Last plot post for a while, I promise

A few more words about plot before I move on to something else for a while:

First off, dozens of people besides Heinlein have come up with different sets of basic plots; he’s not the last word on the subject. Most of them have a lot more than three, which makes them far more difficult to analyze in a brief post; they are also all a lot less basic, as you might expect from the fact that there are ten or twelve or thirty-seven of them.

Second, plots can happen on different levels in any and every story. Some stories are mostly on one level – the James Bond books cited in comments earlier are primarily physical action, i.e. “The Little Tailor,” with no other levels to the plot. Other stories operate on multiple levels at once – Lois Bujold’s Memory is both a “Little Tailor” plot and a “Man Learns Lesson” plot; her A Civil Campaign later in the same series has all three levels of plot for the main storyline, and multiple levels for most of the secondary storylines/subplots as well.

The most common levels for plot to operate on are physical, emotional, and/or intellectual. It’s usually fairly easy to classify a story with a central plot that is all one level. If you want to write a classic sword-and-sorcery Conan the Barbarian type of plot, you don’t have to think very hard to figure out that what you’ve got is Little Tailor action-adventure and not much else. As with the James Bond books, there’s sometimes a bit of romance decorating the main storyline, but it rarely has enough attention paid to it to qualify even as a subplot, and sword-and-sorcery heroes seldom learn anything new about themselves or the world in the course of their adventures (except maybe the location of the nearest bar or brothel).

As soon as you start looking at complex stories with multiple levels, things get harder to classify. What is the central plotline in Bujold’s Memory – the intellectual “whodunnit and how” puzzle, the action/adventure thriller, or the vital lessons the main character has to learn about himself? The three plot levels are so closely entwined that they’re difficult to untangle.

And this is where a lot of folks go heading off in the wrong direction. They have a central plotline that requires some action, so they immediately think in terms of an action plot, when really what they have is an emotional family drama or a romance that involves some action at various points. Or they have a romance but one of the characters ends up dead, so they think it has to be an action plot. (About that – Romeo and Juliet. ‘Nuff said.)

Having mis-identified the type of story they want to write, they proceed to “develop their plot” in that direction, and the more details they make up, the less satisfied they are. Eventually, they abandon the story (sometimes many chapters in, which is exceedingly discouraging).

The thing one has to look at is: what is the bit that, if you took it out or changed it, you wouldn’t still have the story you wanted to write? If you want to write Georgette Heyer’s Frederica, you can do without the hot-air balloon chase (the action part, which would be a shame to lose…but the main storyline would survive), but you cannot do without the relationship between the two main characters and their families, because that’s what the story is about. If you want to write a James Bond book, you can do without the Bond girl-of-the-week, but you can’t do without the car chases, fights, and megalomaniacal villains.

It can be a lot harder to pin down that essential center when all you have is an idea-seed, and not the whole story. A lot of writers do it by feel, meaning that when they start to develop an idea-seed, they let go of the stuff that doesn’t “feel right” as quickly as possible. Sometimes, this means a quick rejection; other times, they try on the not-quite-satisfactory idea for a couple of days or even weeks. This can be extremely frustrating for the friends and family who are trying to be supportive, and who really like the not-quite-right idea that the writer is abandoning.

It is also frustrating for writers who, having started off in the wrong direction (say, trying to think up an action plot for what ought to be a Man Learns Lesson story), keep getting suggestions from their helpful beta readers for the thing they’ve rejected (i.e., more action plot possibilities when they need an emotional plot or a puzzle or a lesson plot). There is not much to be done about this; once you have got people looking in the wrong direction, it is very hard to get them to switch. About all I can think of is to announce that you have to go think for a while and do not want any more suggestions for a couple of months, and then stick to it while you consider alternatives, no matter how much you want to talk about it. Once the wrong-possible-plot-direction has faded a bit from everyone’s memory, you can go back with a new plot-direction and hopefully get some useful suggestions.