Welcome to my How To Write A Novel series (the title of which is rather self-explanatory). I’m taking you through the key components and most common questions I get asked about novel writing – from the very first idea to how to know when you’re done – in a way that aims to provide real, practical, and not-so-generic advice, so you can write a novel you’re proud of, as painlessly as possible (but let’s be honest, you’re birthing something here – there’s going to be at least some pain involved).
5: HOW TO PLOT A NOVEL
You’ve decided you’re a plotter – or at least want to give some level of plotting a go. (If you’re not sure, check out my plotting vs pantsing (aka, options for plotting a novel) post.) And now you want to know how to plot your first novel.
Plotting a novel (or any kind of story) can be as complicated or as simple as you’d like. Let me rephrase that – plotting is technically simple, but the level of detail you want to get into is up to you.
Please note: this is a very basic tutorial on plotting (I may do a full course on plotting eventually, if I get enough interest). Learning how to truly plot a novel – with all the major and minor story arcs, character development and emotional payoffs, plus moral or ethical journeys – takes a significant amount of studying (and far more than I could fit in the 3,000 words of this blog post)! I recommend you read and watch as many great books and movies and tv shows as you can, and focus on how the story moves, what you feel when and why, and how the writer has done that. Read books on story development and plotting too – some goods one are The Anatomy of Story by John Truby and On Writing by Stephen King. And of course – practice!
Remember: any plot is not gospel
Decide how you’re going to plot
Write down what you already know
Start with the big things
Connect the dots
Play devil’s advocate
What if and why
Plot your character’s journey
Take breaks
It’s okay to leave gaps
Flip everything
Key takeaways
Remember: any plot is not gospel
It’s important to go into plotting with the knowledge that you do not have to stick to this plan; it can change at any point (even one page from the end of your first draft). If you start creating a plot with the pressure of thinking you need to get everything perfect here and now, or you start writing with a lack of enthusiasm because you think you’ve already done the “fun part” of discovering the story, you’re not going to write something that lives up to your full potential.
Any plotting you do is a guide. Anything and everything can change at any moment. (That’s what makes writing so unpredictable fun!) Plotting is a roadmap, but you can turn off down any turning you like once you’re actually on the road.
Decide how you’re going to plot
Some people are a tangible, pen-and-paper sort, whereas others work best digitally. Decide if you want to plot by hand or on a computer. If by hand, will you write everything in a notebook, or on a whiteboard, or with each scene on its own sticky note/index card? If on a computer, will that be in a simple text document, or on a spreadsheet, or using storyboard software specifically designed for writing?
Choose a way you think will work best for you – usually that’s whichever way you’re most excited about (yes, writers are allowed to be excited by pens and spreadsheets).
Also decide how much info you want for each scene. Are you going to write down just an outline of the scene and leave it at that? Or do you also want to include character info (for example, if you have more than one narrator, are you going to pre-decide and note down who’s telling which chapter, which POV a scene is from, emotional arcs, etc)? Are you going to colour code stuff, and, if so, what’s your key?
Write down what you already know
Chances are, your story idea came with a few big (or small) ‘moments’ – as in, some key scenes or events that you foresaw as part of the story. This might be an opening scene, or a climatic end reveal, or maybe just a conversation between your main characters. Write any and all of these down.
You probably don’t know how they connect to each other yet – that’s fine. Just get all your ideas onto the playing board.
Start with the big things
A story needs two things – a beginning and an ending. The middle probably needs a few foundational posts to keep it upright too.
When plotting, start with the main landmarks. If you were taking a road trip, these would be the pinpointed locations on your map. This would usually include the start, the final location, and a few key moments in the middle.
For example, if I wanted to write a novel about a down-on-her-luck actress being recruited by HM Secret Service, I might start with her completely bombing her twenty-seventh audition of the week. A key moment would be her meeting some (let’s get real, probably very attractive) agent, followed by her being coerced or convinced to help out. I might want another key moment where she realises the bad guys have taken someone she loves, another moment where she rescues that person, and the end scene might be her kissing the very attractive agent. In full cliche-mode, she and that agent probably got off on the wrong foot, so there’s likely to be an argument between them at some point, and maybe a mission or task early on that goes terribly wrong because they can’t work as a team yet. All of those get their own scene/index card/spreadsheet row/whatever plotting method you’re using.
The above example is clearly not a full plot – but the bones of the story are there. You can vaguely see how it will flow from the start to the end.
Connect the dots
By now you should have a skeleton of major moments, and maybe a few other minor scenes that came with your initial idea. Next we start joining these up so this creature we’re creating can move!
This is also the point where a story can lose some of its excitement. In my previous example, I might look at connecting the first ‘bad audition’ scene with the ‘meets secret agent’ scene and think how are these two characters going to meet? I guess she could knock into him as she comes out of her audition, or he could pretend she’s his girlfriend for a moment to blend in while being chased by a bad guy?
Yeah, yeah, that’s all fine. But it’s boring. I’m focused on getting from Scene A to Scene B, and not on the current moment. You don’t want the story to be a disjointed leap of jumping from one stepping stone to another. You want every scene to matter. (Because, let’s face it, if a scene doesn’t matter, you’ll be cutting it during editing anyway, so what a waste of time.)
I need to be thinking what’s the best thing that can happen to my heroine in this moment? And, because I appear to be writing a bit of a spy thriller, “best” in this case means “most exciting”.
- Maybe she gets taken hostage or kidnapped by the bad guy, and she sees things she’s not supposed to (in which I’m also looking at the bigger picture of how she gets tangled up in all this for later).
- Or perhaps she went to a cafe or a bar to drown her sorrows after her horrendous audition, and the bad guy starts chatting to her.
- Maybe the villain accidentally says a little too much, but she sneaks away, gets chased, gets caught, just about saves herself from being killed by rolling across the pavement and off the bridge he’d cornered her on.
- She lands in a river and then what? Soaking wet and terrified, she makes it to a police station, but they don’t believe her, or they’re busy/too distracted to pay enough attention to what she’s trying to explain, or perhaps there’s even a dirty cop there who’s in on the whole thing.
- Maybe she has to run from the police station, but where does she go? She could climb into a taxi, think she’s safe, let her heart rate slow long enough to answer the driver’s questions before realising the world is spinning – she’s been drugged, the driver has drugged her, everything goes dark – but, oh, the driver is the secret agent, and he’s a good guy, and he takes her somewhere safe and asks her to tell him everything that happened.
That was all off the top of my head right then, so it’s flawed, but it shows you my thought process. I’m not thinking about getting to the next scene – I’m thinking about what would be most interesting now. What would actually happen now, what would my character actually be thinking and doing.
And it doesn’t have to be just one scene between A and B – it can be as many as I need it to be. There could be an entire alphabet between those two ‘key’ scenes.
Play devil’s advocate
When you’re plotting, you can afford to come up with multiple ideas for the same scene, because you haven’t written anything yet. Often it’s worthwhile to come up with an alternative, even if you love your first idea, because you never know if you’re going to come up with something better. Plus, it gets your inspiration flowing, ready for all the other scenes.
Also, if later down the line you realise something earlier from the story’s not going to work, you already have a different option that might.
What if and why
When planning an entire novel, you’ll likely get stuck somewhere. The story isn’t gelling well, or it feels too forced, or boring, or you don’t like how this connects to that, or you’re drawing a complete blank. At times like this, it’s sometimes useful to play ‘what if and why’.
It’s really simple: ask yourself what if… and then come up with ten, twenty, thirty, as many answers as you possibly can. They don’t have to make sense. You don’t have to ever use them. Just write them down. Even if absolutely none of them are useful, they might spark an idea later that is.
Then ask why? Why would that happen? Why does my character care? Why does x have to y? Why is my character doing that? Why do they have to do this? Why can’t this happen? Why did that happen? Why wouldn’t x and y matter? Why does…?
You get the idea.
Plot your character’s journey
The why game is often useful when plotting your character’s motives. But why do you need to plot your character’s motives? Aren’t we talking story plotting?
Yes, but, as I said in Part Two of this series – How to Create Characters – your characters dictate your story. A story in which any character could slot in and play the main character is not good enough. A good story needs to affect your character personally. The stakes need to be specific to them.
If we take my – at this point, rather haphazard – spy thriller, I described my heroine as a “down-on-her-luck actress”. That would have almost certainly given you a first impression as to what she’s like and the state of mind she’s in, without actually telling you anything else about her. I started my first scene by highlighting exactly the same to the reader, which I did by having them meet her as she was failing yet another audition. Humans generally want other humans to do well: empathetically, we probably feel for this woman. And most people have likely wanted something and struggled to get it, so we also probably understand her frustration and despair.
So, taking this first impression alone, I know this woman is probably used to failure. And she’s likely sick to death of it. She probably feels hopeless. Maybe she wants to prove herself. Maybe she wants to do something where she actually feels worth something, or that makes a difference. Maybe she has low self-esteem (or, conversely, maybe she’s so blindly confident in herself, which is what drives her to keep going to auditions). Whichever of these I choose for her, it has to play out over the course of the novel. Yes, the story will be about saving the world (I expect) and there’ll likely be some romance and danger, but, at the heart, we want to change this woman’s internal world. She starts as a failure, despondent, wanting to achieve something, so, maybe by the end, she’ll be a success, confident, knowing she’s capable of so much more than she realised. Forget saving the world – that’s the payoff we want emotionally.
And yes, that’s a very cliche-type of hero’s journey, but I’m using it as an example. You have the plot, and that’s important. But you also need the hero’s personal storyline, which needs to be there tied into everything.
You should also find that the character’s storyline will impact the plot. If you’re stuck, ask yourself what the character is feeling and where they are in their journey right now. For example, if my heroine had messed up a mission (feeling like a failure again) and been dismissed by the secret service (feeling useless and worthless again), and yet, her sister had been kidnapped because of her, what is my heroine going to do? She’s probably not feeling like she can take on a rescue mission single-handedly and succeed at it. So what would she do instead? What needs to happen to make her? What do I, as the storyteller, have to do to make my heroine need to prove herself, to find the belief in herself that she can actually do this and save her sister (and probably the world)?
Take breaks
Don’t try and plot your entire novel in one go. Sometimes it’s great to set aside a lot of time and let the creative juices really blend and flow, but never underestimate the power of the subconscious either. Writers’ brains will continue working on story ideas even when they’re busy doing something else, so sleep on it, do other things, experience the world, and see what your brain comes up with behind the scenes. It’ll be good, trust me.
It’s okay to leave gaps
You don’t have to have everything filled in. Plot to a point where you feel comfortable diving into writing, and let the gaps fill themselves in (your brain will be doing it subconsciously, as you’re writing). You don’t even need to write linearly; you can write all the parts you know and then come back to the gaps. Just be careful with this method, as you don’t want the story to come across as disjointed, with key scenes ‘forced’ together.
Flip everything
Once you’ve got a plot you’re happy with, take a moment to mess with it. By that, I mean play around with it and change it up to make sure you’re not overlooking an even better way of telling your story.
One way of doing this is to ‘flip’ everything. Make all your male characters female ones and vice versa. Make your poor villain rich, or your confident hero crippled with self-doubt. Swap the setting for another country, or a completely different time period. Not all of these will work with the story you’re trying to tell, but it can be helpful at catching places where you may have unintentionally used a cliche or trope, or even at realising places where you can make a powerful cultural point (female villains, anyone?!)
Key takeaways
- Your plot is never set in stone.
- Start with the big scenes and then fill in how they connect.
- Treat each scene as its own important moment – don’t just focus on joining the key events.
- Plot your character’s personal journey and make sure it impacts the plot.
- Don’t be afraid to question your own ideas and come up with multiple versions – you never know if you’ll come up with something even better.
Leave a Reply