Plotting a Novel
Dictionary.com defines 'to plot' it as "to devise or construct the storyline of (a play, novel etc.)." It also defines it as "to plan secretly, especially something hostile or evil." Both seem to fit here.
It's a word that's potentially a very scary and/or confusing one. But plotting doesn't have to be a difficult process. It doesn't even have to take long. :)
Let's plot something together. I'm going to use an incomplete story of mine to show examples, "The Chrysanthemum Curtains" or CC for short.
Depending a little on the story, I like to plot at about medium level on the detail scale. But everything always starts off super simple.
And I mean like super-dooper-über simple.
Step One - The Sentence
The first seed of your to-be bestseller: a sentence (two at most) that covers the core of your story. This is what I had for CC:
"A mysterious writer who's never seen lives in a cottage in the woods and ne
ver leaves her house. A young journalist stumbles on the house by accident and begins to learn her story through her writings."
Unless you're starting off from the point that 'I want to write a story, but I haven't any ideas yet," you might have a story idea in your mind already which you'd like to write. In that case, Step One is already done. :)
Step Two - Detail
Okay, so far we've about 25 words or so to work with. We can't write a novel with that yet, so let's add a little detail. Just a few sentences to add a few more specifics to the above.
"The novel is Historical Fiction and set in England in the 1860s. The young male journalist never sees or speaks to the mysterious writer, but each night a light burns in the first floor window (the window with the chrysanthemum curtains). Every so often an A4 envelope with a manuscript inside has been passed underneath the front door. Reading these, the journalist sees her incredible talent and begins to publish them for her under a pen name, learning her personal story through the fantasy she writes."
Okay, that's a bit better. We can now get some kind of quick idea what the story is about all the way through. This outline is about the length of what you'd tell a friend or a relative when asked what you're writing.
Don't worry if you can't figure out your genre or a title for your novel yet. I just happened to have them here already, but often it happens to me that I figure those out about halfway through writing the first draft of the manuscript. If you don't know them, don't worry, just don't get hung up here trying to come up with the perfect name. It's more important that you get your beauty plotted and written. Fear not fellow novelist, the perfect title will come to you sooner or later. ;)
Step Three - Beginning and Ending
For me it's important to know the beginning and ending of a story. Not word for word, but the idea. For CC:
Beginning: "Young journalist living his ordinary life, believing the mundane is all there is and fantasy and magic to be silly and not real."
Ending: "The secretive writer the journalist came to know through the stories she passed under her door vanishes, apparently dying. The journalist ends up having a wider concept of truth and life and opens his mind to new ideas, ultimately becoming a more successful person."
If I don't know the beginning, of course I can't start writing a manuscript. If I don't know the ending, sooner or later my writing will begin to wander aimlessly resulting in 'loose ends' that are both confusing and (potentially) irritating to the reader.
For me, it also makes it harder to write. So I make sure I clearly define where I'm starting and where my characters are heading very early on.
Step Four - Sketching
Time to do a Picasso. Better be good! :)
Nah, just kidding. But we are going to be doing a little drawing here to help with figuring out the rest of the story, and putting the ideas into order.
Draw a single line down a page with two small horizontal lines at the end and the beginning of that line. At the top we're going to write the beginning in two or three words: "MMC* meets novelist" at the top, and "onto a new life" at the bottom. That should do. This is just a list, no need for more detail. You're probably not going to have the page space for it either though. ^_^
Now draw three more small lines somewhere between The Beginning and The End. These can be the three main culmination points of the story. The first point will be where your main characters first encounter some opposition. They've got a plan, or a mission, or they simply want to continue to exist peacefully, and then something (often the thing that will be the main antagonist throughout the story) appears that tries to stop them or make them fail.
For Frodo it was the hooded riders, for the Little Mermaid it was her father forbidding her from being in contact with humans.
For our CC story, it could be the selfish editor-in-chief who despises anything creative and wants to use his naive junior colleague to defame her and get her into legal trouble.
Either way, this is where the main baddie steps, or some barrier appears for the first time and our story really starts.
Next line could mark where the main characters are apparently, or risking, failing in their purpose. Things are looking bad, and like the main character(s) are going to fail or have very few chances left. This bit is often very close to the biggest battle of the story.
The last line should be the 'big fight,' where your main protagonist and antagonist meet. It could be a light sabre fight, it could be a chess match. But regardless it's the big highlight of the story.
Now that we've got a little filling between The Beginning and The End, draw in as many even smaller lines as you want between those we've got. Here we write similar short notes on roughly what we think might happen between each point.
It's also not a big deal right now if we don't get the order of the events right. At the latest things will get sorted in editing. So I just stick what I think sort of feels right where I sort of think it might possibly go...or not. :)
Step Five - Writing it Out
This is what I like to do. I take an A5 notebook of 40 pages long and dedicate that as the plot book of one novel (which is intended to be around 50,000 words or more). Then I take each event and write it out a little more thoroughly.
So instead of it being "big fight" I write "Main character meets antagonist on roof. Emotions flair up, MMC takes revenge. Bad guy falls to his death." Something like this. And in this way I write out, with just a tad more detail, each item that we wrote up in the diagram above.
And that's it. That's my plotting technique. :) Personally I often have a pretty clear idea of the most major events of a story, so I like to Four and Five the other way around (so I write up the scenes and then do a little diagram to clear up what order everything happened in). Since it's my personal of plotting, this method might not fit everyone. But I hope I may have inspired some ideas about how to approach plotting for those who wish to try. :)
Now that we've got a basic view of our story as a whole, we're ready to write the first draft. This draft is not going to be the final version, but just another step of adding on more detail from before. At this point competitions like NaNoWriMo are very helpful if you feel like you need motivation to get the writing done (like I often do ^_^;;). And always remember what awaits you at the other end of the road of writing: a beautiful finished manuscript ready for publishing! :D
Next time I'll be talking about what I do for troubleshooting when I run into difficulties with a story during plotting or writing.
If anyone has any questions about this plotting technique or plotting in general, feel free to comment and I'll do my best to answer. :)
Thanks for reading!
(*MMC is short for 'male main character.')
(Frodo and Lord of the Rings is copyrighted to JRR Tolkien and The Little Mermaid to Disney. The original story of The Little Mermaid was written by Hans Christian Andersen.)
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