Plotting!

(Or that thing that actually makes your book work. Dammit!)

Let me tell you a little story. Back in 2020 I wrote the beginnings of what would be the novel that got me my agent. I had the setting, I had the two main characters (twin sisters, one of which was a ghost), I had the antagonist. And I set them off interacting in their beautifully isolated Appalachian Mountain homestead. Here is where it all falls apart.

I didn’t have the story.

Of course I told myself I would DISCOVER the story as I was writing, and to a certain extent that was true. I finished the draft with the help of the wonderful Curtis Brown Creative novel-writing course, encouragement from the amazing Andrew Michael Hurley, and of course, my course mates (AKA life-savers). I did a bit of editing and entered the querying trenches, eventually signing with Alice Lutyens (Hooray!).

I count myself very lucky here, because Alice signed me because of my writing, not the story. She was very clear that the story needed a lot of work (she was very right about this and I completely agreed). The test always comes when people ask you to sum up your story in a couple of lines. I couldn’t do that. The story was as garbled as my attempts to summarise it.

Fast-forward a year and a bit, two to three full re-writes later, and I had got closer to the story, but it was still being highly elusive (I created a monster in other words). Now here is where things change for me. I had Alice’s latest feedback, plus a reader report from Curtis Brown, I enlisted the help of a wonderful mentor and I had my best writing friend read and feedback. All said similar things (in slightly different ways) but mostly that the story had too many threads and none were fully realised. There was no satisfactory outcome. The reader’s journey was failing. The only way to sort this story out was to plot it.

And so this hardcore pantser became a fully converted plotter!

Let me tell you how I approach writing now (and remember this is just MY way. If it helps you, then wonderful!)

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Pitch Up

I won’t say anymore about book one because the latest draft is with my agent and I am now just keeping everything crossed that what I have done works. But book two is where I will now take you. Wonderful book two. The dream. I have followed the righteous path and have been rewarded!

Before I wrote a single word for book two, I wrote the elevator pitch, thought about the comparative titles and wrote the full synopsis. Some might hate this approach but it most definitely focussed my mind and showed me what I wanted this book to be. And I don’t write plot-driven novels - they are verging on literary, character-driven, theme-focussed. This isn’t about writing a page-turner for me. It’s about understanding what my starting point is and having a general direction of travel (something I didn’t have for book one and that caused a whole world of pain!).

Spreadsheet Be the Way

Now the secret to my plotting success (*still to be verified) lies entirely in my beautiful spreadsheet. (I can hear your cries now - NO! SHE IS SUCKING ALL MY CREATIVITY!!!). But wait. Hear me out. *whispers* It’s not true! The reason book one was the garbled mess it became was because I was trying to hold it all in my head and in random notebooks and on post-it notes. I lost all my threads because I couldn’t see HOW the story parts linked together. Themes petered out. Characters altered their paths. It was like throwing a bag of marbles on the ground and seeing which way they all ran, trying to catch them, and failing. So when my friend shared her spreadsheet with me, I grabbed it. I had to try something new.

Behold!

These are the actual opening chapters of book two as they currently stand (with spoilers removed), so that you can see how I actually use the spreadsheet. There are self-explanatory headings (Chapter and POV), but the important ones are:

Description/Purpose - This is where I describe the action of the scenes within the chapters. I colour code them depending on the timeline they occur in. To begin with I will do this for every chapter before I write the novel, and then amend as I go. It’s important to note that this is a live document for me. I update it every time I write, and I also allow new ideas to enter and shift things around accordingly. It isn’t just about writing what I have planned. The plan is simply a guide.

Comments/Issues - This column is my editing column. I use it to highlight possible issues with the chapter and to make obvious to me the things that need following up or developing (see, I do learn from my mistakes!).

Reader’s Journey - Now this is a clever column, and I believe is used by Claire Mackintosh (so a no-brainer, really!), but it has changed the way I write in a big way. I am always thinking about what the reader knows at each stage, what questions I want a chapter to leave them with, and the emotions they might, hopefully, be feeling.

Status - A lovely column that I get to turn green so I can see I am making progress. I also use amber for those scenes that aren’t working and I need to either come back to, or ditch.

As you can see from my extract above, I use red to show important things so that I can easily spot them as I’m scrolling back through this document. I also have a ‘follow up’ row (blacked out because of spoilers) but this lays out the key details in a chapter that need a resolution at some point.

This document is my bible. As a visual person, I can’t believe that I didn’t approach writing in this way in the first place. Everything I need is at my fingertips at any moment. I don’t have to scroll through reams and reams of notes or pages of my manuscript anymore.

And, by having the scenes planned in advance (at least in a basic way), means I don’t open my manuscript and stare at a blank page not knowing where to take things next. My document tells me. So I can crack on and wave goodbye to procrastination!

Photo by Tandem X Visuals on Unsplash

Plot Points

I wrote a whole article on using plot points for Jericho Writers (you can find it here) but there’s one graph I use religiously (I LOVE a visual), and that is the Transformational Arc by Dara Marks. You can find it in her amazing book Inside Story - The Power of the Transformational Arc where there is a lot more detail and information. But here it is for you now:

We all know that for a story to work there has to be a change or growth in our protagonist (in what ever way you approach that through your writing). So using the main storyline, I pull out the main turning points of my story:

Hook

Inciting Incident

First Turning Point/Awakening

Midpoint/Moment of Enlightenment

Second Turning Point/Death Experience

Transformational Moment

Climax

Resolution

In the extract above, you can see that I labelled my hook (HOOK) in red letters. I do this all the way through so that I can see where the main plot points occur. Again, some people might not like this approach, but I have an agent and that agent will try to sell my work to a traditional publisher. There are games that we all need to play to give ourselves the best chance of being signed, and plot structure is one of those games. My novels are literary, quiet, character-driven, with a focus on the prose and sentence structures. All of that is still there, but it’s laid over a structure that works for the commercial market (fingers and toes crossed).

And if I write like I’m all at sea (early versions of book one), then my readers will be all at sea, too. We don’t want that. No, no, no.

I also have a neat little page at the beginning of my spreadsheet where I write out the stasis for each main character, I list the main themes, and I have these plot points listed. It’s then very easy to re-focus my mind if I start to wander too much.

Wrap It Up, Wrap It Up

So, book one has hopefully been saved by my new approach (time will tell) and book two is well on its way (currently 50k words into the first draft). By taking the time up front, I have saved myself years, literally, in rewrites. I am sure of that. I have a lot of faith in book two. I know it, I understand it. It’s not an unwieldy beast. And best of all, I am having a ton of fun writing it!

If you love this post, please subscribe and share widely! If nothing else, I hope you have taken at least a small nugget that will help you on your way.

Peace!