Writer to writer: From think to ink - Gail Carson Levine 2014

Stirring the plot
Hatching the plot

After character development, the second most frequent question on the blog has been about plot. Here’s an example from Alexis: “I love writing, but I usually just write with very little in mind, typing whatever comes to me, and it ends up this elongated mess with no clear plot. When I deliberately set out to make a plot, I think of that chart I got in middle school, where I had to define the rising action and the climax and the falling action and so on. This just seems to take all the fun and creativity out of writing for me, but I know I just can’t write blindly. Can you please help me?”

I’m a plot-driven writer. By plot-driven I mean that I develop characters based on where I want my story to go, rather than coming up with a character and finding my story by following her. Generally I start with an idea. For example, The Fairy’s Mistake is based on the fairy tale “Toads and Diamonds,” in which a fairy rewards a girl for a good deed by making jewels and flowers drop from her mouth whenever she speaks. The fairy punishes her sister for being unkind by making snakes and toads come out of her mouth. The sweet sister is further rewarded because a prince falls in love with her goodness and decides that the jewels can be her dowry. The unpleasant sister comes to a bad end because no one will go near her.

My big idea was that the prince would be unlikely to fall in love with this young woman in an instant, but he might immediately fall in love with the precious stones she’s constantly producing. With that notion in mind, I made the prince a tad materialistic, the good sister unable to stick up for herself, the nasty sister quick to recognize opportunity when it exits her lips, and the fairy a failure at foreseeing the consequences of her magic. As the story barrels along, the good sister has to talk constantly and comes down with an awful sore throat. The bad sister gets anything she wants whenever she threatens to speak. And the fairy wrings her hands in distress.

So that’s one plotting strategy. Think what might be your central idea. Then bring in characters who can carry your idea. This may take some doing. You may need to write a few pages of notes, but once you have two or three characters, figure out what they might do next and what the consequences could be.

Suppose this is where you are with your story: In real life you go to the doctor for a sore throat, and in the waiting room you see a worried-looking family. You don’t know why they’re worried, but you start making up a reason and writing it down, because, naturally, you have your notebook with you. You write that the night before, the son, who looks to be about fourteen, showed his mother a mark on the inside of his arm that had appeared just that afternoon. In real life, yesterday, before you got sick, you visited the ancient Egypt display at your local museum, so you decide that the mark is in the shape of a scarab—the beetle design you saw on Egyptian amulets. You imagine what happens when the nurse calls the family in. The doctor feels the mark, looks at it through a magnifying glass, is mystified, takes a small skin sample, and says she’ll have the results in a week. The family leaves the clinic and on their way home the car has a flat tire, and for some inexplicable reason the wrench won’t loosen the tire lug nuts, even after the car is towed to a mechanic.

At this point you feel the story getting away from you. You don’t know what anything means or who anyone is. The scarab mark could be anything, and the car issue seems to have driven in from another tale.

Sit back and look at what you have, which is a lot of potential. What could be your big idea?

You start to write down possibilities. Here are a few that occur to me:

• The son has reached the age when the mind of a murdered pharaoh will wake up in him and seek revenge on the woman who took his life, who was prophesied to return in the same year he does. In the course of the story the original boy will assert himself from inside the brain of the pharaoh. The result will be something better than revenge.

• The son has a rare blood disease, and the mark is the first symptom. He has a week to live, but during that week he will become unnaturally strong. The ending will be bittersweet. The boy will die, but first he’ll accomplish something important to him.

• The skin sample baffles the scientists in the lab to which it is sent. After everyone goes home that night, the sample begins to change. By morning it has taken on the appearance—and taste—of a cinnamon cake, which the scientists and lab techs are unable to resist, with strange and disturbing results. (They don’t notice that the skin sample is missing.) Everyone eats except a single scientist, who is home with a cold. In the end, the scientist who was left out will realize what happened and will warn the world before being tempted to eat the cake too.

Writing time!

Your turn. Write down four more possibilities, including at least one that involves the car and the flat tire. With each possibility, tentatively make up an ending. Then, for the ones that interest you, including mine, consider how you might develop the characters to move the story forward in the direction of that ending. For example, do we need the scientist who didn’t eat the cake to be a suspicious soul? Will he catch on quickly that something is odd when he returns to the lab? Or should he be so focused on his own experiments that he hardly notices anyone else? Maybe initially he escapes the cake through luck and obliviousness.

Write the story.

Your decision about the ending may change as you go. That’s fine. It’s there mostly to give you a direction.

Notice that when you pick one of your ideas, you may have to cut a lot of what you’ve already written. That’s common; it happens to me often. In your writing life you may toss out enough words to fill a big bookcase. I probably have. It doesn’t matter. They’re just words, and a lot of them are the and of and and!

However, I save my snips, the sentences or paragraphs or pages, in a folder I call Extra in case I need them again. I have Extras for every book I’ve written, and occasionally they’ve come in handy.

More coming up on plot. In the meantime, have fun, and save what you write!