(no subject)

[nny]

A possible journal post, since I don't want to ask for just me as that seems awfully selfish but I really do want to know: How do you construct a plot? How do you personally make sure it all makes sense?

It's something I've never learned and I really don't know how to do, and I don't think my writing's going to get any better or more memorable without that skill. :)

Thank you if you are inspired to share!

Comments

[skygiants]

This is something it took me AGES to even partly learn and that I still sort of suck at! I mean, even now, a lot of the time I start from a plot that someone else has already written and either poke at things that bother me/don't make sense in it and see what grows out from that, or change some things to things that I think are cooler ("EVERYONE IS LADIES!" "ADD CROSS-DRESSING!" -- you know, the usual sorts of me things) and then the rest kind of follows as I think through all the implications of that.

Honestly, the other thing that made me feel halfway competent about writing plot was writing a bunch of Baccano! fic, which is an anime that relies on all the plots being fiendishly complicated and having utterly unrelated people jump in and throw bombs or try to murder someone at exactly the wrong moment. So I would start with something like "I want to write these reporters having an adventure!" and then go through a process of, like, "why are they having an adventure? OTHER REPORTER GOT KIDNAPPED. Why was he kidnapped? HE DID SOMETHING STUPID. Why did he do something stupid? I guess because there was a threat to the newspaper they work for! So how did everyone else react to the threat? They did [x] and [y], and now it's all going to come back and bite them in the ass at the same time!" And then I had a WACKY COMPLEX PLOT, but it was pretty much just getting people to respond to the same base stimulus in different ways, according to their characterization.

. . . which I actually hadn't thought about in that way until I was writing it now. That's good! I should remember that next time I'm stumped. >.>

[gramarye1971]

Different stories seem to require different plot elements, but for the most part I need either (1) a start point-end point combination or (2) a particular climactic scene or sentence upon which to hang a plot before I can build a story.

For #1, it's always about 'how do I get the characters from Start Point A to End Point Z?' and then following them through that process as if I were running beside them. It can be rather like playing that children's game with the hoop and the stick, where you have to thwack the plot with Motivation! or Crisis! or Sudden Dramatic Reveal! to keep it going, but it has to have momentum or it'll just fall over. Writing the Crossover Monstrosity was rather like that, where I knew that someone was going to have to kill Voldemort by the end of it, and my job as the writer was to run alongside the characters and keep thwacking them towards that ending confrontation, curbing their tendency to go off on side stories and tangents. Eyes on the prize, and all that. This works best for me when I'm writing a big ensemble story with lots of characters to corral and plenty of possible approaches to End Point Z.

For #2, I have figure out what the big dramatic scene or sentence or whatever is going to be and nail that down, and then build out from there in either direction. If it's not a strong enough idea, the story will fall down, so sometimes I have to go back and reinforce it with a new character or a plot element or whatever. This works best for me for stories with only a few characters, or with a crucial scene that everyone involved will have to react to.

Those two approaches cover just about all of the stories I've written, I think.

[siegeofangels]

When I was midway through writing all of the random bits that came together to form If you want to kiss the sky, I actually wrote a summary of every single scene on an index card and laid them all out on my floor so I could see a) what plotlines I had unconsciously made, and b) what the arc of each of those was. "Oh, this scene is John pulling away from Rodney; this scene is John too close to Lorne." And I realized that c) where I wanted to go was John swinging back and forth between too close and too far away from both Rodney and the military, and finally finding an equilibrium where he can be happy. So I looked at it and thought, okay, I need another scene where John gets too close to Rodney and freaks out, I need a scene where he pulls away from his lieutenants and there are negative repercussions, etc, so I knew d) what else I had to write to make the arcs work.

Does that make sense? tl;dr: It really helped to look at it from the outside and figure out which line of the story each scene was advancing, so I knew what else needed to be shored up.

[in_the_blue]

Let me start this out by saying I despise plotting things out. I much prefer it when things progress organically. But that aside, a few key things.

1. Where does the story start?
2. Where do you hope it will end?
3. What happens along the way?
4. What''s the story's genre? That's important to know. Certain genres progress in certain ways. A romance novel needs love/misunderstanding/resolution. A detective novel needs incident/investigation/trouble/resolution. And so on. These are the bare bones, and the basic structure for these kinds of stories. Once you know them, it becomes a pretty straightforward exercise in filling in the blanks. For literary fiction the rules get different because those stories are less structured.
5. Once you've outlined the plot, understand that your story might take twists and turns you couldn't have anticipated, and know that it's okay to change things up, to backtrack, to alter the ending. We never know until we write the story, and often characters have their own opinions on the way the plot should progress.
6. Have fun, and just let it flow.

[surexit]

I don't.

>.>

I'm pretty sure that's evident in my writing.