Plot Planning

I thought long and hard about what to say about plotting, and I have concluded that there are as many ‘right’ ways to handle plotting as there are kinds of authors. There are not only differences in the ways we as authors want to structure our stories, but also differences in what the various readers want to read.

So what is your plot? There’s no such thing as a story without any plot. The plot is whatever you choose to have happen in your story.

Some authors enjoy writing in a stream-of-consciousness way, letting the characters wander whither they will. Every idea of something that might happen is fair game for being included in the story, and at the same time there’s nothing that must be included in the story. And what they end up with is their plot.

Other authors approach plotting as if they were the coxswain in a racing shell, firmly in control of their boat, and their eight oarsmen are their characters, propelling the story in the direction the coxswain has determined he wants it to go. When I write a story, I know at the outset how the story will begin (my initial premise) and how it will end (the finish line, the final sentences being already composed). Everything in between is constructed to tie those two ends together. This leaves plenty of room for constructive creativity, but always with an eye on the finish line, the goal.  The narrative framework that is built between these two ends provides the basic scaffold or skeleton for constructing the story, draped with details that add flesh and color to the framework, hopefully placed with such finesse that the story comes to life, not merely progressing along mechanically as if it were a robot.

My creative writing professor in college was firmly in the camp of Raymond Carver – what seemed to me as aimless meandering, apparently not trying to accomplish anything, and ending when, as I supposed, the author’s pen ran out of ink. My professor liked stories that were, to me, pointless and boring, but I must concede that those stories found publication and inclusion in anthologies or collected works.  So some authors made a living by writing them and some readers enjoyed reading them. My professor disapproved of surprises in stories, unexpected turns of the story line, or dramatic/forceful situations and events. Imitating Raymond Carver, he called such turns of events “tricks,” as if it was unfair or illegal to include them in the story.

I, on the other hand, liked to put plot twists and surprises in my stories so that the reader could not necessarily predict with boredom-producing sureness what was going to happen on the next page or the next ten pages. So my professor always recommended that I cut off the latter half of my story (where some interesting things were happening) and just have the characters go off and have a nice cup of tea.  In the end, we agreed to disagree.

There are systems in which story structure is dictated according to a strictly analyzed rule. The simplest example is the Three Act Structure often seen in movie scripts. But some systems are highly detailed, to the point that a reader who is familiar with the particular system being employed can see all the nuts and bolts of the system; for me, that makes the narrative less natural, less organic, and the story more predictable. I took a year-long course from an instructor who exemplified this approach to story construction. He used some of his own stories/books as teaching examples, and the system was visible as one read the story. For example, the protagonist has a dilemma to solve, and she will try exactly three ways to solve her problem, and the first two approaches won’t work, but the third one will, not because it is a better method but because it is Attempt Number Three, and Attempt Number Three always works. 

Real life doesn’t happen that way. Sometimes your first solution to the problem works like a charm, and sometimes nothing works. So I try to put flexibility into the strict plotting systems.

Much of real life is mundane and pretty boring, not attention-grabbing. So I like to alternate chapters of dramatic action and chapters that are quieter, though still meaty.  And dramatic or laid back, every chapter should drive my plot forward toward the goal that I wrote on the first day of composition, those precious sentences that now have a powerful impact because of everything that has gone before.