Advice Please: Plot Problems

In short, here's what I believe:

Character is plot.

That's it. Make your characters 'real' enough and the plot will take care of itself.

scarletpeaches said:

In short, here's what I believe:

Character is plot.

That's it. Make your characters 'real' enough and the plot will take care of itself.

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Very good advice.

I have the same problem Jordygirl. It's always characters who come into my head and never plots. I've been banging my head against this trying to find the meat as I revise my novel.

I highly recommend the book Structuring Your Novel by Robert C. Meredith and John D. Fitzgerald. They spend a lot of time talking about the differences between novels that are primarily character-driven and those that are primarily plot-driven and the differences in structure required to make each work. It's helping me a lot.

No. I read "literary" fiction, with some science-fiction thrown in. If you can write, with sparkling dialogue and interesting characters, heck, you've got me.

Your book isn't about your characters, your book is about something. Is it about this really intereting people who sit around saying interesting thing or is it about finding yourself, guilt, redemtion, coming of age, making peace with your parents, dealing with your own mortality. What do your characters want? Where are they at emotionally? Where are they heading? How does what they want and who they are affect the people around them.

In short what is your book about? Once I can answer that my plots usually flow from fairly well.

sorry, double post, Darned Wi-Fi connection

My characters are the something my books are about. No, they don't sit around saying interesting things...but themes such as coming-of-age or redemption are expressed through them.

Sounds like a literary character-driven story without a clear "plot" -- you still have to have some kind of beginning, middle and ending, though.

Most commercial fiction, on the other hand, requires a main plot. "What is the story about?" Even existential, coming-of-age story has a definitive story arc.

I don't think character is plot so much as character drives plot. You can build fascinating characters, but in the end, I think what engages readers is, "What would they do when faced with this situation?" So you still need a situation, a context in which to put them. Boy loves girl who loves his best friend instead? Girl must stop vampires from taking over the world? The actual plot then develops naturally from the character traits and how they would react.

And occasionally, the characters will surprise you and develop from the plot as well.

Finally, never forget that whatever works for you is the proper way to go about things. It's when what you're doing isn't working that you might want to start looking for new ways to try.

There was a romance sub-plot, a losing-your-friend sub-plot, and then the (possibly overused) being-comfortable-in-your-own-skin sub-plot.

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You have to ask, then, what really is your story about? There should be some kind of links, themes, etc. to hold everything together, even in literary fiction.

The Hours, for example, contains three subplots involving three different women from three different times. What tie the whole thing together are a) the structure, b) the theme, and c) the links these three women share. And at the end, the threads all come together. And there's a clear sense of "what this story is about." The theme is very strong through and through.

So if you don't want to have one main plot, you need to do something else -- structure, theme, etc. to make this a story.

In other words, if someone asks you "what is the story about?" can you describe it in one sentence? If not, then your story is likely out of focus.

I have another book to recommend: Story by Robert McKee. He lays all the aspects of plot bare for the storyteller to understand. Every plot has a place between the classical design of plots, the minimalist style (in this falls multi-plot stories and those with open endings, for example), and the anti-structure style. Outside of this scheme of plots are the non-plots, which aren't stories, even if they try desparately to inform or persuade through the course of their supposed "story". The difference between these is change.

The example used in the book is a story in which we see protagonists leading lonely, troubled lives, and by the end they "resign to the pain of life, even ready for more." However much change it tries to make in the one who is listening to the story, nothing inside the world of a non-plot changes, and it's not really a story.

The important thing to ask yourself in the "plot" of the story is what connects the entirety of your story together? What is the backbone upon which your story resides? In the climax of the tale, where does the meaning and emotion come from? Why does the story NOT end at the end of a sub-plot, but continue? What holds it all together? What premise, what change? It may or may not be subtle. It may or may not be the most mentioned topic. A sub-plot can dominate if it helps to quietly build the case for the greater, but less mentioned main plot. It doesn't have to be clear like in, say, the Lord of the Rings. Not all plots are: we need to destroy the ring, now crap, there's a lot in the way of that, isn't there? Heck, the main plot doesn't need to even show itself till 100 pages into the book (that is, when the inciting incident occurs), but it does need to begin and end, and build meaning from its sub-plots.

Let me go back to what you were saying.

Jordygirl said:

Here is my problem: I don't write plots.

My stories are founded on the premise and the characters. There are sub-plots, but no main plot.
Ex: My last WIP's premise was two diabolically different sisters who happen to be best friends. There was a romance sub-plot, a losing-your-friend sub-plot, and then the (possibly overused) being-comfortable-in-your-own-skin sub-plot.
Is this a bad thing? Not to have one strong plot, I mean.

As a reader, does it make you want to chuck the book; what type of books do you read?

Basically, is this something I should work on or are premise-character driven YAs good?

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Well, for your example, perhaps the main plot is the relationship between the two sisters, and the different directions it takes as their lives move forward, and what they find in each other as life takes its toll through those events. The story, then, could be more about what happens to the girls than their relationship, but it is brought into powerful context and conclusion by this connection. The events aren't random, and it isn't random that they're best friends. If each event were contained, that would be what you call a series. There might be an overarching premise, but the plot of each story would be contained to each part of the series, allowing readers to sufficiently disengage between stories, sort of like Fairy Tales. Without a progressive tie, however, your story lies in pieces. It would be like binding up the entire Redwall series and presenting it as one book. Each section of the series is a complete tale, but their is a premise and a non-changing tie of the interest of the chronological order of things: you wonder when the next Redwall story is being told (that's the frame of most of them) and when it is taking place in relation to the other novels.

All in all, self-contain each main plot. If a sub-plot is a different story, and brings absolutely no meaning to the other sub-plots, and there is no connecting plot, then you have a bunch of sepparate stories, perhaps, but not 1.

There is alot more detail that goes into it than that, but I hope it helps. Try and get the book I first mentioned. I tried to figure this all out for myself, but without this book, I would've invariably missed a lot of the key points of structure in a story. Hie thee to the book store! (You'll want to keep this one)

Good luck in your writing!
~Oliver

There was once this girl. She wrote wonderful fiction but she didn't write plots. One day she decided to find out if having a plot was important, and what she learned changed her life forever...

Well, what happens in the story? Does anything happen? Do you just go on and on about the characters...?

I think that strong characters are certainly important, but I can't think of a single novel I've read and enjoyed that didn't have some sort of plot, some sort of action...

Characters aren't characters unless they do stuff. That's what plot is.

caw

Paul T gave me some good advice re plot...he said the most interesting stories are ones in which the characters are transformed in some way by the end of the book (as compared to how they started out) For example read The Cat by Simenon or Picture Palace by Paul Theroux (Paul T).
You really have to give a reader a reason to read your book or they may feel cheated at the end.
JMHO

Oliveman mentioned Robert McKee's book, Story, which I, too, have found useful. In a chapter titled "Structure and Character," he says something that may be helpful to you. He distinguishes "characterization," the assemblage of traits that makes a person unique, from "character," which is how a person reacts under pressure. When a character must choose between several unpalatable alternatives, that's when you know what he or she is really about. So it might be useful if, instead of asking whether you have a plot or subplot, ask yourself what choice(s) your characters have to make, what pressures they face, and what that says about them. Are these dilemmas compelling? If yes, you need not worry. If not, you might need to turn up the heat.

Jordygirl said:

Here is my problem: I don't write plots.

My stories are founded on the premise and the characters. There are sub-plots, but no main plot.
Ex: My last WIP's premise was two diabolically different sisters who happen to be best friends. There was a romance sub-plot, a losing-your-friend sub-plot, and then the (possibly overused) being-comfortable-in-your-own-skin sub-plot.
Is this a bad thing? Not to have one strong plot, I mean.

As a reader, does it make you want to chuck the book; what type of books do you read?

Basically, is this something I should work on or are premise-character driven YAs good?

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Short Answer: Pick one plot and structure the book story around it. Make the other plots hinge off the main plot, e.g. by amalgamating characters.

Even Shorter Answer: Go read Stephen King's "On Writing"

I think you do need a main plot to anchor the book from beginning to end. Otherwise, it's a collection of scenes and may even come across as simply things happening rather than things happening with a definite purpose. Believe it not, it's actually easy to write a book without a story--but you'll find trying to boil it down to a short paragraph for a query and then spending a page for the synopsis nearly impossible. That's because if you know what the plot is, it gives you something to build the query and the synopsis around. Without a story, the synopsis will tend to become a rambling summary of events of "he did this, and she reacted to that." And somewhere between 95% to 99% of just the queries are rejected by agents on the first reading--it's really competitive. If it doesn't look like there's a story in the query, it'll probably get rejected.

So I'll ask something here that no one else has: You say you do don't plots? Why not? When I first started writing a book, I had a terrible time writing it because I had such an aversion to subplots. I'd read a number of books where they either had a meaningless subplot that seemed to exist to fill pages, one that took me away from the story way too long, or A/B stories that solely existed to keep one set of characters from rescuing another (I defined that as a subplot at the time). So I tried to write a book without subplots, and of course, it didn't work and ran too short. I ended up trying to study how to do subplots and learned that I'd pretty much based my opinions on ones that didn't work and hadn't looked for ones that had.

Anyway, I hope some of this helps.

My guess is that one of your subplots is actually the real main plot of your novel.

Novelhistorian said:

He distinguishes "characterization," the assemblage of traits that makes a person unique, from "character," which is how a person reacts under pressure.

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Pulp Fiction, The Wolf: Just because you are a character doesn't mean that you have character.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

I can't even imagine a story without a plot. How does that go exactly? 'There once were these two guys. They grew up, had a normal life and then they died.' You can write all you want about what these guys were like, but it's not interesting to read at all.

I don't know about you guys, but my plots are formed in my head before the characters even exist. I draw the big picture before I add the details and colour it all in.

If you absolutely must develop a plot after the characters, answer yourself this. What do they want? How are they going to get it? Where will this lead them? What is going to stop them? Or who?

Plot isn't always the important thing. I've read that there are 3 kinds of stories.

1. Plot driven

2. Character driven, where the characters are so interesting the plot doesn't really matter (I'm sure this isn't easy to pull off, but it can be done)

3. Setting driven. Something like the Lord of the Rings where the setting is really the main point, the characters are flat and the plot is very basic, but its still interesting.

If there's a main conflict, how the characters overcome it is the main plot.

If there's no conflict, then it's "experimental fiction."

If there's lots of little conflicts, but no over riding conflict, it's probably not a novel. It's probably a series of related short stories.