Advanced Elements of Plot

What are the advanced elements of plot? They are like the bells and whistles you add to your novel's central plot and subplots.

Actually, saying that makes it sound like the advanced plot elements are something superfluous, frivolous - something to add style to your novel but not a whole lot of substance.

In the previous sections on plotting, you have done two big things...

You have created your novel's main plot, using my 10-Step Guide to Plotting a Novel.
You have added one or more Subplots to it.

Adding these advanced plotting elements I am about to talk about is like adding icing to the cake (and the cherry on top of that!)

They will make your novel more interesting, more readable, more professional.

And doing that won't only make your future readers happy - when the time comes to Publish Your Novel, it will make literary agents and publishers sit up and take notice, too.

The Advanced Elements of Plot Are All About "Time"

Think of a plot in a novel as a straight line, with Event A at one end (the story's beginning) and Event Z at the other (the ending).

And think of these events all taking place in chronological order: A happens before B, B before C, and so on.

The advanced elements of plot are a set of tools for manipulating a novel's chronology.

They also represent another opportunity for you to rise above the competition and make your novel better than everyone else out there writing fiction. Why? Because most novel writing beginners either don't know or don't care about the finer points of how to plot a novel.

Foreshadowing In Fiction

Foreshadowing is a way of looking ahead, or of sign-posting future events.

If a woman has a car crash in Chapter 3, for example, it is a good idea to drop a hint in Chapter 1 that today is not going to be the greatest day of her life. Why? Because it will create tension and anticipation for the readers - and doing that is a great way of keeping them turning the pages.

The biggest danger here is heavy-handedness, but the article shows you how to avoid it. And in Nine Examples of Foreshadowing, I make everything crystal clear with some concrete foreshadowing examples.

Handling the Exposition of a Story

Don't let the name scare you. Exposition is one of those advanced elements of plot that might sound daunting but doesn't actually involve a whole lot of work. It simply means those elements of a story that are crucial to its understanding but don't advance the plot in any way - such as events from the protagonist's past (or their backstory).

Dramatized Flashbacks

The main thing you will learn about backstory and exposition is that is best fed to the reader in bite-sized pieces - a few lines of dialogue about the protagonist's childhood here, a small paragraph of backwards-looking narration there.

When an influential event from a fictional character's past cannot be dealt with in a few lines, you can present it instead as a flashback. Flashbacks are the third of my advanced elements of plot and are simply dramatized scenes from the past. They might not be a crucial element of the present-time story, but they nevertheless have an influence on it.

This article shows you how to move from the present to the past and back again in the smoothest way possible.

Story Plots and Chronology

And finally in this look at some of the advanced elements of plot, some advice on how to alter the "running order" of the story you want to tell - perhaps in small and subtle ways, perhaps in a way which tosses the rulebook out of the window.

Instead of imagining a plot in a novel as a straight line, with Event A at one end and Z at the other, think of a plot as a deck of 26 cards, each one marked with a letter of the alphabet.

Playing around with the chronology of a plot is like shuffling these cards - maybe just a little, maybe quite a lot.

Taken to its logical extreme, it is even possible to begin a story with Event Z and work backwards in time to Event A as the reader moves forwards through the novel's pages.

To recap, here are the four advanced elements of plot...