When you're Plotting...
...because plotting takes a capital P.
I'm planning on doing a series of posts (not necessarily consecutive) about plotting, because it's such a huge topic and there are so many different ways to do it. I'm a firm believer in having a chapter outline of some sort, whether it's a sentence in summary or a spreadsheet of details. But I'll start with the beginning of plotting, because I think it's the most important bit:
YA novels are always CHARACTER DRIVEN.
Now, most genres are-- or at least should be-- character driven. But this blog centers around YA. And what makes YA such a big deal is that, while middle grade novels are usually about characters reacting to something, a young adult novel must have your characters acting in their own interests.
This doesn't mean the story has to start with them acting. Oh, no. Like in The Hunger Games, the bestselling story of a girl forced to represent her District in a televised fight to the death, the main conflict of a story could be entirely external. However, the main character of a middle grade novel would react to the situation they are forced into. YA novels usually contain either a coming-of-age theme or a character who has already "come of age", so to speak, and one of the symbols for coming of age is a character not just going on the defense to what is going on, but going on the offense, acting in their own interests and planning out what they want to happen. In a YA novel, a character must be presented with a situation and respond to it by deciding what they want out of it and figuring out what they must do to get that. This is called motive.
What makes a story work, what makes each word a matter of life and death and creates tension so intense the pages are flipping by themselves, is when two characters have motives that directly oppose the other's. This is the basis of conflict.
Let's say one character, a girl named Joanne, is graduating high school and desperately wants to move to Paris to become an artist. However, her high school boyfriend, Luke, needs to get married to inherit his grandfather's fortune and company, and he wants to marry her. This is conflict. Luke can only achieve his goal if Joanne fails to achieve hers, just as Joanne's success means Luke's failure. Only one can succeed.
So this is what plotting needs to start with: a conflict. You can build a world with as many mysterious mountains and magical lakes as you like, and you can create a character and know everything about them from their hair color to the name of the pet rock they had when they were three, and you can end up with an entire universe of people talking and laughing and of bad stuff happening to these people, but until you create conflict, it doesn't really matter.
And Rule Number One, the most sacred and fatal law about fiction, is this: It has to matter.
I'm planning on doing a series of posts (not necessarily consecutive) about plotting, because it's such a huge topic and there are so many different ways to do it. I'm a firm believer in having a chapter outline of some sort, whether it's a sentence in summary or a spreadsheet of details. But I'll start with the beginning of plotting, because I think it's the most important bit:
YA novels are always CHARACTER DRIVEN.
Now, most genres are-- or at least should be-- character driven. But this blog centers around YA. And what makes YA such a big deal is that, while middle grade novels are usually about characters reacting to something, a young adult novel must have your characters acting in their own interests.
This doesn't mean the story has to start with them acting. Oh, no. Like in The Hunger Games, the bestselling story of a girl forced to represent her District in a televised fight to the death, the main conflict of a story could be entirely external. However, the main character of a middle grade novel would react to the situation they are forced into. YA novels usually contain either a coming-of-age theme or a character who has already "come of age", so to speak, and one of the symbols for coming of age is a character not just going on the defense to what is going on, but going on the offense, acting in their own interests and planning out what they want to happen. In a YA novel, a character must be presented with a situation and respond to it by deciding what they want out of it and figuring out what they must do to get that. This is called motive.
What makes a story work, what makes each word a matter of life and death and creates tension so intense the pages are flipping by themselves, is when two characters have motives that directly oppose the other's. This is the basis of conflict.
Let's say one character, a girl named Joanne, is graduating high school and desperately wants to move to Paris to become an artist. However, her high school boyfriend, Luke, needs to get married to inherit his grandfather's fortune and company, and he wants to marry her. This is conflict. Luke can only achieve his goal if Joanne fails to achieve hers, just as Joanne's success means Luke's failure. Only one can succeed.
So this is what plotting needs to start with: a conflict. You can build a world with as many mysterious mountains and magical lakes as you like, and you can create a character and know everything about them from their hair color to the name of the pet rock they had when they were three, and you can end up with an entire universe of people talking and laughing and of bad stuff happening to these people, but until you create conflict, it doesn't really matter.
And Rule Number One, the most sacred and fatal law about fiction, is this: It has to matter.