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A Simple Way to Plot Your Fiction

Posted on 17 November, 2008 By Rob

One of the best ways to construct a plot is to use a very simple technique that almost makes the process seem effortless. All you have to do is ask yourself a series of “What-Ifs.”

What if a Neo-Nazi terrorist organization got hold of a nuclear bomb?

What if they planted that bomb in an American football stadium?

What if a fledgling CIA analyst uncovered the plan and couldn’t convince his superiors that he was right?

What if the bomb actually went off, destroying half an American city?

What if the terrorists planted evidence making it look like the Russians were at fault?

As you can see, this series of What Ifs practically lays out the structure of The Sum of All Fears. And as we plot out What-Ifs like these and turn them into scene and sequence, each and every one of them forms a question in the reader’s mind.

Let’s look at some of them again:

What if a Neo-Nazi terrorist organization got hold of a nuclear bomb? (Reader: What are they going to do with it?)

What if they planted the bomb in an American football stadium? (Reader: Will someone stop it before it explodes?)

What if a fledgling CIA analyst uncovered the plan and couldn’t convince his superiors that he was right? (Reader: How will he stop the terrorists?)

And so on. Each What-If you present, each question you put into the mind of your reader helps compel him forward through the story. He turns the page for one very simple reason: he wants to find out what will happen next.

The longer you take to reveal the answers to these questions, however, the stronger the hold you’ll have on your audience. It’s important not to gave away too much too soon, or your audience will have nothing to look forward to.

But you have to be very careful here. Remember the TV show Twin Peaks? The whole series was based on the premise, “Who killed Laura Palmer?” With each episode, more and more clues were provided — along with a lot of wacky characters and a lot more compelling questions — but after a dozen or so episodes, the Palmer premise began to wear thin.

Why? Because the writers kept the answer from us for so long that we began to lose interest.

Warning aside, you must always remember to take it slow. And as you answer each of these story points, make sure you replace them with questions that are even more compelling.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. Every story — no matter what genre — should be an unfolding mystery.

The Wonderful World of Subplots

Posted on 17 November, 2008 By Rob

3 Comments

While you can certainly get away with a short story having only one plot, novels and movies will almost always have a number of plots going at once. One of those plots is dominant, of course, but what about those smaller, all important sub plots?

In The Godfather, we watch as a violent power play is made against Don Corleone by a rival Mafia family. His young, clean-cut son, Michael Corleone, volunteers to take revenge, and the movie follows Michael’s descent into the dark world of the Mafia and his eventual emergence as the new Godfather.

There are a number of subplots in the movie, but the one that most strikes a chord is Michael’s relationship with two women. The first is Kay, who is decidedly not Italian. She’s his lifeline to the outside world. His connection to “reality.”

But as he’s drawn deeper into the violence, Michael’s ties to her become more and more tenuous, until he finds himself completely cut off from her — and the outside world — as he hides out in Sicily.

In Sicily, Michael meets a young local woman who steals his heart. She’s his soul mate, his true love, whom he marries. Then, in another act of revenge, a car carrying his new bride is blown to bits, plunging Michael into an emotional darkness he’s never known.

He goes back to the U.S. a considerably different man, but rekindles his relationship with Kay and eventually marries her — a marriage that is obviously doomed.

This particular subplot would probably have a tough time standing on its own. Its reliance on the main story line is obvious enough, but what really makes it great is that it parallels and impacts Michael’s descent. Kay represents Michael’s relationship to the “civilian” world, while his marriage to the Sicilian woman illustrates his rediscovery of his roots.

The tragic twist in this subplot is one of the major causes of Michael’s emotional retreat and his rise to power. He becomes a man so cold and ruthless that he’s able (in Part II) to put a hit out on his own brother.

And that’s what all great movie and novel subplots do. They rise organically from the main storyline, attaching themselves to your hero and impacting his ability to reach his goal. Great subplots are so closely woven into the fabric of the story that we often have a hard time discerning them.

Even lesser movies than The Godfather recognize the need for a solid subplot.

A favorite of mine is a dark, direct-to-video thriller called Resurrection, which was written by Brad Mirman, the writer of several good thrillers. To some, Resurrection plays like a poor man’s rip-off of Seven, but I much prefer Mirman’s take on the hunt for a serial killer because of its inventiveness — something I think Seven’s rather cliched story lacks.

Resurrection is essentially about a couple of cops hunting for a serial killer who is taking the body parts of his victims and building them into a representation of Christ. Each of the victims is named after an apostle and the killer’s timeline runs him straight toward Easter, the day of resurrection.

The subplot is a minor one, but it certainly deepens the lead character. He’s a cop who, after the tragic death of his son, has discarded his faith in God and is quickly losing his emotional connection to his wife.

During the course of the movie, his wife attempts to repair their marriage and his faith by inviting the local priest over for a pep talk, but our hero soundly rejects the man and any notion of accepting help from him.

Then, while looking for a clue to the killer’s plan that seems deeply rooted in Biblical lore, our hero must finally seek the help of the priest. But as he enters the church, he hesitates, as if the mere act of stepping foot in the place is a betrayal of his son’s memory.

Again, this subplot is powerful because it is so securely attached to the main storyline that it can’t exist on its own. The two plots feed off of each other and both are stronger because of it.

A lot of movies today treat subplots as an afterthought. Stories are often built by a committee from a “hot” idea, the characters created to fill out a plot that’s stretched so thin that the slightest jolt could snap it apart.

Subplots are haphazardly tacked on in a weak attempt to keep the whole mess together, and their paint-by-numbers obviousness is one of the greatest contributors to the collective snore rising from the audience.

Many storytellers today have it backwards. Yes, start with a great idea, but rather than try to force characters and subplot into that story, try creating the characters first, then let the story grow from them. Characters are story. And any great plot or subplot is driven by the characters’ wants and desires.

Remember this as you sit down to write and, with time and patience, you too can give us writing the caliber of The Godfather and Resurrection. Not a bad place to be.

How to Create a Pageturner

Posted on 16 November, 2008 By Rob

2 Comments

There is an old screenwriting trick that works just as well for novels and short stories. It’s a great way to keep your scenes moving, giving your work that page-turning urgency that keeps the agents, editors or producers reading.

It’s called Enter Late/Leave Early.

When writing a scene, rather than start at the “beginning,” try entering the scene late — coming in after events are already in motion. Then make sure you get out of there before said events have concluded.

For example:

John and Mary decide to go for a jog. Instead of cutting to the two of them throwing on their jogging shorts, pulling on their running shoes, and hitting the road, we cut straight to John and Mary running side by side, in the middle of a conversation.

Then, once the point of the scene has been made, we cut away from them — BEFORE they finish their jog or their conversation. And to compel the reader forward, it often helps to use a line of dialogue or prose that’s a springboard into the next scene.

Brevity is extremely important in screenplays and short stories, but it’s important in novels as well. That last thing you want to do is bore your reader and, while novels give you more room to explore character motivation, background and feelings, it’s important to keep things moving.

Any good story should have rhythm, aided by the ebb and flow of your scenes. And ELLE is one way to maintain that rhythm.

Get in, make your point, then get the hell out.

How Not to Write On the Nose

Posted on 30 December, 2008 By Rob

9 Comments

I was recently sitting with a friend who asked me what I thought of [BIG BESTSELLING AUTHOR]. My response was something like, “People seem to love him.”

“No,” my friend said, “what do YOU think?”

I hesitated, because while there was a time I would openly criticize writers, those days are long gone. Partly because I’m not immune to criticism myself and partly because I’m in a business that requires a certain etiquette — and I’m learning to be polite.

So, I simply said, “For me — and this is my opinion only — his writing is too on the nose.”

Then came the usual question. “What does that mean?”

“It’s a Hollywood term,” I said. “When everything is up front, there’s no nuance or subtlety, no subtext.”

The writer in question, I went on to say, often writes things like, “The evil killer watched them from the hilltop. He was going to kill them all.”

Now there’s nothing particularly wrong with that, I suppose. But, for me, it’s painfully matter of fact. It tells the reader exactly what he needs to know without making him or her work at it.

And, to my mind, the reader should always have to do a little work.

I think of a story as a puzzle. It doesn’t matter what genre you’re writing in. Your job as a writer is to supply the pieces of the puzzle and enough juice behind them to get the reader to want to put those pieces together and figure out what picture they form.

So rather than tell them that the guy on the hill is an evil killer, you instead put that guy on the hill, but you don’t tell them who he is, WHY he’s there, or what his plans are.

You only give them ONE piece of the puzzle.

Then, somewhere in the next several pages you might mention Joe’s missing brother Johnny. Johnny hasn’t been seen in three years and nobody knows where he went.

Put those two pieces together and your reader is pretty much figuring that the guy on the hill is Johnny. Or, if he isn’t, he certainly had something to do with Johnny — maybe even Johnny’s disappearance.

Who knows? You’ll only find out if you continue to read.

The point is, of course, that by not telling them everything up front, you create something VERY important in your reader:

The desire to learn more. And once they have that desire, they will not stop until they satisfy it.

If you spell it all out for them right up front, however, what have you created? For me, you’ve created a reader who’s about to toss the book.

But I guess that’s just me. Because on the nose or not, the writer in question sells books like crazy. Is it because people think he’s a terrific storyteller or because they just don’t want to bother to do any work?

Beats me.

Do I Need to Outline My Plot?

Posted on 10 June, 2009 By Rob

14 Comments

One question I always hear from aspiring writers is, “Do you outline your plots?”

I remember asking this question myself quite a few times, back in the Stone Age when I was typing scripts and stories on my IBM Selectric. If, by some weird stroke of fate, I happened to stumble across an honest to god real published writer (I didn’t do conferences in those days, didn’t know they existed, and there was no Internet), the subject of outlining came up pretty quickly.

Why?

Because, like all aspiring writers, I was always searching for what works. A lot of us look at someone else’s success and think, maybe I should do what they’re doing. Human beings seem to have this unending desire to emulate others in hope that some of the magic dust will rub off on us.

That would explain the thirty billion Star Wars clones that came out in the 1970′s, and the gazillion comic book movies put into production after the Batman and Iron Man franchises took off.

So when Bestselling Author X says he writes using an outline, it’s only natural for aspiring writers to think that they need to outline, too.

I can guarantee you without a moment’s hesitation that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of writing workshops going on in the world at this very moment where the workshop leader is telling his or her students to pull out the index cards and start mapping out their story. And this is NOT BAD advice.

The bad part is when they insist that this is the only way to properly construct a novel or screenplay.

The truth is, there is no one way to do anything in writing.

I was reminded of this in one of the comments from the How to Beat Writer’s Block post. And when I teach classes or do presentations or podcasts with my friend Brett Battles, I always try to remember to tell the audience that.

There is no single way to approach writing.

So in answer to the question that serves as a title for this post: Do I need to outline my plot?

My response is, how the hell do I know?

Only you know if you need to outline. I don’t care what anyone has told you, I don’t care what their opinions might be concerning plot outlines — pro or con — it’s entirely up to you to try it and discover whether or not it has a place in your writing process.

Certainly, if you’ve tried outlining and can’t stand it, don’t walk away feeling as if you’re some kind of failure who will never sell anything. That’s nonsense. Just because Jeffery Deaver writes really long outlines before he starts a book, and just because he writes great books and sells a zillion copies, does not mean that outlining is right for you. Just because your university professor says the world will collapse if you don’t outline, doesn’t mean it will. It won’t. Your professor may. But the world won’t.

Here are my thoughts on plot outlining:

1. I hate it. If I outline, by the time I get to the actual writing itself, I feel as if I’ve already told the story. So my desire to flesh it all out has pretty much waned. I’m not saying I can’t do it. I just don’t want to.

2. Did I mention that I hate it?

But that’s just me. It might not be you.

Here are some of the pros of writing an outline:

1. It’ll keep you on track when you’re writing the full draft. You won’t get lost. You won’t get stuck.

2. It’ll…

Okay, I’ve run out of pros. And that’s simply because I don’t outline. Have no interest in it, thank you. I write by the seat of my pants, always have, always will. The only exception I’ll make is when I’m doing a book proposal and I have to write an outline (or at least a fully formed synopsis) to make the sale. That doesn’t mean I like it.

I’m a jump in and get to the writing kind of guy. And most of the writers I know take the same approach.

Doesn’t mean they’re right. Or wrong.

It just means they’re plotting their stories the way that’s most comfortable for them.

Which is what you should do, too.

And no matter which way you decide to go, don’t ever, for even a minute, feel as if you’re doing it wrong. As I said in my disclaimer, all that matters is what winds up on the page.