Plotting How To Get Plot Discussion

[lizvogel]

Patricia Wrede has a post up about character goals, and specifically story-level goals vs. scene-level goals and how each might be helpful (or not) for the writer at various stages.

Although it's a character-oriented post, and I've ranted many times about how I get character stuff when I ask for help with plot, I think this might actually be useful in my ongoing quest for tips on How To Do Plot. Because it seems like people usually want to talk about plot as it pertains to story-level goals, and what I get stuck on is plot as it pertains to scene-level goals. I'm hoping that pointing them toward this might clarify what it is I'm looking for.

So, test drive: If I were to show you that link and then ask you how to Do Plot, what kinds of things would you be inclined to tell me?

Comments

[duskpeterson]

Hmm. Do you know Peter Pan, the book or the film? There's a scene early on where Peter meets Wendy. The main goals of that scene are for us to (1) learn about Peter Pan, Never-Never Land, and Tinkerbell, (2) establish how Peter Pan and Wendy are going to interact, and (3) have Peter lure Wendy to Never-Never Land. Barrie accomplishes these goals through dialogue and a flying scene.

Is that the point where you'd get stuck? Trying to figure out what dialogue and action to use to reach the goal? Or is the missing element something else?

[lizvogel]

That's at least in the vicinity of what I'm talking about. Dialogue's usually not the problem -- I often have a scene specifically so characters can have a certain conversation -- but what are the actions? What happens?

To put it another way: A novel starts at A and ends at Z. (I'm talking strictly progression of events here; forget theme and character and all that for now.) I get A-E no problem, struggle a bit with F, if I'm lucky F kicks off G-I, J-M I can more or less work out, and I know X-Z, but how the hell do I get from N to W???

This isn't the greatest example, but it's recent so I remember it: I've got a work-not-really-in-progress that's a murder mystery. The main character gets involved when a kitten covered in what turns out to be human blood turns up at the shelter where she volunteers. Using the kitten's fancy collar, she traces the owner, who turns out to have been murdered.

And there the story stops dead (so to speak). She's an amateur, so the cops aren't going to tell her anything. She has no particular reason to investigate on her own or be involved in any way, and also (and here's the important part for me) no further clues on which to follow up. There's literally nothing else for her to do here.

So I need an event/action/Thing that will give her a lead to follow. It needs to be something that gives her a reason to involve herself, it needs to not be such a big thing that she'd hand it over to the cops instead of pursuing it herself, and it needs to be something that a private citizen can get somewhere with. Feel-wise, it does not involve the cat.

The solution (and I'm not thrilled with this, but I've been stuck at this point for several years, so I'll take what I can get) is that somebody follows her when she leaves the crime scene at the dead guy's apartment. She gets the license plate, and she currently has a temp job that gives her (unauthorized) access to the DMV database, so she can find out who owns the car. And then she can do something with that.

I stole this "solution" wholesale from an episode of The Rockford Files, and I don't love it because it depends on the bad guys doing something stupid. (If they'd left her alone, she'd never have gotten involved.) Also, I've no idea who the guys in the car are (except that they feel like minions for someone higher up the food chain) or why they're following her (obviously they or their boss want something that they didn't get from killing the cat-owner, but I've no clue what), so I'm really just pushing the what-happens problem a few steps further down the road. But it'll get me to the end of my headlights' reach, and then I get to do this all over again. *headdesk*