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.