While characters can move your story forward, it’s plotting that gets you to the destination. Here’s how I work out my story structure.
If you write fiction—or are interested in writing fiction—you may have come across discussions around being a plotter or a pantser. The cliché is that a plotter lays out all the story beforehand, and in theory knows where they’re going and how things are meant to unfold before they’ve started writing. A pantser may have a rough idea of their direction, but they see the development of characters and scenes as being more organic than the plotter. The story comes from the unplanned interactions, and is richer for it, so they leave the narrative to develop more naturally. Some say they navigate their plotting “by the seat of their pants.”
I’m not brave or talented enough to go full pantser, so I lay out the bones of my story beforehand. I believe you get a better story by having a framework to provide structure, while leaving enough space for some things to develop organically. This means I sit in the middle and try and get the best of both worlds…
As an aside, one of the best parts of writing is when you realise you’re not always in control of your characters. Sometimes they burst into action and exercise their own initiative within a scene. In one instance, a character unexpectedly killed a significant person in a particularly bloody fashion. When I “asked” them what they were doing, they were completely unrepentant. They just shrugged, and said “I hated them. You know who I am. What did you expect me to do?” While that particular character assassination caused complications with my plot, there’s nothing better than when the story stands up and starts running by itself. I guess the trick is having enough flexibility to allow that, while having some idea of the destination and how to get there.
Having said that, I really enjoy building out the plot! So let’s talk about how I do that.
By this stage you should have all your collected ideas gathered together into high-level groups (see the Ideation post for what I’m talking about). This means you’ll probably have sections that focus on a range of different areas, such as the protagonist, the antagonist, other characters, broad political developments, the environment, technology, the overall flow, and more.
But there’s no sequential structure between the ideas themselves, or those groupings. And that’s what plotting is for me. It’s placing and sequencing your thoughts to form a narrative. So that means you need to take each idea and put it in the right spot.
However, this is difficult to do if you’re looking at a list of tens or hundreds of different ideas spanning multiple topic groups. Because of that, I move the contents of the notes file in Scrivener into a different app. I’m a visual thinker, and love to use mind maps to capture my ideas and arrange them into the most effective order.
Mind maps
If you’re not familiar with mind maps, it’s a visual approach to laying out ideas. It typically takes a branching pattern of linked entries, where a higher-level idea will have branches underneath that relate to lower level or more detailed concepts. Those may have more branches under them, and so on, and this approach means you have a very quick way of building out your thoughts. And if you think of something related to different concept, it’s easy to move to that area and add a new branch to the idea.
Some mind maps often radiate out in all directions from a central concept so they end up looking a little bit like a spider’s web, but I typically arrange mine vertically. I find it better for planning and plotting as it’s easier to understand the sequence by reading the entries from top to bottom.
Not everybody “gets” mind maps, but I find it a really powerful way to capture and arrange ideas because it’s easy to zoom out and see the whole structure. This gives you an idea of the size of the different sections so you can get start getting a rough feel for how things are related to each other.
If you change your mind as to how you want to sequence the thoughts, it’s easy to drag individual branches, or entire groups of branches, into a new position. It allows you to play with the order of the major developments, and add in the different ideas from your collected notes. This flexibility is really important as you start laying down the bones of your story.
I use an app called MindNode, but there are a lot of different mind mapping applications out there. The key is to select a solution that works for you and makes it easy to shift things around without losing any information.
Build the plot structure
To start the process, I create a new branch for each major scene that I’ve captured in the notes file—which has already been de-duplicated and organised into topic groups. I don’t know what the chapters are at this stage, and I’m not bothered. Remaining flexible is key here.
As I populate the different branches/scenes, I may move them around to get them into the right sequence. Each one typically has a few bullet points that detail what’s happening in there, and then a number of sub-branches that hold all the related ideas I’ve recorded over time.
I don’t typically rewrite the notes. That’s not the point of this stage. However, I don’t stop myself writing new entries/notes/sub-branches if something occurs to me as I’m doing this. I add them in or amend the existing notes so they become richer contributions to the story.
And at a certain point, when you have a lot of scenes in your mind map, you need to add some additional structure to the sequence. That’s where I typically group the entries into a very basic narrative structure such as prologue, body, and epilogue. I add these new branches, and drag all the affected and existing sub-branches—one for each scene—into place.
Even with that high-level structure, you will still have a long list of scenes within one of those sections. You will want to add another layer of structure to help you see how the narrative unfolds. I do this by further grouping the scenes into the story’s high-level phases—this is an insight that emerges from the scenes as you order them. As an example, if we look at the body section and see that there are a number of scenes that occur as the protagonists travel to Planet X, they would get grouped into one branch. All the scenes that occur within that phase sits under that entry as new branches. These are not yet chapters, acts, or other meta-level narrative structures—they are functional groupings.
The other high level branches in our example section could be things that happen after landing on Planet X, how the tensions between some groups rise, how the inevitable fighting starts and unfolds, and then how the battle is won or lost. That would probably be the end of the body section.
As you go through this process, some ideas will stand out as being off topic, unnecessary, or just not working. When you find those types of entries, remove them. If they are good, but not right for the current story, perhaps they can go into the notes file for another book. But if they just don’t feel right, delete them and free yourself from the burden of trying to make them fit. If you have to work too hard to integrate something, then take it out! Otherwise you risk compromising all of your other ideas.
By the time I’ve finished processing all of the ideas and slotting them into the right spot in the mind map, I have the first draft of the book’s plot. It’s rough because I haven’t really edited the ideas. All I’ve done is sequence them.
The next stage is to add more narrative input and work out the timings of how things unfold. We’ll look at those points in the next post.
Footnotes
•Are You a Plotter or a Pantser? Here’s Why You Should Be a Little of Both! Christina Kaye, ProWritingAid: https://prowritingaid.com/art/1390/how-to-be-a-plotter-and-a-pantser.aspx
•Scrivener: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener-affiliate.html?fpr=will59
•Mind mapping, University of Auckland: https://learningessentials.auckland.ac.nz/key-study-skills/note-taking/mind-mapping/
•MindNode: https://www.mindnode.com
Disclosure: When you buy through links on this site, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
