Advice Please: Plot Problems

I'm with Doug on this one. You've got to have conflict and the resolution of that conflict is what drives your plot. It's what every story is about.

Bizarre as it sounds, I'd recommend a book called "Writing Screenplays that Sell" by Michael Hague. He goes into great detail about character conflict (internal and external) and character motivation. All of it can be applied to novels as well as screenplays.

Good luck
Stuart

Ok...Hmmm...

An intensely loyal young woman finds herself caught between the team she leads and the queen who raised her.

That really is the heart of the conflict, but it tells next to nothing about my story. I guess I can distill my work down to this, but it leaves me feeling very unsatisfied.

I don't know if that's really here or there, it's just an observation, I guess.

Probably any story at all, even people sitting around reminiscing, can be distilled into a single sentence. I mean, I could say "Joe and Jane are best friends trying to figure out the meaning of life before the Super Bowl commercials come to an end". That doesn't mean that I have a good story, or even that my story really has a focus.

I dunno.

My novel is character driven. I found it hard to summarize until I understood the story still ran along the lines of "because this happens, that happens, and that causes this other thing to occur" (quote=Miss Snark). It's about the consequences of the MC's choices.

Just reiterating other posters, you have to ignore the subplots and narrow your work down to a major story arc, especially if you want to be able to hook an agent/editor--and eventually, your reader. What happens at/near the beginning of your story must be resolved to some extent at the end. Everything else in between is a series of events than can impact upon the plot, but is not considered the plot.

Monkey said:

Ok...Hmmm...

An intensely loyal young woman finds herself caught between the team she leads and the queen who raised her.

That really is the heart of the conflict, but it tells next to nothing about my story. I guess I can distill my work down to this, but it leaves me feeling very unsatisfied.

I don't know if that's really here or there, it's just an observation, I guess.

Probably any story at all, even people sitting around reminiscing, can be distilled into a single sentence. I mean, I could say "Joe and Jane are best friends trying to figure out the meaning of life before the Super Bowl commercials come to an end". That doesn't mean that I have a good story, or even that my story really has a focus.

I dunno.

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I think it's just something we have to put up with. Nathan Bransford has a post on his blog about The Hook, which is basically just encompassing the main plot, the 'core' of the book in one sentence. I don't think it ever really does justice to a book as a whole, as a lot of us have subplots going on, but the point is to grab someone's attention with an interesting premise, rather than summarize the whole book in one sentence. You can't blame publishers really - we live in a short attention span society, and a short, snappy premise can often = a lot of cash.

Stuart Clark said:

I'm with Doug on this one.

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Mr. Clark is obvioulsy an extremely intelligent person.

What a book is about, isn't the same thing as the plot. The DaVinci Code didn't sell a gazillion copies because of its plot, but it has one.

The whole point of a novel, is that the narrator gives it "narrative drive." If all Salinger had wanted to do was say, "If you try to solve all the worlds problems, you'll go crazy," he could've done that in one sentence. Or written an essay to prove his point. If he'd just wanted to play with language, he would've written a poem. If he'd wanted to prove it clinically, he would've performed research and submitted the results for peer review.

Like I said, you might have a series of short stories, or experimental fiction. There's nothing wrong with writing either.