plot / ’plät / n.:
1. A small piece of ground, generally used for burying dead people, including writers.
2. A plan, as for designing a building or novel.
Plot happens.
You might be one of those writers who likes to have the story all worked out in your mind before you write your novel. You preplan, plan, and revise the plan before writing. Maybe you have index cards all over your wall or you store your scenes in your computer.
Or you might be one of those seat-of-the-pants writers who loves to plop down each day at the computer or over a pad of paper and just write, letting the story flow without planning, anxious to see what your wild writer’s mind comes up with.
You could also be a ’tweener who does a bit of planning but still seeks some surprise and spontaneity in the daily output of words.
No matter what kind of novelist you are, there’s one thing you will have when you’ve completed your manuscript — a plot.
It might be a lousy plot, a disjointed plot, a mess, or a masterpiece. But the plot will be there, staring you in the face.
The only question at that point will be, “Does it work?”
By “work” I mean connect with readers. That’s the function of plot after all. The reading experience is supposed to transport people, move them through the power of story. Plot is the power grid that makes it happen.
You may be one of those writers who doesn’t care if your novel connects with readers. You write what you want, the way you want it, and that’s that. Writing is its own reward. If someone happens to like it, fine. But you don’t want to be bothered with bourgeois concepts like plot.
Fine. No one’s forcing you to connect with readers. But if you want readers, if you dream of writing novels that get published and sell, then you have to give plotting its due. Because that’s what agents, publishers, and readers think about when they open books. Consciously or not, they are asking questions:
These are all plot questions, and if you want to make it as a writer of novel-length fiction, you must learn how to answer them satisfactorily, wonderfully, surprisingly.
That’s what this book is about.
“What about character?” you might ask. “Can’t I just write about a fascinating character and see what happens?”
Yes. The what happens is your plot. And, as with any plot, it can turn out flabby and incoherent even with great characters. This book will help you avoid that outcome.
How about a stream-of-consciousness novel? One that’s all about the language, and can’t be limited by such mundane matters as plotting?
It’s a stretch to call such a thing a novel. Fiction, yes. I’ll even accept experimental novel. It might be fascinating in its own right, but is it really a story? I suppose that’s an academic debate.
But if you’re interested in selling your books, plot is something you need to wrestle with.
And wrestling makes you stronger. Even if you ultimately decide, as a writer, that you want to forget about plotting conventions, the effort to understand them will serve you well. You’ll become a better novelist.
Some writers, critics, and other assorted literati sniff at plotting as a tool of craft. A synonym for plotting, in this mindset, is slumming, something decent people just don’t do.
Author Jean Hanff Korelitz sums up this thinking. She wrote about her experience as a young editorial assistant in New York trying to be a novelist. She and her contemporaries were snobs about literary prose, she says, elevating wordsmithery above such mundane matters as telling a good story.
But then Ms. Korelitz ended up writing a legal thriller, and discovered — gasp — that she liked it! Her mind was changed, as you’ll see below in this excerpt from “Story Love,” which appeared on Salon.com:
When you get right down to it, there’s something uniquely satisfying in being gripped by a great plot, in begrudging whatever real-world obligations might prevent you from finding out what happens next. And it is especially satisfying to surrender to an author who is utterly in command of a thrilling and original story, an author capable of playing us like fish, of letting us get worried, then riled up, then complacent and then finally blowing us away when the final shocks are delivered.
Ms. Korelitz ultimately concluded that, while glorious prose is a fine thing, “without an enthralling story, it’s just so much verbal tapioca.”
Now, if verbal tapioca is your thing, we have a First Amendment that guarantees your right to produce it.
But if you want readers, you must consider plot, whether you sniff at it or not.
Plot and structure both serve the larger enterprise — story. In the end, that’s what this whole novel thing is about. Telling a story in a way that transports the reader. Let’s talk a little about that.
If a reader picks up a book and remains in his own world, there was no point in picking up the book in the first place. What the reader seeks is an experience that is other. Other than what he normally sees each day.
Story is how he gets there. A good story transports the reader to a new place via experience. Not through arguments or facts, but through the illusion that life is taking place on the page. Not his life. Someone else’s. Your characters’ lives.
Author James N. Frey calls this the fictive dream, and that’s accurate. When we dream, we experience that as reality.
I still get those late-for-an-important-event dreams. When I was in school, it was usually a test. Lately, it’s been a speaking engagement or a meeting with some important person relating to my work.
I’m late, and I realize it with about two minutes left, though I’m miles away and can move only in slow motion. And everything I do seems to create a further obstacle.
You see what’s happening? Conflict. Story. Experience.
I’ll leave it to the professionals to determine what this indicates about my psyche. But as writers, we need to understand that story is how readers dream. They demand it.
Plot and structure help them get into the dream and keep them there.
Agent Donald Maass, who has written a superb book called Writing the Breakout Novel, is of the opinion that story is what sells the book — not advertising, not a huge promotional budget — but story. And he believes the key to long-term success as a novelist is the ability to write book after book that builds up an audience. How? The power of story:
What causes consumers to get excited about a work of fiction? Reviews? Few see them. Awards or nominations? Most folks are oblivious to them. Covers? Good ones can cause a consumer to lift a book from its shelf, but covers are only wrapping. Classy imprints? When was the last time you purchased a novel because of the logo on the spine? Big advances? Does the public know, let alone care? Agents with clout? Sad to say, that is not a cause of consumer excitement. In reality there is one reason, and one reason only, that readers get excited about a novel: great storytelling.
Plot and structure help you reach that mark.
In college, I signed up for chess lessons from a fellow who promised I’d be able to compete with master players. He assured me he could teach the basic principles that, if applied, would give me a solid foundation for a good game against anyone. Though I might not win, I’d certainly not look like a fool. From there it would be a matter of applying my talent (if I had any) to study and practice.
He was right. I learned to play a solid game of chess. And while I probably can’t go more than fifteen moves with Garry Kasparov — one of the world’s greatest chess players — at least he’d know he wasn’t playing a chucklehead. By applying the principles I learned, I can play a decent game of chess.
It’s the same with plotting the novel. There are a few basics that, if understood and applied, will help you come up with a solid plot every time. How far you go from there is, like most things, a matter of plain old hard work and practice.
After analyzing hundreds of plots, I’ve developed a simple set of foundational principles called the LOCK system. LOCK stands for Lead, Objective, Confrontation, and Knockout. We’ll talk about each of these in detail later. For now, here’s a quick overview. Even if you get nothing else out of this book, a grip on the LOCK system will serve you well your whole writing career.
Imagine a guy on a New York City street corner with a Will Work for Food sign. Interesting? Not very. We’ve seen it many times before, and we wouldn’t stand and watch him for a minute.
But what if the guy was dressed in a tuxedo, and his sign said Will Tap Dance for Food? Hmm, a little more interesting. Maybe he has a yellow pad and the sign says, Will Write Novel for Food. I might buy him a hamburger to see what he comes up with.
The point here is that a strong plot starts with an interesting Lead character. In the best plots, that Lead is compelling, someone we have to watch throughout the course of the novel.
This does not mean the Lead has to be entirely sympathetic. This point hit me one day years ago when I was browsing the paperbacks at my local library.
I was looking at the new releases when I saw they’d brought in a new paperback version of An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser. I’d never read it and didn’t know much about Dreiser, though I knew vaguely that his literary reputation has suffered in recent years.
But I also knew the novel was the basis of one of my all-time favorite movies, A Place in the Sun, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.
So I checked it out, all 814 pages of it, not expecting to actually read the whole thing, but just to skim and see how similar it was to the movie.
Well, I had one of those wondrous reading experiences where I got sucked in. Big time. And as a budding novelist, I asked myself why. The book’s style is everything the critics said it was: ponderous, heavy-handed, at times sloppy. On page 156 is the sentence: “Gilbert chilled and bristled.” And on page 157: “Gilbert bristled and chilled.” I couldn’t make that up.
In fact, the New York Times once called An American Tragedy the “worst written great book ever.” But something makes it a great book, even though the Lead character, Clyde Griffiths, is not a nice guy. We first meet Clyde, the son of fundamentalist evangelists, at sixteen, and then watch as he descends to the point that he lets his pregnant lover drown.
Why does it work?
Because Clyde is compelling, though negative. Because Dreiser gets us into his head, there is a “car wreck” dynamic at work here. Just as people slow down to look at wreckage, we can’t resist seeing what happens to fully drawn human beings who make an unalterable mess of their lives. A skilled novelist can make us feel that “there but for the grace of God go I.”
(Note to readers: This book uses the simplest model — one Lead character involved in the main plot — for teaching purposes. Mastering this will enable you to approach increasingly complicated situations later, for example, a multi-viewpoint novel. See chapter eight for more on complex plots.)
Back to our Will Work for Food guy. What if he tossed down his sign, put a parachute on his back, and started climbing the Empire State Building?
Interest zooms. Why?
This character has an objective. A want. A desire.
Objective is the driving force of fiction. It generates forward motion and keeps the Lead from just sitting around.
An objective can take either of two forms: to get something or to get away from something.
Solid plots have one and only one dominant objective for the Lead character. This forms the “story question” — will the Lead realize her objective?
You want readers to worry about the story question, so the objective has to be essential to the well-being of the Lead. If the Lead doesn’t get it (or get away from it), her life will take a tremendous hit for the worse.
Here are a few hints on making that objective crucial.
If the objective is related to staying alive, that always fits the bill. Most suspense novels have the threat of death hanging over the Lead from the start. Death can also hang over others — Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs is driven to stop Buffalo Bill before he kills another innocent victim.
Not all objectives have to involve death, however. The essential thing is that it is crucial to that Lead’s sense of well-being.
Consider Oscar in Neil Simon’s play, The Odd Couple. He is a very happy slob. Nothing pleases him more than smoky poker games in his apartment, and he not cleaning up afterward. He takes in his suicidal friend, Felix, out of compassion. But Felix is a clean nut. Eventually, this drives Oscar crazy. If he doesn’t get rid of Felix, his happy life as a slob will be ruined! The story works because Simon establishes just how important being sloppy is to Oscar’s happiness.
Now our human fly is halfway up the Empire State Building. We already know he’s interesting because he has an objective, and with a little imagination, you can think up a reason why this is crucial to his well-being.
Is there anything we can do to ratchet up the engrossment level? Yes! New York City cops are trying to stop him. They have plans to nab him around floor 65.Worse yet, a mad sniper across Fifth Avenue has him in his sights. Suddenly, things are a lot more interesting.
The reason is confrontation. Opposition from characters and outside forces brings your story fully to life. If your Lead moves toward his objective without anything in his way, we deprive readers of what they secretly want: worry. Readers want to fret about the Lead, keeping an intense emotional involvement all the way through the novel.
Some wise old scribe once put it this way: “Get your protagonist up a tree. Throw rocks at him. Then get him down.”
Throwing rocks means putting obstacles in your Lead’s way. Make things tough on him. Never let him off easy.
I once asked an old sports writer why he thought boxing was so popular. He smacked his fist into his hand. “Pow!” he said, letting his arm fall like a sack of potatoes.
People watch boxing for the knockout, he explained. They’ll accept a decision, but they prefer to see one fighter kissing the canvas. What they hate is a draw. That doesn’t satisfy anyone.
Readers of commercial fiction want to see a knockout at the end. A literary novel can play with a bit more ambiguity. In either case, the ending must have knockout power.
A great ending can leave the reader satisfied, even if the rest of the book is somewhat weak (assuming the reader decides to stick around until the end). But a weak ending will leave the reader with a feeling of disappointment, even if the book up to that point is strong.
So take your Lead through the journey toward her objective, and then send the opposition to the mat.
Our human fly can make it to the top victoriously or fall tragically. He can crawl through a window that is a metaphor for a new life. The range of endings is massive.
Personally, I’d like to see him make it and write a best-selling novel about the experience.
While there are a number of plot varieties (see chapter twelve for a discussion of patterns in plot), you can boil them all down and fit them into the LOCK system. A Lead with an intense objective, thrust into confrontation, runs through the story until it ends.
Let’s see how this stacks up against some popular plots.
How about Love? Sure, that’s simple. Boy wants girl. Girl denies boy his objective. He battles to win her love. He confronts her resistance by buying her flowers, singing her songs, protecting her from bad guys and all that romantic stuff. He gets her at the end or not. That’s one variety of the love plot.
You can substitute the boy’s and girl’s families as the opposing forces, and you come up with another variety of the love story. See Romeo and Juliet.
Take another plot, Change. Here, the plot focuses on an inner transformation in the Lead character. The Lead desires to stay as he is. Forces arise that challenge his complacency. He tries to resist the forces. But he is overcome at the end, and he changes. See A Christmas Carol.
Objectives can be external or internal. The confrontation can be physical or psychological. But the LOCK system works in all cases.
Your book can be literary or commercial, and you have a huge platter of plot varieties to choose from. But if you keep a compelling Lead battling to achieve his desire, you’re going to have a solid story every time. As novelist and writing teacher Barnaby Conrad puts it, “Once you get a character with a problem, a serious problem, ‘plotting’ is just a fancy name for how he or she tries to get out of the predicament.”
The difference between a literary and a commercial plot is a matter of feel and emphasis.
A literary plot often is more leisurely in its pace. Literary fiction is usually more about the inner life of a character than it is about the fast-paced action.
A commercial plot, on the other hand, is mostly about action, things happening to the characters from the outside.
A commercial plot often feels like this:
A literary plot often feels like this:
Of course these are overly simplistic diagrams. There can be both literary and commercial elements in a book.
Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan reads like a literary novel — what happens inside the first-person narrator is primary — while moving ahead like a commercial crime novel.
The strength of Stephen King’s commercial plots is in his characterizations. He always seems to be writing about real people, and not merely players for his high-concept concoctions.
Literary fiction is much more comfortable with ambiguities. The endings may be downers or leave the reader wondering. We don’t know what’s going to happen to Holden at the end of The Catcher in the Rye, and that’s part of the power of the book.
In commercial fiction, you usually have the good guy winning over the bad guy.
Sometimes literary fiction is called character driven, and commercial fiction, plot driven. Plot driven usually means heavy on the action and light on character work. Character driven, on the other hand, often implies a slower story with less action and more interior work.
I find this to be an arbitrary and unhelpful distinction. All plots are character driven. Without a character facing trouble that is understandable to the reader, you don’t have a plot at all. That’s why LOCK begins with Lead.
Further, you can have all the action in the world, but if your characters don’t ring true, your story will fail.
Instead, I will use the more common markers literary and commercial if only because that’s how bookstores and critics and readers often think.
But plots need characters, and characters need plots.
Some writers object to thinking about plot because it may lead to formulaic writing. They miss a critical distinction. Why does something become a formula in the first place? Because it works!
Here is a formula for an omelet: Crack a couple of eggs. Scramble them. Heat up a skillet. Butter it. Pour in the eggs. Cook them a bit. Add ingredients. Fold the eggs over the ingredients. Serve.
This is a formula that works. But notice the variables.
Depending on the cook and the experience level, the omelet can be delicious, a disaster, or something in between.
And with the addition of certain spices, the flavor can vary.
It’s still an omelet, it’s still a formula, but it has a whole range of outcomes.
Same with plotting. There are principles that work. But used alone they don’t guarantee an original novel. You still have to add your spices, your skills, your talent.
Knowing why plots work is freeing. Master the principles, and you’re at liberty to add all of your personal touches.
Good chefs have their secret spices, ingredients they use to give their creations something extra and unique. For writers, the spices you add to make your plot your own include characters, setting, and dialogue.
In his book, The Art of Creative Writing, Lajos Egri asserts that the key to originality in fiction comes from characters. “Living, vibrating human beings are still the secret and magic formula of great and enduring writing. Read, or better, study the immortals and you will be forced to conclude that their unusual penetration into human character is what has kept their work fresh and alive through the centuries. …”
Note the word formula.
Let’s test this.
What is it that sets Dickens apart in our minds? Fagin and Wilkins Micawber; Uriah Heep and Miss Havisham; Peggotty and Barkis. Characters who sparkle in his plots like jewels.
How about a more contemporary example? I mentioned Stephen King. Study his work and you will see that his character development is every bit as original as his plot lines. The two work together. Take a look at the myriad characters in The Stand; you will not find a dullard anywhere.
Don’t let any of your characters plop into your plot like plain vanilla. Spice them up.
Can you take us to a place we’ve never been before? That will enliven any plot. And I don’t necessarily mean some place far away from home, although that’s an option.
It could mean simply setting your scenes in places that are fresh.
How many times do we have conversations between two potential lovers in a restaurant? Back and forth they go, with the only original element being what they are served by the waiter.
Why not put them in a tree house? Or on the subway stuck in a tunnel? Or underneath the boardwalk by the sea?
Setting also includes the details of life surrounding the Lead character. Tom Clancy created a whole new genre called techno-thriller because he put his hero, Jack Ryan, into a world of complex military hardware. That was new.
Readers love to read about the details of other people’s working lives.
Do research. Immerse yourself in some occupation, either by training for it or by interviewing an expert about it.
Whatever you do, don’t show characters practicing their chosen professions in the same old predictable way. Dig deeper and find original details. You can still write about cops and lawyers and truck drivers, but only if you give them updated challenges and settings. Find out what they are and spice up your writing.
Dialogue is a great opportunity to spice up your plots. Don’t waste it!
Dialogue helps to create original characters and move the plot along. If it isn’t doing either of those things, it probably should be cut.
While the subject of dialogue alone is worthy of another book in this series, here are a few tips for freshening plot through dialogue. First, make sure your characters have unique ways of speaking. No two characters should sound exactly alike. And second, the words they use should tell us something about who they are.
If a character is the charge-ahead type, he’ll speak that way. His words will be forceful and direct. Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon is like that. Here he confronts the odd little intruder, Joel Cairo:
I’ve got you by the neck, Cairo. You’ve walked in and tied yourself up, plenty strong enough to suit the police, with last night’s killing. Well, now you’ll have to play with me or else.
But the dandy Cairo, smelling faintly of gardenia, uses fancier verbiage:
I made somewhat extensive inquiries about you before taking any action, and was assured that you were far too reasonable to allow other considerations to interfere with profitable business relations.
We know, simply from the words, that these are two very different characters. Think of dialogue as weapons used in the plot. Plot is about confrontation. It’s a battle. So verbal weapons are naturally going to be employed by characters who are trying to outmaneuver each other.
There is a whole range of weaponry to choose from — anger, epithets, pouting, name-calling, dodging — virtually anything from the arsenal of human interaction.
John D.MacDonald’s The Executioners (the basis for the two Cape Fear movies) is about a lawyer, Sam Bowden, whose family is stalked by the sadistic rapist Max Cady. Cady’s first act is poisoning the family dog, Marilyn. Sam has not been totally up front with his wife, Carol. She challenges him:
“I’m not a child and I’m not a fool and I resent being … overprotected.”
Her volley is direct, telling him she resents the coddling. Sam responds:
“I should have told you. I’m sorry.”
Sam’s apology is meant to diminish his wife’s anger. But his words ring hollow to her, and she continues to advance:
“So now this Cady can roam around at will and poison our dog and work his way up to the children. Which do you think he’ll start on first? The oldest or the youngest?”
“Carol, honey. Please.”
“I’m a hysterical woman? You are so damn right. I am a hysterical woman.”
Carol uses sarcasm, Sam tries again to soften her up, and she responds with a bitter observation and a curse word. Sam the lawyer tries another tack:
“We haven’t any proof it was Cady.”
She threw a towel into the sink. “Listen to me. I have proof it was Cady. I’ve got that proof. It’s not the kind of proof you would like. No evidence. No testimony. Nothing legalistic. I just know.”
Seeing that this has no effect on her husband, Carol quickly shifts and brings out her heavy artillery:
“What kind of a man are you? This is your family. Marilyn was part of your family. Are you going to look up all the precedents and prepare a brief?”
She has attacked both his manhood and his profession. Sam attempts an answer but Carol cuts him off (interruptions are good weapons, too):
“You don’t know how —”
“I don’t know anything. This is happening because of something you did a long time ago.”
“Something I had to do.”
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t have. You tell me the man hates you. You don’t think he’s sane. So do something about him!”
Carol wants instant action, and Sam knows he can’t provide it. The stress of the situation brings out weaponlike dialogue.
The plot moves ahead with originality and pace because dialogue is used as a weapon.
The choices you make for scenes, the raw “what happens” material, also contribute to your spice.
But our minds naturally jump to clichés as we decide what to write next.
That’s why it’s critical to develop the sort of imagination that considers several possibilities before deciding which scene to write.
You can do this just by pausing, writing a quick list of possibilities, and waiting for something to click.
Do this even within the scene you’re writing. Maybe you start out thinking that you’ll have a cop burst into a house and engage a bad guy in a gunfight, ending with the bad guy dead.
Stop a moment. What if the cop ends up dead? Or there’s an innocent bystander in the house? Or a dog? Or there’s not really anyone there after all?
Think about it. Choose something fresh.
Set aside ten minutes of undisturbed writing time. For those ten minutes, write a freeform response to the following: When readers read my novels, I want them to feel ______ at the end. That’s because, to me, novels are ______.
Write from the gut, quickly.
When you’re done, analyze your mini-essay. What does it tell you about the type of plotter you might be? Are you suspicious of plot? Are you more concerned with the “gossamer wings” of literary style? If so, consider how your writing might be doubled in strength if you learn some plotting craft.
Take some of your favorite novels off the shelf and analyze them using the LOCK system. See how each element is at work in the books you love. Use these questions to help you:
Write a quick plot for your current idea. Use four lines, one line each for LOCK.
If you have filled in the blanks, you have the skeleton for a solid novel. The rest of this book will help you flesh it out.
Start a collection of your favorite “spices” from the novels you read. Look for:
When you come across these things, analyze them. Why do they work? What techniques did the author use?