“You twist and turn like a twisty turny thing.”
Lord Melchett
I have a bit of an issue with words. Certain words annoy me for no good reason. Those who know me will tell you, if asked, how I have ranted to them about seemingly innocent words like content, franchise, amid and salted caramel. Well, today the word is plot.
Just as before, I will say early on that I don’t consider myself to be an expert on this matter (or any other, for that matter) but I do have an opinion. That opinion may be useful, I leave that for you to decide.
My problem with plot is that I don’t understand it. I don’t know what it is. I mean, I know what it means – I just, don’t know what it is. I might just be stupid, or I might just have been asleep when my English teacher covered plot. But nobody has ever really been able to convince me that plot is a thing in its own right. To me, plot is just another word for story. And the story is not just what happens and in what order – it’s all of it. It is the characters, the setting, the emotions the dialogue. I think this is what moves us along, what gets us interested. If you can ‘see’ a plot, then…well, I think someone went wrong somewhere. I very much dislike when things just happen and you can’t figure out why. Why would the characters do that? Why would they go there? Was that really the plan they came up with?
Personally, I find fantasy novels can fall into the plot trap all too easily. They have so many characters, such an expansive world, all that political intrigue, complex magic systems (maybe I’ll talk about systems some other time) Often I suppose people feel a need to link all this together with some sort of glue. But I find that’s where characters start doing odd things, or behaving in odd ways and you can start to catch glimpses of the machinery through the cracks. The author wanted to go from x to y, and so they made z happen to get there. The problem here is making this stuff happen often means forcing it to happen.
So, following on from my previous blog where I wrote about the importance of just keeping going, I tend to plot as little as possible and just write. Now I’m not saying I had no idea what was going to happen. The plot of Nightflower, if there is one, is about as simple as it gets. At its core it is a revenge story, and (without spoiling the ending) I always knew roughly how it was going to go. But only roughly. I knew as well that I wanted it to be simple. I wanted it to be small scale and personal.
I like to think of this approach as wandering on a dark and foggy moor. To begin with, I had a final destination in mind, but no real clear vision of a path. I could just about see the end in the distance, but not much in-between. As I walked, little waypoint started to become visible. A tower here, a waterfall there. They became clearer as I approached them and with each one I got closer to the end, and the fog began to lift.
This is a very long-winded way of saying that I have certain key events that I would like to happen. Scenes I would like to see. But I try very hard not to force the characters in those directions. More than once I found the story went somewhere I did not expect, and new scenes I would like to see began to emerge.
Sometimes I would get a bit stuck – the path was just not clearing. At such times I would go for a real walk, in the real world. I find walking a fantastic way to help me to think. I would mull over the scene, trying out different ideas, and usually return home with at least something to help nudge me a bit further along the path. You don’t have to solve everything, as long as it gets you moving again it’s enough. If there were bigger challenges ahead, unanswered questions I knew I would have to face, then I just left them. I would get there in good time, and answer them then.
I think this approach allowed me to be more creative, more free. I think it resulted in a better story than if I had tried to sit down upfront and create a spreadsheet of plot points and overlapping threads. It was just more spontaneous.
What might you take from this? Don’t worry too much about tightly plotting all the events of your story. Have the confidence to let go a bit and just write. Let the story guide you. You might be surprised where you end up.
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