The Editor's Pen

As far as I’m concerned, plot is the trickiest element in fiction writing. It can be tremendously difficult, because unless you’re writing a very short story indeed, it’s a multi-layered thing, and getting it right in one place doesn’t mean you have any idea what to do with the rest. If you’re not good at plot, you’re often not including enough layers, or they may not be the right layers. And if you are good at plot, it’s quite likely you’re one of those people who deals with plot intuitively, rather than consciously planning it out. Which works fine right up until you have a problem with your plot and can’t interact with it consciously and deliberately enough to fix it.

There are lots of different ways to address plot, and I’ve covered some elements that will help you out in my posts on pacing and the negative point. Right now, I want to talk about plot and subplot at the most basic level. Most of us were taught in public school that a plot consists of situation, complications, climax, and conclusion. For my purposes as an editor, I want to go back even a level above that.

“Plot” is secret writing code for “something happens.” It has to be something interesting enough to hold the reader’s attention, but relatable enough that they’re caught up in the fate your characters are struggling for or against. Let’s use the movie The Mask as an example. At one level, the plot could be described as “character gets a magic mask that fixes everything in his life, then gets rid of it again.” At a more relatable, human level, you could reduce it down to “dorky guy gets everything he ever wished for, but at a cost.” Both tell you what happens in the movie in fewer than twenty words, but the second description contains the emotional cues more likely to draw you into the story.

The overarching plot of your story is considered the A plot. Generally speaking, you’ll also have at least one major subplot, the B plot. In modern Western fiction that isn’t specifically genre-targeted, your B plot is almost always more character- or emotion-driven than the A plot. In The Mask, the B plot is “a local crime boss tries to steal the mask and get revenge on the protagonist.”

In screenwriting, your A plot will almost always get more screen time than your B plot. In novel writing, this will usually be true, but not always. If you need to know which is which, your A plot is the most important plot in your story–the one without which the story would simply collapse.

This is where subplots have a chance to multiply and things get interesting. If you feel your book might not have enough action, you can deliberately choose to add an action plot. If neither your A or B plot is a love story or other relationship between characters, you might add one. If you don’t already have a villain, you might insert one who brings with them subplots of their own. Sometimes, your editor looks at you and says “You never follow up on this thread, and by the way, whatever happened to the shark?” And then you try to come up with a subplot that has something to do with sharks, which also ties up that loose end.

When you’re adding in additional subplots, you want to be careful not to get bogged down in them–if you’re putting too much time into them and not into your major plot lines, you’ll end up with either pacing that’s really off or a book that isn’t the book you intended to write. Likewise, too many subplots risks complicating things for the reader. Keep in mind that the purpose of plot is to make something happen. If you already have enough happening, sometimes you have to drop a subplot.

(On the plus side, those dropped plots sometimes make great freebies–short stories or extra sex scenes or deleted scenes with “DVD commentary”–to give away to help you sell your finished project.)

Every scene you write should advance one of your plots. By preference, one of your major plots, even if it’s also applicable to a minor subplot. If you find yourself writing a scene that doesn’t advance one of your plots, look at that scene and ask yourself what it could be doing for you. If the answer is “nothing,” look long and hard at whether you really need that scene. It may contain your favorite line or an image you’ve had in mind since the brainstorming stage, and it may still not be a scene that belongs in the story.

There will always be exceptions to the rule. Going back to The Mask, the “Cuban Pete” scene/dance number was cut by the studio three separate times. The creators had a certain number of “overrides,” and every time the studio took that scene out because it isn’t really doing anything, the creators put it back in. And it is potentially the best, certainly the most entertaining, and definitely the most memorable scene in the entire movie.

If you have that type of the scene, you will probably need to stick to your guns when an editor challenges you on it. On the flip side, exceptions are exceptions for a reason–they don’t happen very often. Don’t assume you’ve got a “pointless” scene worth keeping in every story. If you find yourself in that position, the right way to deal with it is to ask yourself what could go into that scene to contribute to character development, plot, or other forward motion. Most of the time, you’ll be able to “fix” an otherwise-pointless scene that way.

reprinted/reblogged by permission at Storm Moon Press

Pacing is one of the most important facets of an engaging story, and the longer the story, the more important it gets. It’s also one of the most difficult elements to judge for yourself as a writer, without an independent set of eyes to point out issues.

There are structural elements in Western literature that will go into every story you ever write. If you outline, looking through your outline and picking out these elements will give you a reasonable idea of whether you’ve set up strong overall pacing. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t outline, it’s worth keeping them in mind as you write your story and trying to make sure that they fall in more or less the right positions.

Modern Western fiction follows a three-act structure. Act one ends where your characters begin to understand the nature of the complications they face, usually 15%-20% of the way through the story. Act two ends where your characters finally understand the action they must take to win the day, and usually falls 80%-85% of the way through the story.

The dark point or negative point of your story is the point at which your protagonists are at their lowest and your antagonists appear to be triumphing–at least temporarily. Typically, it should fall near the end of act two. The other point you really need to care about to judge your pacing is the climax: the high point of the action, whether it’s a gunfight at high noon or your commitment-shy hero admitting he’s in love. It should fall somewhere in act three–exactly where depends on the particulars of your individual story, in terms of loose ends that will still need tying up and closure that needs to be had.

So once you’ve found out you have a problem with slow pacing, whether that’s a test reader telling you where the story drags or you’ve determined that your dark point/second act break/whatever is in the wrong place, you need to choose what to cut to fix it. At that point, look at each scene in the problem area and an answer two questions: does it move the story forward and does it provide critical information? If you have a scene that doesn’t move the plot (or in the case of a romance, the relationship) forward, you generally need to cut it and move any critical information into another scene.

Less often, your pacing will be slow but cutting isn’t the right way to fix the problem. In these rare instances, usually where character interaction is happening but plot isn’t, the solution is to add plot to make those slow scenes move faster. Adding action without plot is “padding,” and it won’t fix the problem.

If your pacing is too quick, you’ll need to add information–and sometimes whole scenes or story arcs–to slow it down. What you need to add varies depending on the particular fast spots. The usual culprits are missing emotional interactions, lack of description (setting, action, etc.), and plot threads which aren’t followed through adequately. Again, a test reader is incredibly valuable in identifying which parts of the story are still in your head, and not yet on the page, so that you can flush them out.

Pacing is critical to a reader’s experience of your story. If it slows down too much, the reader may just put the book down and never pick it back up. If it’s too fast, the reader is likely to end up feeling lost or like they’ve missed something. Neither one of those leads to strong writing or good reviews. If you already have a contract for the story, your editor will be able to help point these things out. But if you’re still trying to market the story, your best option is to ask several test readers to look at it before you submit. They’ll be the most valuable source of information you can get on a problem you may not be able to see your self.

reprinted/reblogged by permission at Storm Moon Press