By Janice Hardy

You don’t have to know everything about your story before you start plotting.

Since writing is fairly split between character writers and plot writers, you can bet that half the writers you meet have had struggles with plot (the other half with characters, but that’s another post). Even when you enjoy it, and are good at it, plotting has its challenges.

How do you know what your protagonist has to do? What types of problems and conflicts should your protagonist face? How do you fill in the middle so it doesn’t drag?

Figuring out how to get from the inciting incident to the climax is a head-scratcher—even for hardcore plotters like me. But the key to making this easier is structure.

Structure helps a lot when figuring out your plot.

Structure is like the line drawing of your story. It contains all the key turning points and general flow of how the novel will unfold. Once you know the general shape of it, you can color it in any way you want. For genre novels, it’s even easier, because you’ll have expected tropes to further guide you. You won’t have to draw the image from scratch—you only have to color in the lines.

For example:

• In romance, there’s a meet-cute that leads to romance, and eventually a Happily Ever After.
• In mysteries, there’s a body or crime that leads to an investigation, and eventually solving the crime and finding justice for the victims.
• In non-genre novels, there’s a problem discovered that leads to attempts to fix that problem, and eventually resolving that issue and the protagonist finding happiness.

These turning points and expectations can help you develop a rough concept of your plot.

Maybe you know the details early on, maybe you don't, but that’s okay. The goal here is to find that general framework for your plot to get you started.

I’m in final edits right now for a science fiction detective novel I plotted using this concept. Detective novels have a “formula” of expected tropes and a very clear structure of what happens when. But that didn’t mean my plot would be the same as every other detective story. The tropes and structure gave me a framework that helped guide my brainstorming. I made it unique to my story, based on what that story needed.

Let's look a little closer.

Readers expect a detective novel to open with either the crime or the PI getting hired. But I didn’t want it to open with the client hiring my PI, because I felt that jumped in too fast. I wanted time to set the scene and ground readers in my science fiction world first. If they didn’t understand the world, they wouldn’t understand the mystery.

So I knew I had to have an opening scene that included the two big tropes of my mixed genres—introduce the PI nature and establish the science fiction world. I didn’t know what that scene would be at first, but it was clear I needed to show my PI at work in that world to accomplish both of those goals. That gave me solid place to start brainstorming.

Using that and the general trope and structure format, I was able to craft a basic outline:

• Protagonist’s job and world introduced
• Client hires protagonist to solve problem
• Protagonist investigates and finds connections to his past
• Crime escalates and new problem occurs (in most mysteries, this is another body)
• Protagonist investigates new crime and tries to figure out the personal connections
• Suspects stack up and are investigated
• Connections are figured out and perpetrator is revealed
• Perpetrator apprehended, case solved

It’s rough, but it’s something I could work with.

This works for genre and non-genre stories.

A romance novel will have a similar conceptual outline. It begins with the two love interests and their problems. Then the plot moves to the meet-cute, the attraction dance, problems with getting together, getting closer and then being torn apart. It ends with working things out, and then finally getting that happily ever after.

A non-genre novel will be more general, beginning with the protagonist living their life. They then encounter a problem and make a lot of mistakes that create more havoc in their lives as they try to solve it. Eventually, they face a moment when they want to give up, but they struggle to pull themselves together and keep going. Finally, they face the main conflict and resolve the problem.

Once you know your conceptual turning points, it’s just a matter of brainstorming until you find the right scenes to put there.

Let’s look a little closer at my detective outline to see this in action (sorry, no spoilers):

The Opening

Protagonist’s job and world introduced: I thought about how my PI’s day went and what he routinely did on the job. I knew I didn’t want this opening issue to be a major case that could make readers think this was what the book was about, but I also didn’t want it to be a throwaway scene that didn’t go anywhere. I wanted it to connect to the actual plot crime in some teeny way, so I’d need to drop in clues that later led the PI to the bad guys. Finally, I wanted to show the personal issues my PI was facing to establish his character arc and that plotline.

Many brainstorming sessions later, I had an opening scene with my PI wrapping up a pro-bono case, witnessing something that would later be important but didn’t look important at that time, and experiencing a “medical issue” that related to his personal problem. It ended with a call from his office manager that there was a client waiting to see him, which led to the inciting event and expected detective trope.

Everything I needed to do was there, and it all started with a general concept of what that opening scene needed to do for the story. I targeted the rest of the rough outline the same way.

The Overall Plot

My PI was hired for an adultery case, which let me know the types of things my PI would have to do to solve it. I knew it ended up with a murder by the end of Act One, and it raised the stakes by connecting to my PI’s past. The murder gave me a whole new set of issues and clues to work with to create new plot goals and scenes for Act Two.

I knew that the investigation would uncover something major about his past at the midpoint, setting up the second half of the plot. The two plotlines (case and personal) would become more intertwined as my PI investigated until he knew how one affected the other and what to do about it to resolve both issues, driving the plot into Act Three and the climax.

Sound super vague? Oh, it is. But it gave me direction so I wasn’t just grasping at random ideas for the plot. I knew conceptually where the plot had to go and brainstormed the specifics that got me there. I created a rough outline for the major turning points of the plot without knowing more than “This is a case of adultery that turns into a murder that leads to the PI’s past.” All I had to do was connect the dots.

Bonus Tip: Trying using this format to describe your idea in one sentence. “This story is [inciting event] that turns into [main story problem] that leads to [climax/character growth/resolution].”

Much of my brainstorming was simply asking, “How would my PI investigate this case?” and “How does this case relate to his past?” The unique science fiction aspects gave me even more to work with.

I didn’t know it all when I started, and that was okay.

How to Brainstorm with Structure and Tropes in Your Own Novel

If you’re stuck with an idea but no plot, take a step back and look at your novel’s structure and the tropes of the genre (if applicable). Do you have a classic formula, such as romance or mystery? Do expected tropes and issues appear in this type of story? If not, don’t fret—even a traditional story structure can provide those turning points for you to start with.

Think about how your story would generally unfold, and the types of scenes you might like to see happen. This brainstorming is all about the macro and big picture, so don’t worry about the specific details just yet. When the plot starts falling into place, then slip those specifics into the story and build from there.

If you get stuck...

If you get really stuck, try going right to your ending (even if it’s still vague) and working backward. What has to happen for the ending to turn out that way? What steps get the protagonist there? What happens to get to that point? Keep going backward until you’re at the beginning and have a clearer picture on how this story starts.

Plotting conceptually is a fun and handy way to brainstorm a novel without getting bogged down in the details of the story. It gives you permission to block out the rough lines of the novel until you have a solid framework to color and shade with the specifics of your idea.

Have you ever plotting a novel conceptually? Do you think it might help you the next time you get stuck on a plot?

About Janice

Janice Hardy is the award-winning author of the teen fantasy trilogy The Healing Wars, including The Shifter, Blue Fire, and Darkfall from Balzer+Bray/Harper Collins. She also writes the Grace Harper urban fantasy series for adults under the name, J.T. Hardy. When she's not writing fiction, she runs the popular writing site Fiction University, and has written multiple books on writing, including Understanding Show, Don't Tell (And Really Getting It), Plotting Your Novel: Ideas and Structure, and the Revising Your Novel: First Draft to Finished Draft series. Sign up for her newsletter and receive 25 ways to Strengthen Your Writing Right Now free.

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Top image from peshkov on depositphotos.

by Ellen Buikema

Words have power. As a writer, you can create characters you loathe or love, sometimes a bit of both. 

It’s essential to know your main characters’ backgrounds, strengths, flaws, and personalities. These fictional folks will evolve as you create their stories. In Part 1, we explored the character’s background.

Let’s take a look at:

Personality

Personality helps to determine a character's actions, motivations, and relationships.

A character's personality is a combination of behaviors, attitudes, and traits that make them unique individuals. A well-developed personality makes for relatable, believable characters.

Starting a new story, you usually have a general idea of who your characters are or will be. Start with the basics: age, gender, hair, eye, and skin color.

To create memorable characters that pull you into the story:

Try a Personality Test

Giving your creation a personality test is a fun way to explore your character’s ideas. The Myers-Briggs and Enneagram tests are the most common. These tests can be helpful tools for fleshing out your characters’ personalities.

The Myers-Briggs Test

The four fundamental aspects of the Myers-Briggs are:

• Favorite world: Focus on the outer world, Extroverts (E) versus the inner world, Introverts (I)
• Information: Take in information as Sensing (S) versus interpret and add meaning to information as Intuitive (N)
• Decisions: Make decisions by first looking at logic and consistency as Thinkers (T) versus considering people and circumstances involved using Feeling (F)
• Structure: Make firm decisions, Judging (J), versus remaining open to new information and options, Perceiving (P)

The Myers-Briggs test costs about $60, but there are free options available.

Enneagrams

The Enneagram is a personality theory, based on the idea that everyone has a unique “essence” or personality structure. Ennea means nine, and gram means figure.

Here are the nine different types:

1. The Strict Perfectionists is all about doing the “right” thing. They are idealistic, principled, purposeful, self-controlled, and seek perfection. Molly Gray from The Maid by Nita Prose.
2. The Considerate Helpers may over-involve themselves and risk being manipulated. They are caring, demonstrative, generous, people-pleasers, and possessive. Nicholas “Nick” Andros from Stephen King’s The Stand.
3. The Competitive Achievers: risk becoming overstretched and may cheat to win, are success-oriented, pragmatic, adaptive, driven, and image-conscious. Hermione Granger from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. 
4. The Intense Creatives: emotionally attuned to their environment and focused on their needs. They are sensitive, withdrawn, expressive, dramatic, self-absorbed, and temperamental. Agatha Christie’s, Hercule Poirot.
5. The Quiet Specialists seem socially awkward and defend their isolation. They are intense, cerebral, perceptive, innovative, and secretive. Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Canan Doyle.
6. The Loyal Skeptics: have a deep need to feel safe, running the gamut from self-reliant and grounded to paranoid. They are committed, security-driven, engaging, responsible, anxious, and suspicious. Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.
7. The Enthusiastic Visionaries: seek joyful variety and tend toward impulsive pleasure-seeking. They’re busy, spontaneous, versatile, and scattered. Holly Golightly from Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
8. The Active Controllers: are forces of nature who mask their insecurities with a tough exterior. They are powerful, self-confident, decisive, confrontational, and want to serve a greater good. Indiana Jones from Campbell Black’s Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.
9. The Adaptive Peacemakers: diplomatic group mediators who are easygoing, self-respecting, receptive, reassuring, and agreeable, and have a hard time saying “no.” Samwise Gamgee from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Resources:

Personality Path has a free Enneagram Type test to use to help develop your characters’ personalities.

Don Riso’s Personality Types: Using Enneagram for Self-Discovery is highly rated and digs deep into each type’s mindset and behavior.

Working with character’s test results

Consider what you already know about your characters. Will your romantic lead be dark and brooding like Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff? Is their love interest sociable but stuck-up? Use these personality basics as the start for your assessment, answering the questions that best match the traits planned for the character.

After completing the test, note your character's personality type and insights in a separate document or whatever you use for easy reference.

When developing a character's personality, keep these points in mind:

The fictional person’s personality must be consistent with their background and experiences. A character who grew up in a strict household may have a more “stiff” and disciplined personality than someone who grew up in a more easy-going home.

A character's personality should be easily distinguishable from that of other characters in the story. Each fictional person needs his or her own traits and quirks.

Like the walking, talking people in the real world, characters should be complex, multifaceted beings. No one is totally good or evil, so a character should have both positive and negative traits. Even a living horror may feel comfortable petting animals.

The character's personality should be capable of emotional growth. Fictional people should be able to evolve over the telling of the story.

Finally, a fictional person's personality must be important to the plot. A character's behaviors and traits should move the story forward and influence their decisions. Their personalities are core to the plot.

Get to know your fictional people, and you’ll create a story with multifaceted characters that readers will love or love to hate.  

What personality types do you enjoy creating for your characters? How do you decide on personality characteristics for your fictional people? What characters would you add to the enneagrams?

* * * * * *

About Ellen

Author, speaker, and former teacher, Ellen L. Buikema has written non-fiction for parents, and The Adventures of Charlie Chameleon chapter book series with stories encouraging the development of empathy—sprinkling humor wherever possible. Her Works in Progress are The Hobo Code, YA historical fiction and The Crystal Key, MG Magical Realism/ Sci-Fi, a glaze of time travel.

Find her at https://ellenbuikema.com or on Amazon.

Top Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

by Sandy Vaile

Have you ever wondered why pulling all the pieces of a novel together feels like such hard work? Me too.

Each author has a different process, but if you love feeling immersed in the lives and emotional dramas of fictional characters, then shifting your focus from external plot to internal state, could be the perfect way to allow your plot to be revealed organically.

While writing my third novel I had a revelation that changed my approach to scene planning forever.

Harnessing motivated characters helped me connect internal and external plot threads.

The Evolution of this Story Revelation

For a long time, I wondered why story structure was so difficult. I felt like I’d learnt the various storytelling techniques, but pulling them all together on the changing landscape of plot and character development was a different matter.

I started to doubt myself.

Was I the only one struggling to overlay their ideas onto beats and turning points? Everything I’d learnt about three acts, hero’s journeys and beats was still relevant, but there was some sort of disconnect when it came to pulling all the threads of a story into a cohesive and compelling plot.

Then it struck me!

If I shifted my approach from what external events needed to happen, to why the main character was there, suddenly all the pieces of the plot clicked together like DNA nucleotides, forming the unique genetic sequence for this story.

What Does this Look Like on the Page?

Don’t panic, it’s not as tricky as it sounds and you don’t have to be a geneticist to apply it to your own stories. All you have to do is tie each scene in the book to the character arc of one of the main characters.  

To achieve this perspective shift you need to:

• Develop complex and motivated main characters.
• Use situations to trigger information readers need to learn.
• Wring every last drop of conflict from each situation.

The Significance of Character Motivations

The struggles of characters are what leave a lasting impression on our hearts and souls after reading a book. So, we need to connect readers to them at every opportunity. Make the most of their psychological conflicts and show them struggling between what they want and need, or what they know they should do and what they are driven to do.

I can hear some of you saying, “That’s all well and good if you’re writing a character-driven story, but what about plot-driven stories?”

Even plot -driven stories have driven characters at their core. Take “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien for instance. Although Frodo is one of many main characters and the same world events would play out whether he was there or not, he still goes through personal struggles. We grow to love him and are eager to follow his journey and root for his success.

Benefits of Driven Characters

• Readers feel like they are more intimately involved in the character’s lives by peeking inside their thought processes and feeling the angst of their emotional drama.
• Shows character development through the way they overcome personal struggles.
• Has inbuilt conflict that drives their choices and reactions around external events.
• Character motivations naturally cause them to take action, which builds story momentum and helps steer authors away from stagnant narration.

When a character is suitably motivated, it makes their desire to reach their goal more desperate, which in turn pushes them right to the edge of their capabilities and principles.

In short, character motivations create story momentum.

How to Leverage Situations to Reveal Information

So, how do you shift your focus from external information to the character’s emotional state?

Go from WHAT to WHY.

When we focus on what happens next (external events) the choices around how that scene plays out are often random. Sure, there might be limiting factors to where the information is located, but it can usually happen in a variety of locations, e.g. a clue could be found in a house, the street or a library, and a fight could happen in a shadowy alley or deserted carpark.

Whereas, when we approach a scene thinking about where the character is on their emotional journey (their emotional state at that point in the story), it conjures specific locations, situations and other characters in our minds. Places, circumstances and people who are going to cause the character to struggle with why they want their goals, e.g.:

• What decision they are conflicted about;
• What universal truth they are denying; or
• To what degree they are ready to face the fears around achieving their goal.

Now, imagine putting your character in a situation that will force them to confront all of these things.

That’s powerful!

Write Compelling Scenes from Emotional States

Scenes are the building blocks of fictional stories and each one needs to pull its weight in raising the reader’s curiosity, sustaining tension, advancing the external plot and character arcs, creating an appropriate atmosphere and leading readers to the next scene.

Lets take a look at an example of how a character’s emotional state can translate to actions and a compelling scene.

Example – Emotional state to a compelling scene

In “Inheriting Fear” by Sandy Vaile, early on in the story I needed to show that the most important person in the main character, Mya’s, life was her mother. My thought process went like this …  

Mya’s whole life has been structured to enable her to provide the best quality of life for her mother. So, I need to show what this close relationship and how it came to be.

But her mother is confined to a nursing home, so that is the natural location for the scene. From there I can picture what her room would look like, the gardens, the types of people who would be there. Now I have a vivid image of the setting in my mind.

When Mya vists her mother, it would be natural for her to worry about the cost of keeping her mother and how their roles have been reversed, being her mother’s guardian. That thought naturally leads to the tragic events that put her mother into care.  

See how starting with Mya’s emotional state at that point in the story, leads to a specific situation and raises questions that reveal her backstory, motivations and inner fears?

This makes for an emotive scene that tugs at reader’s heart strings, all the while exposing the deeper motivations and desires of the character.

Link Internal and External Plot Threads

Internal and external events are inextricably linked. Our inner desires, beliefs and emotions drive us to take external actions. Even when external events are out of our control — meaning we didn’t choose to do something but it happened to us — our reactions are driven by our emotional state.

How does this look when planning a scene?

Rather than trying to figure out how to get characters from one external crisis to another, use the character arc to drive their reactions and decisions.

Scene planning process

Note: This is just the way I do things; you should do what suits your process.

When planning to write a scene, I will have already:

• Brainstormed a lit of external events that could potentially happen, e.g. clues to find, information to discover, people to meet, obstacles to get in the way.
• Know the main character’s emotional journey, i.e. what they need and believe at the beginning of the story and the opposite state at the end of the story.
• Listed the gradual changes/realizations they need to undergo/face to enable them to transition from one emotional state to the other.

Then I:

• Determine the emotional state the character is in at that point in the story.
• Brainstorm situations I could put the character in, which would force them to face their emotional blindspot (inner struggle/false belief).
• Flesh out that situation with the setting and other characters (if relevant) that naturally evolve from it.
• Determine what external information/event would logically (the character would realistically choose or find themselves in) need to happen next, e.g. discovering information, finding a clue or meeting a person.

The way they react to that external event is based on their inner desires, beliefs and motivations, determining their reactions and decisions about how to proceed.

Example – Internal reaction leads to the next external action

The emotional turmoil from the above example from “Inheriting Fear” is all happening at the same time as the external plot is progressing. Mya needed to know her mother was okay, which leads her to think about her past and future. She discovers missing jewellery (external event), which triggers an emotional and physical reaction. She’s upset and wants to find who took the jewellery.

In turn, her emotional state informs her decision about how to proceed (the next external actions).  

The Ultimate Scene Planning Mindset

For easier scene planning, try shifting your focus from how to deliver the information readers needed to know, to how to show the emotional drama the character was experiencing. Let the situation they’re in grow organically from their emotional state, connecting their inner desires to external information/events and resulting in compelling reading that draws readers into the story.

They key is to put characters into action and give them good reasons to keep moving by ensuring they have desperate desires, strong motivations and tangible stakes.

You deserve to plan a cohesive novel you’re confident to finish.

How do you handle planning your scenes and does any part of it gives you trouble?

If you’re ready to develop complex characters, grab a copy of my free Character Profile template, which goes beyond appearance and personality, delving into backstory and questions that help you dig deep and figure out what is driving the character and how they would react in certain situations.

Sandy’s flexible outlining method suits plotters and pantsers.

If you are stuck in a rut of writing novels you never finish or aren’t sure how to fix, then it’s your lucky day. I’m offering the first 5 WITS readers a massive 20% discount on my 3-month Novel Navigation Program (use the code WITS-NOVEL-PLANNING-20 at the checkout).

About Sandy:

Sandy Vaile is a traditionally published author, writing romantic-suspense for Simon & Schuster US, with more than a decade of experience in the industry, who empowers authors to write novels they are proud to share with the world (and which get noticed by agents, publishers and readers), through coaching, courses and developmental editing.

Sandy is also a motorbike-riding daredevil who isn’t content with a story unless there’s a courageous heroine and a dead body. Living in the McLaren Vale wine region means lots of prosseco and cheese platters in her down time.

Connect with Sandy Vaile on her website or social media.

Top image by Tobias Brunner from Pixabay. Other images provided by Sandy Vaile.