Step One

Now, back to novice writing.

For me, plot was actually one of the most difficult concepts to get a handle on. I could not for the life of me think of any active conflict, any problem to solve, any random events – there were a good few years where I was making up all these characters, and there weren’t any plots to go with them.

As with everything, all you can do at this stage is push through it. Make stuff happen. Throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. You’ll lose interest in some plots, and that’s fine. Those are the ones that don’t work for you. But there are some that you’ll like, that will make sense to you, and you’ll slowly fill those out, and eventually, you’ll start thinking of things that you could have put earlier in the story to help support the plot you’re building. That’s good! That’s what you want.

For this, I’ll open up old, discarded drafts of original work I’ve abandoned. I think the first serious book I tried to write was Zachariah’s. (Before my stories have fully formed plots, they’re always just the story of the main character.) Zachariah was a magicless man who loved magic, and he wanted magic to rule the world. So he formed a cult, because he was a very charismatic man, and convinced them to want that as much as he did, and they started sacrificing people to Satan to make that happen. As you do. Eventually, his right-hand man betrayed him, and he was caught. End of story.

Now, there are some parts of this plot that have potential, and some parts that don’t. And what doesn’t have potential for me might have potential for you! That’s what’s important about this stage. It’s a framework. It’s scaffolding. You take that summary and you build on it. Whatever you read into that – that’s the story you really want to tell.

What I really wanted out of this story was Zachariah, and everything was built around him. I wanted him to be the villain, but a villain who could act as the POV character of a story – that’s still a very interesting idea to me. Everything else was in service of that. What does a villain do? What makes a villain sympathetic? Those were the ideas I was really trying to get at.

After Zachariah, almost everything was a practical choice, which is always where you have to start with learning to develop plots. They need to be functional before they can be compelling. So, I needed a plot for a sympathetic villain, which meant that I needed a motive, a goal, and a crime. And... that’s about where I started tossing things in at random. I needed a motive, a goal, and a crime, so I came up with a motive (loves magic), a goal (wants magic to exist openly), and a crime (human sacrifice)– hesitant imitations of things I’d read before, things that made sense in this context.

The best thing to come out of that exercise, I think, was Rowan, Zachariah’s right-hand man. Rowan loved Zachariah very much; they’d been friends for years, and Rowan considered himself Zachariah’s protector. But eventually Rowan could no longer excuse him, nor could he ignore the fact that Zachariah was destroying himself, and he betrayed him – still, somehow, out of love. And that is a compelling storyline. That’s still in my pocket for later.

Out of that one discarded novel, I got two good characters, one good subplot, and a handful of wet spaghetti. I tried a lot of things that didn’t work, and I figured out why they didn’t work.

- Zachariah’s motive was not compelling. I made it up; it didn’t come from anything I was passionate about, and that made it hollow. So, from the start, this story was hamstrung. And I know that now!

- I didn’t understand how cults worked. I’ve done a lot of true crime reading since then, and a lot of the emptiness in this story came about because I didn’t know why cults formed, what drove them, or what bound them together. Without that knowledge, all you have is a band of orcs, which is not interesting.

- To that effect, I also didn’t understand how police investigations worked. (Yes, this was an urban fantasy.) So, while I knew vaguely that I wanted Zachariah to be involved and covering for himself (a la Dexter) I didn’t know how to make that happen, and it showed. None of it made sense.

- The hero of the story? Boring. I barely remember her name. I think it was Jenna? It doesn’t matter, because all she did was follow a formula. She had no motives of her own except the requisite ‘hey, who the hell is murdering people?’ This was a mistake. Without a motive, she had no drive, and there was no drama from her end. She was not proactive, which was a huge problem for me in my earlier work. She was just filling a role, and that left a huge, gaping hole in the emotional makeup of the story.

It comes down to, you don’t know what you don’t know. And you don’t know what you need to know until you try it. Same as with worldbuilding, that research will drive you insane if you try to learn everything. You are not a doctor. You are not a police officer. You are not a lawyer. And that’s okay! All you need to know is what matters for your plot. Once you have those facts, you’ll get your compelling and natural storyline, but until then, feel free to grope blindly through the darkness.

Stories reflect reality. Write your story, find out what was wrong with your story, and then write it again. That’s how you end up with something that makes sense – that resonates with your reader. You’re not going to start at step three, because you can’t figure out what’s wrong with a story that you never wrote.

That’s my pontification about plot for the week, and next week will be the last novice writing installment, this time about theme. Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see!