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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26123
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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](https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/24588/can-you-mix-readers-of-fantasy-and-sci-fi/24594#24594) 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.

Original score: 4