#craft:plot

My friend and I were talking about domestic fluff fanfic, and how many folks in fandom crave stories in which everyone is okay and there’s basically no conflict because the conflict in the book/show/movie is so relentless they just want to see the characters peacefully thriving.

That’s fine. We’ve both read many of those we liked. Loved, even. But we also realized the ones we did like were not actually conflict-free. They had a teeeeeny tiny problem that gave the story forward momentum, that unbalanced the situation just enough that we wanted to know what happened next. One character is teaching the other to cook and it’s not going well, and maybe that little hitch gets at larger things about their relationship. Not problems, per se, just complications. The most peaceful scenario imaginable.

There’s an additional issue, though. A lot of stories have that - a problem that’s driving the story - but the development of the problem is linear. It just...gradually gets better. Characters identify a problem, characters fix the problem over time. I don’t usually get a “need to know what happens” feeling from those either.

Here’s my point. There is one thing necessary for a genuine story conflict: someone does something to address a problem and it doesn’t go the way they planned. That’s it.

Story in which things go exactly as the characters expected? No real conflict.

Story in which the characters (and we) are surprised by the outcome of a thing they tried? Conflict.

Endings are tough, yeah! You’re exhausted and eager to finish, you’ve got to weave every thread of the story together and somehow “resolve” them in a satisfying way even though resolutions don’t happen in real life, etc. I mean, not to be a downer, but I’ve read a lot of great stories that fumbled the ending, usually because it 1) tried to sell me a solution to the conflict that the story didn’t earn, or 2) it just kinda stopped without resolving anything, or 3) it took a bizarre left turn that didn’t emerge from anything that happened before, or 4) the story asked big questions and delivered banal answers.

I’m pretty sure I’ve fumbled all the endings I’ve ever written, but let me take a shot at articulating the quality I believe good endings have. (I could be wrong, of course. Like I said, I don’t think I’ve ever written a good ending.)

If you’re writing a conflict-driven story in which there’s a high cost of failure, the best ending will actually make that failure happen. The worst case scenario comes about; however your characters thought they were going to solve this problem does not succeed. This doesn’t mean they must ultimately fail, but it does mean they’re forced to do something they hadn’t planned or never wanted to do. This might involve sacrifice - if not a literal sacrifice (like dying), then a sacrifice of whatever fragile part of themselves they were trying to protect and hoping they’d make it through without having to give up. In other words, they’ve got to find out what happens after their worst fear comes true. If a story does that, the characters can’t help but come out the other side profoundly transformed and knowing something about themselves they never could have known otherwise. (Caveat, though: whatever they learn about themselves can’t come out of nowhere. It should have been present the whole time, if only latently or covertly.)

If an ending does all that, it will blow your reader the fuck away. 

The stakes don’t have to be world-ending, by the way. They can be quiet. Your character could simply have to expose a vulnerability they’ve been guarding. But it should be an important vulnerability. The best endings give you a sense that your characters have truly lost something valuable, even if what they gain is more valuable. Maybe it turns out they’re better off without what they’ve lost. The point is, they thought losing it would be the end of the world, and once they’ve lost it, they’re no longer quite the same.

Now that I’ve written it out, I realize what a tall order it is. But if your ending doesn’t seem quite right, you might ask yourself: did I make my characters at least face the worst case scenario? And did they have to do something costly to get through it? This is what people mean when they say an ending feels “earned”: the characters lose something they really didn’t want to lose.

Are you ever writing and the story kinda...gets away from you? And sometimes it’s cool and interesting, but other times you’re like “that is not where I wanted to go and I’m wildly off course now”?

That’s okay. Let the story veer off course. You can always rewrite that part.

I do think it will help to record those thoughts in some form as close to the time you have them as possible. I’m not sure why, but recording your thoughts externally affects and changes them, or at least changes your relationship to them. Two ways to make this easier and keep up with the speed of your ideas: 1) dictate them to some kind of voice recorder, and 2) figure out a system of note-taking that lets you get the ideas down without needing to spend time thinking about how you’re going to say them. (So, no complete sentences, no attempt to make them sound good. In other words, notes that more closely resemble what you’d say if you were dictating.)

It might also help, though, not to think of the writing process as merely writing down a story you’ve already crafted fully in your head. You might think of the head version as a very rough draft, kinda. This means when you actually start writing, the story will change. You can make it surprise you because it’s not identical to the story you already mentally planned. You can throw in radically new elements. You can change the ending. You can use the head version of the story simply as a jumping-off point for the story on the page.

This is a vast question! And because plotting long projects is SUPER not my strong suit, I must answer with what other people have already said. Before I do that, though, I think this might be two questions. It could be:

“What makes a plot good, generally?” or

“How do I, personally, get from an idea to a fully developed plot?”

#1: The qualities of good plots

Before I talk about this, I need to emphasize: your story may not have much of a structure until you’re well into the process of writing it, maybe not even until your second (or third) draft. It’s perfectly legit to write a plotless mess without thinking about story principles at all, then shape that mess later into a structured story. That said, here goes.

Every author I link to below says baaasically the same thing, which is that a good plot goes roughly like this:

Beginning: a character is chugging along in their normal life as they normally do

Then something happens that makes “normal life” impossible, forcing them to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do

Now in new and unpredictable territory, the character tries to cope with the problem, but the more they do, the more the problem keeps thwarting them, or the more new problems come up, constantly spinning them off in directions they didn’t expect

Eventually they face a decisive challenge, and how they deal with it determines whether they’re going to be okay or not

Once the chips have fallen on one side or the other, the character copes with the aftermath and we see what their “new normal” looks like

People will tell you that all stories follow this basic structure, unless the story is deliberating fucking with you. (See: absurdist theater.) Here are a few folks who go into greater detail:

How Story Works, a podcast by author Lani Diane Rich

Pixar’s Storytelling Rules (a lot of people have elaborated on these ideas, which you can find by googling “Pixar story rules”)

Story Structure: A Basic How To by a wonderful writer I know, @pro-antagonist

A HUUUUGE list of plot structure resources if you want to read everything on the internet about this (many of these also talk about about how to plot - see #2 below)

#2: The practical work of plotting

That’s all well and good, but when you start a story, you don’t want to instantly force a structure on it. You won’t even know how you’d do this, initially. You’ll probably need to explore the idea and not worry about the plot for a while. But once you’ve done this exploring, most people will tell you that plotting begins with the following decisions, not necessarily in this order:

Who is your main character?

What kind of world do they inhabit?

What problem do they face?

How you decide these things depends on your initial idea for the story. If you started with an idea for a fantasy world, you might ask, “What is the worst situation that could arise in this world?” And once you’ve got that, you can ask, “Who would be the most interesting person to put in that bad situation?”

If on the other hand you start with an idea for a character, you might first figure out what “normal life” looks like for them, and then think of an event that could throw the biggest possible wrench into that life.

Some people start with the problem. They’ll say, “I want to tell a story about someone with magical powers who is tempted to use those powers destructively.” Then they ask who the most interesting person might be to face that problem. Okay, maybe a suburban mom. What might tempt her? Maybe some mundane life tragedy, like the bank is foreclosing on her house. Or maybe her old magic cronies show up and threaten to upend her quiet life. Or maybe she’s bored with her quiet life. Whatever it is, she hasn’t used her magic in the past because she wanted a normal life, but then this problem comes up and she sees no other way to handle it. This then creates new problems, and things escalate until, I dunno, she has conjured a demon and has to figure out how to banish it while also saving her house from foreclosure.

So the writer has the skeleton of a plot by now. Then they might look at it and ask, “what do I think this story is really about?” What is its theme? Maybe it’s about how each ordinary person has extraordinary powers locked inside them but most of us are too afraid to let them out. Maybe it’s about the massive anger people feel toward arbitrary societal forces that can ruin their lives, like sub-prime mortgages. Maybe it’s about how people’s desires for a normal, quiet life can conceal a secret longing to burn everything to the ground. As the writer gets a clearer idea of what the story’s about, they can shape the plot in more detail to express that theme.

The writer might ask another question: who is the antagonist? Maybe it’s the bank. Maybe it’s the magic itself. Maybe at the climax of the story, our main character chooses to stop treating her magic as an evil temptation and starts using it to destroy things that need to be destroyed, like shady mortgage lenders. Asking “who is my antagonist?” is just another way of asking “what is the real conflict facing my character?” If the antagonist is the bank, the story’s main conflict is a society that can destroy people’s lives without consequence versus a lady who refuses to accept that anymore. If the antagonist is the magic, then the conflict is internal - it’s about this lady fighting against the potential we all have to cause great good or great harm and finding out what happens when we let it loose. The conflict the writer chooses will determine how the plot goes.

Here are some people who go into greater depth on the process of building a plot from a basic idea:

Story Grid is a course you have to pay for, but the site has plenty of free articles too

The Snowflake Method, which I got from this post by @englishable

The “OH NO WAIT!” method, as I now think of it, described by @sageandginger

Plotters vs. Pantsers, terms you’ll hear a lot in discussions of how writers build plots

Inductive vs. Deductive Storytelling, an alternative to the plotter/pantser model

Hm...now, obviously I haven’t read your draft, but the problem might not be an absence of subplots (not all stories need multiple character storylines) but an absence of...surprises, let’s call them. The smallest unit of plot, to my mind—people have other opinions about this, but this is mine—is when you set up an expectation, and then you violate it in some way. Often your character expects something to happen, or expects their action to have a certain result, and then the writer makes something else happen instead. It doesn’t need to be wildly different from what’s expected, but the difference must feel significant.

Now, this can be tricky with a story you’re writing because you know what happens so nothing can really surprise you. This is why I tend to focus on the main character’s expectations. Look through your draft and see if the things that happen to your character tend to be things s/he saw coming.

The best source of thwarted expectation is, of course, other characters. People never do quite what you think they will, and often they behave very differently than you predict. If you use your secondary characters to continuously throw your main character for a loop, you also make them feel more like real people and less like adjuncts to the main character.

Oh boy. I confess I’m better at answering process questions than craft questions, especially craft questions involving long-form fiction! But I’ll give it a go:

First of all, if you’re still writing your first draft, don’t worry about this. Literally don’t even think about it. Just get to the end of your draft and worry about it later. Preferably a few weeks after you’ve finished the draft and can look at it with a less hostile eye.

If you are onto the revision stage, I assume you realize that your own feelings about the relative boringness of a scene can be misleading. After all, you wrote it, possibly several times over, so you’re sick of it. Other people don’t have that baggage, so they may react differently. To that end, consider getting some feedback. Understand, however, that feedback isn’t foolproof. Don’t ask your readers what you should change, just ask them to react to the story as readers. If every single person who reads the draft agrees that chapter 7 is boring, they might be onto something. Often you can tell where a reader’s interest flagged by what they comment on: if they say nothing about a passage, good or bad, they were probably disengaged. If you notice a pattern of this happening with the same passage, your readers might be onto something.

But like I said, reader feedback isn’t foolproof. Without feedback, you can still think about your story structure. For each scene, ask yourself: have the circumstances changed by the end of the scene, or is the situation mostly status quo? Are the stakes and peril higher by the end, or lower? Could I take this scene out without altering the story much? If a scene is just there to give us information and not to change the characters’ fortunes, it’ll slow the story down. Same with scenes that describe action that chronologically needs to happen but doesn’t contain a real moment of choice or change. If a knight crosses a desert, and all that happens is it takes a while and it’s hot, we might not need to see it. Time jumps are allowed; you can just tell us something happened instead of giving us every single excruciating detail! It’s fine!