Make Your Idea into A Plot

You’re ready to start your first novel. You know what genre you want to write and you’ve got this great idea for a story: aliens colonize earth. So, now what? That idea could or the new TV show Colony, the old TV show V or even the classic War of the Worlds. What distinguishes them is the plot.
The plot, simply put, is what happens. It’s the series of events that take place in the story.  A good plot starts with conflict and ends with resolution.  So the first thing you need to decide is, what is your central conflict?  What is it that my protagonist wants? And what are the obstacles to him or her getting that thing.  In all of the above examples the protagonists want to be free of their alien oppressors. The aliens want to maintain control. That’s where the plot starts. But as you can see, the three stories go in very different directions from there.
So, your plot starts with someone who wants something important, and follows them as they strive to get it.  They need to do that striving themselves, and they need to learn something from the effort.  What matters in plot, unlike football, is not whether you win or lose but how your hero plays the game.

In a really good plot, each of the lead character’s successes leads to another failure, and each of the character’s failures is somehow caused by his own flaws.  You can see these points in every bible story, every fairy tale, and most classic long poems like, say, the odyssey.
The protagonist is the lead character whose plot we’re following.  The antagonist is the person or force that is trying to stop our protagonist from getting what he so dearly wants.  It could be Goliath or Goldfinger or Mt Everest if your hero feels the need to climb it.  The antagonist – the bad guy – has to offer serious competition, maybe appear from the beginning to be too much for our hero.  And the barriers our hero faces have to be logical and believable.
Exactly how do you do that? Well, everyone’s process is different. No two writers work exactly the same way.  So I can only tell you how I do it.  I didn’t learn this from a book or another writer.  I learned this by outlining three or four of my favorite novels, trying to figure out just how the writer did it.  It wouldn’t hurt you to do that.  Or, you can start out using my style and then your own way will evolve on its own.

I’ll share the details of how I do it next week. Meanwhile, you might want to find your favorite novels and outline them.