The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: plotting

  • If they don’t stumble, trip them

    I’ve tried lots of structural things to keep the reader moving through the story. The first and easiest place to start is with mechanics. Things like cliffhanger chapter endings, ominous foreshadowing, alternating storylines, out-of-order plot sequencing. I’ve read lots of good books that use similar techniques, and to great effect. For my own writing, I’ve found that all of these techniques work, at least to a point.

    But none of them are particularly good substitutes for simply writing a compelling plot.

    So, how do you write a compelling plot?

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  • Character vs. Plot: The Chicken or the Egg?

    The simple answer to whether plot or character is more important is that it depends on what genre you’re talking about. If you write literary fiction, character is king. The plot is secondary.

    But I don’t write literary fiction. In genre fiction, specifically urban fantasy for me, both are of equal importance. A great plot with lousy characters is just as bad as great characters walking around with nothing to do.

    Characters drive the story. And the story herds the characters into becoming richer and more fully formed.

    So, the question becomes, which comes first?

    Usually, a “what if” strikes me first. A premise hits out of nowhere, asking a question or giving me a weird scenario. Looking at it that way, you might say plot comes first.

    You’d be mistaken.

    For Monster in My Closet, it began as a vision of a closet monster sitting at someone’s kitchen table, reading the newspaper. From there, I knew that monsters came to the kitchen owner’s house for help. Hijinks and danger would ensue.

    That’s not a plot. That’s a premise. The plot came later. Much later.

    The most important thing for me from that point on was to find out who these things would happen to. I didn’t care about the what until the characters were in place. I could see the monster at the table. Who was standing there in shock, looking at him with me?

    I knew all about Zoey and her back story long before I’d mapped out what was going to happen to her. Her personality and her reactions informed the plot. If I don’t know who my main characters are before I write the actual story, it’s going to veer off in the wrong direction and dead end.

    I know this because it happened last year.

    I’m working on a second series about a djinn. Kam is completely different from Zoey, but I started writing her story before I’d really nailed down who Kam is. The first 3000 words or so went really well. The next 20,000 words went so off course, I have to start from scratch. That first scene can stay, but the rest is complete nonsense. She was too nice. She was too helpful.

    She was too Zoey.

    So, which is more important, plot or character? I guess I’ll have to change my original answer and say character. In genre fiction, if the character isn’t good, the plot’s going to suck. But if the character shines, she’ll take the plot right where it needs to go.

  • Jack Shephard vs the plot monster

    Jack Shephard (played by Matthew Fox) on ABC's drama series LOST.
    Is your character more important than your plot? Jack Shephard (played by Matthew Fox) on ABC's series Lost.

    As I mentioned in a previous post (“Lying on the couch: A conversation with myself“), I usually talk to my main characters quite a bit before beginning the writing process.

    It’s not easy for me to put aside character building in favor of story building. The main character has always been my stepping off point for building a new short story or novel. I like setting down the backstory on my character before I begin.

    For this reason, I really loved the ABC television series Lost. Each week, we were able to delve into the backstory of a new character, further fleshing out the survivors of Oceanic flight 815.

    You might think the writers of the hit television show had a good understanding of all their characters, certainly their main ones, before they started filming the pilot episode. You’d be wrong.

    As you may know, the handsome doctor Jack (played by Matthew Fox) became the de facto leader of the survivors on the show. What you may not know is that when the show was in its infancy, the writers had killed Jack during the pilot episode. But Fox’s portrayal of the likable character convinced the executives (and in turn the writers) to keep him alive. They knew they had a good character that the audience could root for.

    The decision to keep Jack ended up driving many changes in the series. First and foremost, Kate (Evangeline Lilly) was no longer going to be the leader. Jack was. Second of all, it created the often-bemoaned love triangle between Jack, Kate, and Sawyer (Josh Holloway). By the end of the series, we realize the show was really about Jack’s journey.

    When I started writing my latest story, I knew very little about my main character. This was — if you’ll pardon the expression — “out of character” for me. I needed to put plot first, because I was writing for an upcoming anthology and the story’s idea seemed more important than the main character.

    So this time, I decided to let the story drive my character. The result gave me three good pieces of insight.

    1. Your main character can be defined to the reader by how he/she reacts to elements (e.g. characters, events) in the story. As with Jack, sometimes it just takes one heroic action to make a character likable.
    2. The actions of the character are equally important in progressing the story. If the character isn’t willful enough to move the story forward, he/she shouldn’t be your main character.
    3. The story must drive change in your main character. If your character doesn’t grow as a result of his/her experience, then it wasn’t a good story.

    I’m pleased with the story that I wrote (and the fact that I cranked out a 4,000-word story over the course of a weekend). More importantly, I’m pleased that a great character emerged from the story, where none had originally been.

    So, the lesson here is to listen to your characters carefully, but don’t be afraid to let your story change them. The best character you create might be a minor character you had intended to kill off.

  • Pants are optional. Plans are not.

    I’ve tried lots and lots of different things in the pursuit of cultivating story ideas. As an avid NaNoWriMo participant, many of my manuscripts have been an exercise in pantsing, where the story develops while my fingers are typing it. However, I’ve found over the years that a pure pantsing technique doesn’t work that well for me. For one thing, my characters tend to lead me off in strange and unpredictable directions (a phenomenon many NaNo novelists experience in November), but those directions are often dead-ends, and boring ones at that. For another, when I approach a novel with absolutely no planning at all, the ending tends to be…not. No wrap-up, no conclusion, no sense of fulfillment. That’s less than ideal for both me and my prospective readers.

    The alternative to pantsing is careful, meticulous planning. Outlining every scene, detailing every setpiece, crafting thorough background stories for characters and extensive histories for your world. I know many authors absolutely love this process of world-building, and I’ve certainly dabbled in it and enjoyed it as well. I’ve taken online classes that explore theme, and the hero’s adventure, and story arcs, and all kinds of other very important things.I’ve filled a white board with color-coded index cards, and used Scrivener to map out every scene, character, and setting in meticulous detail. I’ve even gone so far as to try rigid plotting techniques like the Snowflake approach.The problem I’ve had with these methods is that by the time I get to the actual novel-writing, I’m bored. All the excitement of creativity is leeched out of me during the outline process, leaving me uninspired and disinterested. Clearly not the right mindset for tackling a novel-length writing exercise.

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