Plot is Hard, Part 2

Once you have an idea of the kinds of plots you like, how much you need to know to get started (and how much you need to not-know in order to keep going), and the kinds of things that seem to trigger good ideas for you, you can actually start working on the plot.

“Working on the plot” means different things depending on what you have to start with. If what you start with is plot, or at least the outline of a plot, most of what you have to do will likely be just fleshing out the details. If you start with anything else (and most people who have big trouble with plot start with characters or setting or worldbuilding or theme or a general idea that they want to explore, rather than with plot), you have to come up with a plot that fits whatever it is that you have.

“Coming up with a plot” is like building something out of Legos. You can go at it in a number of ways. You can start by deciding whether you are building a castle or a submarine, and then decide on the layout and colors and what blocks you are going to need. Or you can start by putting some blocks together until they make a shape that’s interesting, and then decide whether it’s the top of a castle tower or the conning tower of a submarine. Or you can sort the blocks you have by size and color and see how many you have and whether you need to go buy a bunch more before you have enough to build anything.

A plot is, among other things, a whole series of interlocked events that have to hang together to make a coherent, satisfying whole on several levels – logical and emotional pattern-making. If you are the sort of literary genius who can do all that in one go, you probably already know it. The rest of us tend to work on one level at a time, and in no set order; that is, sometimes I have the general shape of the plot arc (“the street urchin gets caught burgling a magician and helps him clear his name”) but no real details about how it’s going to happen, and sometimes I have one or more disconnected scenes that I know are key plot elements, but I have no idea how they fit together, and sometimes I have a boffo ending in mind in great detail without a clue how they get from the quiet village at the start to the king’s coronation.

In other words, almost nobody sits down and “comes up with a plot.” What they come up with are elements of a plot, which may be macro-level or micro-level, which may occur at any point in the story arc, and which frequently move around as the storyline becomes clearer (which may not happen until the writer is in the middle of the novel – the scene that looks like being the climax of my current WIP is one I originally conceived of as a mid-book turning point).

Assuming that you are starting with nothing that remotely resembles a plot-element, the first thing to do is to look at what you have – all the things you know are true about the story. You can get a surprising amount of information from whatever you have, whether it’s a general idea like “I want to write a book about slavery,” or something specific like a character, a fragment of a scene, or just a title or a log line. When I started Talking to Dragons, all I had was the title. From the title, I could deduce that there would be dragons in the story and that someone would be talking to them; this probably meant that the dragons were intelligent and would talk back. And the fact that this was important enough to make into a title gave me the feeling that talking to dragons was probably not the safest thing in the world to be doing. That’s quite a bit to get from three words.

Once you know what it is you know, you also have some idea what’s missing (besides plot). What’s missing usually depends a lot on what you start with. If you begin with an idea, you’re probably missing just about everything; if you begin with a scene or a fragment, you may have characters and setting and a lot of hints about background/backstory. This is useful to poke at, because plot interacts with and is affected by everything else in the story…and sometimes, a great plot idea and a great other idea (for a character, setting, scene, whatever) turn out to be mutually exclusive.

What you’re doing with all this prep work and thinking about stuff is priming the pump, or, as one of my friends says, “putting yourself in a situation in which writing ideas could possibly happen.” There’s no way to guarantee that suitable things will show up, but if you know how you work (see last week’s post), you can at least look in the most likely places. If you know that you’ve historically gotten good ideas walking on the beach, but you have no track record of getting them listening to music, you can plan a couple of beach-walks every week instead of staying inside combing your playlists for something that will get your ideas moving.

At this point, you start brainstorming. This is the equivalent of deciding to build something out of Legos, realizing that you don’t have any Legos, and heading out to the store to buy some, except that there aren’t actually any stores that sell plot elements. This is one of the “creativity” parts that nobody actually knows how to make happen, and I’m going to talk about it in more detail next week.