re: plot

[nny]

In my continued selection of writerly questions, as I ponder which the hell 20 facts to write about myself:

How do you plot? Is there a visual element to your plotting, and if so how did that work for you? How much does it generally change between the plan and the page?

Please come and talk about yourself at me, I would be horrendously grateful!

Comments

[sasha_feather]

I don't know how to plot, which is why my very few stories so far have been PWPs. :D

[nny]

solidarity fistbump, dude, except I can't even porn. Mine are all, like, character vignettes. :-/

[genarti]

Oh god. I am not great at plotting, on the whole, but when I've managed plotty stories, it's -- visual, but four-dimensional? I visualize it much the same way I do a dance. (For reference, what I mean here is Scottish country dancing, which is the kind I know best and the kind that has probably deeply shaped my spatial reasoning. In that, the footwork is an aspect, but the main part of the dance is progressing through figures with other dancers. This is also the same way I visualize directions, but a story's plot is much more abstract and hazy-formed and less tagged to landmarks.)

So it's like a shape, gradually building and swelling and condensing, tracing a path through space, and you follow the path of that shape, and you can look at it from different angles in your brain (different POVs, or different narrative focuses) or start on that path from different points along -- right at the beginning, midway through, whatever. And if you want me to explain my plot to you, it will involve a lot of flaily hand gestures. (This is also true, although less so, of the shape of a non-plotty story. The dance is the shape is the plot is the figure made by the scenes adding on one by one.)

That's not how I outline, but an outline is the two-dimensional list of scenes that are tagged to that nebulous plot-shape.

I am aware this probably makes no sense to anyone outside my brain! I have never worked out how to pin my spatial reasoning down into words.

[cryptolect]

Hiya. I have written so little that I can't say anything useful about plot or editing but I just finished a couple of things, and was hoping to up my game. And then I read some author's notes where she had storyboards and like 6 betas and stuff which blew my mind.

But was also really comforting because it externalises the extent to which even established skilled recognised writers have methods and support and etc. not just natural genius. So I've been looking round and hoping i'd find some more stuff about people's writing methods but drew a blank and TL:DR I am SO PLEASED you've picked this as your topic.

I yearn for a virtual writers workshop. In the mean time I would also be very interested in any thoughts or notes you have about how you do character study because that's one of the things on my list I want to try - but if nothing comes to mind, no worries!

Personal quirks re: editing and plotting so far, a lot of material deleted and many (minor) edits post-publication because somehow the act of pressing post is like revealing the 3d picture and suddenly I see all this stuff I couldn't see before.

[saramily]

The way I've done it in the only thing I have written yet that had a plot and length was as follows:

1) write a massive lot of words, realize half of them don't work, swear, write more, stand back and look at lump of words and cry/swear.

2) SPREADSHEET. I made a spreadsheet with character names across the top and scenes down the side, and used the cells as super brief summaries of what each character was doing/thinking/feeling in each scene (ex. A was trying to find out about B's TERRIBLE SECRET and freaking out that it involved penguins. B is eating a sandwich and wondering why A is acting so weird. C is off screen doing terrible things with penguins)

That was really useful as a synopsis/overview that I could look at and be like oh hey, A is doing this and in the next row she's doing y but nothing happens to make her do y. Or if I tried to summarize action and it was "They talk... a lot..." I knew I need to cut down or just cut that scene. Plus, it reminded me to make sure that offscreen characters were DOING things while offscreen, not just in storage till I used them again. Also good for timeline! I could separate by what happened on each day, etc.

3) fix plot issues in spreadsheet, then go back and exhaustively rewrite everything while crying and/or swearing.

I'm still on step 3.

[siegeofangels]

I am not so great at plots which is why fanfic is so great: I can use the existing plot (or reality)! This may not be of so much help to you, depending on what kind of story you want to write.

I tend to just get hold of a concept that interests me and write a bunch of random scenes for it, and then, as I mentioned on the other post, stack them into something resembling a story. Stuff ends up being more personal-journey-focused than external-plot-focused, but I'm okay with that.

Oh oh oh there was a story that I did plot all the way out, using the technique of--I don't even have a rational explanation for this--getting hold of the score for The Scorcerer's Apprentice, assigning each instrument to a character (this was Harry Potter, so I had that many characters), figuring out which instrument carried the melody/were playing in each phrase, and then making each phrase correspond to a scene where those characters were interacting together. I just--I don't know. I think the plot had something to do with magical sicknesses and having to divide into groups to go find ingredients for a cure. It kind of worked, because the song structure made a good story structure, where it started simple and got more and more complicated and then there was a big climax. And dramatic timpani/Snape and whatnot. I think Draco was the solo trumpet? I never finished it.