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Plan Your Book, Week 8
“Life happens in plots all the time; life is absolutely composed of plots!” –John Mortimer, Paris Review interview
In plot, you start somewhere and something happens, not by accident, but as a result of the first event. The word “causal” looks so much like “casual.” Do not be tricked. Cause-and-effect is the structure of plot. One of the reasons stories are so satisfying is that they contain an element of order that life does not.
In the most basic terms, here’s how plot works:
Something happens to throw your character off balance.
Your character reacts. How does your character react?
Let’s think about human nature for a moment.
Human nature chooses the path that requires the least effort for the circumstance. Don’t get too philosophical as you explore your character’s reactions. Think, what would I do generally in this circumstance? What would someone I know well do?
At the same time, you may have a character who is braver or more reckless than are you. Your book may require it. The first time I did NaNoWriMo, I ran into this problem. My character would start to do something remarkable and clever in the interest of his high-stakes motivation, and I would suddenly think, “I would never be able to pull that off.” And then he would sort of back down or change his mind or wander off somewhere else. In revision, I realized that if this character was as motivated as I’d made him to be, he would go through with the crazy schemes I came up with for him. He’d have to, and the truth is, I might do some of those things myself if pushed up against it.
So start easy and realistic. If you’ve given your character serious motivation and a backbone, as things get harder, he or she will step up. But human beings don’t start there.
Your problems must not only continue to crop up, but they must get worse. They must increase in severity. This means that the solutions your character tries must fail. First, the easy and obvious solution fails. Ah, we have the hint of a story. This is very much how people set up oral stories, if you think about it. They say, “I was going to the grocery store, and you know how I always take Ashby Avenue and then park in the lot there? Well . . .” and we know that we are about to hear about how the ordinary changed. We sure as heck don’t want to hear a blow-by-blow account of the ordinary events of parking and shopping, but we are eager to hear how our loved one or friend got into some sort of trouble. The unexpected rained down, as it is wont to do in the good stories from life and fiction.
In many cases in life, early on a solution arrives after which there is no more problem and, hence, no more story. This should not be the case with your book.
So something unexpected happens (maybe just something slightly out of the ordinary), and the character takes it into stride, tries to overcome the problem simply and easily. Unexpectedly, that simple and easy solution is neither, the problem remains or worsens, and our character must try a little bit harder, still expecting that things will resolve themselves soon enough. But no . . . things get worse, more complicated, more entrenched. Plot!
Your assignment this week is to write a problem/ solution list for your book. Just write
Problem: and then write the first problem
Solution: and the the solution your character attempts, which fails . . .
New or continued problem as a result of or in spite of that solution attempt:
New solution:
New or continued problem as a result of or in spite of that solution attempt:
And so on . . . problem/ solution/ problem/ solution.
At each step, the stakes get higher, the tension rises . . . until the final problem is overcome or not, but nothing further can happen.
Remember, each attempt you make is done in the spirit of experimenting, improvising, asking questions and exploring. This doesn’t need to be perfect. Heck, it doesn’t even need to work. It’s a place to start testing out what is going on in your story.