How I craft plot has changed radically over the last four books. With BIG RED TEQUILA, I did very little plotting in advance. I simply began writing, then went back later and tied up all the loose ends, of which there were plenty. With each successive novel, I've done more outlining in advance. Strangely, this has made writing no easier -- it's only made the process harder in different ways.
My attitude about plot and how one develops effective pacing is evolving, but below are five points I stand by:
Rick’s top five tips on PLOT
5. Don’t write the parts the reader would skip anyway.
Most readers, from time to time, have skipped over portions of a chapter
to get to the “good stuff.” For instance, many readers will skip a long
paragraph of description so they can find the next line of dialogue. One trick
for keeping the reader’s interest is to zoom in on the content they want to
see and leave out the rest. Writers, especially beginning writers, tend to
over-explain.
4. Distinguish between mystery and confusion.
It is good to keep the reader guessing. It is bad to keep the reader confused. The key to successful plotting is giving the reader sufficient information to keep them interested and engaged, but not so much information that they no longer care about what will happen next. The plot should be built in layers of compelling questions – “What will he do?” “What is his secret?” “Why does she hate him so much?” The reader should always have at least one question in mind, and be dying to find out the answer.
3. Get
going!
Beginning writers tend to believe that they must “set things up” before they get into the real meat of the novel. They want to introduce characters, history, and setting before they start on the central dilemma. Chapter one is often limp, because of this. Even worse, some writers are so hesitant to get to the point in chapter one that they put off the action even further by writing a prologue. The problem is, until we know the dilemma, we won’t care about the set-up. Get to the point! Often manuscripts are better if they start with chapter 2.
2. Identify the moral dilemma driving the novel.
The successful novel will haunt a reader because it deals with some ethical or moral dilemma that makes the reader wonder what he or she would do in the protagonist’s place. Action may hold a reader for a chapter. A surface dilemma like a kidnapping or a romance may hold the reader for fifty pages or more, but only a moral dilemma will hold the reader for an entire novel.
1. The protagonist must exert influence to solve the problem, and the antagonist must exert influence to stop the solution. The book must be about conscious choices, carried out in active terms. It must be about conflict. A book about random events happening to passive people will not be compelling. Coincidence is taboo – things can’t just happen. There must be a cause and effect.