Plotting in bits and pieces

There are a myriad of books out there on how to construct a plot. Most of them, so far as I can tell, seem to take one of two approaches: either they focus on the main character as the driver of the plot, or they focus on the traditional plot-skeleton as the way of pushing the plot forward.

Both of these methods (and most of the others I’ve run across) begin by saying things like “have an idea” or “pick a main character” and then proceed directly to either “decide on the main plot problem” or “decide how it ends.” This isn’t wrong – the plot problem and the ending are important, and in most books really do need to be there by the time the story is over. They’re also perfectly valid places that one can start working out one’s plot. They just don’t work first time, every time, for every writer…or even for a writer who has developed plots that way in the past.

But these systems are top-down approaches, the equivalent of saying to a sculptor or potter, “First, decide what you are going to make. A statue of an elephant? A teapot?” The idea is that once you know where you are going, it is much easier to chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant, or add material until it looks like a teapot.

What these approaches don’t help with are the people who work from the bottom up or the inside out. These folks are more like quilters who start with eighteen different types of fabric and a box of triangles and squares left over from the last project, and ask “What can I make out of this that would be interesting?” rather than starting with “I am going to make a Log Cabin quilt; what do I have that I can use?”

If you’re starting with a box of bits and pieces – a couple of characters, a scene that doesn’t seem to have a point, a notion that a sea voyage ought to come in somewhere – the approach you have to take to generate a plot probably isn’t the tidy linear method that so many plotting books describe. It’s going to be iterative, going around and around or back and forth until a pattern emerges. Because that’s one of the things plot is: it’s a pattern that goes somewhere.

The first thing to do is to see what you have. For a quilter, that means spreading out all the fabric and bits so they can get an overview; for a writer, it usually means reading through everything, though it might also mean printing stuff out and spreading it around like the fabric bits.

Depending on your personal preferences, you can then proceed in a couple of different ways. You can pick out all your very favorite bits and then try to see if any of what’s left fits around them or connects them. You can group and regroup your snippets – by obvious mechanical categories like length or type (dialog, description, action) or category (characters, places, backstory, plot twists), or in more intuitive “these feel like they belong together” groupings. You can move stacks of paper around, or use 3×5 cards or Post-It Notes, or make diagrams in a brainstorming program. You can clump things together (all the bits that involve Mary Ann) and then shuffle the clumps, or you can sort things individually and then look for all the different groups that have a Mary Ann bit in them.

As you do this, two things usually happen: one is that as you go over and over the bits from different directions, they will start to collide in your head and cause new bits to appear; the other is that you start to notice the things that are missing. Again, depending on your personal style and preference, you can scribble a list of new ideas and missing bits and keep going, or you can stop and write down the whole idea (whether that’s two lines or a five page scene) or try to make up some bits that would fit in the missing places.

If you are very, very lucky, you will start scribbling down something and come out of the daze several hours later realizing that you have just written Chapter One and you can stop looking at the bits and pieces and just keep writing now. Don’t count on this, though; it’s rare.

More usually, you will shuffle bits and pieces, and add new bits and pieces, and eventually you will start noticing a pattern or patterns. Maybe you have eight scenes where someone is rescuing someone or saving something, or a set of conversations that all seem to involve family crises of different sorts. If the emerging pattern appeals to you, make it your centerpiece and look through all the remaining bits to see what might fit with it. (You won’t ever use all the bits and pieces.) Or just resort and regroup everything until the emerging pattern grows clearer or you nudge the missing bits into view.

If the pattern(s) you come up with don’t appeal, pick the one that includes your favorite scene/clever line/dialog/character and ask yourself what would make it appealing and interesting – not to readers, you’re not at that point yet. Interesting and appealing to you. Or try recombining it with something else – maybe the action-adventure bits would be a lot more fun to write if the main character was trying to deal with the family crises at the same time, or the typical romance scenes would be more interesting if it involved a pod of dolphins.

Eventually, you probably do want to get to the “where does it end?” and “what is the big problem?” questions, but the odds are good that by then you will have a fairly good notion what your story is and where the plot is heading. Then you can tidy up all the stacks of papers and take a quick look at the top-down planning models to make sure you haven’t missed anything you really need or want. Or you can just start writing once you have whatever your backbrain considers “enough to go on with.”