P Is For Plot

For the Blogging From A to Z Challenge I’m doing you all a huge favor and filling you in on the 26 Things To Hate About Writing.** I’m hoping by the end of April, I will have convinced all of you not to indulge in the wild insanity of becoming a writer. If I can save even one person from offering themselves up in sacrifice to the mad and fickle word gods, I will have done some good in this world.

Check out each letter’s post here.
[image error]PLOT

As if writing isn’t frustrating and complicated enough, you can’t just make up some characters and have them do nothing, even if they’re super interesting like being aliens or living underneath Antarctica, or both. You need a story, a plot, something for them to fight against and for. I mean, that’s why people read, so I’m told. If scrubbing the floor and doing laundry to a pointless conclusion of eventual death with no heart-stopping adventure turns your crank, that’s just what we call real life. Heaven knows we’ve had enough of that. Even Cinderella got to have a fairy godmother and go to a ball.

You also need a satisfying conclusion. Cinderella got her prince, but if her wicked stepmother had just beat her and put her back to work scrubbing pots at the end that would be a valuable lesson to our children about not wearing impractical glass shoes. However, plots are better, but here’s how they make you feel like you’re trying to stuff your fat foot in a shoe that is somehow bizarrely sized for only one person on earth:

– Sometimes you create a plot that’s too complicated and convoluted to unravel. Sure, you can just drop a fairy godmother in to sort things, but you and I both know that’s a cop-out. Make Cinderella slay her evil family with a magical sword, instead.

– Oftentimes you can’t see how a plot resolves itself until you get near the end. This both makes you feel creative and terrified you might have just wasted hours of your life writing this book and now you can’t end it. You’re trapped. Forever.

– Your plot may seem to be healthy at first and then drop dead somewhere along the road. Should have sprung for those glass horseshoes.

One of the worst things about writing is creating a smooth, plausible, interlinking plot that carries the story from beginning to end and wraps everything up in a satisfying conclusion. Even worse, you need to have subplots that interconnect and wrap up adequately as well. When this is done with skill, it is indeed like you have a fairy godmother fixing your rotten problems for you. When you can’t make that magic happen, you’re going to bibbidi bobbidi boo-hoo all day.

**Disclaimer: If you haven’t figured it out, these posts are pure satire and simply a humorous way to vent my writing frustrations. No offense is intended to anyone. Please, become or continue being a writer. It’s awesome, I swear. It’s super…duper, awesome…heh heh

Filed under: A to Z Challenge, A to Z Challenge 2017 Tagged: blog hop, funny, writing