Novel Planning Rules

WHAT AM I PLOTTING?

This week I sat down and wrote out the plot of The Story. Sounds simple, right?

Well, it wasn’t. It didn’t happen in just one sitting, or even two or three. In the past, I’ve plotted almost every project as I’m writing it. I’m what the kids these days call a pantser. I like to fly by the seat of my pants, make things up as I go, let the characters write the story for me.

But that hasn’t always worked for me in the past.

I’ve run into the typical problem—without a map, I write myself off the road and end up in the ditch with an unfinished story.

About a year ago, on my longest project to date, I decided to try the planning method. I made an incredibly vague outline utilizing Christopher Booker’s “Meta Plot,” which consists of five stages:

Anticipation

Dream

Frustration

Nightmare

Resolution.

It helped me reach my goal of 80k words for that project, but my roadmap wasn’t quite up to par yet, and my plot still wasn’t tight.

So, for The Story, I followed some Planning Rules that I’ve read from those who know. I won’t blame them on anyone in particular.

PLANNING RULE #1: WRITE OUT YOUR SCENES/CHAPTERS ON NOTECARDS, AND THEN ARRANGE THEM IN THE BEST ORDER FOR YOUR STORY

Whew. Okay. I’ll admit, I was not looking forward to this. I barely had a premise for The Story, if you’ll remember from last week, let alone an ending.

After a lot of staring into space, I came up with this for my first chapter’s notecard:

Bus breaks down. P reflects. Character-building flashbacks.

Snore. I decided not to worry about names for now, so P is my protagonist. And this first chapter sounds super boring, I know. But in my head, these few words blossom into rowdy kids falling silent as the bus rolls to a bumpy stop on the side of the road, then erupting into chaos again when a bit of smoke swirls out of the hood. And in the midst of it all, our protagonist, burying her head under her quilt, wondering why she had agreed to go to summer camp in the first place.

My premise didn’t get me very far, and I had to employ some of my brainstorming techniques from last week to get me through the whole story—namely, I spent every spare moment trying to push the conflict forward in my mind.

I just wanted to start writing, but I stuck to this Rule. And by the end, I actually had a pretty satisfactory storyline, complete with a doorway to another world, a castle in the woods, and an evil force that can only be defeated with the protagonist’s newfound powers. Oh, and a roadmap for the story. More on that later.

PLANNING RULE # 2: USE A TRIED-AND-TRUE PLOT STRUCTURE

Nerds (like me) who study literary theory know that even the oldest stories generally have a basic structure. For The Story, I looked at two of them, keeping Booker’s five-step pattern in mind for both. (I could go on and on about Booker’s Meta-Plot, but this is about trying new things.)

The first plot structure is The Hero’s Journey. Scholars like Joseph Campbell have refined it over the years and apply it especially to more mythological stories. It includes stages such as The Call to Adventure, Crossing the Threshold, Abyss, and Atonement. It’s basically a big circle, where the hero starts somewhere he’s comfortable, and then returns to that place at the end after being changed by his big adventure.

I realized that fits pretty nicely with the more modern Three-Act Plot Structure. This is a structure with—you guessed it—three acts. Each one ends with the stakes being raised. I’ve seen it depicted as a rollercoaster, where each hill is higher than the one before it.

In The Story, our three hills are looking a little something like this:

1. The protagonist has to pass an endurance test in order to be accepted by the people she finds in this strange new world.
2. The castle is attacked by an evil force, and the protagonist is stuck outside with no one to protect her.
3. The protagonist has to defeat the evil force, save her friends, and find a way back to their world.

After each hill, the action is reduced by slower scenes before the stakes start building again for the next peak of intensity.

THE VERDICT

After I cranked the whole story out and stuck my notecards on the wall, I was actually pretty impressed with my results this week. I feel organized. I have a map. I still wrote it chronologically—I don’t know how it’s possible to write random scenes and then put them in an order, because each one of mine led directly to the next, but whatever.

The details of the magic system aren’t there, and I’m a little worried that my characterization will feel a little stiff since I’m not letting my characters build naturally, but I’ll check in after I’ve actually done some writing to let you know if I will continue to be a planner, or if I’ll go back to my pantsy ways.

Speaking of writing, next week we put pen to paper and begin The Story! I want to hear from you—what tips and warnings have you heard about the first line or chapter of a story?