This will be a relatively short one, but I wanted to get this down before I psyche myself out any further and don’t post anything at all.

Let’s talk about how a plot is designed, or more accurately how I go about designing a plot. It’s a few questions bundled together: 1) how do you organize it? 2) what points do you need to hit for the story to feel successful? 3) if you’re outlining, what type of outline are you doing? And 4) what do you need to know about the story that does not need to be included?

Me, I’m an outliner. I always intend for my outlines to be barebones, hit the highlights, no dilly-dallying, but that’s never what happens. Invariably, my outlines start without going into too much detail, but as I get further into the story I end up writing more and more until I’m including helpful notes such as, to use an actual example,

“They ask what she would offer them, if it meant her love would be returned to her. And she says she doesn’t care what they want. Fae are fickle. Some days they want buttons and shoebuckles and other days they want the bones of infants and the souls of virgins. They can’t be trusted. But she is willing to give them that. Her trust. She is willing to believe their words because she is so desperate for a way to bring him back. And the fae find this extremely funny, so they agree.”

There’s a lot of profanity and casual language in my outlines. They’re streams of consciousness more than anything, so in large part they’re written the way I’d write if I was explaining the plot beats on Discord or Telegram or something. But that works for me.

It allows me to walk myself through scenes and major events without a lot of pressure. With low stakes, I have more room to mess around with the plot and twist it until it gets really interesting. This helps to answer the first question: how is the story organized? Where does it start? Who is telling it or who are we following along with? Are we playing with the timeline at all (i.e., out of order, starting in medias res)?

I also feel more comfortable with the characters when I know how they’ll react to the events in the story. Sometimes their reactions change the outcome of a scene. This can inform the second and fourth questions; what do we need to say, and what do we need to know that informs what happens but doesn’t actually need to explicitly appear in the text? The history of the world or personal history of the characters can change the context of an act or event in a way that might change the outcome to a degree that you need to rethink your plans.

I have always felt that the place to start is with an understanding of what your story is going to be, followed very closely (and much more thoroughly) by who that story is actually about. There are stories that are more about places and events, but in most cases—certainly in all of my cases—stories, at their core, are about characters. People connect to stories through the characters. If you don’t have a strong sense of character, the whole story starts to wobble.

Next time we’ll talk about the plot of the story we’ll be working through, and as a direct consequence we’re going to talk about my deuteragonists as well as the supporting characters who will influence the world and the events within.