What doesn’t work in a plot is what doesn’t work. If you stop, frown, re-read, and stop again, there’s something very wrong. The cause of this pause may be loss of viewpoint control, chronological slips, failure to provide adequate pegs into the setting or, much more likely, an inconsistency in plot. These inconsistencies result from careless plotting compounded by either failure to double check each development, or some vague, but suicidal conviction that no one will notice!
First scenes are about heart, about mood, about pace, about making the reader want to know what happens next. First scenes are about making the reader care.


1. Gathering.
Where do you get your ideas? A natural question from a non-writer, I suppose, but a puzzling question from someone who is a writer. We get our ideas from a place we can’t see or touch - our imaginations. What sets the fiction writer’s imagination apart from other types of imagination is the way it collects and organizes. Think of yourself as gatherers. Cultivate the shady side of your minds where impressions can grow freely, where those impressions can take root and spread into fully expanded ideas and the realized basis of plot. Become the owner of many file cabinets. As life passes you by, gather any information that grabs you and store it away.

2. Selection:
When you’re ready for the serious plotting process, choose the strongest idea. Or let it choose you. Sort through your mind, and the boxes, and bags, and drawers for ideas. The strongest idea will almost jump out at you.


3. Characters.
Throughout every phase of the plotting process you’re working with your characters, your conflict, and your setting. The obvious question is: which comes first? The answer to that is: bits and pieces of all elements come at the same time, they come side by side, falling over each other, spurring each other on, adding to each other, puffing up the caricature into character, and people, and giving them bones to fight over, and a place to hold the fight.
We have to have a place to at least think of as the start, so start thinking about gathering ideas, move to expanding ideas, then to developing the characters.
The hero and heroine are, naturally, the most important members of the cast. These two have to fit the roles you’ve developed from taking an idea and expanding that idea. Their backgrounds, personalities, and skills must make them appropriate.
As you build these characters, you constantly check and cross-check their history, past and present, to make sure you haven’t chosen poorly. It’s very important to give them the right kind of baggage to drag with them. The heroine who takes her first breath on page one of your book is an obvious 130 lb newborn. She’s got a lovely, but empty face, no wrinkles in her clothes, and no wrinkles in her soul. Her heart is empty of anything but emotions. She’s boring. She’s already dead, so don’t expect anyone to care about her.
Back to the story.

Your heroine is called..what?…lets say Virginia. She’s twenty – three, ought to be pretty, because if she is you don’t look too hard to get her noticed. But one character doesn’t make a novel. You need a hero. Also secondary characters. Traits and agendas for them. You must build them as carefully as you build your main characters. They are just as important.
The hero…lets call him Sebastian, it’s a strong name. He knows what he wants. He was born knowing what he wanted and he’s been going after it ever since. He’s honourable, loyal and smart and confident. Understanding women isn’t something he’s worked real hard at. He never had a reason to before he met Virginia.
She’s the woman he wants. She works at the office and he’s tried to get to know her but she doesn’t cut him any slack. He doesn’t like that, but he can’t get her out of his head. It doesn’t help that she applied for the promotion that was given to him instead. He also heard that one of the firm’s biggest accounts is her ex-husband. Who still thinks he owns her. Can you see the hero developing here? He’s not perfect, but who is. He needs to be believable to the reader.
Major characters lead to secondary characters. Major and secondary characters lead to minor characters. The time you spend fleshing them out depends on the weight you intend to give them.
4. Conflict. The conflict is already brewing. No part of the plotting process exists on its own. When you work on characterization, you always work on conflict. Unless we’re too busy with silver eyes that shine like a polished coffee urn, and arrogant, sardonic eyebrows that slash heavenward like dark thunderbolts prepared to challenge God. BUT, and there always is one. If you get hung up on the lovely bodies and you’ll miss the guts of the plot.
The golden rule of a story is Only trouble is interesting. And if your story is to capture a busy reader’s attention and hold it, your characters must be in trouble and get into more trouble. The root of all this trouble comes from want. Your characters must want something they can’t simply ask for, or buy. They have to get what they want or they’re doomed to eternal unhappiness or, almost worse, a passionless existence or they may even die.
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So let’s get on with it. Virginia wants to be free of her overbearing ex-husband He was physically and mentally abusive, and continues to make threats. Virginia desperately wants peace in her life. She wants to love and be loved on her own terms. She is ambitious and wants to advance. She also wants Sebastian’s job and rather likes him too. Virginia wants a lot, and everything she wants adds conflict to her life. Here is more conflict to your story
5. Motivating. .
We all make mistakes of innocent omission. Story is not life, but an author’s vision of a fabrication of a selected sequence from life. In the process of plot, in the rushes of enthusiasm and inconsistencies creep in. They happen to all of us. If you don’t catch the problem, you’re in trouble.
At various stages of a book I ask myself questions. I think through the plot, consider each action I’ve initiated, and address the following question: Why? Where and how? Then I cross-check everything.
Sebastian is thirty years old and has never married. Why? He didn’t meet anyone he wanted to marry until Virginia. Why? Because his needs were met by those relationships he did have. And he never felt an emotional connection to a woman before.
Virginia is abducted and the scene left behind suggests she was attacked. She will be presumed to have been murdered. Why? Because she’s convinced someone to help her scare her ex-husband into leaving her alone. How? By framing him and getting him arrested on suspicion of abducting her. Why? Because he’s a coward and won’t hold up. Virginia thinks that if the truth about his behaviour is in the open, he may leave her alone.
This exercise goes on and on until there are no more questions.
6. Location: This is where you decide on the scenes you will use to tell you story. You think you have done that already! But until now, where has been a general question. Location is chosen for impact, not just for setting. Now you must start organizing a few pivotal scenes that act as anchors to the entire plot.

Now proceed, scene by scene, chapter by chapter, to build your story. You don’t really build it like a brick and mortar house because although there may be wonderful eye-appeal in a brick house, there isn’t the type of drama we’re looking for. If you choose wrong the whole story will fall down.
Decide what the next scene must convey, how it will move the story forward, change the characters, complicate the plot. Then decide what scene you will use as a platter to carry all these tasty samples.


Love.
The scene must reveal the identity of the person who, supposedly, abducted Virginia. Actually, she wasn’t abducted. She staged the whole thing and dropped out of sight. Previously she mentioned to a co-worker that Mr…whomever had sent her flowers. What she had done was set him up. Mr. whomever (a secondary character) works for the same firm as her and has been keeping her ex-husband informed of her movements. She wants attention focused on him. Because she expects him to squeal on her former husband.
We’re in London, England. This is a huge scene. You need to add as much drama as possible now. Do we set the stage in an anonymous office, or do we have our Mr. Whomever confronted at the Ritz Hotel?
The hunted man sees the police approach. Are they coming toward him? No. He’s meeting Virginia’s ex-husband. It’s cold. His breath makes clouds in the air. The scent of garlic chicken sickens him. There are snow flurries. He’s cold. The police are coming toward him. People around him are slick, bejewelled - expensive. He’s worked too damn hard to be humiliated in front of them.
Now you have it. This is where the scene unfolds. This is the assembled cast, the emotion of the moment, and we know what’s going to happen. We’re going to have drama.
* * *


Let’s stop and see what needs to be done now.


1. Grab the bones of your heroine. Fill her out. Take a whole paragraph to talk about her. Make her three dimensional.
Go for the hero, too. Thinking about the idea you’ve gathered, the selections you made, use a few quick, broad strokes and give him a paragraph.
2. Think about what the two want. What they want that will put them in conflict with themselves and with each other and with the world around them. Write down what comes to mind.
3. Take the want you developed, devise an action taken to get the want, then motivate and qualify the action with the who, when, why, what, how sequence.
4. You need a scene to present the idea you gathered. To execute the scene use the heroine and hero you’ve fleshed out, and some of the want that stops them from leaping into each other’s arms and living happily ever after on page one of your book.
5. Read over the six points you’ve written.
6. Combine them into a paragraph that captures the essence of the story.

I got this from this website: margaret-west.com/blog/?page_id=25

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DragonBreath
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there are many ways to write a story, I decide on the start and a loose idea of the ending and am continually seeing how the plot goes as i come to each individual part.i eventually reach the intended end but usually in a round about way.

I tend to come up with characters as i need them. for example, The computer in Three Hour Tour, I decided that Geo would have a computer to help him, besides his innate ability to adapt machines to the purpose he needs them for.and an innate sense about machines in general.

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I am more loose in mine, too. I tend more to freewrite once I have a topic. I'll know the beginning and the process to get to the end I want. Sometimes I may not even know which end I want, until I start writing. I'll have multiple, possible endings in mind and let the story tell me which one should end the story.

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exactly. and sometimes the story won't flow if it doesn't go a certain way. for example, the one controversial thing in the Three Hour Tour that I kept trying to avoid, literally had me have a writer's block so bad that the story couldn't progress. I got stuck for over a week at the end of ch. 5 trying to prevent it then finally discussed it with Ladyfur and She said essentially, if the characters don't know, It should be fine.(I won't put any spoilers on the board, but if you want to know what it is, pm me.) the actual event doesn't occur until ch 14, and is so atural that it isn't until later that any of why I hesitated is revealed. I haven't gotten to that part yet.

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This is why I think many students have trouble writing in school. Their teachers require that they follow a certain formula to write. Some can, some can't write that way. I freewrite more than follow a formula. I work on a character then jump to this part of the story. I got to write while the ideas are in my head. Putting them down on paper helps me to define them and settle on them.


I'll wait on your point of being stuck, ch. 14.

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The oldies are still the goodies

Plotting hasn’t changed since Aristotle. Here are the rules:-

1) The protagonist must have a clear central motivation. In literary fiction, that can be some fancy-schmancy motivation, like coming to terms with the death of a parent. In commercial fiction, it’s got to be a more obviously important goal - like getting married or saving the world. But it has to be clear. It has to be consistent throughout the book. And it has to matter. If it’s not important to the protagonist, it sure as heck won’t be to the reader.



2) The protagonist’s goal (which derives from that motivation) has to be determined as early as possible into the novel. Chapter one for preference. The exact definition of the goal can shift. (Lizzie Bennett first wants to marry Wickham, then D’Arcy. James Bond first wants to locate the missing bomb, then he wants to kill Blofeld). But the basic motivation behind the goal never shifts at all. (True love for Lizzie B, saving the world for Jimmy B)




3) The jeopardy must increase. At the outset of a novel, the goal has to matter. By the end, it has to matter more than anything else in the world. James Bond’s little problem has become one of world-saving consequence. Lizzie Bennett’s generalised desire to make a good match has become an all-consuming passion for one specific man. If the jeopardy doesn’t increase, the reader will get quickly bored.




4) Every scene and every chapter must keep the protagonist off-balance - things may get better for him/her, or worse, but they need to be constantly changing. If the protagonist is in the same position at the end of the chapter as he/she was at the start, then you need to delete the chapter. No excuses. Another way to think about the same thing is to ask what the dramatic purpose of each and every chapter is. "Setting the scene" is not a dramatic purpose. Nor is "filling in backstory". Change & disequilibrium is the heart of drama. Your story has to move; your character needs to stay off-balance.




5) Don’t spend time away from the story. The reader has bought your book because it has a story. Spend time away from your story and your reader will want to spend time away from your book. If you let more than 300 words go by without touching on your story, then that’s too many. Go back and start cutting.




6) Think about classical structures. In Campbell’s famous analysis of story archetypes, he typically identifies (1) the Invitation - where the hero is asked to take on the challenge, (2) the Refusal - the hero says no, (3) the Acceptance - something happens to change the hero’s mind, (4) the Adventure - the hero seeks to master the challenge (5) the Failure - everything comes to a head and it seems like the hero has failed, then (6) the Triumph - just when it all seems too late, the hero pulls off a magnificent triumph. You can’t beat 2000 years of storytelling tradition




7) Control your characters. Most novels have just one central protagonist - usually the best choice for first time writers. If you do want multiple protagnists then don’t go for more than 3, max. And make sure that each one of those 3 stories obeys the 6 rules above. No short cuts, no excuses.




Don’t think you’re smart. Commercial fiction follows these rules - just read the James Bond books, for instance. But so do the classics. Read Jane Austen or Dickens or Shakespeare. What’s good enough for them is good enough for you. It’s smart to follow the rules, not clever to neglect them.

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I tend to disagree with the last post.

#4) there are times where backstory is necessary, and vital to the story
same with setting the scene, Heck if margaret can spend over a page describing a magnolia bush...

#5) don't waste time on unimportant descriptions, if what is important is that the person walks with a limp and carries a cane, then you don't need more than a few words at a time about the cane, often times things get revealed at a later time. (like the fact that the cane conceals a gun or sword) which if ti is known in advance it interferes with the drama of the story.

#6) 3-6 are essential the first two may or may not be.

#7) i can sort of agree with, there needs to be one central character, however sometimes what happens to a minor xharacter is at least as important. for example in many of the james bond books, 007 converts a minor antagonist into a sidekick. and without the information on why, the reader would be scratching there head saying 'WTF!' Don't neglect your minor characters, however don't neglect your major one either.


the 'rules' mentioned are more like guidelines. if you get in a jam they are good to fall back upon but they are not inflexible.

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all of this is intended as guidelines or suggestions to help you write. In the end, everyone has their own writing style, but until you achieve that, you may have to experiment with different ways until you find what is comfortable and right with you.

Oh, and I think in #4, she is not saying that backstory is unnecessary, but she's saying that a chapter should not be made up of only backstory.

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DragonBreath
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that i can agree with, in theory.

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