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Today’s post is by regular contributor Susan DeFreitas (@manzanitafire), an award-winning author, editor, and book coach. On Thursday, Oct. 31, she’s offering a free masterclass on plot, The Bones of the Thing: The Truth About Plot (and the Most Common Plot Problems Writers Face).
I’ve said elsewhere on this blog that plot issues are the number one reason people come to me—and people like me—for help with their creative work.
and I’ve shared in the same post that most of the time, these issues really aren’t problems with plot at all. They’re problems with character arc.
That said, sometimes the problem really is the plot. Which is to say, sometimes the problem with a novel really is what happens in the story, the order in which it happens, and the way that it happens.
and for real problems of this nature, there are real solutions. Solutions that I have seen writers apply in revision that produce changes that feel nothing short of magical.
Struggling with the plot of your current work-in-progress? Maybe one of these tried and true solutions will do the trick for you.
1. Shorten the time frame
Some novels really just have to be big, sprawling epics that take place over a long period of time—perhaps even over generations. But most stories? Don’t.
If you have a novel that feels slow in places, a novel that chronicles a long period of time in the protagonist’s life, or a novel that chronicles a whole historical period … my best advice to you would be: See if there’s a way you can tighten the time frame overall.
Because when you tighten up the time frame, oftentimes those slow sections just somehow magically disappear. I believe this is in part due to the fact that when events occur close together in time, you get a stronger sense of cause and effect even if one event isn’t leading directly to the next. For instance, maybe your protagonist is still angry from her conversation with the antagonist the day before when he talks to his love interest later that day. If a week passed between these interactions, it wouldn’t feel like there was any connection between them.
But when you tighten up the time frame, that second interaction might feel like it’s invested with a whole lot more tension, because of the residual emotional effects of the first one.
For a novel that chronicles a long period of time in the protagonist’s life, you’re almost guaranteed to strengthen the sense of storytelling if you focus in on a shorter time frame—say, a turning point time in the protagonist’s life, which will still allow us to imaginatively fill in what happens in that longer span of time without having to plow through hundreds of pages of it.
Same thing for a novel that’s meant to chronicle a longer historical era: Focusing in on a turning point (or two or three) within that longer span of time will almost always have the effect of strengthening the story. Turning points have a lot of power, in that they give readers an opportunity to understand both what the situation was before as well as the new reality that’s coming into being.
2. Get rid of events (and characters!) that do the same work
If you’ve written a novel that’s waaaaaaay tooooo loooong (and you can determine that pretty quickly here if you know your genre—and you should!), then this may be a hard one to hear, because people who write novels that are way too long tend to feel rather attached to absolutely everything that happens within that novel, and everyone it happens with or to.
But trust me when I say, you can take this one to the bank: If there are two different events in your novel that have both been included in order to show your protagonist lacking the courage to take a stand for herself in the face of oppression, it will generally strengthen your story if you cut one of those events (or even combine the strongest elements of both events into a single one).
Same thing with characters: If there are two characters in your story who are basically there to show us how the protagonist doesn’t tend to recognize when her friends aren’t really her friends, you can probably cut one of them with no real impact on the main storyline.
and really, that in and of itself is a good litmus test, when it comes to events and characters you’re considering cutting: If you can do so without having to do a TON of revision to the story as a whole, then that just goes to show that event or character wasn’t doing a whole lot of work for the novel anyway.
3. Add a subplot or consequence
On the other hand, maybe you’re one of those people who’s written a pretty straightforward story in a pretty straightforward genre, one you understand well—a mystery, for example, or a romance. and the issue isn’t so much that your story is overstuffed so much that it is too flat.
In cases like these, you generally have too direct a path from the protagonist to their goal, for better or worse—and not enough in the way of complications.
One way to get more of that in your story—and more of a sense that your story has the sort of depth and density of “incident” we expect from a novel—is to introduce a subplot. One of my mentors, Jennie Nash, frames a subplot as an instance in the story where someone other than the protagonist decides that this is their story and starts pursuing their own agenda in a way that complicates that of the protagonist.
and if you’re wondering where in your story to introduce such a subplot, may I suggest the “break into 2” point of the story—basically, the end of the first act, if you’re working with three-act structure (or, a third of the way into the story, period).
I suggest this because it’s far enough into the story for readers to have gotten to know some of the characters in the protagonist’s world (and therefore to understand how their agendas might conflict with that of the protagonist) and far enough into the story for things to start moving in the right direction for that protagonist (meaning, it’s a perfect time to throw a giant monkey wrench in the gears).
You can also introduce complication by looking at the events you already have in the story and asking yourself if any of these events could have further consequences for the protagonist—consequences that introduce similar complications in the course of their quest.
4. Start earlier
I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about how to figure out whether you’re starting your novel in the right place—and in that post, I shared the fact that sometimes writers (especially newer writers) think they have to start off with the big conflict and fireworks of their story’s inciting incident. Which tends to feel more confusing for the reader than anything else.
That’s because starting that late in the story’s timeline doesn’t give us the opportunity to get to know the protagonist before that event occurs.
For example: Aliens landing on the lawn of a suburban homeowner is an inciting incident is a potentially interesting situation. But aliens landing on the lawn of a suburban homeowner who happens to be the sort of guy who hates everyone who’s in any way different from himself and the people he grew up with—which is to say, a xenophobe—is a story.
If your beta readers tell you that it took them a while to get into the story, or that they liked it but were confused at first, try starting your story just a beat or two earlier, so you give your reader time to get to know your protagonist and their world before the major events of the story are set into motion.
5. Create a real climax
I couldn’t tell you the number of manuscripts I’ve read that have no real climax. Sure, they might feature some sort of conversation toward the end of the story between the protagonist and his estranged father, for example, but that scene doesn’t feel all that much different from similar scenes earlier on in the story.
Moreover, if this story features a central conflict not just between the protagonist and his father but between the protagonist and his boss, who strongly reminds him of his domineering, unreasonable, demeaning father, then the climax point of this story should also in some way intersect with and resolve that conflict.
In this hypothetical story, maybe the resolution of the conflict with the boss originally took place “off screen”—meaning, it was rendered via summary, not scene—and then there was this resolution with the father in a dramatic scene that takes place on the father’s deathbed.
A stronger version of this novel’s climax might be one that consists of two parts (both dramatized via scene): first, the protagonist stands up to the domineering boss at work, and is fired but doesn’t regret it; and then second, that interaction gives him the courage, in part, to tell his father the truth about their relationship, and call him out on all the various harm he’s caused over the years—and maybe the father surprises the protagonist by doing essentially the opposite of what the boss did, which is listening and even acknowledging that there may be some truth in what the protagonist is saying.
A climax in which all the core conflicts of the novel come to a more or less dramatic head—whether it takes place in just one scene or a series of scenes—is just generally more satisfying to read than one in which one or more of those core conflicts seem to just fizzle out, off the page, like a dud firework.
and generally speaking, in order to actually resolve those conflicts, you have to “push them out” in scene—meaning, you have to let the conversations run longer than in previous scenes, and let that conversation go to deeper, more fraught, and/or more vulnerable places than in those previous scenes.
If you’re currently wrestling with the plot of your work in progress, I hope one or more of these plot hacks resolves them for you. Now it’s your turn to share: What’s the toughest plot problem you’ve faced in one of your novels? and what was the solution you arrived at to address it?
Note from Jane: On Thursday, Oct. 31, Susan is offering a free masterclass on plot, The Bones of the Thing: The Truth About Plot (and the Most Common Plot Problems Writers Face).
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