There are a myriad of books out there on how to construct a plot. Most of them, so far as I can tell, seem to take one of two approaches: either they focus on the main character as the driver of the plot, or they focus on the traditional plot-skeleton as the way of pushing the plot forward.
Both of these methods (and most of the others I’ve run across) begin by saying things like “have an idea” or “pick a main character” and then proceed directly to either “decide on the main plot problem” or “decide how it ends.” This isn’t wrong – the plot problem and the ending are important, and in most books really do need to be there by the time the story is over. They’re also perfectly valid places that one can start working out one’s plot. They just don’t work first time, every time, for every writer…or even for a writer who has developed plots that way in the past.
But these systems are top-down approaches, the equivalent of saying to a sculptor or potter, “First, decide what you are going to make. A statue of an elephant? A teapot?” The idea is that once you know where you are going, it is much easier to chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant, or add material until it looks like a teapot.
What these approaches don’t help with are the people who work from the bottom up or the inside out. These folks are more like quilters who start with eighteen different types of fabric and a box of triangles and squares left over from the last project, and ask “What can I make out of this that would be interesting?” rather than starting with “I am going to make a Log Cabin quilt; what do I have that I can use?”
If you’re starting with a box of bits and pieces – a couple of characters, a scene that doesn’t seem to have a point, a notion that a sea voyage ought to come in somewhere – the approach you have to take to generate a plot probably isn’t the tidy linear method that so many plotting books describe. It’s going to be iterative, going around and around or back and forth until a pattern emerges. Because that’s one of the things plot is: it’s a pattern that goes somewhere.
The first thing to do is to see what you have. For a quilter, that means spreading out all the fabric and bits so they can get an overview; for a writer, it usually means reading through everything, though it might also mean printing stuff out and spreading it around like the fabric bits.
Depending on your personal preferences, you can then proceed in a couple of different ways. You can pick out all your very favorite bits and then try to see if any of what’s left fits around them or connects them. You can group and regroup your snippets – by obvious mechanical categories like length or type (dialog, description, action) or category (characters, places, backstory, plot twists), or in more intuitive “these feel like they belong together” groupings. You can move stacks of paper around, or use 3×5 cards or Post-It Notes, or make diagrams in a brainstorming program. You can clump things together (all the bits that involve Mary Ann) and then shuffle the clumps, or you can sort things individually and then look for all the different groups that have a Mary Ann bit in them.
As you do this, two things usually happen: one is that as you go over and over the bits from different directions, they will start to collide in your head and cause new bits to appear; the other is that you start to notice the things that are missing. Again, depending on your personal style and preference, you can scribble a list of new ideas and missing bits and keep going, or you can stop and write down the whole idea (whether that’s two lines or a five page scene) or try to make up some bits that would fit in the missing places.
If you are very, very lucky, you will start scribbling down something and come out of the daze several hours later realizing that you have just written Chapter One and you can stop looking at the bits and pieces and just keep writing now. Don’t count on this, though; it’s rare.
More usually, you will shuffle bits and pieces, and add new bits and pieces, and eventually you will start noticing a pattern or patterns. Maybe you have eight scenes where someone is rescuing someone or saving something, or a set of conversations that all seem to involve family crises of different sorts. If the emerging pattern appeals to you, make it your centerpiece and look through all the remaining bits to see what might fit with it. (You won’t ever use all the bits and pieces.) Or just resort and regroup everything until the emerging pattern grows clearer or you nudge the missing bits into view.
If the pattern(s) you come up with don’t appeal, pick the one that includes your favorite scene/clever line/dialog/character and ask yourself what would make it appealing and interesting – not to readers, you’re not at that point yet. Interesting and appealing to you. Or try recombining it with something else – maybe the action-adventure bits would be a lot more fun to write if the main character was trying to deal with the family crises at the same time, or the typical romance scenes would be more interesting if it involved a pod of dolphins.
Eventually, you probably do want to get to the “where does it end?” and “what is the big problem?” questions, but the odds are good that by then you will have a fairly good notion what your story is and where the plot is heading. Then you can tidy up all the stacks of papers and take a quick look at the top-down planning models to make sure you haven’t missed anything you really need or want. Or you can just start writing once you have whatever your backbrain considers “enough to go on with.”
Just a note to say thank you for this. It’s a pretty close description of the way I plot, or the only way that works for me. I’d continue to do it anyway, but it’s reassuring to know other writers do it also.
My backbrain considers an atom (more likely some subatomic particle) “enough to go on with”. It leads to a lot of dead ends, but the ride is always interesting.
It helps to remember that no time spent writing is ever wasted. If you come up with something unusable, you have still spent the time exercising the writing muscles. At worst, you come up with an example of what to never try again.
Yes. That’s how the muse insists that I work.
I don’t think I could work that way–it’d drive me crazy!
I am bookmarking this, both for my own future reference and so I can point people here when they start making assumptions about the idea-generating process so alien to me that I can’t carry on the conversation.
If you’re starting with a box of bits and pieces – a couple of characters, a scene that doesn’t seem to have a point, a notion that a sea voyage ought to come in somewhere
This pretty much describes every idea I have ever come up with, including the ones that turned into actual functioning novels with real plots and everything. If I’m very lucky, the random scenes come with enough backstory attached that it’s fairly obvious (to me) what sort of story would come out of that situation. Then it’s a matter of turning that starting scenario into a sequence of events, which is usually where I start whining, “Plots are hard!”, but it’s still easier than the top-down approach you describe, which just baffles me.
I can come up with “story beginning” bits and pieces well enough, but then I run into a catch-22: It’s really hard for me to generate further bits and pieces for the middle and ending without a plot pattern and really hard to generate a plot pattern without those further bits and pieces. What usually happens is that I strain and grunt to create an ugly, low-detail plot skeleton, then go to the beginning and try to bull my way through to the end.
The idea of creating detailed bits and pieces out of order is alien to me, so I’m naturally drawn to the blandishments of the various linear, top-down approches.
Something I feel would be useful for me is a “random story idea” generator that produced random plot twists and ideas for climax-scenes. There are a lot of random-idea generators out there, but it seems that they all produce seeds of the “this is how the story starts” type – and that sort of thing I can produce easily enough without help.
I don’t like to go into details before I’ve hammered them into a plot either. That’s why I outline: to ensure there’s a plot in there. Somewhere.
@Deep Lurker – Don’t know if this would work for you, but for one novel, I kept a list of random comments and odd phrases that turned up in ordinary conversations. Whenever I ran low on momentum on the novel, I grabbed something off the list and threw it in. (Usually it tried to kill my characters, which was handy because it meant they had to do something, which meant I had something to write about.)
Mind you, I tend to have the sort of conversations in which things like “cyborg platypus” turn up. 😉 But even less odd conversations could probably be mined for idea-starters.