How to edit story structure
I’ve written a plot for a long story. But it’s not easy for anybody to review because my characters’ dialogue and goals are all over the place, it’s often usually mixed up and I struggle to structure it back because I often forget the plot. I know that a good plot carries out suspense and emotion including the consequences and reactions of a character’s choice, my characters for example don’t add up properly. I am confident with my writing, but not my editing. I’ve been paying attention to the story structure of TV shows such as Breaking Bad and Dexter to try to compare mine to a proper story structure, but at the same time I am trying not copy from a good show.
How can I edit my all-over-the-place writing to focus it more?
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While no one can say for sure, my guess is that you are probably suffering from what seems to be a recurring problem for people posting here: confusing plot with imaginary history.
Story never starts with plot. It always starts with character, and it always starts with a character who wants something and a set of obstacles that stand in the way of their getting it, which build to a point where the character must face a fundamental choice of values.
A plot is a device to place the necessary obstacles in the path of your character and to force them to make that fundamental choice about values. Plot exists to advance character toward crisis.
If you start with plot, what you are really starting with is an imaginary history, which may have an internal logic and causality about it, and may lead to some great event such as a battle or a wedding, but however logical and self consistent it may be, if it is not throwing progressively larger obstacles in the path of character who is attempting to gain a desire and leading them towards a fundamental choice, then it is not creating the necessary conditions for story.
Story does not emerge out of plot. Plot follow the logic and necessity of story. In many cases the plot can be highly illogical, even absurd. There is quite an industry on the Web pointing out the plot holes in famous books and movies. But the point is, these are famous and well loved books and movies. They are great stories, even if they have faulty plots. Because plot is not story. Story is the emotional and moral arc of a character leading them to a moment of decision and to the consequences that follow -- in moral logic -- from that decision.
If you started with a plot, you are never going to edit it into a story. A story is a different kind of thing, but in a novel it is the only thing that matters. Telling your story may mean twisting your plot into a pretzel and taking a bite out of it. No one will care if the moral logic of your story remains intact.
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When organizing my novel, I divided it into sections. At first I simply split it intuitively where it "felt right" to do so, points where there were big changes in story structure, setting, new characters came into play or something else made relevant changes to what was going on.
This division into sections allowed me to think about my novel as seven smaller sections, instead of one big mess. What was inside one section can be changed more or less freely, as long as the characters start the every section in the same place they finished the one before and nothing extremely weird or contrived happens to be ignored later.
Later in my work I edited those sections a lot, moved elements around and even merged two sections, because one of them lacked conflict and felt too short, but that is a later stage of development, and by this point you should already have a pretty solid idea of what your plot and story structure are. First of all, write everything you have lying on your mind, make it beautiful and organized later.
After writing crude summaries of my sections, I studied story structure, especially the Hero's (and Heroine's ) Journey and ways to structure plot, especially the Snowflake Method and used those to organize the events of the story. Conflict was upscaled, downscaled or moved around, character arches were extended or shortened, you get the idea.
Now that you know your plot's bones, figure out what skeleton they will build. Shuffle them around and play with them, trying to figure a good order. Insert the dialogue you have already written in the section, scene and act it belongs to, preferably as a side note or comment or in any other way separated from the plot. Dialogue and plot are different hierarchical levels, do not mix them.
As for character motivations, my best advice is to keep them separated from the file where you keep the plot. Personally, I enjoy having one separated file for every major character (or any character I, for whatever reason, know a lot about) and a separated file for all minor characters. If you find it really necessary, make small annotations on the plot file on why a moment, action or line are relevant for a character and affect or are affected by their motivations.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31927. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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