Every so often, somebody asks me how to get to a full plot skeleton. This leads to me asking them a bunch of questions, which they usually find disconcerting, especially since I always start with:
What do you mean by “a full plot skeleton”?
I have to start with this because a lot of the people who ask me about this seem to think that “a full plot skeleton” means a minimum of twenty pages – often more like fifty – outlining the events of every scene in order, including all the subplots. For writers who work this way, and who need this kind of detail, this is fine, but I haven’t run across very many of them. Most writers I know are at the other extreme; after all, a skeleton is composed of the supporting bones; it doesn’t include muscles, ligaments, or internal organs, let alone skin and hair. Other times, the questioner is fixated on the I.A.1.a outline format they learned in school, which works for a few folks, but really doesn’t fit most people’s processes very well.
What kind of plot skeleton do you need?
The skeleton of a mystery novel doesn’t look quite the same as the skeleton of a romance, and both are quite different from the skeleton of a nonlinear time-travel story. Skeletons are stripped down, true, but the bones aren’t interchangeable, and the skeleton of a cat looks very different from the skeleton of a bird or a fish.
What do you need a plot skeleton for?
The most common answer is that the questioner needs it to start writing, but there are always a few folks who need to write out a plot skeleton once they’ve done the first draft, so they can make sure everything is there. These are two very different problems, and need very different solutions, especially if the end-of-draft outliner routinely finds critical pieces of the story missing. Which brings me to:
What parts of your current plot skeleton(s) are missing?
If the missing section is always the same one – it’s always the opening, or the wrap-up, or the middle turning point – then the writer has one specific area (and possibly one specific problem) to focus on. Someone assembling skeletons who routinely leaves out the vertebrae or the ribs may be avoiding doing that part for some reason.
On the other hand, writers who leave out a different section of plot every time may just be skipping whatever section seems so obvious to them that they don’t need to lay it out in more detail than “some stuff happens.” Alternatively, they may be the sort of writer who does a different kind of stretchy bit with every book, so the part that’s hardest to figure out keeps moving around.
And finally, there’s:
Why do you think you need more of “a full plot skeleton” than you have?
“The protagonist has a problem. They try to solve it and fail. They try again and succeed. Happy ending!” is a perfectly good, complete plot outline, which can be applied to something like 95% or more of all the books ever published. It is, of course, utterly generic, but so is the term “a skeleton,” which can apply to birds, fish, cats, elephants, whales, and people, with widely varying results.
For the 99% of questioners who want “a full and complete plot skeleton” before they start writing, the answer is that they expect having one will make writing the book easier. This is sometimes true, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the book will be better for having begun life this way. Also, many writers find having too detailed a plot outline makes the actual writing part boring. In fact, for most of the writers I know, their preliminary plot outlines look something like this:
“A little guy inherits an evil magic ring that used to belong to the ultimate Evil Overlord. He and some friends undertake a dangerous journey to bring it to the elves, hoping they’ll know what to do with it. That doesn’t work, so they try some other stuff and there’s a war and they get separated. Eventually the little guy reaches the only volcano that can destroy the evil ring, and drops it in and melts it. Happy ending!”
In other words, there are parts of the generic plot outline that are fleshed out (e.g. “The protagonist has a problem and tries to solve it” becomes “A little guy inherits an evil magic ring…and takes it to the elves…”) and parts that are still plenty generic (“They try some other stuff …”). The writer knows something happens there, but they only have a few major plot-points (“There’s a war” “They get separated”). Often, these will change or move around when it comes to the actual writing part.
The generic parts of the preliminary plot outline vary from writer to writer and book to book. Sometimes, it’s the beginning or ending that’s hazy; other times, it’s the obstacle course in the middle, or particular sections of it. Sometimes, giving a book an unusual structure affects which parts are clear from the start and which parts are hazy.
Trying to pin everything down in advance is usually not necessary (unless one is the rare writer for whom a 500-page “outline” is necessary before one can write a 300-page novel), and seldom brings good results. What every writer needs is enough of a plot outline, with enough detail to be going on with. For some writers, that means they need nothing at all. For a surprisingly large number of writers, it means they need a lot less detail than they want.
What I want from a plot skeleton is “The protagonists have a problem. They try to solve it and fail. They try again and succeed. Happy ending!” – but with reasons why. If they failed the first time, then why didn’t they fail the second time? And if they succeeded the second time, then why didn’t they succeed the first time? Or why didn’t they just give up after the first try?
On thinking about it, my problem is… problems. I usually start with a cool setting or character idea because those are easy for me. The first check is finding the right problem that interacts interestingly with the cool idea. I don’t want the cool idea to be the story-problem itself because that makes it less cool.
The second check is working out how the protagonists both fail AND succeed. If I just had to figure out how they failed, that would be easy. If I just had to figure out how they succeeded, that would be fairly easy too. Figuring out how they manage to do BOTH is what makes plotting Hard.
In my “Human woman shops for clothing on an alien planet” story, the key problem wasn’t actually finding clothing that fit. Instead the key problem turned out to be finding a suitable thank-you gift for the alien woman who acted as a native guide. And that turned out to be more a “source of tension” than a “problem.” (Which was OK. The story didn’t need a Big Problem or a Glorious Solution.)On thinking about it, my problem is… problems. I
(Gack, I though I had deleted that bit at the end. Sometimes I wish the comments here had an edit function to clean up those sorts of muddy footprints.)
“End-of-draft outliner”. so that’s what I am. Would you be willing to write some more about that? I feel as if I keep rushing around whacking random errant bits of plot on the head and not really making progress.
Some people write by making more and more detailed outlines. C.J. Cherryh considers that she switched from outlines to first draft when she added dialog.