Plots and Plotting
Plots and Plotting
How to create stories that work
Diana Kimpton
©Diana Kimpton 2018
Published by Kubby Bridge Books
Contents
Introduction
1: To plot or not to plot
2: When’s the right time to write
3: The basic components of a good story
4: How theory works in practice
5: The magic of three
6: Finding ideas
Brainstorming and Mind Maps
Analysing the results
Using real events
7: A note about themes
8: Starting to develop your story
Why you always need characters
What defines characters?
Setting
Why there must be a problem
9: It’s never too soon to think of the ending
What makes a good ending?
10: Step outlines – the powerful way to plot
The practicalities of step outlining
11: Step outlining in action
12: Research
The value of first-hand experience
Research in action
13: Developing characters
Age
Gender
Names
Using real names
Appearance
Backstory
Family issues
The problem with parents
14: Making characters believable
Providing information in good time
Motivation matters
15: Character arcs
16: Character development in action
17: Sorting out the setting
Period
Place
Inventing a place
Inventing worlds
Maps and records
18: Setting in action
Sorting out the world
The effect on the plot
19: Making your story original
Putting the search for originality into action
20: Adding humour
21: Special issues with series
The pros and cons of series
Freestanding series
Freestanding series without regular characters
Series that tell a story
Keeping the reader up to date
Putting series planning into action
22: Viewpoint
Viewpoint problems
Using multiple viewpoints
Viewpoint issues in children’s books
How viewpoint affects plotting
23: Choosing where to start
What about prologues?
Putting theory into practice
24: Making every step count
What about description?
Show, don’t tell
25: Subplots and story strands
How many strands does a book need?
Mirrored strands
Unconnected strands
Weaving strands together
26: Creating story strands
Making strands relevant
Story strand creation in action
Staying flexible
27: Conflict, dilemmas and problems
The problem/dilemma connection
Types of problem
The trouble with phones
Putting theory into practice
28: Pacing your book
Tension can be tiring
Keeping interest going
29: What’s at stake?
Increasing the stakes
30: Handling time
Time jumps
Time travel
Timelines
Flashbacks
Time pressure
31: When the plot goes wrong
Dealing with feedback
32: Troubleshooting the beginning
33: Troubleshooting the middle
34: Troubleshooting the end
35: Troubleshooting the length
36: Choosing the title
37: A final update on Future Proof
Conclusion
Other books about plotting
A note from the author
Introduction
When I first became an author, I wasn’t much good at creating stories. First of all, I tried that technique where you invent some characters and see where they take you. But it failed so badly that my characters wandered off in chapter three, muttering, “Don’t think much of this book. It’s not going anywhere.”
Then I tried writing a list of everything that would happen in each chapter. This was a slight improvement because it helped me complete my first attempt at a children’s novel. But that’s where the success ended. The story came back from a publisher with a note saying it had “a weak plot and a flat ending”.
In retrospect, that was probably a good thing for generations of children because that novel was about an 11-year-old boy who goes to a boarding school for young wizards. This was years before Harry Potter came on the scene so, if my weak plot and flat ending had actually been published, JK Rowling might have been faced with publishers saying, “Tried that, didn’t sell.”
However, at the time, I could see no advantage in the rejection at all. It shattered my confidence so badly that I went back to producing non-fiction while I tried to learn how to write novels properly. I devoured every book and article I could find about story structure and used my new-found information to analyse the books I read and the movies I watched.
Gradually I started to understand what makes stories work. But I still couldn’t write them. That’s because story analysis is a different skill from story creation. Analysing a novel or film doesn’t reveal anything about how the plot developed in the author’s head from the original idea – it only tells you about the finished product.
My personal breakthrough came when I picked up a copy of How to Write for Animation by Jeffrey Scott. As I read his step-by-step description of how he used a step outline to develop the story for an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, something clicked inside my head. For the first time, I realized that I didn’t have to work out a story from beginning to end. I could start at the end and work backwards or start in the middle and work in both directions. Armed with the power of the step outline and the freedom it gave me to work in any way I wanted, I discovered that I could finally create stories that worked.
Since then, I’ve written twenty-three novels for young people, including my Pony-Mad Princess series which has sold a million copies worldwide. I’ve come a long way since that devastating rejection, and I hope this book will help you make similar progress whether you write for adults or for children.
Of course, there are probably as many ways of writing stories as there are authors in the world. We all think differently and work differently. So this book isn’t about getting you to create stories my way. It’s about giving you the understanding and the tools you need to discover how to create stories your way.
To help make my ideas clearer, I’ll be using some of my own books as examples as well as developing a plot especially for this book. The reason for concentrating on my own work isn’t to show off. It’s because these are the only stories where I know for sure how they were created. However much we analyse other people’s stories, we can never be sure of how they grew in their authors’ minds.
1
To plot or not to plot
Raising the issue of plotting with any random group of authors is likely to start a heated discussion. Some think plotting destroys creativity. Others believe that creativity flounders without plot. Personally, I think the argument is pointless because creativity, story and plot are so intrinsically bound together that it’s not
possible to separate them.
When we set out to create a story, we are starting on a journey of discovery and, as with most journeys, there are alternative routes we can take that all end up in the same place. Which one we choose depends on what works best for us personally, and it may not be the same for each story. For example, I wrote the first draft of my funny sci-fi story, Alien Sheep, with only a rough idea of where the story was going, and then added an extra strand to the story during some fairly major rewrites. In contrast, I plotted Princess Ellie’s Summer Holiday in huge detail before I started writing and hardly rewrote the first draft at all, except to tweak the language.
I suspect that much of the strong anti-plot feeling amongst authors is due to a dislike of the formulaic plotting methods and strict story structure taught in some creative writing classes. It may also be due to differences in our understanding of what plot and plotting actually are.
For me, the plot is the plan of the story and plotting is the creation of that plan, whether we do it in our heads or write it down. So maybe planning is a less contentious word than plotting. Unless we truly believe that monkeys pressing keys at random might eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, we all plan to some extent before we start writing, so if you really have trouble with me talking about plotting, please think about planning instead.
2
When’s the right time to write
The less planning you do before you start writing, the higher the chance that you’ll have to do extensive rethinking and rewriting after you’ve completed your first draft. That’s why I think the start writing and see where your characters go approach should be called write first, plot later. It failed me completely, but I know other writers like to work that way so I’m not going to tell you not to try it. However, if you’re the sort of writer who hates making major changes to stories after you’ve finished them, you’ll get a better result by working out the details of your story before you start writing.
It’s fair to point out that having a complete plot worked out doesn’t rule out a later flash of inspiration that calls for big changes, and it definitely doesn’t mean that you should ignore that additional inspiration if it comes. The plotting process is there to help you channel your creativity – not restrict it.
It’s entirely up to you when you switch from plotting to writing, and you can switch back again any time you like. For example, I often write a scene or two quite early on so I can try out different viewpoints (more on that later) before I go back to the plotting process. This kind of test scene can also be useful when you’re developing characters. Writing scraps of dialogue can help you work out their individual voices and see how they relate to each other. If nothing else, it may make you realize they are too similar and send you back to your mental drawing board.
A good compromise between the two extremes of plot first or plot later is to work out the shape of the entire story but leave the details until you actually start the writing. So you plot the opening in detail and write that. Then work out the details of the next few scenes and write them. And so on. This approach is plot, write, plot, write, plot, write, etc. And you don’t have to do it in sequence. Some writers like to concentrate on planning and writing the most important scenes in their book before they work out how the scenes link together.
Experiment a bit to discover which approach works best for you, and don’t be surprised if, like me, you find that your approach varies with each book. This is because different ideas develop differently in our heads. If the inspiration for your story is a final scene that fell fully formed into your head, you may want to write that down before you decide what came before it.
3
The basic components of a good story
We meet stories all the time – by listening, by reading and by watching on screen – so you and I have been absorbing the basics of storytelling all our lives without realizing it. That probably explains why, in the early days of my career, I occasionally managed to write a good story without understanding how I did it. That success came more by luck and intuition than by skill, and it only worked for short stories. As soon as I tried to write anything longer, I got lost and ended up floundering. Maybe you’re in the same situation.
In order to create consistently good stories, you need to understand how they work. Because this is so important, there are plenty of books available that delve deeply into story structure. Some of them are brilliant, but some drown you with jargon and suggest that three act structure or mythic structure or whatever is the current fashion is the only way to tell a story.
Taken to extremes, this can be a disaster. I was once commissioned to turn a Victorian children’s book into a feature film. The young and, it turned out, fairly inexperienced producer asked, “You do understand three act structure, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I replied, suddenly glad that I’d read all those books.
“So you know that the inciting incident has to happen on page 35.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I argued. “It happens when the story needs it.”
By the way, if you’ve never heard of an inciting incident before, Robert McKee defines it in his book, Story, as “the first major event of the telling” and “the primary cause for all that follows”. But don’t worry about that too much. The term is part of the jargon for analysing stories that have already been written. It’s not important to the art of creating them, and you’ll automatically put an inciting incident in your story, whether you know the term or not.
The key to a story’s success is to make the reader or viewer care about what is happening. If they don’t care, they’ll stop turning the pages, switch to another TV station or concentrate on their popcorn at the cinema. But if you really capture their interest and make them care, they’ll lean forward in their seats and concentrate on every word. They’ll be so eager to find out what happens next that they won’t be able to put your book down and, in the case of children, they’ll continue reading long after they should have been asleep.
To be this successful, your story needs to have several components.
One or more main characters your readers can relate to strongly enough to care what happens to them. (In story structure jargon, they are the protagonists.)
A problem that the main character has to solve and which the readers can understand and care about.
A sequence of events where the main character struggles to solve the problem, meeting difficulties along the way.
A final difficulty that seems so insurmountable that all appears lost. This is sometimes called the black moment, and it’s a heart-in-mouth time for the readers.
The final crisis where the main character has one last try and solves the problem. It’s important that they do this by themselves, even if they have help from their companions. Having someone else solve the problem is not satisfying for the readers.
You probably already know that all stories need to have a beginning, a middle and an end. These three parts correspond exactly with the three acts that experts in analysing stories call three act structure. Here’s how the components listed above fit into those three sections.
The beginning or act one – sets up the main character and the problem.
The middle or act two – moves on to the attempts to solve the problem, up to and including the black moment.
The end or act three – contains the climax and the final success.
Of course, the characters in most stories are human, but they don’t have to be. The same skills you use when writing about people can make your readers care about any character who has emotions, including animals, aliens, toys and robots. Books for young children frequently feature this type of character, but older readers can enjoy looking at the world through non-human eyes too. In fact, the different perspective this provides can be useful if you want your story to provide insights into human behaviour.
4
How theory works in practice
To see a good story in action, l
et’s take a look at my first and most successful picture book, The Bear Santa Claus Forgot. It’s delighted thousands of children and was one of the Children’s Book Council Choices for 1996 so I know the story works. It also illustrates all the characteristics of a good story in just over 800 words.
I’ve put the text of the story in italics to help you separate it from my comments.
*****
Christmas Eve was nearly over. Santa Claus yawned. Just one more visit to make and then he could go home.
(This sets the time and place and provides a reason why Santa might be forgetful. Notice that I don’t go into whether his tiredness is caused by a surfeit of mince pies and sherry because that’s not relevant to this story.)
The sleigh landed gently on Madeleine’s roof. Santa Claus put the last few toys into a sack and swung it onto his back. But the sack was old. It had a hole in one corner.
(At this point, the picture shows a teddy bear’s leg sticking out through the hole.)
“Eeek,” said the bear, as he slid through the hole.
(Here’s our main character.)
“Ouch,” said the bear, as he landed with a bump on the floor of the sleigh.
He sat up and rubbed his head. He could see Santa climbing down Madeleine’s chimney without him. That wasn’t right.
He was Madeleine’s bear. The label round his neck said so. She had asked Santa for him weeks ago. What would she say in the morning when he wasn’t there?
(Here’s our main character’s problem – he’s not been delivered. And there’s something important at stake – Madeleine’s happiness. We don’t want her to be sad so we start to care what happens.)
When Santa came back, he didn’t notice the teddy bear sitting all by himself. He just climbed onto the sleigh and whistled to his reindeer. They galloped away, pulling the sleigh up into the night sky.