How I Write Fiction: Plot (Lughnasa 2016)

Lost Ball

To any new profession you bring with you the existing experiences from whatever you’ve done before. You drag these experiences around hoping one day they might prove useful again. You analyze them, adapt them and mutate them to see if they fit or work with what you are doing now. Sometimes this leads to novel applications.

As many of you know, before I started Noddfa Imaginings, I designed software for a large-scale (at the time) communication system. I didn’t have full formal training as a software engineer. Before I was offered that opportunity, I was a systems engineer on the same project. Needs changed so I adapted. Just as I had to again when I switched career tracks to become a writer.

When I started writing full-time, one of the first projects I tackled was a novel. Being a reformed engineer, I bought a book to teach me how. I’d read others on the writing craft, in a creative writing course in college along with other for pleasure. This book devoted itself more to a step-by-step structuring of my writing time itself. For plot, this book favored the 3-Act Play.  It’s a pretty common format. You’ll often see is used as the example for the Hero Cycle.

As the title of this essay suggests, I plan to talk about how I approach plot, hopefully in a way you haven’t heard a thousand times before. I’ll try to anchor it with the 3-Act Play structure because I like it and it’s pretty universal.

Plotting, like software design, like writing itself, is a discipline. It also tends to be an iterative process, at least for many writers. So I like to organize it into the four stages of structured design methodology: preliminary design, detailed design, code and unit test (writing scenes or chapters) and integration.

I use some flavor of this approach whether I’m writing a short story (mine tend to be long) or a novel. The only thing that varies is the depth or formality with which I invoke each stage.

Before I start the preliminary design, I usually have a set of requirements. In writing that translates into the question I’m trying to answer, the character change I’m trying to evoke. There may be other requirements I’ve already hashed out for a piece, things like a character I want to use, a setting, a genre, a tone or theme, a specific background idea I want to weave in, sometimes even snippets of dialog. Almost anything from the Magic Box. Your requirements are anything you want to see in the story. More specifically, anything that might affect your plot, or the solutions to plotting problems as they crop up.

Unlike designing software, my requirements aren’t hard and fast. They are just guidelines and preferences. I am free to change those requirements as I go along. If for some reason I find my science fiction story would work better as fantasy, that my plotting obstacle is better overcome with a spell instead of science, I can change that. But I almost never change my central question or the arc of my central character’s change.

To give you a brief example, when I started Aluria’s Tale, I had a handful of requirements. The central question was: why would a woman sacrifice her life for someone else, someone she’d never met. That also served as the change I wanted to evoke in my main character, that she would go from a neutral observer of events to an active participant whose life was at risk. As add-on details, I knew it was going to be post-apocalypse, specifically built around the world I’d created for an role-playing game I’d run. The main character was going to be loosely patterned on an NPC I’d created. That there was going to be a two-track plot between her and a CuFF (genetically modified, intelligent cat) whose life she was going to save. I had a few other background details I wanted to weave in from notes I’d taken on a research trip of the area in which it was set, north Georgia and North Carolina. With that in hand, I was ready to begin.

The 3-Act Play breaks down into several key scenes. Opening Scene, Plot Point 1 (Decision), Midpoint, Plot Point 2 (Reversal), Catharsis and Closing Scene. All with a rising tension until the Catharsis where it quickly falls off into the denouement. That’s all based on Aristotle’s incline.

In preliminary plot design, my goal is to identify these scenes. Not in complete or unrelenting detail, just with a road map of how critical events will unfold. What’s the hook (opening scene)? What’s the decision that sucks the main character in, that means s/he can’t turn back (Plot Point 1)? Where does the change in the character begin, the point where the journey is no longer pointed outward but returning home (midpoint)? What is the reversal that complicates the character’s journey, forcing her to recommit irrevocably to her choice in her darkest hour (Plot Point 2)? What happens in that climatic moment where the conflict is resolved (catharsis)? How do I wrap it up and ease the reader back out (closing scene)?

I don’t always, or even usually, tackle these key scenes in order. Often the opening dictates the closing or vice versa. Sometimes they mirror one another, which is a common writer’s trick. Those are often the two I take on first. Sometimes it’s the catharsis because I can picture that climax in my mind and know everything else will build toward it. Usually from there, I fill in Plot Points 1 and 2. Almost always the midpoint comes last. 

In any order these are the impact scenes, the scenes that tell the bulk of the story. They are anchor points for the readers and characters. They deserve the most attention, requiring the most iterations to ensure they’re telling the story I want to tell. They also provide the central structure for beginning, middle and end.

Beginning, middle and end. I can’t stress that enough. Unless you are an experimental post-modernist (and maybe even then), that is the purpose of a plot, to tell a story. A sequence of events that form a structured, tailored narrative. While there can be some satisfaction (and success) in telling a winding, never-ending story, it becomes easy there to allow your central question or character change to drift off into mushy nothingness, entertainment for entertainment’s sake alone not to make a point.

From those key scene, I often sketch out the rest of the plot, filling how to get from point A to point B. Not the detail, just the broad brushstrokes. Not a formal outline like most of us had to do for term papers in high school. All I really want to capture is what my mind is thinking so I can move forward certain I know where I’m going. That’s important to me.

Next, I usually begin detailed design. Where preliminary design is focused on the laying out the entire story structure, even in scant detail, detailed design extends plotting down to individual chapters or scenes. For me in fiction, it’s critical to have a roadmap before I pick up a pen. 

This process is similar to the overall story outline above just in a microcosm with finer detail. What is the purpose of the scene or chapter? Where does it begin, where does it end? What vital things happen in between?  What facets of the character or situation are revealed? What new obstacles are encountered and which old ones are overcome? What character decisions will lead to further obstacles in their future?

Those last few are where some of the iterative nature of plotting comes out. This is still a process of discovery. I don’t hold it all in my head at once. Sometimes the solutions to problems, the character’s or the author’s, require revisiting a previous scene or chapter to reinforce or properly set them up. Sometimes previous motivations fall apart and need to be rethought. Or sometimes they are just improved upon. New obstacles and the decisions leading to them need to be noted forward.

Again, for me, this is similar to an outline of where I need to go and things I need to remember before I start writing. It’s jotting down on paper the notes buzzing around in my head.

I don’t do this for every chapter or scene all at once, or even necessarily in order. Depending on the piece and my mood, I might start with the keys scenes again, maybe sketching out one or all. More often now, I take chapters or scenes in order because it makes better sense to my brain. I’ll design one chapter then write it before moving on to the next.

But plotting doesn’t end with these outlines. Nor are the decisions necessarily cast in stone. The purpose of these design elements is to anticipate problems and minimize rewriting, not to serve as a rigid GPS roadmap to be followed even if it drives me off a cliff. I stick to the outline I’ve laid out until I find some unanticipated snag, some bit of construction or a detour that wasn’t highlighted, some mismarked route or underdeveloped road I mistook.

Just like when I was designing software, at times the implications of some decisions aren’t revealed until I am deep in the trenches and have a view from the ground. In those cases, decisions need to be rethought. As well, at times better, more elegant solutions occur to me once I’ve become immersed in a character or scene. Often, new chapters or scenes that weren’t in the initial outline suggest themselves as I move forward. All that gets back noted onto the master plan.

Though, hopefully if I’ve done my job right, these aren’t massive and complete redesigns accompanied by an overflowing wastebasket of crumpled paper. Thankfully, I’ve almost never had that happen. But I can’t anticipate everything. Nor do I believe I should try. There is something to be said for maintaining some organic evolution of the story.

The final stage of plotting comes once I have the first draft in hand. There are times during the writing process where I’ll make a note to revisit some element of plot so I can continue moving forward while I’m in a flow. I don’t do it often, though other writers highly recommend it. It will just niggle at me until I resolve it, which throws most everything off.

Regardless, once I do the first full read-through, almost inevitably I’ll find some piece of plot that needs to be reworked or reinforced. Often, it’s inserting a bit of foreshadowing. Or remembering to weave the threads of decision that didn’t become obvious until later chapters into earlier ones. That can be something as simple as realizing my main character used a piece of fishing line and an empty shotgun shell to MacGyver her way out of a situation but that I never mentioned her having them before. There, I try not to just figure out where she got them or when, but also to point out once or twice that she has them or kept them for some seemingly organic reason. In other cases, it’s reinforcing the character consistency of a critical decision that doesn’t come until later. Every now and then, that reinforcement requires a new scene or chapter or a new perspective to bring it out. That’s the integration phase, making sure all the pieces of the plot play seamlessly together.

In each phase, each iteration, I focus on the key scenes again to make sure they are the most highly polished, that they create the most impact. As well they serve as touchstones to make sure the plot is holding up, that I haven’t drifted off into some dead-end loop or dropped a stitch that could unravel the whole piece without realizing it. Either is easier to do than you might think.

Most of my time plotting comes in the preliminary and detailed design phases so that whatever plotting happens while I’m writing or editing is minimal. To some writers, this feels a whole lot like not getting much done, not having much to show for a bunch of time other than scraps of notes and a timeline in their head. Like they are just sitting around daydreaming rather than writing. While I sometimes feel the same, this approach allows me to shift my focus to the words that craft the characters, descriptions and dialog once I start writing or typing. Plot becomes one less thing to worry about though it never completely leaves my mind. Plotting after the first draft is complete is generally a smallest slice of the pie chart, or at least I think it should be for me.

Of course, mine is not the final word. There are as many ways to approach plotting as there are writing in general. Some writers will tell you they plot out everything in minute detail before they ever fire up their word processor. Others just wing it with a vague idea and see how events unfold. Either way is valid if it resonates with you, with your habits, personality and style. As long as you can make it work.

Plotting, like writing, is an art not a science. In the end you need to find a method that does what it needs to do for you consistently. Even if it’s based on a somewhat obscure software design standard. 

 © 2016 Edward P. Morgan III