http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/your-novel-blueprint

http://www.writersworkshop.co.uk/plot2.html

What is Plot - How to Build a Story from Beginning to End

On this page, we answer the question, "What is plot?" and talk about how to create a road map for your own fiction. At the bottom, you'll find links to other fiction writing resources, including a free creative writing course.

What is plot and how to get where you're going

A story's plot is what happens in the story and the order it happens in.

For there to be story, something has to move, to change. Something goes from point A to point B. 

This change could be:

• A physical event (Point A = psycho killer is picking off everyone in town. Point B = police arrest the killer).


• A decision (Point A = character wants to practice law like his father. Point B = character decides to be a ballet dancer).


• A change in a relationship (Point A = They hate each other. Point B = They fall in love)


• A change in a person (Point A = character is a selfish jerk. Point B = character has learned to be less of a selfish jerk.)


• A change in the reader's understanding of a situation. (Point A = character appears to be a murderer. Point B = The reader realizes that character is actually innocent and made a false confession.)

This change could even be the realization that nothing will ever change. (Point A = your character dreams of escaping her small town. Point B = her dream escape is shown to be an hopeless.)

What is plot? It's the road map that takes your story from point A to point B.


Advertisement:

What is plot - why happiness is overrated

There's a reason why "Happily ever after" comes at the story's end. It means nothing else is happening. Cinderella and her Prince Charming wake up late, eat a nice breakfast, and take a walk. A slow news day. Forever.

It would be different if it were:
"Happily ever after, except for one extramarital affair and its violent ending..."
"Happily ever after until Cinderella discovered Prince Charming's secret dungeon..."

Please don't assume I'm some kind of evil fairy-tale witch, wishing ill on the fortunate couple. I don't think there's anything wrong with happiness. There's just no story in it.

The story is how you get to the happy ending. Or how it turns sour.

For there to be a story, something's got to happen. Narrative conflict is what makes it happen. This can be:

• a conflict between character's (Prince Charming's ex-girlfriend decides to break up the marriage)


• a character's internal conflict (Cinderella develops a drinking problem)


• a conflict between characters and an impersonal force (floods, disease, dragon attacks)

Einstein once said, "Nothing happens until something moves." If your characters are getting comfortable too early in the story, it's time to stir things up.

What is plot - how to stir up major trouble

How do you come up with an interesting conflict for your story? It's often a good idea to start with your main character.

• What's something this character desperately wants? What difficulties might get in the way? There's your conflict.


• What would force this character to do something he or she is really uncomfortable with? Something he or she doesn't feel capable of doing? Create this situation, and you've got a conflict.

Or maybe there's a specific type of conflict you feel inspired to write about, and you're building your story from there. Perhaps you already know that you want to write about divorce or a battle with cancer or child abuse. That's fine, but be careful not to skimp on character development. Remember that the more real you can make your character for readers, the more deeply readers will care what happens to him or her. We lose sleep worrying over the divorces and illnesses of our friends, not those of strangers. If you haven't done so yet, you might want to take a moment to read about writing character profiles.

What is plot - drawing your road map

Okay, so you've invented characters, and you've planned a conflict that will get them off their sofa and doing something interesting. How to organize your story? 

Here's a traditional way of looking plot structure:

Step 1) The reader gets to know your characters and to understand the conflict. You can accomplish this by showing instead of telling. Take a moment to review the difference between showing and telling here. 

Step 2) You build up the conflict to a crisis point, where things just can't continue the way they are. A decision has to be made or something has to change. This point is called the story climax. If the story is a road map, this is the major fork in the road. The character can turn left and wind up in Alabama with her ex-lover or turn right and end up back in Illinois with her husband and kids. 

The story climax is when Cinderella discovers Prince Charming's dungeon. Will she leave? Will she just pretend she doesn't know? The rest of the story depends on what happens at this moment. The story climax can be a moment of great suspense for your reader. It determines how the story will end, the location of Point B.

Step 3) Show, or hint at, Point B. This is called the story's resolution, and it all depends on how the climax played out.

Remember that this is just one theory of plot structure. But it provides a road map that will give your reader an interesting ride from Point A to Point B. Then, as you read and write more and more short fiction, you will develop your own sense of the best shape for each story.

What is plot - next steps

Choose one of the following links.

Are you taking the CWN Free Online Writing Courses? If not, do you want to? Click here.

Not sure how to start writing a story? Get advice here. 

Are you looking for story ideas? Browse writing prompts related to plot structure. 

Would you like to see a complete list of CWN pages on how to write short stories? 

Advertisement:




<< BACK from What is Plot to Creative Writing Ideas Home.

Literary Analysis: Using Elements of Literature

https://www.roanestate.edu/owl/elementslit.html

Students are asked to write literary analysis essays because this type of assignment encourages you to think about how and why a poem, short story, novel, or play was written.  To successfully analyze literature, you’ll need to remember that authors make specific choices for particular reasons.  Your essay should point out the author’s choices and attempt to explain their significance.
Another way to look at a literary analysis is to consider a piece of literature from your own perspective.  Rather than thinking about the author’s intentions, you can develop an argument based on any single term (or combination of terms) listed below.  You’ll just need to use the original text to defend and explain your argument to the reader.
Allegory - narrative form in which the characters are representative of some larger humanistic trait (i.e. greed, vanity, or bravery) and attempt to convey some larger lesson or meaning to life. Although allegory was originally and traditionally character based, modern allegories tend to parallel story and theme.

• William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily- the decline of the Old South
• Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde- man’s struggle to contain his inner primal instincts
• District 9- South African Apartheid
• X Men- the evils of prejudice
• Harry Potter- the dangers of seeking “racial purity”

Character - representation of a person, place, or thing performing traditionally human activities or functions in a work of fiction

• Protagonist - The character the story revolves around.
• Antagonist - A character or force that opposes the protagonist.
• Minor character - Often provides support and illuminates the protagonist.
• Static character - A character that remains the same.
• Dynamic character - A character that changes in some important way.
• Characterization - The choices an author makes to reveal a character’s personality, such as appearance, actions, dialogue, and motivations.  

Look for: Connections, links, and clues between and about characters. Ask yourself what the function and significance of each character is. Make this determination based upon the character's history, what the reader is told (and not told), and what other characters say about themselves and others.

Connotation - implied meaning of word. BEWARE! Connotations can change over time.

• confidence/ arrogance
• mouse/ rat
• cautious/ scared
• curious/ nosey
• frugal/ cheap

Denotation - dictionary definition of a word
Diction - word choice that both conveys and emphasizes the meaning or theme of a poem through distinctions in sound, look, rhythm, syllable, letters, and definition
Figurative language - the use of words to express meaning beyond the literal meaning of the words themselves

• Metaphor - contrasting to seemingly unalike things to enhance the meaning of a situation or theme without using like or as  
• You are the sunshine of my life.
• Simile - contrasting to seemingly unalike things to enhance the meaning of a situation or theme using like or as  
• What happens to a dream deferred, does it dry up like a raisin in the sun
• Hyperbole - exaggeration
• I have a million things to do today.
• Personification - giving non-human objects human characteristics
• America has thrown her hat into the ring, and will be joining forces with the British.

Foot - grouping of stressed and unstressed syllables used in line or poem

• Iamb - unstressed syllable followed by stressed
• Made famous by the Shakespearian sonnet, closest to the natural rhythm of human speech
• How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
• Spondee - stressed stressed
• Used to add emphasis and break up monotonous rhythm
• Blood boil, mind-meld, well- loved
• Trochee - stressed unstressed
• Often used in children’s rhymes and to help with memorization, gives poem a hurried feeling
• While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
• Anapest - unstressed unstressed stressed
• Often used in longer poems or “rhymed stories”
• Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house
• Dactyls - stressed unstressed unstressed
• Often used in classical Greek or Latin text, later revived by the Romantics, then again by the Beatles, often thought to create a heartbeat or pulse in a poem
• Picture yourself in a boat on a river,
  With tangerine trees and marmalade skies.

The iamb stumbles through my books; trochees rush and tumble; while anapest runs like a hurrying brook; dactyls are stately and classical.

Imagery - the author’s attempt to create a mental picture (or reference point) in the mind of the reader. Remember, though the most immediate forms of imagery are visual, strong and effective imagery can be used to invoke an emotional, sensational (taste, touch, smell etc) or even physical response.
Meter - measure or structuring of rhythm in a poem
Plot - the arrangement of ideas and/or incidents that make up a story

• Foreshadowing - When the writer clues the reader in to something that will eventually occur in the story; it may be explicit (obvious) or implied (disguised).
• Suspense - The tension that the author uses to create a feeling of discomfort about the unknown
• Conflict - Struggle between opposing forces.
• Exposition - Background information regarding the setting, characters, plot.
• Rising Action - The process the story follows as it builds to its main conflict
• Crisis - A significant turning point in the story that determines how it must end
• Resolution/Denouement - The way the story turns out.

Point of View - pertains to who tells the story and how it is told. The point of view of a story can sometimes indirectly establish the author's intentions.

• Narrator - The person telling the story who may or may not be a character in the story.
• First-person - Narrator participates in action but sometimes has limited knowledge/vision.
• Second person - Narrator addresses the reader directly as though she is part of the story. (i.e. “You walk into your bedroom.  You see clutter everywhere and…”)
• Third Person (Objective) - Narrator is unnamed/unidentified (a detached observer). Does not assume character's perspective and is not a character in the story. The narrator reports on events and lets the reader supply the meaning.
• Omniscient - All-knowing narrator (multiple perspectives). The narrator knows what each character is thinking and feeling, not just what they are doing throughout the story.  This type of narrator usually jumps around within the text, following one character for a few pages or chapters, and then switching to another character for a few pages, chapters, etc. Omniscient narrators also sometimes step out of a particular character’s mind to evaluate him or her in some meaningful way.

Rhythm - often thought of as a poem’s timing. Rhythm is the juxtaposition of stressed and unstressed beats in a poem, and is often used to give the reader a lens through which to move through the work. (See meter and foot)
Setting - the place or location of the action.  The setting provides the historical and cultural context for characters. It often can symbolize the emotional state of characters. Example – In Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, the crumbling old mansion reflects the decaying state of both the family and the narrator’s mind. We also see this type of emphasis on setting in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.
Speaker - the person delivering the poem. Remember, a poem does not have to have a speaker, and the speaker and the poet are not necessarily one in the same.
Structure (fiction) - The way that the writer arranges the plot of a story.

Look for: Repeated elements in action, gesture, dialogue, description, as well as shifts in direction, focus, time, place, etc.

Structure (poetry) - The pattern of organization of a poem. For example, a Shakespearean sonnet is a 14-line poem written in iambic pentameter. Because the sonnet is strictly constrained, it is considered a closed or fixed form. An open or free form poem has looser form, or perhaps one of the author’s invention, but it is important to remember that these poems  are not necessarily formless.
Symbolism - when an object is meant to be representative of something or an idea greater than the object itself.

• Cross - representative of Christ or Christianity
• Bald Eagle - America or Patriotism
• Owl - wisdom or knowledge
• Yellow - implies cowardice or rot

Tone - the implied attitude towards the subject of the poem. Is it hopeful, pessimistic, dreary, worried? A poet conveys tone by combining all of the elements listed above to create a precise impression on the reader.

May 14, 2016

I thought some of this advice especially good. The link is at the  bottom of the page.

How to Revise A Novel

I’m revising my current novel right now, and I got to thinking about what a pain it can be to get the thing right.

When you finally finish the first draft of your novel, the temptation to just print it, box it, and start it on its rounds can be almost overwhelming. By the time you’ve written anywhere from 90,000 to 150,000 words, you can be pretty tired of the storyline, the characters, the plots and subplots, and you’re generally itching to start that new project, too — the one that started creeping into your dreams three or four months ago and that has now become almost an obsession.

But you can tremendously improve your chances of making your manuscript marketable if you’ll take the time to sit down and do one truly ferocious pre-submission edit.

(For the record, I usually only revise anything I write one time before I send it out the door. My revisions to editorial request add another one or two times through the manuscript. I don’t do five or ten or twenty revisions. At that point, I’d be so stale and jaded on the material that I wouldn’t be any good on it anymore.)

Here’s how I revise a book before submitting it for the first time; this process eliminates a lot of the editorial requests for revision that I would otherwise get, and for those of you who have not yet sold anything, will make it a lot more likely that your book will sell in the first place. There are, of course, other ways of doing this. This is mine.

• First, gather materials. 
  You can’t do a decent, deep revision of your book without a printed manuscript copy of it. Don’t try revising on the computer screen. Words look and feel different on the printed page that they do on a monitor, and you’ll find mistakes in hard copy that your eye would slide right over on the screen. So you’ll need:
  1. A manuscript copy of your novel, appropriately double-spaced and with wide margins. Don’t go with anything less than an inch and a quarter all the way around.
  2. A new single-subject spiral-bound notebook — you’ll be writing down continuity errors in this, ideas that you’ll need to include later in the story, notes about threads you dropped, and more.
  3. Pens with three or four colors of ink (colored ink optional).
  4. The background notebook or notes that you created while working on the book, plus any maps, charts, diagrams, character descriptions, etc. that you used while you were writing it.

• Second, set a completion date for the revision. 
  You need to keep yourself going with deadlines. It’s easy to fall into a nasty cycle of second-guessing yourself, revising your revisions, and never getting to the point of actually sending the manuscript out. So you have to remind yourself that the book you’re writing right now isn’t going to be the best book you will ever write. (If it were, that would be really sad, because it would mean your entire career from this moment on would be downhill.) Your objective is to make it the best book that you are capable of writing right now. Worry about next year next year.
  I can do a complete revision of a 125,000 novel in one to two weeks. It might take you less time than that, or more — but if you’re spending more than two or three months on this, consider the possibility that you might be malingering because you’ve developed a sudden case of cold feet about mailing the thing. A little self-honesty never hurt — much.

• Now, sit down with notebook, background, and pens in hand, and start reading from the beginning. 
  It helps if you pretend you’ve never read this stuff before. If, like me, you end up doing much of your writing in that almost-metaphysical fugue state where you’re watching events in the story happen and typing what you see, there will be whole huge chunks of it that youwon’t have read before. Those will generally be the good bits.
  From word one, ask yourself the following questions:
  • Does this character appear all the way through the book, or disappear with an explanation? (Death, travel, etc.) If not, does this character have a place in this book?

  I introduced a character on page one, chapter on of the book I’m currently working on that I discovered in my read-through never appeared again. My ideas for the novel shifted as I wrote, and he just vanished. So now I’m having to follow up and add him back in, especially at the end where he will add a lot.

  • Does this character still look and act the way he did at the beginning of the book? If not, have I shown the character development that accounts for the changes? Or did I just screw up?

  I am hell on wheels for giving people hair and eye color changes, adding six inches to their height, adding or removing foreign or regional accents as the story progresses. In first draft, this is no big deal. But you can’t let the book go out the door with those sorts of errors still in there.

  • If this scene introduces a new idea or new action, is it something that I remembered to follow through all the way to the end? If you add subplots, introduce new characters, throw in red herrings or real herrings that you intend to make use of at the end of the story, you have to make sure that you pick up on them by the end of the book.
  • Have you met the objectives of your story? Did you resolve your theme and your major and minor character conflicts (excluding those thrown in to give some meat to the next book in a series, if relevant), bring your plot to a logical conclusion, and give the reader something to cheer about at the end?
  • Have you followed your header, chapter, and quote scheme consistently? If you use subheads for each chapter at the beginning, did you remember them at the end. (I didn’t in this current book. Oops!) Do you have quotes at the start of the front chapters, but not the back ones? How about chapter titles? Did you write out Chapter One at the start of the book, but just go to 35by the time you hit the end?
    I’m a “kitchen sink” writer — that is, if I have a good idea while I’m writing but I’m not sure where it’s going, I’ll throw it anyway and trust my subconscious to make it work. Most of the time it does. Sometimes my imagination is a little too fertile and I’ll end up with promising subplots that simply vanish because I forgot about them in the press of the main storyline. This is the point where I mark each of those dropped threads and figure out where I can fit it in (or else figure out how to extract it without crashing the book.)
  • Does this scene matter? Not “Is it well written?” or “Is it interesting?” or “Do you love it because it’s funny, cool, sexy, or brilliantly written?” Does it matter? Does it move the story forward, develop a character, flesh out the plot, and create the forward momentum that will keep your reader reading?
  • Have you demonstrated an acceptable level of literacy? 
    It isn’t more important than everything above, but it is asimportant. Is your spelling correct? Is your grammar grammatical? Do your sentences parse logically? Do you have paragraphs, and do they break at logical points? Do you use the best word for what you’re trying to say? Have you used a lot of unnecessary words, or re-used the same word over and over and over?
    I’ve written a lot of great scenes and even some great chapters that never survived to the mailing draft of the book. I fell in love with my own writing, got distracted by secondary characters that took off on a tangent, and because of the way I write, I followed them. But in rereading, I discovered that I wasn’t following them anyplace that mattered to my book.
    You have to be willing to ruthlessly cut stuff you love if it serves no real purpose to your story — at least if you hope to be published.

• As you read, correct any little mistakes in the manuscript margins. 
  This includes spelling and typing errors, awkward sentences, vague bits of dialogue, and places that just don’t read right as you go through them. It also includes little continuity errors like hair and eye color, height, age, and dialect. Those corrections fit pretty well into margins and are easy to edit from page to screen as is. Get rid of all those florid descriptions So do chapter, section, and quote corrections.
• At the same time, mark off the big errors that you find. 
  These are the continuity and story errors that I described above. These are rarely “fix-it-in-the-margin” errors. Mark each one that you find with an asterisk, and in your spiral-bound notebook, describe the problem you found and what you need to do to fix it. For example:
  “John Brown appears at the front door with a package for Murphy, and is carrying a knife, but after Murphy opens the package, I never use John Brown again. He needs to show up in the parking lot scene before the end of the book and threaten Murphy with the knife.”This is where different-colored ink comes in handy. If you edit each day’s work with a different colored ink (or rotate between three or four) it becomes a whole lot easier to locate your notes to yourself and connect them to the appropriate asterisk.
• When you finish your read-through, go back and start adding pages. 
  Don’t do this before you’ve done one complete read-through, because as you get to the end of the book, you’ll find places where you jumped to conclusions that you’ll need to support earlier in the book. If you’re a thrifty writer (as I try to be, since I always seem to be writing with a constrictively short word limit — and, yes, there are days when fitting my 200,000 word idea into a 125,000 word novel can feel like writing haiku), you’ll figure out ways that you can kill two or three or even four really big goofs with a single new scene.

• Finally, re-read the book in manuscript form one time after your major edit. 
  Writing uses a lot of paper, a lot of toner, and a lot of time and patience. But the end goal is to get your manuscript in front of an editor who wants to buy it, and in order to do that, you have to demonstrate professionalism. Don’t edit, and then forget to check your changes.
  For the read-through of your manuscript, you can print it in small type with small margins and on both sides of the paper if you want. You’re mostly going to see if you’ve introduced any new mistakes with your new sections. I have discovered that I always add a few spelling mistakes at this stage, and invariably I’ll take out part of a sentence, edit the rest of it . .. and then leave a section of the old sentence dangling there at the end. Don’t just skim this part. Be vigilant.
• And when that’s done, kick the thing out the door. 
  And have yourself a party. You’ve earned the right to celebrate.

http://hollylisle.com/how-to-revise-a-novel/

May 7, 2016

 Below is a link to the Paris Review interview with Earnest Hemingway that I quoted in the last meeting. Although lengthy, the it is worth a read. For decades the Paris Review has been publishing interviews with authors in their "The Art of Fiction" series, notable as much for the interviewer as the interviewee.
Hemingway interview

A good meeting on Saturday although I ended up with more work to do than I expected. I like the way we set out own agenda at each meeting. We seem to come up with solid take-aways helpful to all.

Vaya con Dios!

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words. Mark Twain

April 30, 2016

Here is a link to the article I  referred to in the meeting. Some of the content is a little too brand-centered for me but it leads to the concept of voice that we discussed. I believe voice to be all-important to the writer. It evolves and deepens over time, the result of lots of practice and reading.




http://99u.com/articles/53561/style-over-everything