In the spirit of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), here are a couple of interesting posts on story lines and plotting. (If you know of others, please let us know about them in the comments.)
The first, from Roz Morris of Nail Your Novel, talks about how most stories can be broken into four parts, even if there are only three acts. (Hint: the second act has two parts.) This can be a useful device for both plot planning during the writing phase and for plot analysis during the editing phase.
The second, by Bill Boyd, The Literacy Advisor, is essentially a summary of Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots, which looks at plot from the reader’s point of view. Since our audience is pretty much made up of readers, this can be a great way to think about our writing. It could help some of us get past those stuck places we all seem to run up against from time to time and might even inspire some to venture down a different road in the next story.
Whether you’re engaged in the madcap frenzy of NaNoWriMo or churning along at your own pace, what kind of resources or tools do you use to plot and frame your stories?
I was a ‘pantser’, nearly 70,000 words into my first novel but it felt lame, amateurish. Something kept nagging at me…story wasn’t hitting on all cylinders, couldn’t figure out why. Then I stumbled on a book: ‘Story Engineering’ by Larry Brooks. In simple terms it explained the absolute necessity for following basic rules of plot structure, passed down for centuries, and laid out the story milepoints every good story has to hit. That was it! To meet these milestones I had to re-write much of my mss, and the process forced me to dump 8 whole chapters, strip out 12 others (approx. 20k words) and it hurt. But as a by-product, magically the story began to gel, tension ramped up, suspense grew. Less was more. Highly recommend this book to serious writers.
This is a great testimony. Rewriting can be so difficult, but it’s true that we writers have to be willing to “kill our darlings” in order to realize their potential. Thanks for both recommending Larry Brooks’ book and sharing your personal experience using it. Much success to you and your writing!