Plots and Plotting

by Diana Kimpton

  This doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to start off with a desire to show that bullying is wrong or drugs ruin lives. It just means that you mustn’t let that theme dominate your plotting process. Instead, start by creating characters or events that will bring your issue to life. Then put your message to one side and concentrate on creating a strong story about people (or animals) that your readers will care about.

  In my experience, the theme of a book usually looks after itself so I don’t worry about it very much. Even when I don’t have one in mind when I start plotting a new book, a theme often appears without me consciously thinking about it. It’s revealed by the events of the story and, once I’ve realized it’s there, I can go back through my plot or first draft, tweaking events slightly to make it stronger.

  Whether your theme comes first or you find it later, there is no need to tell the readers what it is. Give them the pleasure of discovering it for themselves. If the only way to get over the moral of your book is to write it down on the last page, you haven’t told the story well enough.

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  Starting to develop your story

  Once you have your basic idea, you are ready to start developing it further. This is the point at which those people who feel strongly about the “To plot or not to plot” question start asking if your book is going to be character-led or plot-driven. In my opinion, the question doesn’t make sense because the events of the story affect the characters and the characters affect the events. So the plot and the characters are so closely intertwined that it’s impossible to tease them apart.

  The division of books into character-led or plot-driven is something that comes after they are written. It keeps reviewers happy and gives something for story analysts to do but, just like the inciting incident, it’s not important to the creative process. What is important is that, before you can start plotting in detail, you have an idea of the main character(s), the problem they face and the setting of the story. You don’t have to decide on them in that order, but you do need all three.

  Why you always need characters

  If your idea is predominantly about an earthquake, a war or some other major event, it’s tempting to think that characters aren’t important. But without them, your novel would be more like a documentary than a story – a factual account of what happens without the tension and excitement that holds readers’ attention. To capture their interest and make them care about what happens, you need to make those events personal by showing how the characters involved in the situation are affected.

  That’s why war films focus closely on individual soldiers, and disaster movies focus on the people whose lives are in danger and/or those who are trying to save them. It’s also the reason why directors often add a small child or a dog to tug at the audience’s heartstrings, but that isn’t compulsory and it can look hackneyed if you’re not careful. (Similar hackneyed ideas explain why I’m always wary of travelling by plane if there’s a nun on board.)

  What defines characters?

  Let’s imagine a tall, slim girl with long, blonde hair and blue eyes. We’ll call her Jane. Do you feel sympathy for her? No. Do you care what happens to her? No. That’s because the facts I’ve given you so far only tell you what she looks like. They don’t tell you anything about what she’s like as a person. It’s not appearance that determines who someone is – it’s how they react to people and situations and the reasons they react that way.

  What type of person we want Jane to be depends on the part we want her to play in our story and what that story is about. But our decisions about her will also affect how the story develops. Let’s imagine we’re working on a science fiction book about an alien invasion and think through some possibilities.

  Jane looks like a stereotypical dumb blonde so the easy option is to cast her as a passive victim, screaming in terror while she waits to be rescued from evil extraterrestrials. However, easy options produce predictable plots and they, in turn, produce bored readers. That’s why I’m going to turn the stereotype on its head and make Jane clever at something. Exactly what that should be depends on what she needs to do in the story. So let’s play with some possible skills she could have and see where they might lead.

  Skill 1: Businesswoman

  Jane has a flair for buying and selling – a talent that’s already made her a fortune. But, for reasons we haven’t decided yet, she is not satisfied. She always wants more. When the aliens arrive, she sees them as a vast untapped market. No longer content to sell only to her own world, she tries to join with the invaders so she can market to the universe. This brings her into conflict with the other citizens of the town who see her actions as betrayal.

  Skill 2: Doctor

  Jane has dedicated her life to helping sick children and preserving life. When the invaders arrive, she joins up with a small group of medics willing to fight to protect their patients. Then an injured alien comes to her for help. Should she let him die or does the Hippocratic Oath apply to all life, not just humans?

  Skill 3: Linguist

  Shy and reserved, Jane spends her days deep in the basement of the university, deciphering texts written in long-lost languages. When she translates some alien messages, she realizes there is a way to make peace with the new arrivals. Can she stop the government from killing the aliens unnecessarily and sparking a war across the universe?

  These three different skills produce three very different Janes with three different problems which, in turn, give us three very different stories. She looks the same in all three so it’s not Jane’s appearance that’s affecting the story – it’s the way she responds to the challenges she faces. So when you think up characters, concentrate on who they are rather than what they look like.

  Setting

  You don’t have to know much detail about the setting yet, but it helps to have a rough idea of where and when your story is going to take place as that will affect what happens. A murder mystery set in a closed community of nuns will be quite different from one set in the middle of a busy city; and a romance set in an Elizabethan palace will be very different from one in a hippy community in the 1970s. Once again, keep details to a minimum at this stage. If your story doesn’t demand a specific setting – 18th century Paris or the battlefields of the American Civil War – you can get away with just a vague idea of period and place at this stage and add the details later.

  Why there must be a problem

  A man on a boat is just a character in a setting. To turn it into a story, you need to give him a problem. If we make the boat very small, put it in the middle of an ocean and add a fierce tiger as the only other passenger, the man faces a life-or-death struggle to survive and we’ve got a story. But don’t rush off and write it. Yann Martel got there first with The Life of Pi.

  Not all stories need a tiger, but you definitely need to give your main character a problem. That needs to be something your readers will relate to, although it doesn’t have to be a problem they will have actually experienced. That’s particularly important to remember when you’re writing for children. Even pre-schoolers understand about love, loneliness, fear and taking risks so they can enjoy a wider range of stories than many people realize.

  What next?

  Once you have at least one character, a problem and a setting, you have the basic ingredients for your story. But before you start plotting in more detail, there is one more thing to think about and you can find out more about that in the next section.

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  It’s never too soon to think of the ending

  Your plot is the route for your writing journey. When you are travelling by car, it’s impossible to decide which roads to take until you know where you are going and, in the same way, it’s easier to plot a book or movie if you decide early on what the end will be. Once you have that, you’ll find there are many possible paths you can take to reach your final destination and part of the plotting process is deciding which of these you will use. Maybe that’s why plotting often makes m
e feel like a detective discovering a story that wants to be told.

  This doesn’t mean that you need to know the ending in huge detail before you start. A vague idea of what’s going to happen is quite good enough and leaves room for surprising twists and turns along the way. Will the romantic couple decide to stay together forever? Will the detective find the murderer, or will the hero succeed in saving everyone from the volcano? Once you know that, you can work backwards from the ending to see what needs to happen earlier in the story to enable that ending to take place and, as you decide those points, you’ll find that you can plot the end in more detail.

  For example, your detective can’t solve the murder until one’s been committed so you need to decide who’s been murdered, where the body was found and how your detective becomes involved with the case. You also need to decide who the murderer is and why they killed the victim so you can work out the clues that will help your detective solve the crime. As that all becomes clearer in your head, you’ll be able to work out the ending in more detail and decide on the final confrontation with the killer.

  What makes a good ending?

  The ending of a story has a big effect on the reader and plays a large part in making them decide whether to recommend the book or movie to other people. In order to satisfy the reader, the end needs to bring the storyline to a successful conclusion by showing the main characters solving their main problem in a way that’s believable and makes readers feel that natural justice has been done (which isn’t always the same as legal justice).

  As I mentioned earlier, they also need to solve that problem themselves so it’s best to make sure that any necessary help turns up as late as possible. For example, if you need the police there to arrest the villains, try to make them turn up after your hero has overcome the ringleader, defused the bomb or otherwise foiled the evil plan.

  Your end doesn’t have to be totally happy, but a sad ending can be depressing unless it’s handled carefully. It’s best to leave your readers with at least some hope at the end, even if they are crying at the same time. This is particularly true if your chosen ending involves the death of one or more of your main characters. Readers will accept this more willingly if the world is a better place for their sacrifice so they didn’t die in vain. You can also take away some of the sadness of a character dying by showing that they freely chose to let that happen. In the movie Gladiator, our sadness about the death of Maximus is tempered by the fact that he wanted to be reunited with his dead wife and son and by the fact that he gave his life avenging their deaths.

  It’s also important that your ending is clear and makes sense. If you suddenly introduce magic to a story that hasn’t contained any before or you don’t say whether the main character survives or not, you’ll end up with confused readers who won’t recommend your book. You don’t have to tie up every loose end, especially if you’re planning a sequel, but you do need to bring the story to a satisfactory conclusion and maybe hint at what the future holds.

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  Step outlines – the powerful way to plot

  Once you’re ready to start plotting, the most powerful tool you can use is a step outline. That’s just what the name suggests – an outline of the steps of the story. And the reason it’s so useful is that you don’t have to develop your plot from the beginning to the end as you would if you used the “start writing and see where your characters take you” technique. Instead, you can start at the end and work backwards or in the middle and work both ways or jump around wherever you like. Better still, you can do all that without losing sight of the overall shape of the story.

  Over the years, I’ve discovered that the best way to explain how to use step outlines is to show you the process in action. But before I start doing that, I need to tell you a bit more about them.

  A step outline is not a chapter by chapter outline

  Chapters and steps are not the same thing. Steps vary in size enormously, but chapters are usually much the same length. As a result, some chapters may contain several steps while a big step might need to be spread over two chapters with a cliffhanger at the end of the first one. It’s hard to tell exactly how big the steps will be until you start writing them so fixing the chapter breaks at the planning stage can act like a straightjacket, preventing you from making the most of dramatic events through lack of space. It will also restrict your ability to deviate from the plan when inspiration strikes.

  I suspect that these problems with chapter-by-chapter outlines are what turns people off plotting. But step outlines don’t restrict you in the same way – they just keep you working in the right direction while leaving you the flexibility to make your scenes as long or short as you wish. I usually find that chapter breaks occur naturally while I’m doing the actual writing, although I sometimes write large sections as continuous prose and put in the chapter breaks later. This works particularly well with action sequences and the final crisis.

  A step outline is not set in stone

  If you think of creating a story as a journey of discovery, your step outline is your roadmap. And just as with a real journey, there is nothing to stop you exploring interesting-looking diversions or changing the route to one that looks better.

  I find that knowing where I’m going frees up my creativity. I can concentrate on making each individual scene as good as it can be, because I know where it fits in the overall structure of the story. In the process, I often spot a new way to develop the plot or I introduce a minor character who is so good that they need more to do. When that happens, I pause for a while to rejig the step outline so it incorporates the change. Then I go on writing.

  When I was working on Princess Ellie’s Perfect Plan, I plotted the book carefully before I started the actual writing and created a detailed step outline that I thought would work. But halfway through writing the story, I realized I’d made a mistake. The second half had too little action and too much introspection. Worse still for a pony book, it had far too little stuff with ponies.

  So I brainstormed ideas, reordered some of the steps in the outline, cut others out completely and introduced a major new problem in the shape of an angry bull. These were huge changes that would have really hurt if I’d already written the whole book, but the step outline helped me make them painlessly and fine-tune the action and tension to give the story exactly the right pace. In fact, when I finally sent the book to my editor, she said it was so good that I should give masterclasses in plotting. She had no idea how near it had come to disaster!

  The practicalities of step outlining

  In this book, I’m writing each step outline as a numbered list, and that’s how I always write the final version I use as a base for my writing. The numbered list facility in the software you use for writing is perfect for this as the numbering will adjust automatically as you add, take away or move steps. You'll also find a step outlining facility built into some specialist writing software. (I used Snowflake Pro successfully for There Must Be Horses.)

  However, during the early stages of the plotting process, I sometimes find that I am more creative if I don’t use my computer at all. Instead, I write each step by hand on a sticky notelet. Then I stick those together in a long line that I can easily peel apart to insert a new step wherever it’s needed or to move an existing step to another place.

  It’s hugely satisfying to see your plot grow physically like this, and you can add extra sophistication by using different coloured notelets for different characters or for different strands of your story to help you see how they weave together. Although it becomes a bit unwieldy for long plots, it’s a powerful technique that works for writers of all levels of experience. When I’ve taught it in school workshops, the teachers assured me it was the first time all their children produced stories with a beginning, a middle and an end.

  Some people prefer to use postcards instead of sticky notes. Others prefer to write the list by hand on a white board or to use software specially designed for step outlining. Th
e exact technique you choose doesn’t matter. Use the power of the step outline in whichever way works best for you.

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  Step outlining in action

  The easiest way to explain how step outlining works is to show you the process in action. So, while I’m writing this book, I’m going to plot a brand-new story to let you see how I do it.

  Of course, that means I need an idea so I’ve gone back to the one we thought of earlier where Jane was an expert in deciphering ancient languages. I’ve added a second character – a geeky guy called Seb – and I’ve ditched the invading aliens because I don’t want to write a war story. But Jane still works in a university or museum (setting), and she still discovers an important secret when she deciphers a mysterious message (problem). I’ve also decided that the book is set in the future (more setting) and its working title is Future Proof. That’s probably not what the book will be called if it ever gets published, but it gives me something to call it until then.

  Here’s my initial very short step outline:

  Jane translates a message.

  The message contains a secret that affects the future safety of mankind.

  Jane alerts important people.