How to write plot

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“I have a great book idea, but I have no plot.”

I hear this pretty frequently. Most new writers seem to think that plot lines are supposed to spring into their heads fully formed. Then they feel deficient when they come up dry. But plotlines rarely appear out of the blue – and never fully formed. More often an idea is nothing but a world, a character, a single scene, or a mere image. We must take these fragments and grow them into stories.

But how? Yes, some of it still has to be inspiration, and I can’t teach you how to be inspired, but here are some methods that will help:

Image – have nothing but a picture in your head? Don’t fret. C.S. Lewis started out with nothing but a mental picture of a faun carrying an umbrella, and got the seven-book Chronicles of Narnia out of it. Let yourself daydream about the image for a while. Once it has grown into a scene, read below.

Scene – Markus Zusak got the idea for I Am the Messenger when he noticed a 15-minute parking zone outside a bank and wondered what it would be like to be stuck lying on the floor of the bank during a robbery, worrying about a parking fine. So start by writing down everything you know about that scene. Is it a beginning scene, a middle scene, or the climax? Who is there? How did they get there? What will be the result of their actions ?

World – maybe your idea centers on a world that has some interesting little difference from ours (like it’s full of mutant humans with magical powers). How did the world get that way? (Are they mutating due to a nuclear explosion, or are they doing it to themselves intentionally?) What are the social, political, religious ramifications? (Are they suing a power plant? Are they fighting laws against genetic manipulation?) What are the real-life ramifications for an individual person? (Is the psychic teenager ostracized by his parents? Is the housewife fighting crime at night?)

Character – maybe you’ve invented Sherlock Holmes, Sydney Carton, or Margo Roth Spiegelman and this person is begging to have a story written about them. Again, write down everything you know. Pretty, plain, strong, smart, cowardly, kind, mean, funny? What is the most important thing in the world to this character? Maybe it’s his wife, maybe her son, maybe it’s getting into Harvard or on Broadway, or escaping prison. Then, threaten this thing. Take it away and make them rescue it. Endanger it and make them protect it. Entice them to pursue it, and throw obstacles in their path.

Moral – Stop. Rewind. I forbid you from writing a book based on a moral alone. It will come off as salesy, preachy or both. Come up with some other idea, follow the directions above, and if a moral happens to grow naturally out of the story you are already writing, more power to you.

Inspiration Monday II

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Thanks and kudos to Debra at Find An Outlet for participating in last week’s Inspiration Monday. Read her (two!) fantastic pieces here. If I missed any participants, let me know in the comments!

 

The Rules

There are none. Read the prompts, get inspired, write something. No word count minimum or maximum. You don’t have to include the prompt in your piece, and you can interpret the prompt(s) any way you like.

No really; I need rules!

If you work better with guidelines: write 200-500 words on the prompt of your choice. You may either use the prompt as the title of your piece or work it into the body of your piece. You must complete it before 6 pm CST on the Monday following this post.

 

The Prompts

I ignored the raised eyebrow of the checkout girl

Time capsule from the future

The answer, one day too late

Saved by a broken law

Everyday villain

If you want to share your Inspiration Monday piece, post it on your blog and link back to today’s post; I’ll include a link to your piece in the next Inspiration Monday post.

Happy writing!

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Why Doctor Who is awesome: a writer’s perspective

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yes, this is a sonic screwdriver

 

I’ll try not to break into fangirl gushing – and simply state some solid reasons Doctor Who has lasted so long.

The BBC’s Doctor Who is the longest-running sci-fi series in history. It ran from 1963-1989, was regenerated in 2005 and has been going strong ever since. It’s about a 900-year-old Time Lord from an alien planet who calls himself “the Doctor.” He spends his days traveling through time and space, saving people, worlds, and whole universes. Here are five reasons the show has been so successful for so long:

Infinite possibilities

Because the Doctor can travel through time and space, the writers have the whole of human history to play with, plus whatever they can imagine in our future and across the universe.
Immortal characters played by mortal actors

The DW writers solved the problem of actors aging or moving on to other projects by creating in a quirk of Time Lord DNA – Time Lords don’t die; they regenerate. I.e., the same character comes back as a different actor, with a different wardrobe and perhaps a different personality.

Recurring elements

There are some things that stay the same throughout the series, maintaining a sense of familiarity despite constantly changing characters and locations. The main ones include:

The Doctor – insofar as his background and identity goes.

The TARDIS – the Doctor’s space ship/time machine, which is bigger on the inside. Due to a broken chameleon circuit, the TARDIS is stuck looking like a Police Call Box from 1963 London. The Doctor doesn’t fix it, because he likes it that way.

Sonic Screwdriver – a handy tool the Doctor uses in almost every episode to open doors, reprogram robots, and more.

Psychic paper – a blank piece of paper that shows people whatever the Doctor wants them to see. He usually uses it as fake ID to break into high security establishments and exclusive parties.

Relatability

The genius alien time traveler must be balanced with a more relatable, “regular” character, if only so the Doctor has someone to explain things to, so the audience doesn’t get lost. The Doctor always has a companion – usually a girl from modern-day Earth, who travels with him.

Great writing

The concepts are fascinating, the storytelling is effortless. Within a single episode you may laugh, cry, gasp, and grip the edge of your seat. The storylines are fun-filled adventures, but mixed with a greater depth of moral questions, such as self-sacrifice and when it is right to kill.

If you are writing a series, consider employing some of these same concepts to keep it fresh, familiar, relatable, and emotionally relevant.

Inspiration Monday

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Per Debra’s suggestion, I’ve decided to post some weekly writing prompts, here forward known as, “Inspiration Monday.” Of course, because I won’t get around to getting the post up until 8 or 9 pm CST Monday, most of you won’t see it until Tuesday. But I digress.

The Rules

There are none. Read the prompts, get inspired, write something. No word count minimum or maximum. You don’t have to include the prompt in your piece, and you can interpret the prompt(s) any way you like.

No really; I need rules!

If you work better with guidelines: write 200-500 words on the prompt of your choice. You may either use the prompt as the title of your piece or work it into the body of your piece. You must complete it before 6 pm CST on the Monday following this post.

 

The Prompts

Leftover humans*

Our last kiss

When it looked at me, I screamed

I knew I shouldn’t have published that article

The invention of music

 

If you want to share your Inspiration Monday piece, post it on your blog and link back to today’s post; I’ll include a link to your piece in the next Inspiration Monday post.

Happy writing!

—

* Today’s first prompt is brought to you by The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak.

Backpacks across the galaxy: how to personalize the epic

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Epic-ness is all well and good, but without a personal touch, it can fall flat. We wouldn’t care whether or not Middle Earth fell to Sauron if we didn’t get to know Frodo and Sam along the way. It’s the little, everyday details that make us care; that show us the relevance of the big picture by connecting it to a close-up of the character(s).

This concept really threw me the first time I read Out of the Silent Planet. A man is on a walking tour in England, when he loses his backpack and is kidnapped by two men who take him to an alien planet. He escapes, and spends the next several chapters living among the locals, learning their language and discovering fascinating things about the universe. Then, on page 96, he gets a chance to look through a telescope at a planet the locals call Thulcandra:

He wondered for a moment if it was Mars he was looking at; then, as his eyes took in the markings better, he recognized what they were—Northern Europe and a piece of North America. They were upside down with the North Pole at the bottom of the picture and this somehow shocked him. But it was Earth he was seeing—even, perhaps, England, though the picture shook a little and his eyes were quickly getting tired, and he could not be certain that he was not imagining it. It was all there in that little disk—London, Athens, Jerusalem, Shakespeare. There everyone had lived and everything had happened; and there, presumably, his pack was still lying in the porch of an empty house near Sterk.

This last sentence is so amazing it makes me dizzy. From the alienness of another planet, the hugeness of the universe, the awe of seeing Earth from space, the vastness of human history—to the ordinariness of a backpack left on a porch. This is why C.S. Lewis is my favorite writer; he turns my brain inside out.

Douglas Adams does something similar (but much more humorous) in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, when Arthur Dent is falling to his death and suddenly remembers he has a bottle of olive oil in his knapsack—possibly the last piece of the Earth left in the entire universe (this realization enabled him to learn how to fly…but that’s another post).

And I experienced something similar when I was driving home from visiting my grandparents last Christmas. We stopped at a Denny’s, and I happened to notice that the walls at this Denny’s had the exact same texture as the walls at home. And although I hadn’t been gone long enough to miss home, I suddenly got a lump in my stomach and felt homesick.

Moral of the post: the details make it meaningful. The next time you are writing a “big picture” scene, consider making your character notice or remember something that gives you a “close up.”