What Every Writer Needs to Know About Plot and Structure, Part 3

When I first got bitten by the writing bug, I found an excellent series of articles, the first being: Does Your Novel Have a Heartbeat?, by Holly Lisle.
They're directed at those who already have a novel written out, but it would be helpful, in my opinion, to read them before you've typed 100,000 words and devoted a year of your life to a piece of your soul.

Read these articles, and create something with a heartbeat from the beginning. Create something real and meaningful to you. Love your work before you even start writing it.
You can find the other articles of this series at this page (scroll to the bottom).
Yes, it's a lot of reading.

As if that wasn't enough, I have some free resources for download. These tools (along with others from the same source) have made a bigger impact on my writing than anything else.

Holly's Create Your Professional Plot Outline Mini-Course is a free, completed mini course on developing a plot, starting from any number of places: a character, a twist, world building, a structure (like the ones I listed in Part 1 of this series), or questions. This is a rough sketch of one of the techniques you can use to create a workable plot. She explains the process, gives a demonstration, and then provides an exercise for you to build part of your plot.
You can download this mini-course in PDF format here.

If this is something that works for you, you can get more in-depth instruction from Holly's Create a Plot Clinic. I have the first 52 pages of it here for free.
The full course can be found here: Create A Plot Clinic, by Holly Lisle

Seriously, this has everything you need to know in order to plot out an entire novel. Last I checked, she had an updated version of this for $9.95. But she also has it available at a discount in a bundle, with building characters, cultures, and languages: Clinic Writing Bundle. They're all good, but the plot and character ones are the best (unless you do a lot of world building).

Part 4 will cover beginnings, middles, and endings.

Part 1 was on classic plot structures, and Part 2 covered getting down to creating a story that matters to you, but will keep your readers interested.

Sample Scenes: Good and Bad, and How to Fix Them

For the past couple of days, I've been working on Lesson 8 of Think Sideways. So far, I have written a Sentence Lite describing each one of my 54 scenes (a few of which haven't been written yet). As I mentioned before, some of my scenes have everything they need.

Others have been found lacking.

So as part of my process I've decided to post some of my less-than-savory scene sentences. As I revise them, you should be able to see an improvement (I hope).
WARNING: SPOILERS. Stop reading this post if you don't want to read them!

But first, so you can see 1) what does work, 2) what I'm aiming for, and 3) that there is some hope for me as a writer, I'm going to post a couple of sentences that I'm pleased with.

Here, we have protagonist (Nathan) against the antagonist (burning wreckage) in a conflict (fighting to save Rachel's life) with a twist (Nathan is a ghost, but is somehow able to pull Rachel to safety). The setting is embedded in the antagonist: burning wreckage.

The protagonist (Rachel) against the antagonist (the shade) in conflict (an attack that causes Rachel to lose consciousness) with a twist (the shade was waiting for her).
This one isn't quite twisty enough and could use some tweaking.

So here it goes. My crappy scenes:

Okay "introduces" and "explaining" are not conflict. They are boring. There isn't an antagonist. I suppose Nathan's unique situation could be a twist, but it's not a very good one. See the fixed version here.

Again, a conversation isn't conflict. For there to be conflict in dialogue, they have to want different things or there has to be some subtext that causes conflict. The improved scene is here.

While this is great news for Lisa, there isn't much conflict. The scene needs some work and the sentence needs a LOT of work. Mostly, Rachel is suspicious of Kevin, but doesn't want to disappoint her friend. That's the conflict, but it could be better. Improved scene: here.

Learning is not conflict. Nor is a discussion. There needs to be more tension. There needs to be something at stake here. See the improved version of this scene.

I think the scene is okay, but the sentence needs reworking. The verbs aren't very strong and don't convey any tension. Here's the improved scene.

So there you have it. 5 scenes in desperate need of a makeover. Let's see what I can do.

Here are the before and after shots of my first three scenes.

Pay Attention to ALL Your Characters

I just deleted over 2,000 words. Why would I do this when I’m having trouble getting enough words as it is? Because I messed up. Big time.

You see, when I get started writing, I just go with it. I get in the head of my POV character and I fly. It usually works out. I know the general direction the story needs to take and I have a (albeit vague) idea of what I want to accomplish in each scene (in my defense, I go back and make the scene tighter). My muse likes freedom and when I give it to her, I’m usually rewarded with some neat twists that I hadn't been expecting.

But there are some minuses. Aside from the aforementioned wandering that I sometimes catch myself doing, I don't frequently get in the heads of my other characters. I figure out each character at the beginning--discover their motives, needs, personality--but rarely do I stop and think, "How wil so-in-so react to this?"

And today it cost me 2,000 words and about 2 hours of writing and planning. Maybe more. Chapter 12 has been demolished and I’m having to start from ground zero. All because I didn’t use my villain to his full potential. He was being way too nice, only attacking when convenient and never really threatening anyone, just trying to be scary.

Now, he has an army waiting outside my heroine's home, ready to attack her mom as soon as she steps over the protective threshold of her home. And she won’t even see it coming.

For a brief synopsis, see my earlier post: My Current Project