Structure and Plot

[raspberryhat]

Kate Green (Shattered Moon) said, “Plot is what happens. A woman sitting and having a cup of tea is good for one sentence. Plot is a sequence of actions that compels the reader to want to know more.”

How on earth do you actually work out what’s going to happen though? What makes a story interesting? Once you've worked out the plot of your story, how do you tell it? What’s an outline and how to you create one?

You want to produce something compelling that keeps people reading...You want to know...Should I worry about telling absolutely everything in sequential order? When is flashback appropriate? How do I decide which PoV is appropriate? How long should a chapter be? How do I know if I am lecturing the reader? How do I word sentences, arrange chapters, present characters, set scenes?

This thread is for discussion of all things related to structure and plot.

[raspberryhat]

Here is my perspective on plot and structure and some of the difficulties I find. It's a personal perspective and one which I imagine will evolve. I've not being writing long and have much to learn. For what they're worth though, these are my thoughts which may raise some discussion points.

I think of plot as the abstract thing that exists before any words are written down. The structure is the first layer of realisation of the plot. The next layer is the words and the third layer is the polished words which can be very different to the first draft!

I start an outline by thinking through the plot then writing down a long ordered list of events that goes right from the opening til the end. After considering the plot itself, I think about characters and their background. From that I’ll get a strong idea of what they’re going to do if they happen to be present in a chapter. Equally I can work out if they’re present by working out their background and motivations.

I sometimes find myself going into great depth on writing back story that I’ll bring out later. If I think that somebody is going to perform a certain act I need to think about why. Sometimes that means me going off and writing a lot of background which is part of the definition of the character but doesn’t need to be written in directly. It comes out as implied through their actions. That all goes in my outline.

Additionally I find myself thinking about where I need to reference or build on the canon. I draw out specific points from canon and noting them in the outline to make sure I properly refer where I need to.

Once I’ve got all that, I then put chapter breaks in between clusters of events. Each chapter gets a defining synopsis that pulls it together. Thinking hard about the essence of what a set of events is meant to achieve can make me change and refine the detail and order of events.

I start a chapter by using each listed event to seed a scene. I don’t go too detailed in the outline about how a scene should break down. I worry about stifling any creativity by trying to be too scientific before starting writing. Because the list of chapter events is ordered I know how a scene needs to start and end and it’s up to me to try to flow the content in the middle.

Although I try to get the order right within the outline, to me that’s structure not plot. I could still tell the same story with events being related in a different order. That’s the difference to me, there are lots of ways of telling the same story.

When I am working out the order of events, I try to think about keeping the pace right. On re-reads I find overly long expositions or character thoughts jumping out as slowing things down. Sometimes that’s desired. Sometimes a sudden change in pace to dive into a character’s head sticks out badly.

Triple asterisks serve as scene breaks to me. I don’t know any other way. A brief passage of time can happen with a double line space. Early on I found I was being quite discontinuous between scenes. Without describing what happens in between, the end of one has to naturally suggest the start of another. I found I was start each new scene too later and it wasn’t obvious to the reader what had happened in between. It seems to me that some things can be skipped because they’re implied or obvious and that keeps the pace up. Skipping too far can break it though. Conversely going into detail that’s already implied from the previous scene can slow things down. I’ve found that all quite hard.

I find interleaving multiple threads quite challenging but it enriches things when it starts to work. I scratch my head a lot trying to think how to order scenes of what’s happening in two different places. I’ve tried writing them sequentially and sort of mixing them in the edit.

Between posts, I realise I am introducing a natural time gap that would allow me to take up the story a little later. That wouldn’t work if I posted the pieces back to back so I try to avoid it. Seems like an unnecessary short cut.

My biggest worry about plot is cliché. I worry that what I am coming out with is too much like this or that. I don’t mean at a detail level but at a general level. I am sure I can think up any number of first meeting situations that’ve been done in some way. I know resurrection’s been done in so many ways. I’ve agonised on that a lot. In worrying about cliché I’ve found my writing stopped and when I got back to it I was rusty and regretted stopping. What I found is that even if similar plots have been worked out by others, the telling is still an educational experience for an aspiring writer. I still spend A LONG time on plot and outline, but eventually I get to something I want to write and go for it. Not being totally paranoid about cliché has helped me keep my writing practice up. I know I’ve got so much to learn but I’ll only get better by writing. I read a nice quote in a writing book. “Writers write.” I try to live by that. However uninspired or tired I might be feeling, I still try to write something each day.

As I write a chapter, I go refer to my outline to see that I’ve covered what I need to. In the outline I also go into character background, note down key bits of research and also keep track of the timeline. Where I’ve got people wondering between time zones it’s easy to lose track and have someone turn up somewhere they couldn’t physically be.

Also as I go through building the chapter, where I think of problems or concerns I write them down in the outline rather than get too bogged down in trying to fix every detail in the first pass. In subsequent passes I go over my issues list and methodically try to address them all.

That's my structure and plot approach. A lot just seems to be hard work to get it going in the right direction.

[Trom DeGrey]

My outlines tend to be very vague if I do one at all. I live by the "plot is what happens" part of Kate Green's quote. My stories rarely evolve by chapters but by scenes. Usually days actually, and then further broken down to individual scenes. When approaching a scene, I know where it begins, where it needs to end and a couple of things that I know must occur somewhere in the middle. Then, with that in mind, I just let the pen go. Sometimes I can keep it. Sometimes I can keep part of it. Sometimes it's all total crap. I've found that my stories tend to form themselves around finite time frames, like a certain number of days, and that this structure comes out early in the brainstorming phase. For instance, what I'm working on currently will occur over several days time and each chapter will be devoted to one day. I didn't think about it that way, but it's the way it came out in brainstorming and the rough outline I did for it. What Hides Beneath the Grey is the exception at the moment. It's structure has not settled itself in my mind yet. It's also still in the brainstorming phase in many ways though. I am considering framing it around the Union's march toward and eventual take-over of Savannah in December of that year. None of this, of course, speaks to the traditional concepts of structure: intro, rising action, climax, denouement. I've found that those often come out logically and of their own accord. That having been said, many of the most eye-opening works of fiction being published turn traditional structure on its ear.

[Verdant]

A note about character driven plot -- which is what made BTVS so great and W/T so lovable.

Character driven plot takes a character from point a to point b emotionally and physically. It's about growth, development, and interpersonal relationships. The trappings of the story serve this interest.

I just watched an episode of Futurama that spoofed the "battle chess" scene of Star Wars -- only this time all the holographic pieces jumped off the table and attacked Fry.

I bring this up because sometimes the best way to find plot is to let the characters run amok. You will hear many writers say when they hit the "zone" they feel as if they are just channeling the characters, and it is really the characters who choose their own direction.

The Futurama piece was a nice parody, but also a self-referential nod by the writers.

When you have a very good handle on your characters you can let them run amok with fantastic results. We may have to reign them in once in a while when they take off in tangential direction.

Writing fanfic, especially Willow/Tara-fic makes character driven plot easier because you don't actually have to develop the characters from scratch. We already feel we know them. We really can just channel them if you pay close enough attention to their characterization on the show.

Often a plot point can be solved by answering the question -- What would Willow or Tara do, react like, say, etc.? The answer may take you in a direction you never thought of before. Or a direction you don't like. In that case modify the question -- what would W or T do/say with the aim of making happen?

Never make a character say or do something "out of character" to drive a contrived plot device (we all saw the disastrous results of that in Season 6). The flipside of the point above is that since we are all very familiar with these characters, as readers, we know immediately when they are doing/saying something out of character.

This means extra work for the writer but the payoff is exponential to the work.