sometimes people want to get a plot in order; sometimes they have two seemingly-incompatible ideas that they are trying to decide between; sometimes they need to develop a character’s backstory; sometimes they just want a plausible explanation for some plot-critical event to happen. Or there’s a specific aspect of a character or the world that they need but don’t have yet.

If they’re just stuck, the problem is often that there’s a gap in the story that they don’t know how to bridge, rather than a total void out ahead. So I ask something like, “Are there events or scenes that you know belong in this book, even if you don’t know where or why?” or “What gave you the idea in the first place?” (Sometimes, the writer’s problem is that they started off wanting to capture an idea, or a character, or the feel of a song or a place, and they’ve lost track of that while trying to make a coherent plot out of the pieces they do have. Which usually means backing up to wherever things started to get off-track from the original push-to-write.)

If the writer has one or more “floating” scenes – say, they know the characters will escape a dungeon, but not where/when to put that scene – I usually poke a bit at what would have to happen before each of those scenes in order to get to them, and why the characters would want to do X, and what kind of resources they have that would help them do it (whether “resources” means magical ability, people they know, or mundane skills like sword fighting or spinning). It’s basically looking at the underpinnings of the causal plot-chains and working backwards instead of trying to project things forwards before there’s a solid foundation.

If the writer just has a couple of characters or a world, and no plot events or scenes, I start with questions about the characters and their background, what they know (how to cook, pilot a spaceship, etc.), who their friends/family are and whether any of them might/could be important in the book, what their current situation could be at the start of the book, where the writer wants them to get to emotionally/intellectually by the end, maybe some details about how the magic/technology or cultures work. When the answers start pointing in the same direction, I point that out and see if that’s where the writer wants to go or if it triggers something for them. I also ask lots of “why” questions, which I find are a lot more useful than “what” questions in many cases.

Once I start getting answers, I look for connections – places where characters or plot events or aspects of the world either overlap, or where they appear contradictory. I try not to make actual suggestions; if I can’t think of any other way to get at something, I say things like “Does Character X know about that plot event?” or “Is there enough time between when X happens and when Protagonist hears about it for the villain to start setting up the next trap? Would it help if there were?” And if I really can’t think of any other way, I try to come up with at least three completely different possibilities – “Would your protagonist duck down the alley to get away, try to sneak closer to eavesdrop, or leap out to confront the thugs?” – in order to not unduly influence the writer’s imagination. (Half the time, the writer says very slowly, “No, no … they’d use that gadget they found back in Chapter One … let me write that down…”) A lot of it is asking the kinds of questions that I would need to know if I were developing a story (the answers, of course, are never the ones I would pick, but that’s the point).

The problem with this description is that it contains mostly the general questions that can apply to many situations, while in actual practice, a lot of the questions I ask are very specific to the story, and would be completely useless for noodling on any other story.