Writer Unboxed

Plot Month continues with contributor Sophie Masson’s advice on plotting. Enjoy! 

The great children’s writer Philip Pullman has observed that one of the reasons children’s and YA literature is often in a much stronger position than adult fiction, particularly so-called ‘literary’ fiction, is that writers for kids can’t afford to lose sight of story. And at the heart of story is plot. We can’t go off wandering on self-indulgent linguistic experiments and lose sight of plot, because then you lose the sense of story, and kids very rapidly get bored. It’s not that you can’t have fun with language, because of course you can; just that you shouldn’t lose the plot, which is central to the smooth running of your story. And I don’t think that this only applies to children’s writers. All writers, if they want to keep readers, need to remember it.

Just what is plot, though? It means different things to different people, but to me it’s not a mechanical contrivance: it means events and people, and their interactions. Something happens: you create a situation and how that situation impacts on different people, how they react to it and each other, is the plot. Sometimes the situation is something external to your group of characters—e.g. a natural or man-made catastrophe of some sort, which they are willy-nilly drawn into. Sometimes it is internal to the characters—for instance, something that has happened because of events in the past, immediate or distant, of those people. Whatever, this event and the group of characters who experience it, from the heart of the plot, which can then go in various directions depending on the personalities of your characters. The thing is, that just as in real life no-one quite knows how different people will react to a given situation, though you might have a shrewd guess, for me, it’s the same with book characters. I have an idea from the start how this or that particular character might react to a happening (and in a mystery/thriller situation, I always know whodunnit from the start, though not always why or how), but I’m not absolutely sure how it will pan out. The reason for that is that as you progress in a novel, things can change—you can suddenly see alternative possibilities, other ways in which your character might react other than the one you’d originally thought of.

People often say that truth is stranger than fiction and what’s meant by that, I think, is that in real life improbable coincidences and bizarre random events often play a much bigger role than they’re allowed to in fiction. Life is full of meandering, broken and jerky plot lines, but to give a reader satisfaction, you have to tie up plot ends, not have too much coincidence, not leave too much to fate, keep things more in order than in life. Writing is an art, and art shapes material. I think that’s often the mistake with too much modern ”literary” fiction—it attempts to be a faithful reproduction of life in all its starts and stutters, its boring and random moments as well as the more dramatic ones (and often it seems rather more the former than the latter!), and to me that’s not what the art of fiction is about. Fiction writers need to edit out the white noise of life—it is dull and unsatisfying and confusing for readers otherwise.

OK, so you’ve got your happening and you’ve got your characters—you’ve got the building blocks of your plot. Add setting and atmosphere and you’ve got the necessary accessories. Stir in some continuity—is your plot going to be unrolling over a period of hours, days, weeks or years? (This to me is very important.) Add some sub-plot, though not too much (it’s one of my own faults that I’m tempted to over-egg the pudding, as they say, by adding too many complications, and I’ve got to watch myself there!) Mix together lightly with a good, fresh, interesting voice, and you’ve got all the ingredients of a great story.

But what happens if after a great start, your beautiful plot suddenly runs into trouble, like an ill-thought out bank job that has failed to take account of cars suddenly breaking down or cops suddenly turning up? It can be a terrifying experience, to be faced with a tangle of plot snarls and stuff-ups. What you have to do then is be ruthless. You need to apply your mind to what precisely is the problem.

Have you over-egged the pudding? Easy; just cut out the sub-plots and return to the lean mean original. You can add more later, discreetly, if things work out. Are your characters behaving too much out of character? Not so easy but not too hard, either. Often the over-egging and the out-of-character are part of the same problem. Cut one out and you’ll improve the other. Think carefully about your characters, who they really are, in their essence. If the plot works, it reveals their personality, not obscures it. Have you got the wrong setting or period of time? This can be hard or easy to fix, depending on the circumstances. Have you simply got the wrong event to begin with? This is a serious problem of course because it threatens everything else—but even this can be worked around, tinkered with and made into an unexpected strength or opportunity. For instance, say your mainspring event was a fatal car accident. What if you turned the accident into a deliberate act, a murder-by-car? It’s a bold change but at the same time it preserves the basic idea of violent death on the roads, and the huge impact it has on families and friends. You could even add the sub-plot that the murder is not recognised as such; that at first people think it’s an accident, and only later begin to realise otherwise. That would actually strengthen the plot.

The thing to remember is—think laterally. Allow yourself to be open to unexpected ideas or solutions even if at first they seem a bit scary or weird. Mind you, some unexpected ideas really are weird, and can lead you up blind alleys—but it’s better to be open because that way you don’t get paralyzed, blocked and flummoxed by a plot that simply gets heavier and heavier and more and more unwieldy. A good plot has unobtrusive elegance and grace; a bad one flattens everything in its path, character, atmosphere, setting, story itself, everything clunked down to a series of events happening one after the other. And that is reader poison.

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Sophie Masson has published more than fifty novels internationally since 1990, mainly for children and young adults. A bilingual French and English speaker, raised mostly in Australia, she has a master’s degree in French and English literature. Her most recent novel, The Madman of Venice, was written for middle school children, grades ~6-10.

Sophie Masson

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