The other day I blogged about how to improve your novel by improving your story (by the way, I use “plot” and “story” almost interchangeably for reasons I’ll get into next post). I got this comment from Whitney:
…so far, I’ve been working on character sketches and how I can weave the characters and their lives together, but I do not have a clear plot line from beginning to end. For some reason, my mind thinks in episodes… I don’t know what works best, but I do know that I want my episodes to be connected!
Whitney is definitely starting at the right end of the process, by developing characters. But then what?
Why should it be hard to develop a clear plot line? Every popular novel we read, every movie we see, every TV drama or comedy we watch is written in a way that would make perfect sense to Aristotle thousands of years ago. You’d think coming up with one of your own would be easy.
It’s not.
In Whitney’s case, her character sketches have become more and more elaborate and interesting, yet the process hasn’t moved her much closer a story or plot. What’s missing from the picture?
Almost always, the missing ingredient is conflict. Richly developed characters are gold, but before there can be a story, they must be set into motion. A main character needs to encounter a major bump in the road, that forces her to:
• Make a decision
• Take action based on the decision
In the character based story, decisions and actions are intimately related to character–ideally they actually flow from character.
Example: A character who is a coward will choose not to face a difficult conflict (decision) and will run (action).
As you develop your people, keep a sharp eye out for circumstances that could act as flashpoints when they impact the qualities you’ve given them. Focus on unmet inner needs, emotional hot buttons, the conflicting agendas of other characters–anything that can balloon into conflict. All your character work pays off here, because readers only make strong emotional attachments to characters they feel they know. Emotion keeps them reading.
Make conflict-awareness part of your writing habit and strong story material will follow, because when you have conflict, you have the beginnings of plot.
Next post: When a traditional plot isn’t the answer, when your story is coming to you as an accumulation of scenes, related, but not in a causal chain, there’s an alternative: episodic story structure…
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Thanks for your response, Bill. This information is extremely helpful for me. I’ve also been reading literature about the archetypal heroic journey and trying to figure out how my characters could experience this… So many ideas…
Thought I’d throw this out there: I never really got how to make stories move, how to consistently set up conflict, complication, and all the rest of the elements of plot, until I connected story with desire. The easiest way for me to think about story structure (traditional — not episodic, lyrical, whatever) is to think about what the characters *want*. A story then basically (ha!) boils down to someone who wants something they can’t have, usually because someone else wants something else. Clear as mud?
This helps soooo much! Thank you! You are a true life saver!
Glad to help, Jenny.