#plot methods

Okay. Full disclosure. This is how I plot, and it’s a mess--but a lot of fun, in my opinion; and if you have a lot of thoughts all at once that aren’t necessarily coming out in a logical order, it may be the method for you.

This method doesn’t really have coherent steps, because it’s just based on the natural flow of your own thoughts.

Where to Start

Start with whatever you have. For the examples here, I’m going to make something up as a I go along, exactly as I would if I were doing this in real life.

Maybe you have an idea for a character, or a scene, or a concept. Start there by just writing it down. I write it as if I’m talking to myself, in full sentences, but may you’ll do bullet points, or a mind map, or some other method.

EXAMPLE: “Story idea: a story where a guy is on the run from death. Death is looking for him for some reason, and he’s trying not to be found.”

Expanding Upon the Idea

Okay, so now you have... something. And you don’t really know where to go with it. So start asking yourself questions, and try to answer them. They don’t have to be good answers, and you don’t have to use any of what you write. You’re just brainstorming until something clicks.

EXAMPLE: “So why is death after him??? Maybe he was supposed to die but found a way not to? May he was sick, knew he was dying, and somehow found a way to hide from Death (who is like an actual being in this world). Or maybe he died in some accident and made a deal with Death to get a little more time, and now Death is here to collect after the time runs out, but in the meantime the guy has found out a way to hide from Death? I think I like the first idea better though.”

Bouncing Around

One thing that is nice about this method is that you don’t need to work chronologically. You can bounce around as ideas come to you, and then go back and rework what you’ve come up with so far to fit in with the new ideas.

EXAMPLES: “I have this image in my head of a scene where the guy has finally been caught by Death, and is standing in like this... in-between, limbo world or something. Death is all pleased he’s finally caught up with the guy, but then the guy whips out this item, like a coin, that buys his way out of death. And maybe that’s how he does it, there are these special coins that can “buy” your freedom from death, and he has some way of finding them, over and over again, and always has at least one when Death shows up to collect the next time. And maybe he keeps dying over and over again in ridiculous ways, like eagles dropping turtles on his head and having sinkholes open up under his feet, as Death keeps trying to take him by surprise.”

Give Yourself a Goal

Once you have something to work off, start asking yourself questions about the conflict, climax, character goals, etc etc. Start working on getting your plot some direction, goals, and structure.

EXAMPLE: “So I know the conflict is this guy running from and outwitting Death, but what’s the climax? Where does that lead? Maybe he has to work WITH Death for some reason? Maybe he meets someone who needs to die by the end of the story? I feel like I want the main character to have to die in the end, but he has accepted it, and is ready to let it happen. Oh, maybe he meets someone who is going to die for some untimely reason, like they weren’t supposed to, and he has to give that person his coin to save them? Like, maybe he meets this woman, and while he’s in Limbo with Death, handing over his coin and getting out of dying for the millionth time, Death suddenly feels... like, a disturbance in the force. Something has happened that wasn’t supposed to, someone’s fate has been changed. Maybe Death pulls out this hourglass and sees that someone’s hourglass has suddenly lost a huge amount of sand at once--not supposed to happen. Death go,es there, bring MC for some reason? MC meets the woman, maybe she’s a Queen or leader of a group or country, and someone is planning to assassinate her. Death has a lot of work to do obviously, but can’t have this kind of reality-altering nonsense going on, so partly out of spite, he tells the MC to fix whatever has gone wrong and protect this woman, and he (Death) will stop trying to kill MC all the time. So then it becomes this political intrigue thing.”

Inevitable Changes

Do you see what happened up there in my example? Originally, I’d started out with an idea that the main conflict was between the Main Character (MC) and Death, and that the main antagonist was, more or less, Death. But now I have this completely different main antagonist, some shadowy assassin, and Death and my MC are forced to become allies. Things change as you work and come up with new ideas--and sometimes, you might follow a thread of an idea to the end, and find out it doesn’t work after all. You may have to throw it out and start over, possibly more than once. But it also helps you avoid plot holes later, by working through them in the planning stages.

Keeping Track of it All

The biggest challenge with this method is ending up with twenty pages of rambling plot, half of which you changed or didn’t use or is just you asking yourself questions.

How I combat this is by liberal use of my word processor’s highlighter. Once I feel like I’ve hit on something I’ll use, I’ll highlight it in the document, usually according to some kind of color-coded system (e.g. yellow for plot points, orange for actual scene ideas, blue for character ideas/background/development, green for lines of dialogue I’ve just thought of, etc).

Then, once I’ve plotted out as much as I can, I’ll go back through the document, pull those highlighted bits, and put them all in their own document--et viola, I have an outline.

The beauty of this method is it allows you to plot as minimally or extensively as you like. You can use it just to get a general sense of your overall plot, or keep drilling down until you end up with a chapter-by-chapter outline.

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