Author, We Have a Problem: 4 Tips on Plotting Your Novel

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

When I ask writers what they struggle with the most, plot is often at the top of the list. Here are some tips to make plotting easier.

Despite their challenges, plots are really simple things to create (no, really,). A plot is just the events that make up your story. It's what happens in the novel, and what the characters do.

Now the hard part, and the part writers often struggle with, is crafting a good plot. Because plotting is easy, but plotting in a way that best serves your story is much harder. You can't just have "stuff" happening--all that "stuff" has to have a point and tell the story you want to tell, in the way you want to tell it.

This is why the same story can be told a million different ways, because the plot can always be different.

This is an important distinction, because it allows you the freedom to change your plot without feeling like you're losing your story. 

For example, I re-wrote my novel Blue Fire five times before I was happy with the plot. The plot changed constantly, the story never did. To use my house analogy: You build a house once, but you redecorate it every year.

The house is story. Decorating is plot. If you don't like the decor, change it. It's still your house.

Some key things to remember when plotting:

1. The goal of plot is to illustrate your story

If your story is about a soldier trying to save his king, then the plot is going to be the steps in which that soldier takes to save his king. Subplots will naturally arise, but even they will illustrate some aspect that ties back to that main storyline.

The plot resolved the core conflict or story problem.

I often suggest writing down that one sentence that says what your story is about and taping it to your monitor to remind yourself what the end goal is. When you think up a scene, look at that sentence and ask yourself how it connects to your story. It can be subtle, it can be an intermediate step to a bigger goal, but it'll be something that has to happen in order for the core conflict to be resolved. If there's no connection to the main goal, odds are the scene can go. It's not advancing your story.

It doesn't have to be a direct line connection, though. 

If the story goal is to break the king out of prison, all kinds of additional problems might pop up while trying to break him out. Those smaller obstacles create plot, because they all make it harder for the protagonist to achieve his goal. The end goal is still the same and that end goal (freeing the king) is what's critical to the story.

(Here's more on Why Your Plot Isn’t Working)

2. Never let the plot dictate your story

It can guide it, influence it, enhance it, but it's easy to write a scene that's really cool, but not right for the story. And since you love that scene, you bend over backward to try to make it fit. If you're forcing it, it's probably not working, no matter how cool or how well written the scene may be.

Cut it, save it in another file, but don't let it waylay your story.

Say, for example, while trying to free the king, the protagonist discovers the warden is corrupt and planning to kill a slew of wrongly imprisoned political prisoners captured when the king was captured. This is a bad thing, but it has nothing to do with the story goal of saving the king.

It might work as a nice inner conflict (the protagonist has to choose between abandoning the prisoner and saving his king), but to go and actually try to save those prisoners is very likely going to waylay your story and send the plot off on a tangent. Will that scene be cool? Probably. Will it have stakes and goals and everything it needs? Sure. Does it advance the story? Probably not.

Why? Because if the stakes don't escalate, and it's basically the same goal with smaller stakes. 

Saving prisoners the protagonist (and reader) doesn't know or care about is a lot less important that saving the king he adores who is needed by the people.

And that's the tricky part, because it really seems like it should be a great subplot, right? But those prisoners aren't keeping the protagonist from anything. They're a sad situation to be sure, but leaving them there isn't going to affect his goal of saving the king at all. He doesn't have to free them to free the king. He might want to, might be haunted by it because he didn't, but it's not a plot-advancing goal. It's a delaying goal. It's plot fluff to delay your protagonist from achieving his goal instead of something designed to make it harder and raise the stakes of that goal.

However, when you find yourself in a situation where you write something unexpected that looks cool, you can start thinking about ways in which saving those prisoners does directly affect saving the king or a bigger story goal. 

Maybe the king needs to be the one to save them to gain supporters. Maybe it turns out later one of those prisoners is important to the cause or the king in some way. Instead of sending your protagonist right at it, it might be a nifty seed to plant that will later be exactly the right problem for the plot.

(Here's more on Don't Let Your Plot Hijack Your Story)

3. Characters create the plot

Since stories are about characters, characters act and create plot, which in turn illustrate a story. So, characters and their choices in the story are where your plot is going to come from. Their actions drive the story. They're going to want things, want to avoid thing, want to cover things up. They're not just going to sit there and do nothing. They're going to act in some way.

This is a biggie, so I'm going to go into more detail on this over the next few days. It deserves its own post.

4. Plot needs stakes

It's probably more accurate to say characters need stakes, but if there's nothing to lose, the plot won't matter. Something to lose is probably more important that something to gain, crazy as that sounds. It's the struggle that makes the story compelling, the risk that things might go wrong and the protagonist will fail and face terrible consequences.

Why someone acts is a huge driving force behind plot, and stakes are a big part of that. 

It's what turns a bunch of scenes into a story, because the events suddenly matter and aren't just characters acting out a script.

This also deserves its own post, since characters and stakes are key to a good plot.

Plotting can be challenging because there really is no limit to what you can do. But if you keep your core conflict in mind, it makes it a lot easier to identify what advances your story and what's just more plot.

How do you like to plot your novel? Do you plan in advance or figure it out as you go?

*Originally published May 2010. Last update February 2020.

For more help on plotting or writing a novel check out my Plotting Your Novel: Ideas and Structure.

Go step-by-step through plotting and writing a novel. Learn how to find and develop ideas, brainstorm stories from that first spark of inspiration, develop the right characters, setting, plots and subplots, as well as teach you how to identify where your novel fits in the market, and if your idea has what it takes to be a series.

With clear and easy-to-understand examples, Plotting Your Novel: Ideas and Structure offers ten self-guided workshops with more than 100 different exercises to help you craft a solid novel. Learn how to:

• Create compelling characters readers will love
• Choose the right point of view for your story
• Determine the conflicts that will drive your plot (and hook readers!)
• Find the best writing process for your writing style
• Create a solid plot from the spark of your idea

Plotting Your Novel: Ideas and Structure also helps you develop the critical elements for submitting and selling your novel once it’s finished. You’ll find exercises on how to:

• Craft your one-sentence pitch
• Create your summary hook blurb
• Develop a solid working synopsis And so much more!

Plotting Your Novel: Ideas and Structure is an easy-to-follow guide to writing your novel or fixing a novel that isn’t quite working. 

Available in paperback and ebook formats.

Janice Hardy is the award-winning author of the teen fantasy trilogy The Healing Wars, including The Shifter, Blue Fire, and Darkfall from Balzer+Bray/Harper Collins. The Shifter, was chosen for the 2014 list of "Ten Books All Young Georgians Should Read" from the Georgia Center for the Book.

She also writes the Grace Harper urban fantasy series for adults under the name, J.T. Hardy.

When she's not writing novels, she's teaching other writers how to improve their craft. She's the founder of Fiction University and has written multiple books on writing.

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