Craft 8: On Plot and Structure
I’ve read/been told two very succinct definitions of plot that have stayed with me, though I can’t remember the source:
1) Get your character up a tree-then throw rocks.
2) …And then it got worse.
I think I'm going to need more than that. I had my arm twisted was encouraged by elidyce and bambu345 to participate in this year's NaNoWrMo. That commits you to writing 50,000 words of novel in the month of November. You're not supposed to use current ongoing projects so that means I can't use my WIP, Book of Shadows. I have to hunt down a whole new bunny.
Meanwhile, I figured it might be nice to put this up as a reminder to me of what a plot is. Besides, darth_luna is back, and she always said she wanted to see me do one of these compilations on plotting. So consider this my welcome back.
From that "handbook" I made of AOL posts--the word according to Strange New Worlds acquiring editor, Dean Wesley Smith:
Plot is the events that happen in your story, the order of the events, and all the details that lead to the conclusion of the events. Call it the skeleton.
Story is everything else on the body. It's the skin, the heart, the essense of what you are trying to say. Your story exists in your head. The series of events you use to hang the story on to convey it to someone else is the plot.
The problem in this country is that we call a manuscript a "story" when in reality the story exists only in your head. A manuscript is just your attempt to transfer that story into someone else's head. Plot is just a tool of manuscript building.
Any of that make sense?
Cheers
Dean
A story is simply this: A character, in a setting, with a problem, who tries to solve the problem, fails, then tries again when everything is on the line, to either succeed or fail, as the case may be.
1) A character... You must be inside the character's head, seeing through the character's eyes, feeling and smelling through the character.
2) ...In a setting... no talking heads. Must have a THICK setting, with all seven senses used if possible.
3) ...with a problem... Stories don't happen without a problem. The opening problem might not be the main problem, but there needs to be a problem.
4) character must try and FAIL. I know failing is not something we like to do, let alone put our characters through, but the character MUST fail, at least once. Fails fifty times and you have a novel. And the attempts to solve the problem must be logical and smart attempts.
5) Final attempt, when all is on the line: called a "climax" in schools.
That, in a nutshell, is a story. To study this, go see movies. For example, the Robin Williams movie now showing is from a Mathison short story, called WHAT DREAMS MAY COME. Perfect story from the above outline. See the movie.
Or just about any movie showing at the moment, or this year, or last year. Kris and I teach Die Hard as an example of this because there is no theme, only plot. Rent it.
Or watch the last Trek movie. Picard and the Enterprise have a problem. What is their first problem in the beginning of the story? Picard is having a nightmare. Simple. However, things go on. Problems change. He is not allowed into the fight, solves that, then when he's in the fight, he tries to win, thinks he has, but in reality, failed when the Borg ship goes into the past. Repeat. Try/fail/try/fail...right to the point where it all matters, everything is on the line.
Story. Focus on learning story, folks. Let the writing and smaller details take care of themselves. Story.
Dean
In plot driven fiction, things must get worse for your character.
Watch any movie that is mostly action based, such as the current Mummy#2. The characters are faced with problem after problem after problem. Sometimes they solve the problem, sometimes they fail. Yet right up until the last scene, things are constantly getting worse and worse and worse for our heroes.
So, you have a character, with a problem, in a setting. The character tries to solve the problem and FAILS. Things get worse. Character keeps trying, sometimes seeming to succeed, but in the process making the problem worse. And so on. Study any movie from the last Trek film to Thelma and Louise and you will see this pattern. It must be in your short stories as well.
Cheers,
Dean
Good books on plotting are Zuckerman's "Beyond the Bestseller" (I think that's close) and Don Maass's "Writing the Breakout Novel" or some such title like that.
They are aimed at writers who have a bunch of novels under their belts, but still good for reading earlier.
To study great plotting without all the other stuff like characters and theme getting in the way (in essence, the skeleton) read Clive Cussler.
Cheers
Dean
Clive Cussler, bestselling author
I plot as I go. Many novelists write an outline that has almost as many pages as the ultimate book. Others knock out a brief synopsis…. Do what is comfortable. If you have to plot out every move your characters make, so be it. Just make sure there is a plausible purpose behind their machinations. A good reader can smell a phony plot a block away.
Don Maass Writing the Breakout Novel, top literary agent
Pages 136-138 - The Five Basic Plot Elements
1) Sympathetic Character
2) Conflict appears
3) Conflict must undergo complication
4) Climax
5) Resolution
Page 139
Applied simply … conflict is little more than incident, anecdote or news. Made complex, active, climactic and complete, it becomes a plot.
Page 160
Many writing teachers teach only… [the quest or journey] form, as if Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1948) and Christopher Vogler's distillation of Campbell's work The Writer's Journey (1998), were the only workable blueprints for a novel….
Many writers have benefited from the methods taught by Robert McKee in his screen writing seminar and book by the same name, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. McKee's approach to plot construction involves many elements of the hero's journey. Along with those elements, he teaches principles such as character arc, story logic, scene linkage, setups and payoffs, beats and scenes, and so forth. His overall three-act structure is a powerful tool for building screenplays, although its usefulness in plotting a novel is a little less clear to me.
That said, I have come to feel the hero's journey is not a universal plot cure. The novel is too fluid a form to have only one basic structure. Same with film. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if the pervasiveness of McKee's seminars does not explain why many Hollywood movies seem to have the same action story…
Stephen King, On Writing
Page 163
You may wonder where plot is in all this. The answer-my answer, anyway-is nowhere. I won't try to convince you that I've never plotted any more than I'd try to convince you that I've never told a lie, but I do both as infrequently as possible. I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren't compatible. It's best that I be as clear about this as I can-I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course)…. [S]tories are found things, like fossils in the ground.
Page 167
I'd suggest that what works for me may work equally well for you. If you are enslaved to (or intimidated by) the tiresome tyranny of the outline and the notebook filled with "Character Notes," it may liberate you. At the very least, it will turn your mind to something more interesting than Developing the Plot.
Elizabeth George, Write Away, (13 bestsellers, including Deception on His Mind) Page 54
For my part, I have always had to have an outline: the plot in advance. I haven't had to have the entire plot worked out prior to writing a novel, but after I have the expanded idea, I have to have a sense of where I'm going to be heading in the first 150 pages or so.
To give myself a sense of direction, I do two things. I create a step outline. I then expand it to a running plot outline.
A step outline for me is just a list of scenes in the order in which I envision them in the novel.
George gives an example on Page 54 from the step outline she used for a chapter in her novel A Place of Hiding:
1. SJ talks to Le Gallez: Prints on bottle; money missing-suggests payoff which takes SJ to Adrian (can he phone Lynley at this point?)
Lawrence Block, Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers, (Award-winning, Bestelling author with over 40 novels)
Sometimes an outline helps. I've used outlines frequently and have mixed feelings about them. It's comforting, certainly, to know where a book is going, and an outline spells all of that out for you in advance and saves you worrying that you'll plot yourself into a corner.
On the other hand, an outline can keep a novel from developing organically. There's no way an outline can include absolutely everything, and the little elements of characterization and incident that crop up while you're writing can change the shape and direction of your novel. If you're tied to an outline, the book can't grow as it wants to; its final form is as predetermined as a paint-by-number canvas. Of course you can always modify the outline as you feel the need, but that's sometimes easier said than done.
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, (author of several novels) Page 62
Alice Adams … said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw us in…. Background is where you let us see and know who these people are…. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care about most… move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different…. And then there is the ending… what happened and what did it mean.
Noah Lukeman, The First Five Pages, (Top literary agent and former editor) Chapter 17: Focus Page 170
It is so easy when writing to fall in love with yourself, to let words, sentences, characters carry you away, to indulge yourself…. [W]riters often have to allow a certain amount of indulgence in order to let their writing to go where it "wants" to, let their characters do what they "want" to do-in other words, to let the work evolve out of itself. The alternative would be for the writer to impose his original plan onto the work no matter what, even if no longer suitable, and this would inevitably lead to a contrived text.
Noah Lukeman, The Plot Thickens, (Top literary agent and former editor) Page 81
[T]he first thing you'll find is that story telling is not about giving away information but about witholding it; the information is never as important as the path you take in disseminating it.
Gustav Freytag, Dramatic Structure
A synopsis of his historical and extremely influential take on dramatic structure in the Wikipedia.
God knows plotting is the part of writing fiction I find scariest, especially ever since I embarked on a novel-length work. I've said several times and in several places that I'd never post a WIP again, and part of the reason is that I think that especially if you don't outline, (and I don't) you're going to have some false starts and it's difficult to back track and revise once it's out there.
Also, I've seen so many WIPs that have started strong become a shapeless mass. I can think of one very popular behemonth, which I found fun in the beginning, become one tedious chapter after another of Hermione wet in her knickers. Is it that the author never bothered to outline? Or just that she should never have posted her WIP before she finished and could see the shape of her story as a whole and revise accordingly?
Never mind the abandoned ones-but considering I'd name two WIPs that may remain forever unfinished as favs, I'm not going to carp about that. I'm grateful for what we have.
Oh, and as I said, I'm now taking applicants, so if anyone wants to send something my way...
WANTED: Rabid and rapidly growing plot bunny with potential to grow into a wild hare. Any variety with a high enough hop (50 thousand words minimum) is eligible for the position: SS/HG, DM/HG, or original prefered. Position must be filled by November 1, 2006.
(Yes, you read right-I’d seriously consider writing a DM/HG novel if the right bunny comes along.)
Hmmmm...so to outline or not to outline? I'm inclined to try one for once--how do you guys do it?
1) Get your character up a tree-then throw rocks.
2) …And then it got worse.
I think I'm going to need more than that. I had my arm twisted was encouraged by elidyce and bambu345 to participate in this year's NaNoWrMo. That commits you to writing 50,000 words of novel in the month of November. You're not supposed to use current ongoing projects so that means I can't use my WIP, Book of Shadows. I have to hunt down a whole new bunny.
Meanwhile, I figured it might be nice to put this up as a reminder to me of what a plot is. Besides, darth_luna is back, and she always said she wanted to see me do one of these compilations on plotting. So consider this my welcome back.
From that "handbook" I made of AOL posts--the word according to Strange New Worlds acquiring editor, Dean Wesley Smith:
Plot is the events that happen in your story, the order of the events, and all the details that lead to the conclusion of the events. Call it the skeleton.
Story is everything else on the body. It's the skin, the heart, the essense of what you are trying to say. Your story exists in your head. The series of events you use to hang the story on to convey it to someone else is the plot.
The problem in this country is that we call a manuscript a "story" when in reality the story exists only in your head. A manuscript is just your attempt to transfer that story into someone else's head. Plot is just a tool of manuscript building.
Any of that make sense?
Cheers
Dean
A story is simply this: A character, in a setting, with a problem, who tries to solve the problem, fails, then tries again when everything is on the line, to either succeed or fail, as the case may be.
1) A character... You must be inside the character's head, seeing through the character's eyes, feeling and smelling through the character.
2) ...In a setting... no talking heads. Must have a THICK setting, with all seven senses used if possible.
3) ...with a problem... Stories don't happen without a problem. The opening problem might not be the main problem, but there needs to be a problem.
4) character must try and FAIL. I know failing is not something we like to do, let alone put our characters through, but the character MUST fail, at least once. Fails fifty times and you have a novel. And the attempts to solve the problem must be logical and smart attempts.
5) Final attempt, when all is on the line: called a "climax" in schools.
That, in a nutshell, is a story. To study this, go see movies. For example, the Robin Williams movie now showing is from a Mathison short story, called WHAT DREAMS MAY COME. Perfect story from the above outline. See the movie.
Or just about any movie showing at the moment, or this year, or last year. Kris and I teach Die Hard as an example of this because there is no theme, only plot. Rent it.
Or watch the last Trek movie. Picard and the Enterprise have a problem. What is their first problem in the beginning of the story? Picard is having a nightmare. Simple. However, things go on. Problems change. He is not allowed into the fight, solves that, then when he's in the fight, he tries to win, thinks he has, but in reality, failed when the Borg ship goes into the past. Repeat. Try/fail/try/fail...right to the point where it all matters, everything is on the line.
Story. Focus on learning story, folks. Let the writing and smaller details take care of themselves. Story.
Dean
In plot driven fiction, things must get worse for your character.
Watch any movie that is mostly action based, such as the current Mummy#2. The characters are faced with problem after problem after problem. Sometimes they solve the problem, sometimes they fail. Yet right up until the last scene, things are constantly getting worse and worse and worse for our heroes.
So, you have a character, with a problem, in a setting. The character tries to solve the problem and FAILS. Things get worse. Character keeps trying, sometimes seeming to succeed, but in the process making the problem worse. And so on. Study any movie from the last Trek film to Thelma and Louise and you will see this pattern. It must be in your short stories as well.
Cheers,
Dean
Good books on plotting are Zuckerman's "Beyond the Bestseller" (I think that's close) and Don Maass's "Writing the Breakout Novel" or some such title like that.
They are aimed at writers who have a bunch of novels under their belts, but still good for reading earlier.
To study great plotting without all the other stuff like characters and theme getting in the way (in essence, the skeleton) read Clive Cussler.
Cheers
Dean
Clive Cussler, bestselling author
I plot as I go. Many novelists write an outline that has almost as many pages as the ultimate book. Others knock out a brief synopsis…. Do what is comfortable. If you have to plot out every move your characters make, so be it. Just make sure there is a plausible purpose behind their machinations. A good reader can smell a phony plot a block away.
Don Maass Writing the Breakout Novel, top literary agent
Pages 136-138 - The Five Basic Plot Elements
1) Sympathetic Character
2) Conflict appears
3) Conflict must undergo complication
4) Climax
5) Resolution
Page 139
Applied simply … conflict is little more than incident, anecdote or news. Made complex, active, climactic and complete, it becomes a plot.
Page 160
Many writing teachers teach only… [the quest or journey] form, as if Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1948) and Christopher Vogler's distillation of Campbell's work The Writer's Journey (1998), were the only workable blueprints for a novel….
Many writers have benefited from the methods taught by Robert McKee in his screen writing seminar and book by the same name, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. McKee's approach to plot construction involves many elements of the hero's journey. Along with those elements, he teaches principles such as character arc, story logic, scene linkage, setups and payoffs, beats and scenes, and so forth. His overall three-act structure is a powerful tool for building screenplays, although its usefulness in plotting a novel is a little less clear to me.
That said, I have come to feel the hero's journey is not a universal plot cure. The novel is too fluid a form to have only one basic structure. Same with film. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if the pervasiveness of McKee's seminars does not explain why many Hollywood movies seem to have the same action story…
Stephen King, On Writing
Page 163
You may wonder where plot is in all this. The answer-my answer, anyway-is nowhere. I won't try to convince you that I've never plotted any more than I'd try to convince you that I've never told a lie, but I do both as infrequently as possible. I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren't compatible. It's best that I be as clear about this as I can-I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course)…. [S]tories are found things, like fossils in the ground.
Page 167
I'd suggest that what works for me may work equally well for you. If you are enslaved to (or intimidated by) the tiresome tyranny of the outline and the notebook filled with "Character Notes," it may liberate you. At the very least, it will turn your mind to something more interesting than Developing the Plot.
Elizabeth George, Write Away, (13 bestsellers, including Deception on His Mind) Page 54
For my part, I have always had to have an outline: the plot in advance. I haven't had to have the entire plot worked out prior to writing a novel, but after I have the expanded idea, I have to have a sense of where I'm going to be heading in the first 150 pages or so.
To give myself a sense of direction, I do two things. I create a step outline. I then expand it to a running plot outline.
A step outline for me is just a list of scenes in the order in which I envision them in the novel.
George gives an example on Page 54 from the step outline she used for a chapter in her novel A Place of Hiding:
1. SJ talks to Le Gallez: Prints on bottle; money missing-suggests payoff which takes SJ to Adrian (can he phone Lynley at this point?)
Lawrence Block, Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers, (Award-winning, Bestelling author with over 40 novels)
Sometimes an outline helps. I've used outlines frequently and have mixed feelings about them. It's comforting, certainly, to know where a book is going, and an outline spells all of that out for you in advance and saves you worrying that you'll plot yourself into a corner.
On the other hand, an outline can keep a novel from developing organically. There's no way an outline can include absolutely everything, and the little elements of characterization and incident that crop up while you're writing can change the shape and direction of your novel. If you're tied to an outline, the book can't grow as it wants to; its final form is as predetermined as a paint-by-number canvas. Of course you can always modify the outline as you feel the need, but that's sometimes easier said than done.
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, (author of several novels) Page 62
Alice Adams … said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw us in…. Background is where you let us see and know who these people are…. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care about most… move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different…. And then there is the ending… what happened and what did it mean.
Noah Lukeman, The First Five Pages, (Top literary agent and former editor) Chapter 17: Focus Page 170
It is so easy when writing to fall in love with yourself, to let words, sentences, characters carry you away, to indulge yourself…. [W]riters often have to allow a certain amount of indulgence in order to let their writing to go where it "wants" to, let their characters do what they "want" to do-in other words, to let the work evolve out of itself. The alternative would be for the writer to impose his original plan onto the work no matter what, even if no longer suitable, and this would inevitably lead to a contrived text.
Noah Lukeman, The Plot Thickens, (Top literary agent and former editor) Page 81
[T]he first thing you'll find is that story telling is not about giving away information but about witholding it; the information is never as important as the path you take in disseminating it.
Gustav Freytag, Dramatic Structure
A synopsis of his historical and extremely influential take on dramatic structure in the Wikipedia.
God knows plotting is the part of writing fiction I find scariest, especially ever since I embarked on a novel-length work. I've said several times and in several places that I'd never post a WIP again, and part of the reason is that I think that especially if you don't outline, (and I don't) you're going to have some false starts and it's difficult to back track and revise once it's out there.
Also, I've seen so many WIPs that have started strong become a shapeless mass. I can think of one very popular behemonth, which I found fun in the beginning, become one tedious chapter after another of Hermione wet in her knickers. Is it that the author never bothered to outline? Or just that she should never have posted her WIP before she finished and could see the shape of her story as a whole and revise accordingly?
Never mind the abandoned ones-but considering I'd name two WIPs that may remain forever unfinished as favs, I'm not going to carp about that. I'm grateful for what we have.
Oh, and as I said, I'm now taking applicants, so if anyone wants to send something my way...
WANTED: Rabid and rapidly growing plot bunny with potential to grow into a wild hare. Any variety with a high enough hop (50 thousand words minimum) is eligible for the position: SS/HG, DM/HG, or original prefered. Position must be filled by November 1, 2006.
(Yes, you read right-I’d seriously consider writing a DM/HG novel if the right bunny comes along.)
Hmmmm...so to outline or not to outline? I'm inclined to try one for once--how do you guys do it?