In my newsletter, I do a lot of case studies on writers. I like to study the writing process of other writers. Even though we’re all unique and we have our own unique process for writing, there is sometimes overlap.

For example, I prefer to outline my plot before I write. So do a lot of other writers.

But we don’t outline exactly the same and that’s the fun part. What technique or tip can I pick up from another writer that makes my plotting better? I’m always looking for what I can steal and incorporate into my own process.

Here are some interesting variations on plotting.

Robert Crais

Robert starts a book with approximately three months of outlining and general notes. He uses the time to develop the characters and then the story line. “The story requires the most work. I have to live with the story for months. I’m not one of those writers who can just begin typing on paper. I couldn’t keep all the clues straight if I didn’t plan it all out.”

Janet Evanovich

Janet generally creates a brief outline before beginning a new book, with one or two sentences about what will happen in each chapter.

She also uses storyboarding to map out the action in her stories. “I have a huge white dry-erase board that hangs on the wall in my office. I’ve already decided who the villain is going to be; I’ve decided what the crime is, and how the book is going to end. So now I map out in a couple of sentences what the physical action is going to be– that is, the action that is going to promote the crime line of the book. Every now and then, I’ll add what is going to happen in Stephanie’s romantic relationship and sketch in the secondary plot information as well.”

Lois McMaster Bujold

Lois makes a broad section outline, what she calls “the event horizon”, which is how far she can see to write until she has to stop and make up some more. This is usually between one and three chapters. She gets mental pictures of what scenes should go in the next chapter and she pushes them around until they slot into sequence. She then pulls out the next scene and outlines it closely, as a kind of messy first draft. She choreographs dialogue especially carefully.

She takes her notes to the computer and types up the actual scene. She continues this process until she gets to the end of the chapter and her brain is out of ideas. Then it is back to the outlining for the next scene. Each scene she writes has the potential of changing what comes next in the story, so she re-outlines constantly.

It’s All Plotting, But…

Robert outlines meticulously so that every clue and detail is known before he starts writing.

Janet jots down a couple of sentences for each chapter, using a storyboard to track the action.

Lois plots just enough for a couple of chapters at a time.

Three successful writers. Three different variations on outlining and plotting.

Your Turn

Do you outline your novel before you start writing? What’s your process like?

You may have heard about the need for an “elevator pitch” for your book. It’s a brief (usually one or two sentences) summary of your book–the main essence of it–short enough that it could be given during a chance 30-second elevator ride with the agent of your dreams. (Also useful when people find out you’re a novelist and ask what your story’s about.)

This is also sometimes described as the “high concept”, a term that originated in Hollywood to describe a movie idea, though an elevator pitch and a high concept have different nuances.

The elevator pitch is a short plot synopsis that intrigues the listener enough to want to know more. Character-driven stories do well as an elevator pitch.

The high concept is more of a big commercial plot (hence the reason that Hollywood uses it) that gives the listener an instant grasp of the “hook” in the idea. The stakes are usually higher (end of the world, city will blow up, plague will kill everyone) with more of an emphasis on plot events and action.

High concepts for movies usually use other movies as a reference because they’re so easily grasped, like “Pretty Woman (love story between businessman and hooker) meets Die Hard (cop must defeat terrorists who’ve taken over an office building at Christmas)”.

Example of an elevator pitch – A no-nonsense businessman hires a hooker to be his date for a week and then falls in love with her, but has to give up his heartless business practices to win her. (Pretty Woman)

Example of a high concept – Pretty Woman meets Die Hard on a cruise ship. (I think I’d like to read that book.)

Which Do You Use?

Which do you use for your novel? Start with the elevator pitch. Craft a good 30-second summary of your story. As you work on that, consider the stakes involved for the characters. Is an an end-of-the-world type of story? Or is there something amiss that will affect more than just the protagonist? You might have a high-concept story, if there is.

Identify the unique elements that take your story from beyond ordinary to amazing and see if you can craft a high concept from them. For help in creating an elevator pitch or a high concept, check out these links.

How to Create an Elevator Pitch

The 50-Word Elevator Pitch

Going Up! Honing the Elevator Pitch

The Importance of an Elevator Pitch

How to Create a High Concept

What is High Concept?

High-Concept Novels: Turn the Ordinary Into Extraordinary

Recipe for Success? High Concept

And for fun, check out these ultra-condensed plot summaries of some classic novels, Book-a-Minute Classics.

It’s nearly November and time for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). This is the month where thousands of people tackle the challenge of writing 50,000 words in just 30 days.

To get you started, check out these posts on getting prepared for NaNo from last year:

Creating your characters

Laying out your initial plot

Getting into the proper mindset for NaNo

Writing tips to help you reach 50,000 words

Training yourself to write FAST

How to have fun while doing NaNo

Some tools to use for NaNo

Download a free copy of the NaNoWriMo Survival Guide from Lazette Gifford

Read a review of No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty (founder of NaNo)

To track your progress for NaNo, here’s an updated copy of the tracking spreadsheet originally created by Eric Benson. This is in Open Office format, but you should be able to open it in other spreadsheet programs, as well.

You can sign up to participate in NaNo at their website, www.nanowrimo.org. It’s totally free.

I’ll be participating as well. Got a science fiction novel that I want to get through the first draft. You can follow my progress by adding me as a Writing Buddy. Or follow me on Twitter as I’ll be reporting my progress there, as well.

Time once again for our round up of online writing classes and workshops happening in November. If you’re not participating in NaNoWriMo, sign up for one of these low-cost classes and learn something about writing this month.

Surviving Trauma – Learn the characteristics of resiliency and the secrets of survival from numerous case studies of individuals who have survived violent trauma including concentration camps in Germany, genocide in Rwanda, violent crime, spinal injury, childhood abuse, etc.

Ignite Your Fiction – Learn how to examine and write succinct, vivid examples of Exposition, Description, Narration/Summary, and Action-Dialogue. The concept of pacing in character and plot will be stressed as well as development of the writer’s own “voice.”

Mastering Point of View – How truly understanding and mastering point of view can fix an ailing manuscript, and turn a decent but lackluster novel into a page-turner.

Scottish Castles of the 12th and 13th Centuries – Learn about the castles, king and court, the nobility, and calendar feasts and pastimes.

The “W” Plot…or The Other White Meat for Plotters – Learn how to use the “W” plotting technique tol uncover the skeleton of your own novel. Whatever your genre, not only will you have the tools you need to finish plotting your story using the “W”, you’ll know how to use it to write the synopsis we all love to hate…all without writing one word of the novel.

Breaking Procedural Rules – Learn the facts about legal procedures and how they can go awry, including how to stir in entrapment, illegal searches, tainted evidence, tampered juries, and badgered witnesses.

Inner Drives: Create Characters Using the Centers of Motivation (Chakras) – Each physical-psychological-philosophical Chakra has unique hopes, fears, strengths, weakness, actions, speech styles, and more that you can use to define and explore your characters.

Fiction to Freelance Writing – Discover how writing articles can boost their writing career regardless of their publishing status. Get insider tips on how to research a publication’s slant, learn the secrets of twisting a topic to generate great article ideas, where to find the perfect markets for those ideas and the easy (and painless, honest!) way to create the perfect query letter.

Day in the Life: Archaeologists – Learn about the difference between contract work, academia, and wwashbuckling; the basic steps in what to do if you want to dig something; the importance of permission and ethics (no Indiana Jones-style looting); how to interpret archaeological sites from the ground up.

Heightening Conflict Through the Fatal Flaw & Shadow – Learn how the “triangle” technique can unveil your character’s suppressed or shadow traits, which will emerge as the character struggles to overcome a deeply hidden flaw.

Online Critique Group – Receive feedback on six crucial components (concept, character development, plot, narrative, dialogue and research) of whatever you’re currently writing with the goal of helping you continue the development/rewrite process independently.

NaNo’s approaching rapidly and I’ve got some fun links for you.

The Writertopia Progress Meter. There are two available; get the second one with the writer. You can use it to set your “mood” to illustrate how your writing is going.

If you like to do timed writings, try the Online-Stopwatch. You can do a count down or a count up. For extreme fun, try the Bomb Countdown.

Need some plot ideas for your novel? Try the 36 (plus one) Dramatic Situations for some twisty ideas.

Draw a Basic Mind Map of Your Character with guidance form Deborah Woehr.

How about a Timeline Generator for your fantasy or science fiction novel?

If you need details on a religion, try the God Checker featuring over 2,850 deities.

If you need a break from writing, there’s nothing better than fun with Sticky Notes?

By Holly Lisle

So how DO you keep from boring the socks off your readers? (And in a related question, how do you keep from putting YOURSELF into a coma while writing your story?)

Well… you CAN cheat, making grand promises, going off in a million cool directions…and then have the whole thing fizzle into a big wet lump of “it was all a dream” or “it was just a misunderstanding.”

You can, in other words, suck.

Or you can play fair.

To be true to your You and your Muse, craft a story that delivers what it promises. To do that, you need to do this:

Create a believable story where actions are followed by consequences. In real life, situations happen this way, so don’t hold back in your stories. It may seem cruel, but your audience will actually thrive on how much trouble you can heap on your protagonist while watching him drag himself over broken glass by his lips to save the woman he loves.

And if you have a female protagonist willing to make that sort of commitment to the man she loves, stand back. You’ll flat-out floor your readers, and get wistful fan mail from men who want to know where to meet a woman like that. (I have the fan mail to prove it. )

Let’s go deeper, into the two paths you can take to create stories:

You have cheating narrative and you have sustained narrative.

Cheating narrative uses smokescreens and parlor tricks to entice a reader through the book, teasing with cliffhangers that never go anywhere, promising character conflict that never materializes, and getting to the end of the book with nothing that matters having happened from one end to the other. Cheaters try to keep the reader from discovering that they had nothing to say, but were using a ludicrous amount of words to say it. Except, unfortunately for the cheaters of the writing world, readers are pretty bright, and sooner or later they catch on. And then they get ticked off, and bounce your book off a wall, and tell the 5000 people on their MySpace page just how much your book reeked.

Sustained narrative follows a logical path from point A to point B to point C. Conflict begets chaos, cliffhangers frequently send the character off the cliff, and promises made are promises kept. This leaves the reader satisfied with your story, but hungry for more. Writing sustained narrative gives you fans who write telling you to hurry up with your next book, because they cannot wait to read it.

To get sustained narrative, first you CREATE. You begin with a situation that might happen in the real world (or a believable magical or alternate world) given the right set of circumstances. The stage is set and the air is ripe with problems for your main character.

Then you COMPLICATE, by building logical problems. Readers can’t be allowed to see the problems coming, but when you pull them out, they have to be both surprised, and they have to say, “Yes. Of course! That IS what would happen.” The complications you add must follow as a natural progression of your initial situation.

Resolving the complicated situations your characters find themselves in is not always easy. If you wrap the solution up in a neat little box with a bow, people are going to litter the landfill with your book. If you wimp out with “it was just a misunderstanding,” well, we’ve been over that. If it was a misunderstanding, it didn’t matter, and why did we waste our money on your book?

Don’t cheat. Win your readers by telling stories that matter, by daring to make promises, and by daring to keep them. Do this, and the people who read your first book will be looking for the second faster than you can sign the contract for it.

You can do this.

Note from Cheryl: To find out more about how to tell stories that matter and how to make your plot grab your readers, check out Holly’s book, Create a Plot Clinic, and her novel-writing workshop, How to Think Sideways.

Okay, so maybe TV can’t actually write your short stories for you, but it can provide a structure to use for writing a short story.

The Intro – 1st 10 Minutes

Introduce the characters and the situation. Start your story on the day that is different for the characters (or just shortly before the moment that is different).

My example using one of my favorite TV shows, The A-Team:

A young woman, Debbie the Daughter, has an injured father, Dad, who is now unable to take care of their farm. Bad Bart the Neighbor wants to buy them out, but is offering very little money for the farm. He is pushy and insistent and frightens Debbie a bit. She tries to get some other farmers in the area to help out, but they are intimidated by Bad Bart. Debbie decides to get outside help to convince Bad Bart to leave them alone.

Complications – 2nd 15 Minutes

Start a new scene – show the characters trying something to resolve the problem, but it doesn’t work and the situation gets worse.

Debbie contacts the A-Team and has them meet her at the farm. They meet Debbie and Dad, but explain that they don’t think they can be of much help. Bad Bart shows up at the farm and tries to intimidate Debbie and Dad again. The A-Team stands up to him and he leaves, vowing to get the farm one way or another. The A-Team decides to stick around.

More Complications – 3rd 15 Minutes

New scene – the characters try something else to resolve the problem and it just gets worse.

The team hangs out around the farm, helping with the chores. That night, the barn catches fire and all the farm tractors are destroyed in the blaze, crippling their ability to work in the fields. The daughter and team know that Bad Bart is responsible, but can’t prove it to the local sheriff, so he can’t do anything to help.

Daughter goes to the bank to get a loan to rebuild the barn and buy new equipment, and is told the farm is in default on its loans and will be foreclosed if the back payments aren’t paid by tomorrow. There is no money, so Debbie is sure they will lose the farm.

The Climax – 4th 15 Minutes

The climax of the show/story – characters make one final push to resolve the problem, face off with the villain and win the day.

One member of the A-Team visits Bad Bart the Neighbor and announces that Debbie and Dad have agreed to sell the farm, so Debbie can take Dad to Florida to recuperate, if Bad Bart will bring the money in cash to the farm the next morning. He agrees.

He arrives the next morning with his henchmen, but says that the price he’s willing to pay has been lowered considerably, since he knows about the pending foreclosure. He offers $1 for the farm and he’ll let Dad, Debbie and the team leave quietly.

Hannibal pretends to have a change of heart, stating that his team just got involved in the situation because of a girl with a pretty face. They don’t want any trouble and will leave, so Bad Bart has clear access to the farm. Hannibal gets Bad Bart to confess to starting the barn fire and several other acts of sabotage around the ranch over the last few months. Eventually, Bad Bart realizes he’s been set up and his confession has been videotaped. He orders his men to attack and get the tape back.

The A-team withdraws into the house, while Bad Bart and his men surround the house, and attempt to get inside. The team quickly makes weapons out of household materials and fights off Bad Bart’s gang, just as the sheriff arrives and arrests Bad Bart and his men for various crimes, including the attack on Dad and Debbie. Hannibal hands over the videotape confession to the sheriff.

The Closing – Last 5 Minutes

Final short scene that ties up any remaining loose ends and leaves the readers smiling (or at least satisfied that everything ended well for the characters).

Debbie and Dad thank the A-Team for their help and announce that the bank has extended the farm loans because of the evidence of Bad Bart’s sabotage. The other farmers in the community heard about Bad Bart’s arrest and have offered their time and equipment until Dad is back on his feet. Debbie tries to give money to the A-Team, but they refuse it and ride off into the sunset.

Okay, so it’s a bit corny, but you get the picture. You could apply a similar structure to a humorous or dramatic story- introduce the characters and situation, throw in some complications, build to the climax and then resolve the situation.

Have you ever used a TV show or other form of entertainment as the structure for a story? What did you use and how did it work?

Not many people like conflict, but it’s hard to avoid it. From the ongoing conflicts around the world that pit country against country to conflict as basic as two shoppers wanting the same position in the grocery store checkout line, conflict is all around us.

While we may want to avoid it in our personal lives, conflict is exactly what we should be filling our novels with. A story without conflict is boring. Who wants to read about characters that never have any problems? That never have to struggle or work to overcome difficulties? Not me. I want my characters to suffer, so I can rejoice with them when they figure a way out of their troubles. I find tremendous satisfaction in seeing my characters finally overcome the worst disaster in their lives.

To help you put some obstacles in front of your character here are some links on conflict:

What is Conflict? by Caro Clarke

For Successful Fiction, Add Conflict — Twice by Laura Backes
This focuses on conflict in children’s fiction, but it applies to all other kinds as well.

Conflict Plot Plan by Adrianne Lee
A handy chart example showing how to plan your conflicts.

Conflict Test by Kathleen O’Reilly
A quick test to determine if you’ve got the right amount of conflict in your story.

External Conflict Worksheet by Alicia Rasley
An exercise that walks you through creating and shaping your conflict for maximum effect.

We’ve determined that the plot of your novel is the series of events that occur and lead your main character to the conclusion.

There are lots of resources to help you with your plotting. Let’s start with one of the most common – the various lists of basic plots like these.

One of the best things I’ve learned as a writer is that all of these lists are not plots. (Thank you, Holly Lisle!) They’re conflicts or dramatic situations. Take man vs. nature. Man vs. nature is a type of conflict. It certainly isn’t a series of events which we’ve determined makes a plot.

You can use these conflicts in your story as starting ideas for specific scenes and events however, so they are useful.

But for specific plotting help, it’s nice to have some guidelines.

Plotting Resources

Learn How To Create A Professional Plot Outline -This is the mini-course from Holly where she explains how to use the lists of conflicts to create plot events.

Holly also has an ebook out, Create a Plot Clinic, that gives you a bunch of tools to use for plotting. You can get the first few chapters for free here.

Novel Outlining 101 by Lynn Viehl

Outline Your Novel in 30 Minutes by Alicia Rasley

How to Plot Your Novel by Simon Haynes

Plotting Your Novel by Stella Cameron

The Three Act Structure by Stephen J. Cannell – this is a screenwriting method that many writers adapt for use on novels

Try one of these methods for plotting or several. What works for you on one novel might not work on the next, so don’t be afraid to try different techniques as needed.

Do you have any plotting methods that have worked really well for you?

You’ve got a character or two, you might have an idea for your setting, or a really great event to start your story with. Next, you need a plot.

Plot is the series of events in your novel that lead to the ending.

My favorite definition for plot is that it is “what happens to people”. A story about a person sitting alone, doing nothing, thinking nothing isn’t much of a story. Something needs to happen to that person, either physically, mentally, or emotionally. There has to be a change of some kind, otherwise your story is static.

In general, you can consider plot to be the series of events that happen throughout your book that your character either causes or must respond to. The events can be mental or cerebral like many literary books. Or they can be world-ending disasters and violent upheavals like in a thriller, scifi or fantasy novel. They can be emotional as two people work toward a lasting relationship, as in a romance novel. Or they can be a mixture of all of these.

The common thread is that things are happening and changing.

So, for your story, you need events. There are two schools of thought about plotting in the writing community – the plotters vs. the pantsers.

The first group, the plotters, believe in planning out the story events before writing the first draft. The second group, the pantsers, believe in just setting down and writing whatever comes to mind.

There are pros and cons to each method and neither one of them is the definitive correct method you should use. You should use the one that works for you. The only real difference between them is whether the plotting is done before you start writing or if you do it while you are writing.

For some guidelines on trying each method, check out Plotters vs. Pantsers – Which is Better?

You’ve got some characters and now you need some events. My next post will give you some different plotting resources that you can use to come up with those events.