Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure

by James Scott Bell

  TAKE A LOOK INSIDE

  All writers should periodically take a good look inside themselves. Before developing your next plot, take some time to answer the following questions. This will create what I call a “personality filter” through which you’ll be able to generate original plots full of interesting characters:

  What do you care most about in the world?

  If you were to write your own obituary, how would you want it to read?

  What is your physical appearance? How do you feel about it? How does it affect you?

  What do you fear most?

  What are your major strengths of character?

  What are your major flaws?

  What are you good at? What do you wish you were good at?

  If you could do one thing and know that you would be successful, what would you do?

  What are three events from your childhood that helped shape you into the person you are today?

  What are some of your annoying habits?

  What secret in your life do you hope is never revealed?

  What is your philosophy of life?

  Answering these questions opens up a door into your own soul. From that viewpoint, you can better evaluate plot ideas. Does the story you’re considering hit a nerve inside you? If not, why write it?

  “Know thyself,” the sages admonished, and that’s still good advice. Especially for writers. By knowing yourself truly and honestly, by writing with passion and intensity, by caring about important issues, you’ll find your writing is not only fresh, but a joy. You’ll have you. And that’s enough to start writing.

  GOING AFTER IDEAS

  Not every idea is worth writing about. Why spend six months, a year — ten years! — hammering out something that editors and agents, not to mention readers, will not care about?

  Listen: You haven’t got time to waste on mediocre stories.

  So what do you do? How do you come up with an idea so good that it alone is almost enough to keep readers reading?

  In school, I was taught to sit and think and formulate an idea, then set to work.

  That’s the path to the reaction, “I’ve seen this before.”

  You need to do the opposite.

  You need to come up with hundreds of ideas, toss out the ones that don’t grab you, and then nurture and develop what’s left.

  In a moment, I am going to give you twenty ways to come up with hundreds of ideas for your fiction. But first, some rules:

  [1] Schedule a regular idea time. Once a week at least.

  [2] Get yourself into a relaxed state, in a quiet spot where your imagination can run free.

  [3] Give yourself thirty minutes of uninterrupted time.

  [4] Select one or more of the exercises below. Read the instructions.

  [5] Begin by letting your imagination come up with anything it wants to, and record everything on paper (or the computer).

  [6] The most important rule: Do not, I repeat, do not censor yourself in any way. Leave your editorial mind out of the loop. Just let the ideas come pouring out in any way, shape, or form they want to. Do not judge anything.

  [7] Have fun. Lots of fun. You’re even allowed to laugh.

  [8] Save all your ideas.

  [9] After two or three sessions, it’s time to assess your ideas. Use the guidelines in “Nurturing Your Ideas” at the end of this chapter.

  [10] Repeat the process as often as you want.

  And always remember: The journey of a thousand miles requires plenty of snacks. So feel free to eat while you do these exercises.

  THE TOP TWENTY WAYS TO GET HUNDREDS OF PLOT IDEAS

  Here are twenty fast, simple, and fun ways to develop your own unique plot ideas:

  1. The What-If Game

  This is perhaps the oldest, and still the best, creative game for the novelist. Originality is nothing more than connecting familiar elements in unfamiliar ways. The what-if game gets our minds thinking in such a way as to make those connections.

  The what-if game can be played at any stage of the writing process, but it is especially useful for finding ideas. Train your mind to think in terms of what-if, and it will perform marvelous tricks for you.

  For example, when you read something interesting, ask yourself, “What if?” Let all sorts of connections burst forth.

  For one week do the following:

  Read the newspaper asking “What if?” while encountering each article.

  For every TV show or commercial you watch, ask, “What if?”

  Let your mind roam free.

  Write down your what-if questions on a master list.

  Put the list aside and come back to it a few days later. Take what sounds promising and jot down some more notes about it. Your next story may start here.

  2. Titles

  Make up a cool title, and then write a book to go with it.

  Sound wacky? It isn’t. A title can set your imagination zooming, looking for a story.

  Titles can come from a variety of sources like poetry, quotations, and the Bible. Go through a book of quotations, like Bartlett’s and jot down interesting phrases. Make a list of several words randomly drawn from the dictionary and combine them. Story ideas will begin bubbling up around you.

  Take first lines from novels and make up a title. Dean Koontz’s Midnight begins, “Janice Capshaw liked to run at night.”What might you do with that?

  Perhaps something like these: She Runs by Night. The Night Runner. Runner of Darkness. Night Run.

  Now all you have to do is choose one and write a novel to go with it. It’s easy.

  3. The List

  Early in his career, Ray Bradbury made a list of nouns that flew out of his subconscious. These became fodder for his stories.

  Start your own list. Let your mind comb through the mental pictures of your past and quickly write one- or two-word reminders. I did this once, and my own list of more than one hundred items includes:

  The drapes (a memory about a pet puppy who tore my mom’s new drapes, so she gave him away the next day. I climbed a tree in protest and refused to come down).

  The hill (that I once accidentally set fire to).

  The fireplace (in front of which we had many a family gathering).

  Cigar smoke (my dad, who loved his stogies).

  Each of these is the germ of a possible story or novel. They resonate from my past. I can take one of these items and brainstorm a whole host of possibilities that come straight from the heart. You can do the same.

  4. Issues

  What issues push your buttons? Robert Ludlum once said, “I think arresting fiction is written out of a sense of outrage.” Outrage is a great emotion for a writer. So start an issues list. You might include:

  abortion

  environment

  gun control

  presidential politics

  talk shows

  people who yak on cell phones while driving

  The late Edward Abbey based his novels on issues he cared about. For him, writing was a calling as well as a craft, which is one reason his books inspired a wide readership. The writer, Abbey believed, must be a moral voice. “Since we cannot expect truth from our institutions,” he wrote, “we must expect it from our writers!”

  So one way to write who you are is to find the issues that press your hot buttons, then press them!

  If you embody your moral viewpoint in a three-dimensional character who takes vigorous action to vindicate his cause, you’ll virtually guarantee a story packed with emotion and dramatic possibilities. Want that in your fiction? Then do this:

  Find an issue that makes your cheeks red. It can be global, like military strategy, or local, like school board policy. It must, however, be something likely to make people mad.

  Choose up sides. What is your moral viewpoint about the issue? Come up with a good argument defending your position.

  Next, and most important, come up with a good argument for the other side! Few things are black and white in th
is world, and even those on the dark side feel justified in what they are doing. Your job as a writer is to see the whole picture, and that means treating your characters — all of them — fairly.

  Now ask yourself, “What kind of person would care most about each side of this issue?” Come up with several possibilities for each. Later you can choose the best.

  Remember, however, that fiction is not a sermon. Your job is to deliver a gripping story, not a windy lecture.

  5. See It

  Let your imagination play you a movie:

  Sit down first thing in the morning and ask yourself, “What do I really want to write about at this moment in time?” List the first three things that come to your mind. This may take the form of issues (crime in the streets, euthanasia, lawyers, religion) or characters (a character who shows guts in the face of danger) or situations (what if somebody got stuck in a blimp over Iraq?). Pick the one that gets your juices flowing the most.

  Close your eyes and start the movie. Just sit back and “watch.”What do you see? If something is interesting, don’t try to control it. Give it a nudge if you want to, but try as much as possible to let the pictures do their own thing. Do this for as long as you want.

  Then start writing, with no thought about plot construction, and keep writing for twenty minutes. Write about whatever you remember from the “movie.” You can make notes about character, plot ideas, themes, whatever. Just write. Do this every day for five days, adding to your written material each day.

  Take a day off, then print a hard copy of your movie journal. Look it over and highlight the parts that turn you on. Go through the nurturing process now and apply the freshness test.

  6. Hear It

  Music is a shortcut to the heart. Listen to music that moves you. Choose from different styles — classical, movie scores, rock, jazz, whatever lights your fuse — and as you listen, close your eyes and see what pictures, scenes or characters develop.

  When you do find something worth writing about (and you will), you can use that piece of music to put you in the mood every time you sit down to write.

  7. Character First

  Perhaps the best and fastest way to get a story idea is through a character. The process is simple: develop a dynamic character, and see where he leads.

  There are a variety of ways to come up with an original character. Here are a few:

  Visualizing. Close your eyes and “see” the first person who pops into your mind. Describe this person. Plop him down in a setting, any setting, and see what develops. Later ask yourself, “Why is this character acting this way? What pattern of character is developing here?”

  Re-Creating Who You Know. Take a fascinating character from your past. Don’t try to copy him. “Re-create” him. Give him a different occupation. Even better, change his sex. He becomes her.What would your crazy uncle be like if he were really a woman?

  Obituaries. Every day the newspapers run obituaries. These are character biographies there for the taking! Adapt them. Take the interesting parts and apply them to a character of your own choosing. You can alter the age and the sex of the character and see how things play. Let loose.

  The worst thing. Once you have your character, ask this question: What is the worst thing that could happen to this person? Your answer may very well be the start of a novel of suspense, a novel the reader just can’t put down.

  8. Stealing From the Best

  If Shakespeare could do it, you can too. Steal your plots. Yes, the Bard of Avon rarely came up with an original story. He took old plots and weaved his own particular magic with them.

  Admittedly, that’s harder to do today. You can’t lift plot and characters wholesale and pretend it’s an original story. But you can take the germ of another plot and weave your particular magic with it. You can switch key characters and conventions (see “Flipping a Genre” listed next). You can follow the same story movements even as you add your own original developments.

  “Originality,” says William Noble in Steal This Plot!, “is the key to plagiarism.” What he means is you cannot lift the exact plot, with the same characters intact. But you may take a pattern (and plot is nothing more than a story’s pattern) and use it.

  9. Flipping a Genre

  All genres have long-standing conventions. We expect certain beats and movements in genre stories. Why not take those expectations and turn them upside down?

  It’s very easy to take a Western tale, for example, and set it in outer space. Star Wars had many Western themes (remember the bar scene?). Likewise, the Sean Connery movie Outland is like High Noon set on a Jupiter moon. The feel of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man characters transferred well into the future in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.

  Even the classic television series The Wild, Wild West was simply James Bond in the Old West. A brilliant flipping of a genre that has become part of popular culture.

  So play with genres, conventions, expectations. Mix them up. There is an idea there somewhere.

  10. Predict a Trend

  Novels can be “hot” because of the subject matter alone. If you are able to catch a topical wave before it breaks, you may have a winner.

  The trick, of course, is in predicting what will occupy the popular mind. How can you do it?

  The best source is specialty magazines. Often you’ll get a window into the immediate and long-term future areas of interest to people.

  This doesn’t need to take a lot of time, either. Go to a newsstand and irritate the manager by scanning magazines like Scientific American, Popular Mechanics, Wired, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. In addition, USA Today often has stories about cutting-edge technologies and issues. Jump on something interesting and ask:

  Who would care about this?

  What would that person do about it next year? In ten years?

  What would happen if all of society embraced this?

  What would happen if all of society rejected this?

  Who would it hurt the most?

  11. Noodling the Newspaper

  Read newspapers. Scan all the sections. Have your homing device set for sparks that get your mind zooming in original directions.

  Read USA Today. The paper is written in “arrested attention span” style — lots of little snippets you can scan quickly. One edition will yield at least a dozen possible ideas. Take an item and ask a series of what-if questions to expand on what you find. If an item itself has information you might want later, snip it and toss it in a box.

  12. Research

  James A. Michener began “writing” a book four or five years in advance. When he “felt something coming on,” he would start reading, as many as 150 to 200 books on a subject. He browsed, read, and checked things. He kept it all in his head and then, finally, he began to write. All that material gave him plenty of ideas to draw upon.

  Today, the Internet makes research easier than ever. But don’t ignore the classic routes. Books are still here, and you can always find people with specialized knowledge to interview. And if the pocketbook permits, travel to a location and drink it in. Rich veins of material abound.

  Don’t forget experts, either. Find and interview people who lead in their fields. Go to ordinary folks who lived through certain periods or in certain places to get rich detail and factual accuracy.

  Here’s a quick way to get ideas from research:

  Choose a nonfiction book on some subject you always wanted to know about.

  Skim the book for an overview.

  Jot down plot ideas that come to you.

  Read the book in greater detail.

  Spot more ideas, and flesh out those you already have.

  Do this, and soon your heart will connect with some bit of data that fires you up.

  13. “What I Really Want to Write About Is …”

  Try this exercise first thing in the morning. Your subconscious has been dreamily percolating through the night. It has things to tell you. So grab your c
up of Joe and get to a paper or computer screen. Start with, “What I really want to write about is …”

  Then write for ten minutes without stopping. Follow the thoughts that come to you, expanding them, going on to others, floating on the streams of your consciousness.

  This is not only good for ideas, but also to loosen up your writing muscles. You can use this as a warm-up to your writing day.

  14. Obsession

  By its nature, an obsession controls the deepest emotions of a character. It pushes the character and prompts her to action. As such, it is a great springboard for ideas.

  What sorts of things obsess people? Ego? Looks? Lust? Careers? Enemies? Success?

  What is Javert’s obsession in Les Miserables? Duty. It drives him to fanaticism and finally death.

  What is Ahab’s obsession? A big, white whale. Without that obsession, we’d have no Moby Dick.

  Dorian Gray is obsessed with youth.

  All of the characters in The Maltese Falcon are obsessed with the black bird.

  In Gone With the Wind, Rhett is obsessed with Scarlett. Scarlett is obsessed with Ashley. Therein lies the tale.

  Create a character. Give her an obsession. Watch where she runs.

  15. Opening Lines

  Dean Koontz wrote The Voice of the Night based on an opening line he wrote while just “playing around”: “You ever killed anything?” Roy asked.

  Only after the line was written did Koontz decide Roy would be a boy of fourteen. He then went on to write two pages of dialogue that opened the book. But it all started with one line that reached out and grabbed him by the throat.