Plot Doctoring: How to Make Plotting Simple

Like the main event itself, NaNo Prep is always better with an incredible writing community around you. Luckily, our forums come with such a ready-made community. We’ve asked Letitia Jones, forums moderator, to talk to us about the Plot Doctoring forum, and how to construct a plot:

I envy pantsers, I really do. They can sit down, open their word processor or pick up a pencil, and the words will just flow out of them. No planning, no outline, and yet they manage to get it done. I’ve tried it and I ended up with a gargantuan knot of plot holes and twists the likes of which Stephen Hawking could attempt to untangle until the sun burned out. 

I’m a planner like many of my fellow writers in the Plot Doctoring forum, and a rule of thumb I like to apply when plotting is that if it takes you longer to describe your plot than it does to send a text message you need to go back to the drawing board.

You know the saying, “Everything you need to know in life you learned in kindergarten”? Well, that principle can be applied even in plotting. You might have learned in kindergarten that simplicity is the key to success. Let’s take the simplicity route and see where we end up.

We are going to start with a simple sentence, free of characters, subplots, or twisty ends.

A boy meets a girl.

Nothing could get be simpler than that. A boy meets a girl. It’s a tale as old as time, and still as sweet as the first go-around. Now we are going to take this simple sentence and give it an equally simple resolution. Again, we don’t want anything flashy or fancy.

A boy meets a girl who changes his life forever.

Now we have a plot that will take us from the beginning of our story to the end. 

Moving on, we’re going to add adjectives for the girl and the boy. An adjective is a describing word, which qualifies a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified.

A street rat boy meets a noble girl who changes his life forever.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “We don’t have a villain yet!” So let’s go ahead and add in a villain. We are going to go through the same steps.

Simple sentence:

A wizard wants to rule the world.

A simple sentence with a resolution:

A wizard wants to rule the world by stealing a lamp.

A simple sentence with resolution and adjectives:

A bad wizard wants to rule the world by stealing a magical lamp.

Now let’s combine our initial sentence and the villain sentence with some flair.

A bad wizard wants to rule the world by stealing a magical lamp, but a street rat boy that meets a noble girl who changes his life forever thwarts him.

I know I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense and it’s a grammatical mess but the key here is simplicity. You want to keep you plot as simple and as basic as you can in the beginning as you start to write. This will allow you to create and destroy characters, subplots, and plot twists with abandon and with ease. 

Plotting is not some mystical Holy Grail that you have to assemble the Fellowship or the Avengers to find. It’s as easy as a boy meets a girl. 

Letitia Jones constructed her first story after she watched Michael Jackson zombie-walk across her screen and onto the page of her Lisa Frank notebook. She grew up in Germany. In 2010, she penned her first NaNo-novel while studying in Manchester, England. Since that first attempt, Tommeh has graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, moved back to Manchester and started a Creative Writing masters program at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is currently plotting her debut YA novel.

Top photo by Flickr user Tallent Show.