adamalcock

Plotting – The Motivational Way

When I started writing longer stories I went in head first and barracaded thousands of words into the story. Can you guess what happened? The story became blander that an eastender’s repeat. The characters were generic, the plot was “and then this” and nothing was leading anywhere. I would be fooling myself if I was to carry on.

After this failure fifteen thousand words in I went on an expedition on how to plot, there are quirky methods, there are ones based upon scenes you want to write. None worked for me, they all seemed to forceful of getting ideas out and didn’t leave room for me to breath. Plotting should be fun, vibrant and it should get you geared up to write the novel.

So the first thing I do is I take my base idea and write the opening chapter or prologue. Write about the first characters that come to mind, we’ll work on those later, just write an exciting piece that intrigues you and makes you want to build more onto the story. It may end up that you never use this in your final draft of your novel but the fact is it adds enthusiasm to your work.

Done? Right you have your start, the next thing is to vision where is this taking place, is it in our world. If so where? Is it in your made up world. If it is then you will need to world build. I usually start with a map of the world or city and create it around the location of the first piece I do. After this ideas start to bounce around.

Next thing to do is if your first scene is about the villain, you need a hero or vice-versa. When you have the 2 main characters you need an ending, what do you want achieved at the end of the novel, does your main character live. Of course you only have skeletons of characters at this stage, your 3D characters come alot later.

When you have your beginning and end you can start working on the middle or extend the beginning, you will need to introduce your main character in the first few chapters/scenes so you need an interesting action packed start for him/her. Then you will need a scene about you MC going from danger to more danger, you will need to constantly work on building towards your ending.

This worked for me, it will work for you, it will make you want to carry on to the end.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 30th, 2006 at 2:04 pm and is filed under On Writing, Plotting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.