Welcome back! If you have been following along from the beginning, you’ll know that today I’m going to be talking about the second step of how to figure out the main plot for an outline of a story. Or, at least how I’ve found it easiest to do so. I split this part in half because of how long of a process it can be, at least if you’re trying to write out an explanation for it.

After figuring out the who and what of the story, I found a reliable way to make a premise and a synopsis. From there, I strongly encouraged you to write furiously for five or more minutes and put any ideas you could think of for the story on paper. Each of these steps should have built on top of each other to help expand the ideas out to give you a good idea of the story. For the next part, you’ll need a highlighter, red pen, highlight tool, or whatever you can use to help single out ideas that you find in your flurry pages.

What to Highlight

Before you turn your lovely ideas into a colored masterpiece, let’s take a moment to talk about story structure. There are so many ways to organize a story that choosing one is almost as intense as choosing what genera, age group, or subject to tackle in your work. There is the hero’s journey, in media res, and the Fichtean curve just to name a few. What kind of story you are writing will determine what kind of framework you’ll wind up going with in the end.

If, for example, you want a tight and fast story that takes the reader on a while ride from start to finish, I would consider the Fichtean curve. This structure is basically just a series of rising problems and solutions that lead to more problems until you reach the climax and resolution. Think of an action novel without a lot of down time. The story is kicked off with the MC needing to make a decision which causes a problem, and solving that problem leads to another until you reach the point where you take out the main source of the issue.

Let’s say that instead you have a great story revolving around a war or some other major event and all the build up to that event is slow, boring, or could be handled in only a few scenes. Instead of cutting that out all together (which risks readers becoming confused) you could consider an in media res story. This is a story where you start in the middle of the rising action and on the way to the climax, you sprinkle in flash backs about what happened before to get the story to that point. Instead of having ten tedious chapters about every way democracy fell apart in the lead up to preventing a civil war, consider starting on the battle field and flashing back to important moments of betrayal, alliance, and training that happened to get to that point.

The classic outline is the hero’s journey which is a set of bullet points that happen so often in literature that they were able to be extracted by studying centuries of story telling. This is one of my favorites and is what I’m using for my current novel. I also honestly believe that the plot points covered are so universally true to all stories that going over them is helpful to each type of structure. This is why I’m going to explain them in detail and encourage you to look for and fill them in for your story no matter how the final structure winds up.

What to Highlight

Introduction
This isn’t necessarily, or exclusively, about telling the reader who your MC is. That i a very important part because everyone wants to know who it is they’re rooting for. This part of the story is also about setting up what normal is like for that character and the world around him. It’s equally important to know that your character is a poor boy in New York and that his job is terrible, his roof leaks, and that he and his mother live alone. It’s maybe even more important if the MC likes or is comfortable in their normal. Everything is sunshine and rainbows which means that rain cloud in the distance is going to especially difficult to deal with.

Call
This is also often referred to as the inciting incident. Something happens that tells your MC that they need to go outside of their normal and deal with the problem. This can be anything from the castle guard telling the hero that the princess has been kidnapped to the MC realizing that if she doesn’t find a husband soon her dream of being a mother might not happen in the way she wants it to or the MC’s mom getting a devastating cancer diagnosis in the Great Depression where health insurance isn’t a thing.

Push Back or Refusal of the Call
I like to refer to this part of the story as the push back as opposed to the refusal simply because it is possible that the action does not necessarily stem from the main character. While it is possible that the main character might not want to be drafted into a war when their life at home is going perfectly because it sounds like death being delivered on a silver platter, it is equally likely that the main character could be willing to take out a life threatening loan but his mother would rather he just take out a life insurance policy and let her answer the call of death.

This was something I realized while working on my current WIP. My MC is powered and pumped to rush out there and find a way to save the day. I, however, did something extremely controversial in my story and did not make her family dead or estranged (shocking, isn’t it?) meaning her parents and siblings were a bit worried about eldest sister going out to the front line and possibly dying or not being able to take care of herself. This meant there was a push back even when there was enthusiastic excitement.

Crossing the Threshold
For whatever reason, you get your character past that push back and decide to do the thing your story demands of them. That means now you have to cross from the ordinary life you set up in the introduction and into the world of wherever the actual story takes place. In many books and movies, especially fantasy, this is a huge leap. Think: “We’re not in Kansas anymore Toto, there’s color and weird people.” However, it doesn’t always have to be so dramatic. Sometimes the threshold is a state of mind change: the MC has decided to ramp up their dating life now every eligible person in their desired SO pool becomes a series of checklists while any event becomes an occasion to dress to impress.

Roadblock
This is the first in a series of major issues that your character is going to face due to the unfortunate decision to take on the task at hand. I like to think of it as the climax to act one of the story, the final trial in an act dedicated to getting the ball rolling. This can be anything from realizing that there is a skill required to complete the task that the MC didn’t know was needed going into this to needing to prove themselves to the other members of a gang or army so that they have access to the rest of the quest. Depending on what it is in your story will determine how long it takes to overcome this obstacle and in many cases the character won’t have a chance of getting past this issue without…

Mentor
No one knows everything from the start, even if your character is a Nobel Peace Prize winner with three PhD’s. There is always going to be room for improvement or help when facing a task and the roadblock is usually one of the first real indicators of the issue. If MC HAS to be able to cast a certain spell to defeat the evil wizard and they know exactly zero (0) magic, they had better find a teacher/go bug that guy in the creepy tower that his grandma knows to teach her how to do it. No matter if it is someone the MC knew the mentor before or if they are brand new, most of the time the mentor is someone who has done some similar thing or someone who trained to do your task before giving up due to an injury, old age, or family issue.

First Obstacle
If taking on the big bad was a walk in the park everyone would have done it. If getting a good SO was as easy as making one in a game, your MC would have been married a long time ago. Now that they have a mentor and are working on their struggles, they are going to hit another issue. After all, conflict is the essence of story writing. If there isn’t anything to cause trouble, there isn’t really any reason to care. It’s why video games sometimes throw in a timed even, it builds tension. It also is why most games put a locked door in front of the final boss: if you rush the big bad in your underwear you’re either going to die prematurely or end the game far too quickly.

Second Obstacle
Yep, we’re back at this once again. Feels like we just overcame an issue, doesn’t it? Sometimes, we might not have even done that yet. We’re on our way to get the boss key and now we heard one of the boss’s lackeys is in the process of trying to blow up Mars for some nefarious reason. Or we just got the police off our tail and are making progress towards paying off our loan with our moonshine business but now the loan shark says that if the MC can’t pay half of his loan by tomorrow, he’s going to kill the dog. Now MC needs one thousand more dollars than he has saved to prevent that.

Temptation
In many traditional listings of this step it’s called the somewhat dated “Woman as Temptress” instead. A super pretty lady tempts the hero with loads of bed sharing if he will abandon his goal of going home to his wife. It has been discovered that it is possible for something other than procreative concerns to make the hero want to quit. It could be that the MC can just murder and rob the little old lady who lives by herself and get all the money he needs. It could be that your cousin is screaming, “Come to the dark side! We have cookies! And no morals!”

In my story, the MC has taken several beatings, done things with her powers that scare her and make her feel guilty, feels completely abandoned by her friends (even though she knows that part of the problem is her pushing them away), and with the negative media spin by the enemy against her she feels like it would just be better to go back home and wait out the end of the world.

Third Obstacle
From the grace and fortitude of a gift from the heavens or determination, your character decides that they are not going to go down the wrong road. The cookies were oatmeal raisin anyway. Things were probably seeming pretty high for a minute. Then, just because life is hard, we have another problem on our hands. In many cases, this is the best obstacle to make happen due directly to one of the actions taken by the main character or someone on their team. You know that cyclops you pestered waaaaay back then? Now your crew destroyed your Deus ex Machina device because of a curse. Remember how during your temptation you cussed out the friends you made who were helping you make money with your business? Now you decided to keep at it and have no help as the deadline approaches. Even if the antagonist causes the obstacle, it normally leads straight into…

Disaster
You didn’t join the dark side and you also didn’t destroy the super weapon you’ve been fighting against so now just after your party splits some emo kid with too much power blew up a planet with another planet. That was not in the plan.

You were able to get your operation back up and running even without your hurt friends, but it turns out the shark snuck in a double agent and now your distillery is on fire.

This is the worst possible thing that has happened all book. The MC is kicked while their down. Salt is rubbed in the wounds and your reader can experience the MC’s pain in ways they didn’t realize was possible.

Crisis
That disaster creates a crisis. Things have never been worse and it is clear that it has never been more important to finish this task, preferably yesterday. Before we leave, we have to get our ducks in a row. Do we have our pants? Our key? The spell we needed? We put out the still fire but now there is no way to use that to make money. How are we going to get what we need in the week we have?

The crisis is an important part of the story. While the MC gets up from the disaster and is plowing forward to the end, there should still be a reason for the reader to wonder if they are going to make it. After all, there might be a teammate off sulking and the team doesn’t expect them to help. Or the disaster created such a huge problem that it seems impossible to complete the task at all without going back on some of the moral character growth made back around the temptation. You don’t want to have it feel like your MC is level 99 and the big bad maxed out at level 20.

Climax
This is it. The entire book has been building towards this moment. The big bad is an evil puppy kicking lunatic, there’s blood and tears everywhere, no one knows if we can do this, and yet we are fighting anyway. Your MC threw down the needed money while the shark tries to assassinate him. Despite the ups and downs of the relationship, the SO is proposing to the MC. The evil wizard is definitely getting the upper hand without that last member.

Then the last guy shows up and talks about friendship and the wizard laughs so hard he drops dead of a heart attack. Or the letter the MC wrote to his jilted friends explaining everything got through and they sniped the mob hit man from the next building over.

Return Obstacle
Your MC won! Now it’s all sunshine and rainbows, right? Sometimes, especially in young adult fiction or something where the issues are more directly contained, this is where the horrible things ends and the party starts. Other times, the characters are reminded that a snake’s head can still bite a few hours after death. (Look it up, it’s creepy stuff.) This means that just because you won, doesn’t mean that the antagonists are done throwing a fit about it.

Did the SO’s mom not like the MC? Well, that might not change just because they’re engaged and might come back to haunt them on the way to the alter. Did you win against the loan shark? Well, that doesn’t do much for your reputation with the police or help the fact that your mom is still upset that you did this in the first place. There is something that is standing between victory and that return to normal that has to be overcome in order to realistically enjoy it.

Resolution
This is the part where the happily ever after lives. It is not ever a return to the beginning of the story, even if they are in the same home they started in. There will always be a few things that stick with the MC from their journey: PTSD, a new spouse, new responsibility. However, in many cases, things are better than they were before even if there are struggles that are built into life as a part of the actions needed to get to that point.

Wrap Up

That took so much longer than I thought it would. There are, after all, many different parts to a story and many different ideas needed to craft one. While these are the ones that I find the most helpful, I’ll admit that on some lists there are even more items to check off.

Were you able to find everything on your list in your notes? If not, you may have to repeat the flurry writing with this list in mind to help come up with those missing elements if you can’t think of them while ordering your points. Don’t be too hasty to discard the things you didn’t highlight or whatever came to mind fresh during this part of the exercise either. There might be a place for them in the story still, we’ll talk about that in another part.

Thank you for reading my long and crazy post! Sorry it’s a bit late. Like I said, I did not expect it to take three hours.