Many people will argue against plotting out their stories for a variety of reasons. They will say that plotting is boring, removes spontaneity, stifles creative flow, etc. While arguments against plotting reflect individual taste and preference, there is still room for SOME planning.
Why plan? It’s simple: PLANNING CUTS DOWN ON ERRORS AND BACKTRACKING. Unless you are a born storyteller, you will find it hard to have all the pieces you need for a well-constructed story on hand without doing some planning, or PLOTTING, first.
Here are SEVEN benefits to plotting that I hope make sense to use or at least explore in your own writing.
1. Character ideation.
Developing solid, believable characters takes time. Remembering their names and character traits takes planning and some way to remember them. If a story is populated with more than just two characters at any given time, chances are you’ve forgotten names, and any defining features, back story, or even motives by the time you are halfway through writing your story. If you’re writing more than one book with these characters, you are going to need to become intimately familiar with them. Character sheets, character motivation and arc sheets, etc. help you to achieve some semblance of consistency and order for your cast. Who are your characters? Why do they matter? Why is this story about them? How do you want them to show who they are and what their purpose is in your story? How do you want them to change?
Without these devices, you are almost certain to fall into the trap of forgetting a name, origins or who they are in the greater scheme of things.
2. Story arc and subplots.
Getting a basic grasp of what you want your story to be about doesn’t involve exhaustive preparation, but it’s worth having some idea of the story arc you want to follow, as well as how subplots can add richness and texture to your story. What do you want to achieve? What is the main character’s goal? Is there a lesson they must learn? How do you want the story world they start in to change by the end? As for subplots, what can you add to your story to help carry it through the middle chapters? Who adds interest or tension in your story? Why? Is there an opportunity to tie the subplot to another book/story arc for a follow on? How?
3. Determine how much story you have.
Doing some kind of plan based on a story idea will give you a rough to solid understanding of how much story you have to tell. This is often where you will realize the length of what you have can become a novel, or fall way short, become a series or a standalone book, a novella or a short story. The impact of your story often hinges on the length of what you write, and if you don’t have enough idea, or any way to add to it with a subplot, it starts to fray and develop problem areas such as winding and pointless descriptions or the opposite problem: too brief and bland from a lack of detail. Characters can become over-explained or wooden in scenes that become unnecessary in stories that are too long for the ideas, or in the case of deciding to write something short – underdeveloped and amorphous due to not enough space to develop them properly. You need to know also if you over-write or under-write at this point. If you have a tendency to get into the details, it is worth remembering and noting cautions down for yourself ahead of scenes that could be traps for this. If you tend towards a lower word count, be conscious of adding in the necessary details and life to each scene before moving on.
4. Determine the kind of story you have.
It is not helpful getting halfway through your story writing, sixty-thousand words in, only to discover you haven’t stuck to a genre or that your story is suddenly a horror when it started out as a cozy mystery. Plotting out the story arc involves knowing the tone and nuances that make up the kind of story you intend to write. If you are vague on this aspect, you will need to understand genres and reader expectations first before diving in. Readers will balk at unexpected surprises that throw them out of a story including unexpected deaths that are unnecessary or story-altering (it’s never a good idea to kill off a main character unless you have a damn good secondary who is really your main), relationships, path changes, tone changes, etc. Plotting helps to avoid the pitfalls of whimsical and mood-led writing and helps a story stay on track over the long haul.
5. Understand what you need to research and why.
If you plan your writing, you will recognize what you need to brush up on in terms of knowledge before you write yourself into inaccuracies and dead ends. Every good writer is backed up by great research. But what if that seems like an awful lot of work? Well, it should. The more you know about a subject, the more confident you will be in bringing it to life in your story. Research as much as possible, even down to names that have symbolism if that is integral to your story. A word of caution though: In this age of AI assistance everywhere, including in searches on the internet, be careful. There is a saying I always go by: Trust but verify. This goes for story research too. Verify the sources of information you will hang a story on. Don’t expect that an AI assistant will give you an accurate summary. Read the sources yourself. To ignore the research process in favour of a faster start is to create endless possibilities for mistakes, misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and worse – liability. If you ignore every other point in this post, please don’t ignore the need to do your research. To do so is to assume you are an authority on a subject and your readers will punish anything that falls short of their expectation of your expertise.
6. Choose your point of view, tensing, and tempo before you start.
How many times have you realized some way into your story that your tensing is wrong? How many times has the point of view niggled until you admit you should have gone with something else? And how many times have you wondered why the middle of your book is sagging and lackluster? If any of these scenarios sound familiar, you will have guessed that it might have been avoided through some advance planning. Point of view is crucial to getting the story to flow, to read RIGHT. If you are not comfortable, your readers won’t be either. What point of view best allows the story to develop, portrays characters well, gives a sense of the direction, energy, etc. that the story has? What are the genre expectations? The same can be said for tenses. Present tense allows readers into the immediate story but has trouble pulling back and giving exposition room. Past tense can lead to info-dumps and then there’s the trouble with flashbacks . . . When it comes to tempo, it is smart to have an average chapter or scene length in mind and remember how often you want to add action, scene transitions, the passage of time and how characters interact in time inside your world. Fast-tempoed stories add urgency, while an epic that spans decades will develop more gently. It is worth understanding how you want to portray time because your readers will be linking those chronological clues in their heads and counting hours and days, weeks and years in their heads as they recreate your story in their imaginations.
7. Plan your resolution.
Every story ends. This story you’re writing has to end. And yet so many writers are not prepared for the ending. The final phase, or denouement (Oxford Dictionary defines it as “the final part of a play, movie, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved.”) is probably the most important part of your story. It is the WHOLE POINT of any reader committing to however many twists and turns you’ve led them on. If you screw up your ending, no one will want to read anything else you write, but if you nail it, ah, you’ll have fans for life. So how do you master the ending? One simple method is to begin with the end in mind. Start at the final scene, the final moments and envision them, craft the feeling you want to convey then walk it back, find how to link it to a series of events that will inexorably draw to the conclusion you have meticulously planned. Master storytellers always know how they want the story to end. Even if they don’t plan the rest of it (mostly out of practice and developing an intuition for how a story flows), they KNOW how it must end. What is the final lesson? What is the important change? Who is there to pick up the pieces? How has the world in which the characters have lived changed? All of these things must contrast strongly with the beginning, or something will feel off. The most stunning endings are not cliffhangers, they are the ones that draw attention to the new normal in a way that leaves readers satisfied they got out of this story what they expected.
I hope that some of the reasons I’ve stated here are things you will try so you can understand the true benefits of planning your story writing process. I know it’s not for everyone, but it is worth contemplating why people who do plot tend to go back to that methodology time and time again. There is a sense of peace in knowing what you’re in for, a sense that the path ahead is not fraught with obstacles and challenges. Planning in even a small way can drastically improve your chances of succeeding at writing your book.
I have created The Big Write Box and have started to offer items from it on my Patreon as paid products (no subscription needed). The first one, PlotBox, is available now and is a set of downloadable and printable worksheets writers can use to plot their stories in as much detail as they want. Please visit my Patreon to learn more.