I'm a writer who knows what he wants to write about before he starts. I just need to work out how best to explore it as an author and present it to the reader.
At the scene level I trust my subconscious, but at the story-level most of what it produces is crap, so I don't like to go on 'voyages of discovery' except as exercises to develop my writing craft. I never try and wing manuscript that's more than a half-dozen scenes long.
Having critiqued hundreds of manuscripts and worked with writer-buds through dozens of story ideas I can say with some confidence that a lot of other writers are floundering without clear plot ideas too, so when people tell me that whatever their subconscious produces is golden I tend to scoff a bit. I'll believe it for Harold Pinter, say, but not for most authors. My suggestion: for efficiency's sake, and sanity's, if you
can plot, you
should.
But that said, I'm in favour of 'pantsing' at the plot level -- going off on frolics at the plot level might cost time, but nothing like the time it takes to write manuscript, and even plotters need to give their subconscious a run. I'm also in favour of writing out critical scenes if you're not sure of the plot. So one doesn't have to be a 'pure' plotter, and equally if you don't like the plot you've written, you don't have to keep it.
I don't have a sure-fire way of producing a good plot, but I've found ways to improve the odds:
- Start with complex, sympathetic characters of high worth -- extremes of type that the reader will value as much as a close friend, say
- Give them contradictions of desire or behaviour that challenge who they think they are and who we think we are
- Give them goals that we can admire and sympathise with
- Put them in situations where pursuit of those goals becomes a matter as important as life. Do this by escalating the stakes until they can't possibly get worse
- Write the antagonist's side before the main characters' side
- Give major supporting characters their own contradictions and extremes
- Plot the inner journey of the major characters before plotting their outer journey. Mark each major change with a major event causing a dilemma.
- Once you have the inner journeys mapped, plot again at the scene-level of action/reaction and goal/outcome.
- Move toward crisis with setbacks of increasing consequence.
- Add additional dilemmas that force a pick between bad choices whenever a major character faces additional options to change
- Make events surprising
- Whatever happens, ensure that a major character takes it personally
- Structure the plot so that the crisis reveals who the major characters are -- and changes either one side of the conflict or the other
- Write the ending so that it's clear who the major characters are at the end, and how they've changed.
Oddly enough, I've never found this advice in a single plotting book, but I've found pieces of it in several books, including:
- How to Grow a Novel, by Sol Stein
- How to Write a Damn Good novel, by James N. Frey
- Writing the Breakout Novel, by Donald Maass
- Top Story/Bottom Story, by William H. Coles (online essay)
There are other approaches, several more formulaic -- such as James N. Frey's
The Key, which is based on Joseph Campbell's
Hero's Journey. I've played with Dramatica Pro and various Heroes Journey sorts of software and three- or five-act frames, but for my purposes they're not terribly useful, because I don't need moulds to chuck ideas into; I need ways of growing the ideas I have in surprising ways.
I don't know how well this approach will suit people who don't know what they want to write about. I have a friend though who leans on her subconscious more. She increasingly builds stories out of key scenes, and that's starting to work quite well.
Not a bad idea, actually.
