Plot Development for Novels

Tips and Techniques to Get Your Story Back on Track

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• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781440563713
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Editoria

Have you run into writer's block? Not sure of the next twist or turn for your novel? Beat your block and keep things interesting with The Everything® Writing Series: Plot Development for Novels. You'll be able to get your story back on track with these helpful tips and ideas. With some quick reading, you'll be back to writing in no time.

Building the Plot

Scenes are the most fundamental building blocks of plot. Scenes are grouped together into chapters, which are in turn grouped together into acts, each with a rising story arc as the protagonist seeks a goal and is ultimately transformed by her journey. This section helps you begin to organize the building blocks of your plot and plan out the scenes of your novel.

What Is Plot?

Plot is, simply speaking, the story that you are going to tell in your novel. It consists of all the things that happen between page one and the end of the book.

Some of the terms you may have heard used to describe different elements of plot are:

• Exposition: Introduction and establishment of the characters, setting, and situation; exposition includes the narrative that gets the story moving forward; authors use exposition to set up the main character and his problem or goal.
• Complications and conflict: The events and characters that thwart your protagonist and prevent him from solving his problem or reaching his goal.
• Crisis: Complications and conflict hit their highest point.
• Climax: Crisis builds to a dramatic, do-or-die moment.
• Resolution: The problem is resolved and the protagonist has either reached his goal or failed to reach it.
• Reflection: A change that the main character undergoes as a result of learning something important about himself or the situation he’s in; he experiences an epiphany about life and the great scheme of things.

Like all kinds of drama since the earliest Greek play, the plot of a novel is divided into a beginning, middle, and end, parts that can be thought of as comprising three acts. The three-act structure of a novel are:

• Act I (the beginning): This is the first quarter of the novel. The contents include the Exposition: introduces characters, setting, situation goal; complications and conflict begin
• Act II (the middle): This is half of the novel (the longest act). The contents include more exposition as characters and story are developed; complications and conflicts escalate and the act ends
• Act III (the end): This is the final quarter of the novel. The contents include the crisis reaches its highest point and finally is resolved and characters reflect on the resolution.

This structure is often referred to as the “story arc.” That’s because the tension in the story gradually builds to a crisis and then, much more quickly, falls with resolution and reflection.

Coming Up with a Plot

A good plot keeps readers interested and turning the pages because they need to find out what’s going to happen next. To design a plot, the author must continually ask: “What happens next?” followed closely by the all-important question: “Why?”

At every turning point in your story, there will be multiple possibilities for what might happen next. Readers especially enjoy plot twists that surprise them and take them to unexpected places. It’s up to you to decide where your plot goes and which obstacles you place in your protagonist’s way as she struggles to reach her goal.

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Quote

“I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, make the story. But all this ends up by being a plot.” — Isak Dinesen

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The key to making your plot feel compelling is finding that worthy goal for your protagonist to pursue, something that’s worth all the complications and conflict you’re going to put her through.

The Worthy Goal

It is essential in every novel that the protagonist has a goal. As an author, you need to find that goal for your character, and it has to be worth fighting for. Is achieving a career change a worthy goal? By itself, not so much. But if making that career change means that the character can prove to herself and to her family that she’s not a loser, then it becomes worthy.

A goal is worthy if the stakes are high and the consequences of failing are catastrophic, either in material or emotional terms. Stakes and consequences. Those are the things to keep in mind when you assess your main character’s goal.

Here are some more examples:

• In Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Meg Cabot must travel through time and space and journey to the “dark planet” to find her missing father.
• In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 Captain Yossarian, a bombardier, strives to stay alive, retain his humanity, and get the hell out of the war.
• In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth Bennett wants nothing more than to be well married.

The Journey and Setbacks

A journey is interesting only if it is difficult, so setbacks along the way are essential. There are many potential sources of setbacks. Here are a few examples:

• A weakness in the character like cowardice or prejudice or impulsivity.
• An external event like a war, a plague, or a traffic accident, or a tear in the space-time continuum.
• An opposing character — like her lover’s ex-girlfriend or her controlling mother or her mercenary boss — who tries to keep the protagonist from reaching her goal.
• A misunderstanding in which the character misinterprets something she hears or witnesses.
• An injury like a broken leg, a gunshot wound, or temporary blindness.

The more your character must struggle to reach the goal, the more heroic the journey seems to the reader. But be sure to modulate the misery, and beware that readers have little patience with a protagonist who whines.

The Transformation

Characters, like real people, are transformed by their experiences. They often are wiser having gone through the struggle of reaching their goal. For instance, they realign their priorities, or lose their innocence, or accept responsibility.

A character may realize, as the novel progresses and the character gains knowledge and self-knowledge, that she was wrong about what was truly important to her. In Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada, for example, Andrea Sachs yearns for a job on a high-fashion magazine, only to find that she’s not willing to sell her soul to succeed.

Scenes

Modern novels, like movies and television shows, are usually broken up into scenes. A scene is action that takes place at a parti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Elements of a Novel: An Overview
• Building the Plot
• Shaping Scenes
• Also Available
• Copyright Page