How Can I Make a Great Plot?
I'm a plotter, meaning I plan and develop my books before ever writing the first draft. I've given a good deal of thought to character, stakes, and the other parts of novel creation, and I feel like I have a solid understanding of those areas.
The same can't be said for the plot.
I don't think I create bad plots. My readers (I've written several small fan fiction pieces) seem to agree with me. I do think my plots could be better, a lot more interesting, and add a lot more to the story.
I have some ideas of what I can do to add to my plots, but I still feel like I'm missing the large picture. I have most of the parts, but I'm not sure if I have all of the parts.
This has led me to ask the question: What constitutes a great plot?
Is it twists that you never saw coming? Is it a complicated web that becomes clear only at the end? Is it something else I haven't identified yet? What makes a plot great?
Note: This question is not a duplicate of this question. That question deals with creating a connected plot across a series of books. This question deals with simply creating a great plot, connected or not, whether for a series or a single novel.
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There are no great plots. There are great stories and there are lousy stories. Great stories and lousy stories can have exactly the same plot. The soundness of a story lies in the rising tension of the story arc. The greatness of a story lies in the telling.
There are, I think, different kinds of great story. There is the story whose greatness lies in it high moral seriousness (like The Brothers Karamazov, Heart of Darkness, or King Lear) and there are stories whose greatness lies in their high comedy (such as Much Ado about Nothing, Jeeves and Wooster, or Pickwick Papers). But it is never in the plotting, always in the realization, in the perception of the human condition and the deftness in which it is told.
Being a plotter may give you a sound foundation for the mechanics of telling a story, but it is never going to bring you to greatness in itself. It is in the agonizing businesses of seeing and recording the fate of your characters in all its grittiness and pathos that you will find greatness or fall short of it.
Art is blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Art is pain and madness and unbearable joy. None of this is ever found in the outline, it cannot reside or be discovered anywhere but in the making of the full text.
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There are so many different plots that can be written. The majority of them can be narrowed down to even more broad terms until every story is just a variation of around a dozen different types.
There probably isn't a definitive answer for 'what makes a good plot', because I've read almost identical stories done both badly and well. There are a great many different ways the same plot can be written, so ultimately the plot will not matter in the grand scheme of the quality of a story.
The important thing is that you, the author, understands and knows what you want the plot to be. To understand from the beginning where the story is going, and write the story from beginning to end. The story is a journey, after all, and not the destination.
Personally I feel like there is nothing worse than reading a book and having it flip from what I expected it to be to something else. This isn't to do with having a twist in the story, but more to do with the author trying so diligently to avoid the reader guessing the plot twist that they write one story, get to the twist, then begin writing something else.
Good twists come from when the writer writes the book in a way that the story is progressing towards a twist, and then the story continues afterwards. Bad ones come from setting up the story specifically in order have the twist in, and then the story changes so monumentally it feels as if it becomes a different book.
This can happen without twists as well. Sometimes writers will begin writing a certain plot, then part-way through things just change for seemingly no reason and it feels as if the story is two different entities put into a single stack of paper. As the author it's important to go back and ensure that if the book does develop and change over time, the earlier part of the book that is already written is also adapted in order to fit the change.
So overall, a plot is really defined by its consistency. The story that the reader begins needs to be the story that is finished at the end, whether that's over a single book, three, or even seven. Even if the plot starts off as an overcoming the monster plot and changes into a tragedy two-thirds of the way through, it's important that this is reflected in the writing.
I wrote in this answer to your own question about mixing two different genres and ensuring the reader understood what they were reading from the start. The same applies with the plot: if it does have a twist and turns the plot on its head, there needs to be hints dropped in near the beginning so that the reader is not completely blindsided.
Even just having a single straightforward plot from beginning to end, it's important that the same story is continued throughout. I'd go as far as to say that the defining thing that separates good from bad stories is how well the writer focuses on writing the same piece of work consistently from beginning to end.
Note: this will also apply to 'sub-plots'. Whilst two parallel plots can be developing within the scope of the same story simultaneously, their strength individually will rely on them remaining the same from beginning to end.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26123. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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A great plot is a plot that can engage the readers from start to finish. It has nothing to do with the twists according to my thinking. Again this depends on the audience you are writing for. The flow of the plot should be consistent and it should be moving forward and it should not have elements that are just added to drag the plot. These things or characters should help the move plot forward, it should be logical. The reader should not feel that bored. Even if its a simple straight forward plot, it should be engaging, there is no one formula to come up with a great plot, its hard work, you may need to tinker with it a few times before you can come up with a solid chapter without any loose ends. Your plot should be able draw your audience in line with your thoughts. Best way to write is place yourself in the characters that you write about and see if you would sound good with those dialogues. Does the dialogue sounds good, can it be made better, does it sounds humorous, does it deliver the intended punch. Most of all the flow should be logical.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26138. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Analyze some books you found particularly satisfying. This will help you identify what works well for you as a good plot.
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