Plotting - Tumblr Posts
for my eighth year of art fight (good lord), i'm on team seafoam!
come kick my ass in july!!
Art Fight yay 🌊!!
This is my first year so yeah I'm still figuring it out. Check my page out, it's pretty barren lol.
I’m on artfight for the first ever year! Always looked fun so I’m thrilled to actually join this time
Sooo
I am at an ill-advised crossroads of having two (ish) potential new WIPs to start. (Yes. Yes I know there are twenty-something unfinished WIPs already, just ignore that for now)
For some reason, I have decided to outsource this decision to whoever sees this post.
i return with a bunch of books (albeit good ones and ones i wanted to read) and a jumbled mess of concepts im supposedly supposed to string together for my next novel
why is fantasy so daunting to write
yet… i regret nothing (only a bit that im not planning more, but it’s FINE)
Hello my fellow writers.
Most people have heard of Evernote by now, but a lot of people (myself included) thought/think that it’s purely for business or shopping lists and what not.
I’m here to tell you that it’s not just for business. It can be a valuable tool for plotting and organizing your novel!
I’ve blurred out all the super pertinent details for my current project as well as my email address, but here’s how I set it all up.
1. Download Evernote. There are paid versions, but for what we’ll be doing, the free version works just as well. You have to make an account, because everything is in cloud storage, unless you make a local notebook.
2. Set everything up and make your first notebook. Title it however you want.
3. Make Notes in the Notebook. Obviously, you can do this however you want, but here are some note blocks to get you started;
-Plot: Here’s where you’ll put your premise, summary or outline
-Setting: Here’s where you’ll describe your setting. I found a cool thing when I was searching for Evernote templates that has key questions to answer about setting. Find it HERE. (If you have an evernote account, you can add it straight to your notebook!)
-Misc Ideas/Notes: This is just a place to jot down things you may think of that may not fit into any category or are incomplete. (I have lists of names and potential titles in mine)
-Characters: This is to hash out your characters!
-Snippets: I don’t always write in the right order or I’ll think of something a character might say or do, or a particularly awesome description I don’t need quite yet and I can add it here.
-Character Profiles: This was something I added because I found a really nice 100 question survey thing for characterization and I didn’t want to clog up my character page for this. I only did this for my four main characters, but as far as I know, there are no limits to how many notes you can have in a notebook.
I hope this helps someone out! I’m really excited about this because I’ve been having trouble getting my ideas sorted out in my head and this has really, really made things easier to see and think about!
Back to work!
-Amanda
P.S. It occurred to me that this could seem sponsored and I assure you that Evernote is not paying me to promote them, though if they did, I wouldn’t say no because money is nice. However, I’m nowhere near popular enough for that, so you guys probably have nothing to worry about! Happy writing!
not sure what should happen next in your story?
Embarrass your protagonist. Make them seem weak and vulnerable in some way.
Shoot someone. That always takes the reader by surprise.
In relation, kidnap someone. Or, rather, make it seem to your protagonist like someone has been kidnapped.
Have one of your side characters disappear or become unavailable for some reason. This will frustrate your protagonist.
Have someone kiss the wrong girl, boy, or person, especially if you’ve been setting up a romance angle. It’s annoying.
If this story involves parents, have them argue. Push the threat of divorce, even if you know it won’t ever happen. It’ll make your readers nervous.
Have someone frame your protagonist for a crime they didn’t commit. This could range from a dispute to a minor crime to a full-blown felony.
If this is a fantasy story involving magic or witchcraft, create a terrible accident that’s a direct result of their spell-casting.
Injure your protagonist in some way, or push them into a treacherous scenario where they might not make it out alive.
Have two side characters who are both close to the protagonist get into a literal fist-fight. This creates tension for the reader, especially if these characters are well-developed, because they won’t know who to root for.
Make your protagonist get lost somewhere (at night in the middle of town, in the woods, in someone else’s house, etc.)
Involve a murder. It can be as in-depth and as important as you want it to be.
Introduce a new character that seems to prey on your protagonist’s flaws and bring them out to light.
If it’s in-character, have one of your characters get drunk or take drugs. Show the fallout of that decision through your protagonist.
Spread a rumor about your protagonist.
If your protagonist is in high-school, create drama in the school atmosphere. A death of a student, even if your protagonist didn’t know them personally, changes the vibe.
If your story involves children, have one of them do something dangerous (touch a hot stove, run out into the road, etc.) and show how the protagonist responds to this, even if the child isn’t related to them.
In a fantasy story, toss out the idea of a rebellion or war between clans or villages (or whatever units you are working with).
Add a scenario where your protagonist has to make a choice. We all have watched movies where we have screamed don’t go in there! at the top of our lungs at the main character. Make them go in there.
Have your protagonist find something, even if they don’t understand the importance of it yet. A key, a document, an old stuffed animal, etc.
Foreshadow later events in some way. (Need help? Ask me!)
Have your protagonist get involved in some sort of verbal altercation with someone else, even if they weren’t the one who started it.
Let your protagonist get sick. No, but really, this happens in real life all the time and it’s rarely ever talked about in literature, unless it’s at its extremes. It could range from a common cold to pneumonia. Maybe they end up in the hospital because of it. Maybe they are unable to do that one thing (whatever that may be) because of it.
Have someone unexpected knock on your protagonist’s door.
Introduce a character that takes immediate interest in your protagonist’s past, which might trigger a flashback.
Have your protagonist try to hide something from someone else and fail.
Formulate some sort of argument or dispute between your protagonist and their love interest to push them apart.
Have your protagonist lose something of great value in their house and show their struggle to find it. This will frustrate the reader just as much as the protagonist.
Create a situation where your protagonist needs to sneak out in the middle of the night for some reason.
Prevent your character from getting home or to an important destination in some way (a car accident, a bad storm, flat tire, running out of gas, etc.)
This looks like an awesome way to lay everything out and see how it all overlaps! I may need to try this
so I've like finished one of the presents (not typed it up yet) and the other is - I've got three weeks today to finish it by and I've got it started! I have done some! I just need to check some notes and work out a few things that I couldn't do at work because I didn't have the files
(I did) (I just didn't read down far enough)
so now I'm back home and rather than getting straight to playing DA:I like I have been for the past week I was gonna write but uh
yeah anyway I'm working out the dnd shenans timeline with post-it notes on the floor and there is one hell of a draught down here. Wild.
Writing from Scratch #12: Compound Plots, Part 2
Compound Plots, Part 2: Parallel Plots
Parallel plots share a lot in common with subordinate plots. As with subordinate plots, parallel plots occur simultaneously – the individual problems and their solutions should be introduced and resolved at roughly the same time. However, parallel plots can be divided from each other and stand on their own, unlike with a subordinate plot which is dependent on the principle plot for its try-fail cycles.
“Parallel plots” is a bit of a misnomer. “Parallel” comes from the idea of parallelism in sentence construction because parallel plots often act as mirrors to one another or two sides of the same coin; they often work on each other indirectly to strengthen or emphasize the Thought of the story. What we don’t want to do is fall into the trap of thinking that the plots cannot intersect; although you should be able to separate them into their own stories, in a single story, they are meant to work together.
Superhero stories have parallel plots a plenty with the main character dealing with a plot-problem as their civilian identity and dealing with a different plot-problem as their superhero identity. We’ll look at one of these examples, Spiderman: Homecoming. Peter Parker is dealing with a Character plot in overcoming his lack of confidence to ask Liz out on a date; meanwhile Spiderman is dealing with an Inquiry plot involving the sale of alien tech weaponry on the streets. These do have points of overlap – they should for effective storytelling. However, if you take the Inquiry plot out of the story, you have a rom-com/coming-of-age story with a complete plot of no confidence to ask Liz out to yes confidence to ask Liz out. If you take the Character plot out of the story, you still have Spiderman investigating the origin of the alien tech weaponry.
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Writing from Scratch # 11: Compound Plots, Part 1
Compound Plots, Part 1: Episodes
Like complex plots, compound plots have two or more plots put together, but unlike complex plots, in compound plots, the plots can be split apart and still work as a Complete Thought.
The first way to compound plots that we’ll go over is via episodes. So, we first we need to straighten out some terminology. There is a current trend in storytelling that could be called anti-episodic (there are pockets where this is not as much the case, like crime and mystery books and television); instead what’s really popular is “serialized” storytelling. What people generally mean when they talk about episodic versus serialized storytelling is that an episodic style has a different unconnected, self-contained plot every episode or book and that a serialized style has every episode or book contributing to one very large season or series spanning plot. As with most any binary, what we’re actually looking at is a spectrum – Harry Potter has a self-contained plot with every novel, but overall, every novel contributes to the plot of Voldemort’s resurrection and final death.
Supernatural is a really interesting case study because it lasted so long and it started before the anti-episodic trend took hold. So, you can see the early seasons, especially the first season, very firmly on the episodic side of the spectrum with its monster of the week format and it slowly became more and more serialized to the point where an unrelated monster of the week was anomalous and generally warranted some kind of in episode commentary by a character.
When I talk about episodic compound plots, I’m kind of talking about this idea, but it’s squares and rectangles. Or maybe squares and quadrilaterals. What I’m talking about is that one plot-problem will be solved, and then another plot-problem will arise. What the episodic-serialized debate is talking about is the causal relationship between those plot-problems. There are some serialized series that do not have episodic compound plots, but most of them do.
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