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4: Plotting — Part Two

By September 29, 2025October 7th, 2025No Comments

Refine your plot by assigning characters to scenes, which also helps with pacing and tension.

As I discussed in the Plotting-Part One blog, I start my work on the plot by using a mind map to assemble all my ideas into a rough sequence. This lays things out in functional groupings, such as putting all the ideas related to travelling to Planet X in one mind map branch. I would then put all the things that happen immediately after landing in a second branch. I work through the collected ideas, creating more branches until I’ve processed all of them.

At this point, there’s no interplay between characters or anything like that. I’ve simply grouped concepts together. The next stage is to refine the idea sequence by adding additional structure.

Assign characters to a scene

Like a lot of fictional writing, my stories have multiple characters within them, each with their own place in the narrative. To move to the next stage of plot development, I go through all the idea entries in a branch and identify each character involved in the entries. I don’t need to know everyone at this point—as I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, being loose about the details is your friend.

Sometimes, you realise you need a character to perform a specific role for the plot, and you have to add them in later. Then there are some characters that come alive as you write and expand their presence in the story in ways you didn’t expect. That’s where the flexibility of being a pantser is truly helpful.

Finally, there are characters that sound good in abstract, but never come alive. Maybe they’re too undefined, or perhaps they’re just not that interesting. If that’s the case, either don’t include them in the writing at all or kill them off. After all, everyone and everything you write about needs something to pull the reader’s attention—for characters that can be a unique perspective or quirk. I’ll talk about that in a later post.

Know your scene’s point of view

Once I’ve gone through and worked out the protagonist, antagonist, supporting characters, etc., I can start processing the scenes. In my writing, each scene is told from a point of view (POV), and this is usually from the perspective of a character.

It’s generally accepted that it’s not a great idea to shift the POV within the same scene. This could be changing from one character to another, or shifting from a first-person perspective to a third-person limited perspective.

Instead, you’d typically have multiple scenes, each with its own POV. They can all focus on the same event—let’s say an argument or a fight—but each scene unfolds from the view of one character or perspective. If you want to add a different character’s view to the narrative, then that’s a different scene. Otherwise, you just confuse your readers. They won’t know who’s thinking or doing what. And if they’re puzzling over that, they’re not immersed in the story.

This rule also helps apply structure to the plot layout as I go through and work out what the POV for each scene is. Doing that allows me to further refine the mind map by assigning characters to the different entries and forming them into scenes.

Tension

Understanding the POV of a scene also helps us introduce tension into the plot. In one scene, we could have the POV of the antagonist planning some dastardly action they’re going to take against the protagonist. In the next scene, we have the protagonist walking down an alleyway, completely oblivious to what we know—as the reader—is about to happen.

Interleaving scenes in this way, providing the reader with information the characters don’t have, is great for adding interest to your narrative. It raises the stakes, introduces danger for your characters, and increases the reader’s engagement. This is on top of your character’s inner narratives, which can also add tension—such as conflicting goals, internal struggles, and destructive character quirks (they don’t want to do X, but you know they will).

Pacing

Switching between characters is also a great way to control the story’s pacing. In writing, pacing is how fast or slow the story unfolds—and it changes throughout the narrative. Consider it as the book’s rhythm, and by changing it, you can pull the reader in, get them excited as you build to a climax, let them cool down after a big reveal, etc. You want this variation—it’s an additional layer of texture to engage your readers.

For example, I find I often have longer chapters at the start of the story, or I follow the same character for several chapters. This is where you lay the foundation for events that unfold later in the book. The paragraphs in these early scenes could be longer and more descriptive.

Then, as I progress through the story, the paragraphs get shorter, and I start moving between characters more quickly. This is often the result of the different characters and events coming into open conflict with each other.

As I move to the climax, I often have quick scene after quick scene—where each one is from a different POV. This is, or should be, the most dynamic part of the book. I write adventure and space opera, so the unstated reader expectation is that there’s going to be action, conflict, and the closing or resolution of multiple plot lines.

Then, once the climax has occurred, I like to slow the pace down once more as you explore the outcomes and consequences of what happened. In the classic three-act approach, this is called the denouement.

So now I have a reasonable idea of the book’s flow. I know what happens in each scene, who’s in them, and the sequence in which they occur. And for some people, that’s good enough to begin writing. For me, however, there are some extra steps I still need to take—and the most important one is working out the timing of events. I’ll discuss this in my next blog.

Footnotes

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