HOW TO PLOT A NOVEL

I’ve never heard of anyone pre-planning a short story. You generally just sit down and write them. But when it comes to the creation of a full-length novel, some authors pre-plan massively before they set to work, envisaging every twist and turn of their plot and producing outlines that can sprawl for one third the length of their finished book. A friend of mine in Texas does that. And better-known authors like Robert Harris and Jilly Cooper do similar things.

But they’re still in the minority. Most people write ‘organically,’ starting off with a basic idea – or maybe just a situation in an opening chapter; maybe just a notion of an interesting character – and then seeing exactly where their imagination leads them, trusting their subconscious inner voice to guide them in the right direction.

And that’s the part a lot of other people cannot get their heads around. It sounds like an awfully risky endeavor. What if you happen to take a bad wrong turning with the plot? What if you go leading yourself up a dark blind alley, all that hard work gone for nothing?

Well now, just because there’s no solid pre-planning, that almost never means that there are no plans whatsoever. You’ll usually have a few major elements of your new book in mind before you start out on the work – a few pivotal scenes, the general tenor and direction of the plot, a couple of the characters you plan to introduce.

And it’s generally wise to have an ending visualized as well, a final scene if you can manage that. It might have altered by the time it’s finally reached. You might have even changed your mind completely as to what that ending ought to be once you have worked your way through a few dozen chapters. But do try to start out with an ending in your thoughts, even if you finish up discarding it.

In her classic work Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande called that provisional ending a raft for the writer to swim toward, and she is absolutely right, since it provides a target for you, a light at end of the long, dark tunnel that is creating a novel. Would-be authors who get stuck often do that thing simply because they had no real notion where they were headed in the first place. You don’t have to understand the finer details of your ending, but you ought to have at least a fair-sized notion of what it should be.

But you will usually already have a few building blocks for the construction of your novel when you first start out. And as you keep on working, new pivotal scenes ought to start springing up beside the handful you already have. These are pretty much like stepping stones or the important features on a road map. What you need to figure out is how precisely to negotiate your way from one point to the next, how to get from scene A to scene B and so on. And this is the stage in writing where your ‘inner voice’ – apart from leaving clues – is almost useless.

Your hero – let’s say – has gotten mixed up in a gunfight with some bad guys. He has finally prevailed, but in the course of the battle his car has been shot up so badly it will not restart. You know that your next pivotal scene takes place in San Diego, where your hero has to be in no more than twelve hours’ time. Except that right now he is slap-bang in the middle of a cornfield in Nebraska, not a nearby house in sight.

Far too many would-be writers, having written themselves into a hole like this, expect their subconscious mind to simply bail them out. Inspiration started them writing this novel, and they want it to come riding to their rescue now. And so they sit at their desks, staring blankly off into the distance, waiting for a flash of insight that will most probably never come.

This is the point at which … yes, you still need to keep looking out for those subconscious clues … but beyond that you must start relying far more on your conscious will and intellect. Because this aspect of writing a book is nothing less than simple and straightforward puzzle-solving.

Firstly, get up from that desk. Move away from your laptop screen. That half-blank page in front of you, the constant challenge that it lays down to a writer, is an unwanted distraction at the moment. You are not writing for a while. You’re simply thinking, very clearly.

Apply your general knowledge to the problem you have set yourself (see Chapter 9). And if you don’t have any on the subject, start looking things up. Is there any way your hero’s car could be repaired? And even if that’s possible, can anybody drive from Nebraska to San Diego in twelve hours? (I just went away and checked on that: traveling at legal speeds and using Hastings, NE, as a starting point, the average journey would take 21 hours and 12 minutes.) And that being the case, where would the nearest domestic airport be and how could it be reached? Or failing that – in an agrarian setting – is there such a thing as a crop dusting plane available?

Or perhaps a passing stranger happens by: he or she is driving all the way to southern California in a new Ferrari, and is planning to drive really fast. Which opens up the doors of your novel to some injections of action and excitement, quite possibly humor, not to mention the likelihood of a friendship being formed, or even a romance.

And by this stage, you might be beginning to see that – when you put your hero in the middle of that cornfield – you weren’t digging yourself into a hole at all. You have presented yourself, instead, with a whole new range of directions in which to take your storyline. Try always to adopt this kind of ‘glass half-full’ mentality when it comes to the difficulties you might face in figuring out the details of a novel. Far too many would-be writers greet a problem with a weary groan and then give up.

Exactly as with spotting clues your inner voice has left you, becoming good at this kind of process takes experience built on solid practice. The more you force yourself to solve these kinds of puzzles, then the more it will become your second nature, so that in the end your mind will be racing ahead of you, creating obstacles for your characters to overcome, finding ways to get around them and then moving on. That is what true organic writing is, the next few chapters of your story taking shape inside your head while your fingers on the keyboard are still struggling to catch up.

In that light, here’s an exercise that you can try. Forget about creating an entire plot. In fact, you don’t even need to be sitting at your laptop. Simply think up a character inside your head. Then put him or her in the worst, the most confounding situation you can think of. And then start trying to figure how to get him or her out of it. And – for the purposes of this exercise – are you allowed to use magic to that end? No, absolutely not.

Of course, it needn’t be an action situation you are trying to navigate your way through. If you’re writing – for instance – romance fiction or some other kind of human interest tale, your characters will still have obstacles to overcome. How do your two principals meet in the first place, for instance? If they don’t like each other from the start, then what exactly changes that? One or both are trapped in an unhappy relationship … how can they get out of it? How do they overcome such difficulties as guilt, resentment, upbringing and sense of duty? Your people are not in any cornfield, and the problems that they face are of a different type. But they are equally profound, and must be dealt with through the self-same process I’ve described above.

What it finally all comes down to is one single thing called ‘logic.’ Let’s take a look at another example. You’re writing heroic fantasy this time. Your warrior needs to recover a magical stone from a dark, high tower. The few doors into it are heavily guarded by enormous orcs. And your hero knows that when a human hand touches against the stone, it will begin to emit a dazzling white light, warning its guardians it is being stolen.

Logic tells you he cannot get in through any of the doors, and so he has to use some other means. So … what are they? The windows or the roof, of course. Are the tower’s walls climbable? If not, does he have a rope? If again not, is there anything around him he can make one from? But even when he’s crafted one, how to stop the noise of his ascent from reaching the sharp ears of the watchful orcs?

And so on, until you’ve figured out that entire scene. And you’ll have noticed by this stage that when I first solved that initial problem – by what route does he get in? – a whole bunch of smaller, secondary problems started to present themselves. This is in the nature of the beast that we call ‘plotting.’

But that is nothing to become anxious about. Plotting is simply the act of putting awkward puzzles in the path of your main characters, then figuring out – within the boundaries of your type of fiction – credible solutions, so they’re able to move on from that scene to the next. And what is more than likely waiting for them in the next scene?

You’ve got it. Another problem.

This article first appeared in How To Improve Your Writing: The Art of Creating Professional Fiction.

TRUST YOUR INNER VOICE

I honestly believe that, when you start out on a piece of fiction, you might not understand exactly where it’s going. But your subconscious does.

In his novel The End of the Affair – told from the first-person viewpoint of fictitious novelist Maurice Bendrix – Graham Greene discusses this in detail. And he most importantly tells us the following: When not writing, we might be busy with other things – going to the supermarket, recording our business expenses, chatting with our chums – but “the stream” of the unconscious goes on flowing regardless of all that, studying the problems in our story and pre-planning.

That is perfectly true, and I believe that I can prove it.

You spend most of the afternoon working on a new novel. Finally, you reach the end of the chapter you’ve been busy with and decide to call it a day. Your partner comes home and you talk about the day’s events. You watch the Simpsons and the TV news. You read the evening paper. Then there’s dinner, washing up. And then, when it’s round ten o’clock and you’re preoccupied with something else, the book that you were working on a few hours back suddenly pops into your head again. You abruptly realize that you’ve got some detail wrong, or ought to add more detail, or the whole plot would work better if you changed this thread to that. It might not even be the chapter you were working on that afternoon. It could be a scene you wrote last week, or one you haven’t even written yet but suddenly have definite ideas about.

But the real point is this. You weren’t consciously thinking about your book at all – you had completely different matters on your mind. The notion that just struck you came, apparently, from nowhere. Except that cannot be true.

The only explanation has to be that your subconscious mind continued working on your book the whole while you were doing all those other things. So it already knows your story and where it is headed. Quietly and secretively, it has more than likely figured the whole plotline out. Getting all of that unconscious gunk out of the latter regions of your mind and up into your conscious brain, where you can think about it, work on it and re-work it – that is the true job of a writer. Greene was of the opinion that we “remember the details” of a piece of fiction, rather than inventing them. So that on one level, a part of the task before us is already done.

But those sudden flashes of revelation are not simply your subconscious helping you. They’re your subconscious yelling at you – “Put this right, you dope!” And it’s important that you take immediate notice; mental promptings of this sort have a nasty habit of sinking back far too quickly into the tar pits from which they first emerged. I might not type up notes before starting a novel (see Chapter 4) but I do meticulously write these elbow-joggings down as soon as they have come to me, on a pad or Post-It if there’s one handy, or on the torn-off corner of a newspaper or envelope if not.

It’s often the case that – once produced – there’s no need to refer to these small scraps of paper. The simple act of writing on them is an aide memoire in itself. But I always make sure to rifle through them once a new draft is complete, discarding those that have already been used and keeping those that might just still be helpful.

But is that the only thing that your subconscious does, simply jog your elbow? No, it tries to guide your entire journey through the telling of a story, and it does that thing by leaving clues.

It is important – at this point – to understand how the subconscious mind works in the first place. This might sound unhelpful from a writer’s point of view, but it does not use words as a medium the way the thinking part of the mind does. It does not form sentences, nor does it decide that one adjective is better than another. No, all it largely does is throw up dreamlike images and vague conceptions which the conscious part of the mind absorbs. Your conscious mind translates those images, solidifies them with real detail, and then turns them into prose. In fact, it might be said that writing is a process where the two separate parts of your mind start ‘interfacing.’

The trouble is that you are often so fixated with the conscious act of completing your story, you might well miss the true significance of what those images are trying to tell you. Let me illustrate this point with an example from real life.

One of my oldest friends occasionally enjoys taking a crack at writing fiction. He was halfway through a long sf story one time, but had got stuck in terms of plot, and so he asked for my advice.

His story was a post-apocalyptic one, set within a blasted landscape populated by barbaric characters, but with some technology still intact. His Character A was down in the desert. His Character B was up in the air above that desert in – if memory serves – a rather battered but still functioning flying machine.

“I need to have these two characters meet,” my friend said, “but I can’t figure out how to make that happen.”

I gave his last few paragraphs another glance. Character A was looking up at Character B’s flier, which was already moving off into the distance. But the flying machine … it was not only battered, it was leaving in its wake a thin, dark trail of smoke.

And there’s the point at which my friend’s subconscious had dropped him a clue, except he didn’t have enough experience to see it.

“There’s something wrong with that flying machine. So have it crash land, and your characters can meet that way.”

Which doesn’t merely solve that immediate problem – it opens up whole realms of possibility in terms of plot and character development. Here are just a few of the options from this point on:

1/ A rescues B from the crashed, burning flyer. They become close friends and allies.

2/ A and B were enemies before the crash. But now B feels indebted to A, which has consequences later on.

3/ A pulls B from the flier, but B is badly hurt. A feels compelled to nurse him back to health.

And so on.

The fact that your subconscious mind already knows your story means that what you have already written holds the keys to what you will write next. The details you have set on paper … they might seem to have been chosen arbitrarily, but that is not the case. Somewhere in the far, dark reaches of your mind, the tale you’re working on is already complete. And another word for complete is ‘whole,’ every aspect of your story having relevance to every other part.

If you mention a river near the start of your story, that river is sure to put in another appearance sometime later on. Literally or figuratively? That’s up to you, a conscious decision, except that it was prompted in the first place by your latter brain.

Halfway through your story, your character stubs his toe? You might see that as an amusing detail at the time of writing it … but what if he has to run for his life in the later pages of your book?

I spoke in the last chapter about ‘little silver bells,’ the process of seeding your story with tiny hints of what is coming next, so leading your reader’s train of thought in the appropriate direction. That’s a conscious process, a deliberate act of will. But while you’re writing, even when you’re resting, your subconscious mind keeps doing the same, making sure you describe details that will have relevance later on. The real skill lies in spotting and deciphering those tiny clues. And you develop that skill the way you do most others, through experience and practice.

The worst example of the output of a writer who’s ignored both processes – the conscious and subconscious one – is a story which culminates in what US magazine editors used to call a ‘banana surprise’ ending. That is, an ending which was never once hinted at in the entire course of the preceding story. Your female character – let’s say – is married to a violent bully. All throughout the story, she is nervous, timorous, and cowed. She never seems to leave the house except to go out shopping or attend her yoga class. And then, right at the very end, it turns out she’s been having an affair for ages with her husband’s boss, and they’ve been working out the perfect scheme to do away with Mr. Nasty.

You can almost hear the writer of that bellowing tah-dah! But no, a story’s not that kind of conjuring trick. A surprise ending is a trick, though, and you need to be extremely artful in the way you pull it off. Have your female character come home three hours late and smelling of a man’s cologne and you’ll have given away the game completely. Your reader will roll his eyes and move on to another book.

But wait. But softly …

When Mr. Nasty happens home one day, his wife is talking on the phone. She hangs up quickly. “Just my sister,” she says calmly. And your reader will most probably think nothing of it.

But your female gets back slightly late from yoga class on one occasion because her instructor “asked me to help tidy up the mats.”

And on another occasion, she gets in her car and drives half an hour to a different part of town because “the local stores just don’t have what I need.”

Taken on their own, these three small incidents will seem like nothing but the fine detail good writers fill a story with. Only that when your reader reaches the conclusion, he’ll go: “Aha, that’s who she was talking with, that’s why she was late from class, if there really was a class at all, and that’s why she was gone so long when simply shopping!” All the little silver bells you’ve put in place start ringing in his head at once.

But your subconscious mind is doing that to you the entire time. Be aware of that process and make use of the help it gives you.

Don’t give in to it entirely, though. Your subconscious might be brilliantly creative and can tell you which direction you should go, but it lacks the discipline required to turn its images into a finished piece of fiction. No, your intellect must do the rest.

This article first appeared in HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WRITING: THE ART OF CREATINGPROFESSIONAL FICTION.

ME, MYSELF, AND SOMEONE ELSE ... CREATING CHARACTERS IN FICTION

One of my favorite fictitious villains of all time comes not from any novel, nor from any film, but from a TV show.

In the action series Alias (2001-2006) evil genius Arvin Sloane starts the ball of badness rolling by having the fiancé of the show’s heroine killed for the flimsiest of reasons. He then sets off along a course of murder, torture and treachery that finally culminates in wiping out the populace of an entire Russian city. He’s ruthless, vicious, quite fanatical in the pursuit of his goals. And yet – and this is why I consider him to be such a fascinating character – he’s also shown at certain points displaying kindness, compassion, empathy and tenderness and even love.

How can he be like that? asks the heroine of her father. How can he do such evil things, then turn around and be so nice? To which her father responds very simply.

Nobody, he says, is “just one thing.”

One of the most confounding aspects of the job of writing lies in the creation of a realistic character. It means … getting inside someone else’s head, now doesn’t it? Which in the true physical sense is completely impossible. None of us can read another’s thoughts; none of us is even slightly telepathic. If you’re in a room and talking to a stranger, or even a friend, you might be listening to their words and watching their expressions, but you cannot possibly know what’s really going on inside their skull. All that you can do is take a guess, and with no slightest way of telling if that guess is even close to being correct. So how do you take on the thought processes of someone other than yourself, with different life experiences that have shaped their own view of the world? A doctor, say? A homeless man? An art critic or a serial killer?

A good part of the answer to that lies in the short phrase that I alluded to above. No human being is “just one thing” … and that applies to you as well. If you understand yourself – and a writer needs to, warts and all – you’ll know that there are not just several facets to your personality but dozens of them. And those different aspects of yourself have been fed, watered and given focus by the myriad experiences you’ve been through. So make use of that.

You want to write about that homeless man, for instance? But you’ve never been homeless and don’t intend to start, and so how can you?

Well, surely you have felt extremely cold from time to time, brutalized by a spell of harsh weather? You have been hungry on more than a few occasions. You surely have felt lonely, lost, from time to time. You must have even felt, occasionally, like the whole world is against you. And that is where your fictional character has to start from, those relevant aspects of yourself and your own background. It’s not the end of the task of creating a character, but it gives you a strong foundation and a good place to start out from.

But then you might well need to take some extra steps to reinforce your own experiences. We’re still with that homeless man, remember? Go out on a busy shopping street, preferably on a chilly day. Stand in a dark doorway for a while, blending back into its shadows, watching all of those strange faces passing by you. They’re in such a hurry, so intent on what they’re doing that they barely notice you, if they manage that at all. Their skin is clean and their clothes are neat, since they’ve not slept on any sidewalk. Their shopping bags are full and they are all headed intently for some destination, so they obviously have homes and money.

You’re beginning to see the world in the same way that a homeless person might. And that becomes a part of your experience, an aspect of your personality, which you can draw on as you labor on your story.

The same type of approach applies to almost any other kind of character. A serial killer? Go back to those incidents when you were treated very badly as a child, and then throw in a few things that you genuinely, quietly loathe about some people. What do you occasionally imagine yourself doing to those aggravating folks, if you could only get away with it? Hold all of that resentment in your mind, and then create a character who doesn’t simply fantasize.

But what if you – and you’ll hardly be the first writer to do so – want to create a central character who is a fearless action hero or an unstoppable warrior? He or she is as physically tough as any human being gets, laughs at danger, eats bad guys for breakfast … and you fully understand that you are no such creature as the one I’ve just described?

In Becoming A Writer, Dorothea Brande opines that fiction writers are most usually the kinds of people who play Walter Mitty games inside their heads, imagining themselves in the lead role in a wide variety of situations, punching out the villains, getting all the girls, saving the world while winning the Super Bowl. Which sounds fairly juvenile, until you start to get that whole weird aspect of your persona working for you. You’re already a practiced fantasist, quite accustomed to becoming different people in your head. All you really need to do is to apply that talent to your laptop keyboard, albeit that you need to hem in those wild fantasies within the rules of realism. Your character can do improbable things, but not impossible ones, in other words. And how ‘impossible’ is defined depends very largely on the type of fiction that you’re writing.

The most popular such character today – as of setting this on paper – has to be Lee Child’s ‘Jack Reacher.’ And Child has described many times how Reacher – as he rights wrongs, doles out rough justice, and makes the world around him just a little fairer – doesn’t merely provide wish-fulfillment for his readers … it is wish-fulfillment for himself as well. And that’s a perfectly valid route for an author to take. If there are aspects to the world that genuinely upset you (see Chapter 1) … how would you most like to put them right? Rather like the serial killer a few paragraphs back, it’s all a case of: what I’d really do if I could only get away with it.

But can that be the entire matter? Are the characters in your new novel really nothing more than aspects – in disguise – of your own character or else expressions of your fantasies? From one point of view, there’s nothing else they can be. You have nothing else to draw on. You cannot read minds.

What you are able to do, though, is keep a very close eye on other people. How they speak, the many different ways. How they behave in different situations. What their gestures and their mannerisms are. The opinions they express, and how they sometimes contradict themselves.

And that applies as much to people who are there and gone in a few seconds as to people you can observe closely. I was out one evening with a would-be writer friend in a part of town that I know fairly well – I’d lived there for a few months while a student. At the end of the evening, heading back to catch our train, we were still talking as we strolled along … in spite of which, my head and eyes were going around constantly. I was taking in all over again sights that were already quite familiar, the beauty of the shadowed buildings round me, the lights gleaming in their small windows and the shades cast by the tall trees in a nearby park.

But I was also taking in the people passing by, this being the hour that restaurants and movie houses were all emptying out. That young couple – look how tightly they are clinging onto one another. But that other, older couple – they are almost walking an arm’s length apart. That teenaged girl looks desperately sad. That large young guy is slightly drunk, and he seems to be angry about something.

The very stuff of fiction was right there in front of me. Any one of those people could have sparked off a character inside my head, along with an accompanying storyline.

But after a while of this, I looked round at my would-be writer friend … and he’d been staring at the sidewalk the whole time.

Nobel laureate Doris Lessing was of this opinion: many writers, she believed, had difficult starts to their lives, mistreated by parents or else bullied by their peers so that, from an early age, they learned to keep a very careful eye on other people, watching out for any signs of trouble brewing. She was most probably right, and if you do not have this kind of early ‘training’ then you’ll have to teach yourself to do it.

You can build on that by reading about people who live very different lives to yours and watching documentaries on the same subject. There are plenty of limitations here – you’ll only ever get as far into their heads as those other folks let you and past that the rest is – again – guesswork. But we are all of us human beings, linked by certain commonalities, and so the guesses that you take ought to be educated by that fact.

Once you’re home and sitting at your laptop, that’s the point at which you put all of that careful study to good use. Become the character you’re writing about as much as is humanly possible. Visualize yourself as him or her. Even – and I understand this has to sound a little crazy – act out, if that helps at all. Get up from your desk a while and move around like he or she would. If your character is in a fight then swing your fists the way he might. Even try holding part of a conversation in his or her voice.

You can never fully – truly – become someone else, not even inside your own head. Your characters will always have a fair-sized trace of you, be it good or bad ‘you,’ hating or loving ‘you,’ cowardly or brave.

But you can use your gathered knowledge about other people to create some characters who are a solid fusion, one part you and three parts someone else.

This article first appeared in HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WRITING: THE ART OF CREATING PROFESSIONAL FICTION.