Tag: plot

Seven-Point Story Structure

I think I’ve said something similar before, but I feel like I was cheated out of a great deal of lessons when I took classes on writing in high school and college. There are so many unique and interesting ways to order a story and to think about progression that I honestly don’t understand how the basic three act structure managed to monopolize all of our lessons. Perhaps, it has something to do with the fact that our teachers had to squish stories, poetry, creative non-fiction, and more into a single semester. It is a shame how some of the most enjoyable parts of life and education are cut down to the point of being hardly covered.

The seven-point story structure is one that has caught my attention with its heavy focus on cause and effect. It is simple and helps to keep the story moving forward if applied correctly. It is also a great template to add to and subtract from to create a more flexible work. I’ll talk about each of the seven points, and illustrate this flexibility.

Hook

The hook is, as always, the initial bit that latches onto the reader and drives them to pick up your story beyond that first chapter. It should be the introduction of the main character and, in most cases, the main objective and stakes as well. These are especially important in a shorter story where you don’t have a great deal of time for expositing. Longer stories can usually get by with focusing on the main character and the setting as long as something interesting (and plot relevant) takes place.

First Plot Point

The hook captured the audience and flung the protagonist into their journey. As a result of them taking off, they are going to encounter something new and central to the objectives of the story. Whether that is a guide, a contest, a quest, a match on their dating profile, something that carries them to the goal and forces them to make a decision is going to pop up.

First Pinch

Your character made the decision to engage with the first plot point. They signed on with a mentor, accepted the quest, or entered the death mash gala. Actions have consequences, and their decision is the action that is going to propel your character straight into the gaping maw of their first real problem. Does their new teacher have a stuck-up favorite student who trashes your character on the first day? Does the quest prove to be 10x more dire than they have the training for? Did they think the death gala was about metal music and not having an ax shoved in their face sharp side first? These are all things that your character is going to have to deal with very quickly.

Midpoint

Your character survived their encounter with the first pinch. Maybe they were able to pull a trick out of their back pocket and get away, or maybe someone had to bail them out, but they emerged all the same and are now at a cross roads. Are they going to keep acting in a way that will allow the first pinch to cycle back into their life? Or, the much better option, are they going to change something about themselves and how they act to enable them to deal with any future issues? Hiding behind the teacher is only going to get you pummeled again. Training your butt off and learning to defend yourself is an active way to prepare for the next attempt so you don’t wind up flat out on the train grounds again.

Second pinch

The midpoint has passed and your character decided to be a doer and not wait to get in trouble again. This, however, does not stop trouble from arriving. In fact, their decision to not run away and hide is the precise reason trouble decided it was within its rights to waltz up to your character and strike once more. Depending on your story, and the specific choice your character made that propelled them from the midpoint to the second pinch, the second pinch will take shape. A larger group of bullies, a secret organization that wants the hero dead, your character’s crazy abusive ex with a baseball bat at three in the morning in a dark alleyway; these are all potential second pinches as long as they stem from that midpoint choice and bring your character to the brink of disaster. We’re only two points away from the end, after all, so if it’s really the main second pinch of the story, it’s going to be a big deal.

Second Plot Point

Your character started a journey. The faced a trial and decided to change themselves to reach the goal they set out to accomplish. This did nothing to stop another problem from knocking them down to a level of pain and despair that they didn’t realize could exist. What decision did they make to get out of that darkness? They resolved to be stronger before, what is there to decide now? There is a climax looming in the distance and one more decision that needs to be made.

Resolution

Did they make the right decision? Did they get back on their feet from the pit of despair and continue on? If so, you’re going to reach the climax and resolution of your story. Everything else should have been building to this moment, all the character’s training and suffering have led to what is happening here and now. They’ve made their choices and dealt with the consequences. This is their final consequence to face and the glory they receive afterwards.

Flexibility

It’s not much of a surprise to think that as long as you have a set of probably cause and effects, you can carry a story like this on for more than just the initial seven points. You can also increase the length and strengthen the pacing by overlapping several characters’ decision arcs to create an ample supply of sub-plots to fuel your story. The seven-point structure is also good for a wide variety of genres due to the fact that decisions are made in romance, fantasy, sci-fi, and more. If you’re looking for a plotting structure with options and simplicity, I would definitely recommend giving this a try.

Fichtean Curve

Hello and welcome back! During my post about forming a plot skeleton for a novel, I focused on the classical Hero’s Journey and the parts of it that I find particularly crucial to a good story. I mentioned some other outline ideas as well and wanted to take time to go over what each entails.

While struggling how best to manage the various parts of my different WIPs, I came across the Fichtean Curve as a model for plotting a novel. I had never come across this one before, even in my college creative writing class, and I wondered why. I love it as a concept and it virtually eliminates one of the biggest problems with one of my potential novels. For this reason, I wanted to talk about it first as I don’t think it has quite enough attention.

What It Is

If you’ve ever made a story outline graph in elementary/middle/high school then you’re likely familiar with the six points of introduction, exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. I remember having to fill in the blanks on paper for books and short stories in class and on at least one occasion create a very primitive work using that model. It is an important thing to learn as it is the form most stories take, even if they ditch or rearrange a few pieces.

The Fichtean Curve is one such model that tends to keep the elements, though they are rearranged. Beginning with the rising action, stories plotted in this style will be thrown right into the exciting bits, ramping into a crisis within the first few pages in many cases. From there, the story will dip down into the valleys of the consequences of their handling of that crisis and some sprinkles of background information to help catch the reader up on why they should care as the consequence revs its way up into a brand-new crisis.

This series of peaks and valleys will result in the climax, the ultimate crisis, then taper off into the falling action that will help to establish a new normal for the characters of the book.

What It Isn’t

Hearing that the story starts with the rising action sounds like another style of outlining that is much more frequently spoken of: in media res. This style is known for dropping the reader in the middle of the important actions and then meandering towards the climax and what comes next. They easiest way to think of the difference is by looking at the pacing. The Fichtean Curve is a quick ride of ups and downs, whereas anyone who has read the Iliad or the Odyssey is aware that in media res does not require speed by any stretch of the imagination.

What It’s Good For

There are plenty of uses for the Fichtean Curve in storytelling, which is why I was surprised that it is not more widely taught. It particularly helps with one of the issues that I was facing with a particular story idea of mine: consistent pacing.

When I sat down for this particular outline, I quickly realized there was a problem with how my story was unfolding. I had mountains of background that were all important and helped to set up the coming plot, however they were spaced so far apart and so numerous that I was actually thinking of ways to put flashbacks in my exposition. Never a good sign; especially when the action portion happens in a shorter time frame and a much faster clip. In media res sounded like a good idea, but the Fichtean Curve was even more appealing.

The curve did something similar to in media res, dropping you off at the start of the action as opposed to the middle of it, with the added bonus of helping you to keep your story progressing at a fast pace. This meant that I could start with my characters marching on the leaders to begin their revolution, cut to why that should matter without having to bother with taking the long and extremely mundane road to get from A to B, then swing back to describe how that all mixed to create the military joining my heroes and not their rulers.

To put it quickly, it helps to trim a great deal of the fat, without making it seem like there should be filler content or *two months later* after every incident. It is especially good for action novels, and perhaps a fast-paced mystery that needs a good hopping back and forth between setup and payoff.

Has anyone ever read a story they think fits this model? Do you think it should be taught in more classes on writing?

Source: https://blog.reedsy.com/story-structure/

Subplots

While making the skeleton outline for the main story, I mentioned that some stories have subplots that run alongside their primary narrative. Not every story does, especially if you are writing a one-shot short story, and there is nothing wrong with taking a single topic and following it through without any detours. However, many (if not most) stories have subplots that run alongside the main story. From a love interest in an action piece to that pesky job that prevents the protagonist from spending as much time as she would like with her family, subplots should always contain something that is paramount to the overall story even when it pulls away from the main action.

I’ve read too many books, and I’m sure you have too, where the subplot becomes more of a side tangent. It’s not relevant plot-wise, nor is it a sub category of the main story. This is something that, even if interesting, would be better suited for a prologue, epilogue, or completely different story. Keeping the story on track means that anything you write about that isn’t one of the primary plot points should still pick your characters up and send them hurling across the pages in that direction as opposed to letting them meander their way three towns over. No reader enjoys having to slog through the storm of unfulfilled tension to grab your characters by the ear and drag them back to where the action is because the author forgot to do it for them. There’s evil afoot and dagnabit we need to be doing something about it!

If you’ve read all the preceding articles, you probably would have picked up on what I’m going to suggest to help prevent wandering plots.

Stick to Primary

During the two character posts, I mentioned sticking to PCs or primary characters while doing the exercises. The reason is simple, to help guide you through this step. The first rule to making sure your subplots stay on track is to make absolutely certain every plot point contains at least one of the primary characters doing something important. In the majority of cases, that one character will be your main character. But, if you are writing in third person omniscient, it could be any of them.

Having a primary character does not automatically assure that a thread is a worthy subplot, however, and there are more classifications.

Make it Matter

The second rule to crafting a worthy subplot is to make sure it matters to the main plot of the story. If it isn’t, it probably doesn’t belong. The one exception would be introducing something into the first book of a series that will come back later on to be important.

Sticking to the first part, keeping it relevant, I will give a quick example of what I mean. To explain for those who have never watched anime, and to re-traumatize those who have, many popular shows run into a frustrating problem comparable to this point. Manga, the Japanese comics that anime tend to be based on, are often picked up for shows as soon as their popularity takes off. This means, in many cases, that the manga itself is not fully written and is continuing to release issues as the anime is being made. Do you see where this is going? With the majority of the story already written, character designs already made, and larger teams able to work with and compile the shows, anime often times quickly catches up and surpasses the amount of material the original author has made.

There have been two routes normally taken by animators when this happens, because stopping production of a popular show is absolutely unthinkable. The first is to get a team together and scrape together a satisfying conclusion to the story that may or may not have anything to do with how the manga will end. This is used in shows that have very serious subject matter in most cases as any deviation will completely throw off the meter of the story.

The other route is filler arcs. 99% of filler arcs fall into the side tangent category as opposed to the subplot category. You don’t know frustration until you’ve sat through a twenty-episode tournament, received five episodes of plot, and were then blindsided by Tournament Zero: it’s like the last one, but the same! Don’t write a tournament zero. Also, don’t write the details of your side character’s multiple love affairs in extended detail unless a messy divorce or twenty summonses (I can’t believe that’s actually the plural) for child support are going to play into the overall plot of the story. We can know that he’s been with one of every bipedal species in the realm without having to hear about it. Unless you’re writing a bard erotica. But it wouldn’t be the side plot in that case.

From A to B

If you stick with primary characters and maintain subject matter that is important to the main plot, you’re almost guaranteed to create a working subplot. Almost. There is one last thing to keep in mind when you look over your sidelined ideas that didn’t make it into the main plot of your story. Does it keep the main plot moving, even if we’ve stepped away from it?

Sometimes, that’s easy to answer. If one of your obstacle bullet points is needing a key to get to the bad guy, a side plot where the heroes go on a dungeon crawl to obtain said key is a pretty safe bet. If well written, not only do your characters obtain the much-needed item, but they learn a new ability that will come in handy later without having to completely stop the action for a training montage.

Other times, it’s a bit harder to balance. Comedic minor villains are a great way to break up the tension and even help the hero once they realize the main baddy is too terrible to support. But if you start dissecting their tragic backstory in two in-depth chapters three chapters away from the climactic battle, you’ve probably overdone their involvement.

Put it All Together

This can be one of the more difficult parts of the process. You know what points you want to add to the main skeleton, but where do they go? The key quest clearly comes after learning a key is needed, but will it be fully complete before the villain makes their next move? Does it make more sense to put the major argument of the couple before or after the accident? How will it change the perspective of the characters and the impression the readers have of them?

You might have to do some rearranging, because if you wanted subplot x to happen between main plot b and c but subplot x needs character 3 and character 3 isn’t introduced until after main plot d, you are going to have a problem on your hands. Maybe it is possible for subplot x to happen after main plot d. If not, can character 3 be introduced sooner?

No one but you can answer these questions. After struggling with it myself, I’ve come across many different suggestions on how best to spread out your ideas to help you decide. You can use sticky notes to have easy rearrangement, a solid line to squeeze points into so you don’t over fill one part of the story, whatever you need. My only recommendation is to keep it organized so you don’t have to worry about being confused later.

Sorry this wound up being a day late. It has been storming where I live and my internet keeps kicking in and out. Thank you for reading and keep imagining!

Characters

            If you’re following along, I’ve outlined how to go from a basic idea for a story to a full skeleton outline. That’s a lot of work and, in some short stories, that might be all you need to get your project underway. However, often times in novels you will need more to flesh out your pieces and that normally falls to side plots. So how do you choose side plots? The first thing to consider is your characters.

            The main plot is your main character interacting with the antagonist and the objective they are trying to solve. In many stories, your character can’t do it by themselves and needs help from others. While making your skeleton for the main plot, you most likely realized that there were characters, or needed to be characters, at certain points in the story. Maybe it’s a best friend, maybe it’s a mentor, or maybe it’s the guys being paid to help with the scheme. Though they touch into the main part of the story, they probably wouldn’t have enough room to be introduced and grow without a few side happenings. How do we know what scenes we need to add to keep the plot moving believably?

            First, we need to meet the characters. By this point you should already have some idea who your primary characters are. Even if you don’t have names, you should at least have some place holders like: male hero, evil wizard, protagonist’s mom, friend who wants out of the friendzone, etc. Just like in the real world, these are all different people who will have different ideas, beliefs, goals, and motivations. Knowing what all of these are will be the key to crafting a realistic set of side plots to help get everyone to the final goal.

            For this exercise, you’re going to want to stick to the main characters who are going to impact the main plot line. These I’ll refer to as Primary characters. Later, you’ll need to think through Secondary characters, those who only affect a side quest in a significant way, and Background characters, those who are there but could really be swapped out for anyone without change. But for now, we’re concerned with the big guns and not Drunk Guy Randy who lives at the local tavern because Martha left him for shoving 15 peanuts up his nose whenever he gets drunk. Unless Randy knows where the magic amulet of liver health rests. Then you can worry about him now.

            Take out a note book or a piece of paper or a Microsoft word sheet. Got it? Good. Because now it’s time to figure out who is going to be in this story and write… you guessed it: a sentence to let us know who we’re dealing with. Don’t worry, this will be expanded upon later.

Sentence should contain

            First, we need to decide your PM’s name because that’s important. No more place holders for you! Behind the name is a great tool and doesn’t carry the stigma of a sixteen-year-old girl walking into the bookstore to buy a baby name book. I swear, I’m just working on a book! Remember, unless your society is weird, parents choose names for their babies. The rich, white, Europeans are not going to name their child after an anime character and the nerdy anime cosplayers who live on minimum wage are not going to name their kid Sir Reginald III. So, make sure your name matches what their parents would have chosen, as well as your character.

            Next, we need to come up with each PM’s defining trait. How would people who know them describe them? Idealist? Jokester? Happy? Sad? Shouty? This is a snap shot of how the world perceives them that will dictate how they tend to act. If a character is going to tell jokes and play pranks, they’re a jokester or trickster. If they are a sunny ball of happiness, they are an optimist. If they think things should be done a certain way to lead to the best outcome, they are an idealist. You will want to choose something that will be easy to show at all times, unless something major happens to pull them out of their typical mood. I won’t list any dos or don’ts here because it completely depends on your own style and talent to decide what is and isn’t reasonable for you.

            Now that we know what the PM acts like, what drives them? Why do they do what they do? Is your character a dad fighting to make the world a better place for his children? Is your character like my MC: a dreamer who has a vision of a better future and wants to act on it? For your main character, this is what will get them to accept the main quest. For your villain, it will be why they are evil, even if it’s just because they want to be evil. For PMs who aren’t the MC or the villain, why do they help or hinder the hero? What do they hope to gain or are afraid to lose?

            Different from their drive, what is your PM’s main goal? This is what they are heading towards. The villain is evil because of his drive. His goal is what he hopes to achieve with his evil. The children are their father’s drive, but his goal is to topple the evil regime and make the world better.

            What is the character’s role in the story? Are they the main character? Main villain? The love interest? The Mentor? A minor villain? Why do they deserve to be in this story at all and what makes them count as a PM?

            And those are our pieces! With this, you should be ready to craft a killer one to two sentence character description that will help you know how to move forward with your story. Next Monday, I’ll talk about fleshing out those sentences and Wednesday I’ll cover creating the side plots. In the meantime, I’ll see you Friday with another bestiary entry and leave you with an example sentence. Thank you for reading and liking! Feel free to comment with any questions or other methods that you have found that work for you on each subject.

James Mooney, a hardworking immigrant with a dark sense of humor, wants to lift his family out of poverty and away from the scaffolding that his brother died working on by making quick money with good moonshine and teaching others how to do the same.

Plot Points

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.

Starting the Plot

Welcome back! I want to take a minute to thank everyone who has read my last piece. I was not expecting to see so many views in just a few days so early on!

In my last post, I talked about finding the Main Five of a story: the Character, Setting, Objective, Opponent, and Stakes. These are the foundational pieces of a story; you can’t build a novel, movie, game, or anything else without knowing the who, what, when, where, and why. Now that the foundation is set, where to go from here?

The simple answer is plot. The less simple question that follows it, how do you come up with the plot? Personally, I didn’t have a great deal of trouble with this step other than having far too many ideas for any sane person to work into a story. However, I’ve had friends who will know one or two things that they want to transpire in their final masterpiece but don’t know how to string them along and link them together coherently. Between some of my own trial and error and getting a few others involved, I think I have a good two-part suggestion for anyone facing similar struggles.

Premise and Synopsis

So the first step in part one is to create a premise and a synopsis to help guide you and keep you on track. That way, when you are pulling together the main plot points later you have a cut-and-dry guideline to keep you moving in the right direction. This way, unlike me in some early cases, you don’t wind up sobbing at the cutting table when you realize you’ve written three or four books at the same time and none of them are going anywhere near a coherent conclusion.

I found many different websites offering the premise and synopsis advice, which is where I came across the concept to mull over, but none of the ones I found had what I considered to be a satisfactory answer as to what these should encapsule. I knew they were supposed to be short (a sentence for the premise and a paragraph for the synopsis) but that was the primary advice. About your story and short… not so helpful as it would turn out.

Part of the problem may be me and my over-wordiness or my uncanny ability to get sidetracked into a spiraling cyclone of writing whenever I set my hand to the pen or keys. My sister has the opposite problem, as more of an artist than a writer, yet having the need to write the basics of a story so she can craft her comic around it, she doesn’t get nearly as overblown as I do: which is where I finally realized what the answer to the issue was. In trying to get my sister to write more than three words before coming back to ask again how to proceed, I introduced her to the premise and synopsis in the following way.

For your premise, write a sentence containing all five of your main five as they will be presented in your story. If your main character is Joe the paperboy, your setting is New York during the 1920’s, your objective is helping Joe’s mother with her cancer treatment, the opponent is the loan shark who works with one of the local mob bosses, and the stakes is Joe, his mom, and his dog will all die if he fails, your premise might look something like this:

Joe needs to help his mother pay for her cancer treatments but the local mafia’s loan shark wants more than a paperboy in 1920’s New York can afford, putting the lives of him, his mother, and their dog at stake.

Simple, right? “What about the synopsis, then?” you may ask. The best way to think of it is a paragraph detailing the relationship of each of the main five to the other. This will put you a step deeper in explaining your story while still limiting what you can put in it. This was a life saver for helping me to keep on track. Don’t worry about a love interest, don’t worry about the mentor, or anything else. Just stick to those main five in a small paragraph. Here’s another quick example of what I’m talking about.

Joe is a 15-year-old paperboy who lives in New York in the 1920’s. Joe’s mother has cancer and can’t afford her treatments on her small maid salary and Joe’s paperboy money. Against his mother’s warning, Joe goes to the local mafia to get a loan from their loan shark who just so happens to be the 20-year-old bully who has harassed Joe since he was three. The loan shark is a dangerous and evil man who wants to give the loan for 350% interest with only one year to pay it off. There is no way for him to pay it back, but Joe can’t stand the thought of losing his mother so he takes the deal. Now he has to pay off the loan quickly or the shark will kill him, his mother, and their dog for good measure.

That almost sounds like it could be on the back cover of a novel or movie, doesn’t it? And we only know five things with just a bit of added information to flesh out the idea. Now we can look at this for the rest of our drafting process to make sure our story stay’s on track. If we come up with a great idea for Joe to find a wife, but it won’t happen until he’s 18, that’s going in a sequel so put it aside. If you come up with a story about some of the mafia members who don’t really factor into that exact synopsis, their story belongs in a spinoff.

The Flurry

Step one of part one is complete, but I can’t very well leave it alone at that. Don’t worry, this next part is straightforward which is why I didn’t think this needed to be it’s own part or article. I’ve made the mistake of skipping this part, possibly because it’s often forgotten or assigned to a different stage of the process, but this is the best place for it in my personal experience.

After you have your premise and synopsis on paper, you probably have a great number of ideas buzzing around in your head. After all, before the antagonist was just a loan shark and now he’s a loan shark who has made your protagonist’s life miserable for twelve years. For that reason, it’s the best time to put those trains of thought to good use before they careen off the bridge of distraction into forgetfulness cavern or get turned around and wrecked in the tunnels of overthinking plot classifications.

That’s why for the second half of this tip I want you to do the exercise of many names at this point. Some call it brain storming, other info-dumping. I’ve heard it called the morning minutes, word vomit, and a litany of other monikers. It’s like icee-pops: everyone calls them something different. The concept is completely the same in all instances. You set a timer for five, ten, or fifteen minutes (the most you can tolerate in one sitting) and you write.

Take those five foundational stones and the premise and synopsis mortar that bind them together and write about them. Just ideas. Why is the loan shark a bully? How long has mom had cancer? Why does the loan shark hate dogs? Where is dad? Why didn’t Joe find a better solution to his problem? Whatever questions come to mind, answer them. Don’t worry about anything like the hero’s journey, or three act structures, or anything that will come later. Just write like you took fifteen minutes on the first question and have fifteen minutes to answer the last three.

That is part one of the two part plot point outline: premise, synopsis, flurry of writing. The next article on Monday will pull together what to do from that point. Yes, I did say Monday and that is because Fridays are my days for building up my bestiary! I’ve always loved mythical creatures and as a fantasy author my works do and will include so many of them! I want to have a place to display my takes on these myths and legends, and will likely include other fantasy elements later on like my plants, races, languages, worlds, and the like.

Thank you again for reading! I hope to see you around and to pass on more of my writing tips and stories.