Writing a Plot Your Own Way
This section on writing a plot contains many thousands of words explaining the "rules" of how to plot a novel.
But before getting down to the nitty-gritty of plotting a novel, it is important to point out that you mustn't be afraid to break the rules.
Writing a plot for a novel is like many things in life: First you must understand, then you must take this knowledge and adapt it in a way that makes sense to you.
The trouble with a guide to plotting a novel is that it can only tell you how to write a typical book - and such a thing does not exist.
If you take every work of fiction ever written and distil how they are constructed into a blueprint, you come up with a universal guide to how to plot fiction.
It can tell you how to construct stories in general, but it takes no account of the quirks and idiosyncrasies and broken rules found in every story.
And so you must use this material on plotting as a guide, not as a set of commandments...
- If one of the 10 steps of the plotting process doesn't make sense for your particular novel, twist it into a shape that fits - or perhaps even leave it out altogether.
- Similarly, feel free to add steps of your own. For example, if it feels right that the central character should experience not one but two moments of "rebirth", do it. Or if you want the character's "epiphany" to be a more gradual process of awakening than a sudden moment of revelation, fine. If it works, it works.
So long as you understand the rules of writing a plot - and are not merely skipping steps because you don't quite "get" them - you will have the confidence to adapt the rules to your own unique requirements.
"There is a temptation with such a structuralist approach to think that a novelist is a sort of intellectual engineer: assemble enough parts, follow a blueprint, and there you have it: a mechanism capable of flight, a literature machine. But a novel is not a machine, it is an infinitely complex relationship between author and page, page and reader."
- Nigel Watts
"...fiction can be cheapened by the heaping-on of plot. A novel may possess more verisimilitude if it contains some disorder, and it may be better to sacrifice formal niceties of structure in order to gain the quality of lifelikeness we look for in serious fiction...The makers-of-rules for fiction must fall back on the global disclaimer, that what works, works."
- Oakley Hall
Next Step: It's time to get down to the details at last, and that starts with Plotting the Novel's Beginning...
