Why Your Plot Isn’t Working

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

At the heart of every novel is a problem to solve. When the novel has no problem, you’ll have a problem plotting it.

One of the first novels I tried to write “for real” (one I intended to submit to agents and hopefully get published one day), suffered from me not knowing what my novel was truly about. I had a general sense of what the main problem was—save the world—but I never fully understood what that meant to the plot.

I knew the characters all had issues to face and problems to solve, and I knew the details of every one of them. I knew they’d all converge at a particular point in the point in the book and have a massive battle. I even knew specific details about how some of those epic fights would go down.

What I didn’t know, was what my villain wanted, why it mattered, and what he’d planned to do about it. Not on any real level anyway. He wanted to take over the world because he was a bad guy and that’s what bad guys did. I decided what “evil step of his plan” my characters encountered as I outlined the story and had to give them scene goals, with no regard to a larger plot beyond “stopping the bad guy from taking over the world.”

Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com