Planning Longer Plots

There are three basic ways to handle plotting a story, whether it’s a short story, a stand-alone novel, or an epic twenty-volume series:  1) You can do it intuitively as you write, 2) You can plan it out in advance, or 3) You can write a bunch of stuff and then arrange it into a plot afterward. (There are, of course, ways that are a mixture of each of these, and whatever way you choose requires flexibility – I think I’ve met maybe one writer who actually plans in advance and sticks to the plan exactly – but these are the obvious possibilities.)

One of the problems with writing longer fiction – and by “longer” I mean “longer and more complicated than what you’ve been doing,” whether that means you’re moving from drabbles to short stories, from short stories to novels, or from novels to trilogies or series – is that whatever plotting method you’ve been using often quits working at some point when you start writing longer. So if you’ve been flying by the seat of your pants, you may have to plan, or you may need to do more rearranging of things once the first draft is written. If you’ve been planning, you may need to let go…or you may need to dig deeper, or, again, rearrange things a lot more afterward. At the very least, even the most intuitive of writers often finds it necessary to do something to keep track of where everyone is and what stage of the plot they’re at.

The other thing about longer works is that they tend to be more complex in terms of plot, because there is more room for things like ensemble casts (three or more main characters, each of whom has his or her own major plot thread), braided plots, and subplots, to say nothing of structural variation based on plot. If the writer has been used to doing fairly straightforward linear plots, the increased complexity can result in much tearing of hair. Using calendars, maps, spreadsheets, and other physical diagrams can help a lot with keeping things consistent, whether one does the diagrams, etc. before, during, or after writing the first draft.

I’ve already talked about the basic plot skeleton.  Each plot thread, each strand of a braided plot, each subplot, has its own pattern of ups and downs. The more strands and subplots there are, the more attention the writer needs to pay to how the ups and downs fit together. Again, a lot of us do this by instinct and intuition, but I find that it still helps to back off, disentangle the plot threads, and look at whether maybe the reason things feel a bit flat is that the major plot thread is consistently hitting a low at the same time as two subplots are hitting a high, and they’re canceling each other out.

Exactly how the writer goes about doing this depends on what suits their particular process and mindset. A lot of writers use spreadsheets to plan or track characters and subplots (I’m using “plan” for laying things out in advance and “track” for doing it while writing – at the end of each chapter, say). Formats vary, but a common one is to have chapter1/scene1 running down the side, and columns for which characters appear (or are central) in the scene, scene location, which plot threads or subplots are advanced, viewpoint (if it’s a multiple-viewpoint story, which long stories frequently are), who has the McGuffin, etc. – anything the writer wants to keep track of.

I find flow charts helpful. You can still find those plastic guides for making them in office supply stores – the ones that have cutouts shaped like diamonds, circles, squares, etc., meant for computer programmers. With one of those and some colored pencils, I can have hours of fun diagramming what’s supposed to happen to my main characters, where their paths cross, what their relationships are and how they change, etc. Post-It Notes (TM) are another great resource – I use different colors for different plot threads and write a brief scene summary on each one (“Lan loses temper” “Wedding planning”) and then lay them out in order. If I get too many of one color bunched up together, I know that I need to move things around so I don’t lose track of a bunch of my plot threads.

Storyboarding (or a variation of it) works well for some visually inclined writers, even if they can’t draw and aren’t working on a film script. It can take a while to draw out a bunch of comic-like panels, even with just stick-figures and captions, but it really does strip the various story lines down to their essentials. Even just a three- or four-word scene summary with no pictures can do the trick. Telling the story to someone in all its complexity can be incredibly useful, if only because you find all the places where you have to keep backtracking to explain things (and if you do it with a pen and paper handy, you can jot down the order that seems right for telling it, which may turn out not to be what you thought would work when you were plotting it all out on paper.)

There are also computer programs out there that can help track complex plots. I haven’t played with a lot of them personally, but yWriter and Storybook are two that I’ve found useful from time to time. I’m sure other folks can recommend things, too.