The Plot Thickens

As I discussed previously in ‘Digging Your Plot’ I brushed across thinking of Plot in terms of conflict.

As our characters wrestle with doubts, problems and challenging situations, they cause conflict, and this conflict will grow stronger if the choices they need to make are at times equally undesirable.

The role of conflict centres on your main characters (we’ll talk more about
characters shortly), you’ll need to know to whom the action of the story will have the greatest impact or effect on, and how will that conflict be resolved, whether it means your character fails, succeeds or realises they were on the wrong track from the start.

Man, hero, fire, soldier (Pixaby)

There’re many types of conflict, and even if its external conflict it will still create inner conflict within your characters ie the big shearing strikes, your character chooses to work against the strike, earning the title of scab, emotionally he struggles with going against the strike, but he needs to feed his family.

This in itself creates both external and inner conflict. There may be additional complications, he comes from a long line of shearers, and this causes additional conflict between father and son, a father who often finds his son’s abilities wanting.

Any type of conflict can come from the same desires and wants of real life, and develop powerful feelings within your Readers. All great music resonates to the person listening, and good writing will do the same. We’ve all had that reading moment, and thought out load, ‘I know where you’re coming from.’

Man, forest, planet (Pixabay)

The Plot is not a synopsis. Plot has more flesh than that. 

By now you may or may not know how many characters you have in your story, but a good start for reference is four main characters, and there are some fundamental questions that need to be asked in relation to how they are going to function in your story to move the Plot along, and I’m assuming by now you have a genre in mind.

Ask yourself, who is the main character, meaning, who will the action have the main effect on, and what is the conflict, is it internal, external or both?

Once you’ve answered these two questions you can then think about how your characters will interact with your other minor characters to resolve the conflict they are facing.

Again we can take our Plot from real life, but as we’ve mentioned before this is not always satisfactory. It has to be believable.

Plots are like a good joke, jokes are stories, and as with any good joke it is all in the telling, this is the same for a good Plot.

Dragon, books, lady (Pixabay)

The Plot, can be the driver of the story, or can be driven by other
factors, i.e., landscape, language and characters as we talked about in ‘Characters – Good or Bad we need them.’

The greatest danger of a Plot driven story is Plot can become a hard task master and once let loose will want everything its own way to the detriment of your characters. You can find yourself sacrificing your characters amazing profiles to fit him/her into your unchangeable Plot.

So be flexible.

Many writer’s often start with character driven Plots, and flesh out the story to fit in with their characters.

Character driven Plot for me is a better way to proceed, your Character’s will react to a chain of events, they will show motivation, but they will not assist your plot unless they face challenging situations. If you take this road you will need to know your characters well, so start asking them questions:

What do they want or need?

What do they fear?

What goals do they want?

Are they prepared to take risks to achieve them, and what might those risks be?

You may think you have a Plot in mind and your characters are developing along at a nice pace, and then your character makes you decide that he/she wants something totally different from the Plotted outcome.

As in real life things change, be open to your Characters way of thinking, they could be on the right path.

Rock Biter (Pixabay)

Try this exercise: 

Set out 1000 word Plot from beginning to end, look at several scenarios of events and then write your characters into your Plot. Then re-write the same story from your characters perspective first, and see if your characters take the same Plot paths as in the first version.

 

Keep writing, and have a good week.