I’ve been filming people for a couple of years now. I ask them questions, and they talk about falling in love at the age of sixty, or beginning a new career as a writer at the age of fifty. They talk about God, and they talk about money. They show off the business they’ve worked hard to build, and how it’s finally taking off. They talk about what makes them happy, and they talk about what hurts.
They look gorgeous to me when the mask slips and they reveal their most relaxed and open selves. You can’t help but love them. They’re tender. They’re radiant. They’re loving. They laugh, they cry, they share themselves.
It gives me faith in humankind.
Then they see the video I’ve prepared and the complaints start to fly. My butt looks too big! Why didn’t I wear my hair up? Those pants look awful! I hate it when my eyes roll like that. Look at the saggy chin on me. I am going to lose twenty pounds immediately.
Here are five easy ways to look and sound great on camera:
1. Don’t forget to smile. This is not a colonoscopy. Your viewers relax when you’re relaxed. We can hear the smile in your voice, and we like it.
2. Breathe deep, way down in your belly, and let your voice deepen. Nervous voices are high and tight, while luscious voices are low, relaxed, easy.
3. If you’re sitting, don’t sag against the back of your chair. Sit up straight and lean forward slightly from the waist. This gives you a trim silhouette, and makes your waist look thin.
4. We hold fear in the jaw. Yawn, laugh and dance a silly dance in between takes. Adrenaline is good, it will help you, it will light you up. Let it be happy energy.
5. Happy hands are loose. No fists, no clenching, no wringing. Let your fingers uncurl, give your hands a good shake and let them flop.
6. Relax. You don’t have to try hard to look beautiful. You are beautiful.
Check out my website at http://www.loisgilbertmovies.com/.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Reading New Mexico Review of "Lost in the Gila"
GILBERT, LOIS
Lost in the Gila
Five Star, 978-1-59414-732-6
$25.95 Amazon
Kate Donovan has an unusual gift – she can relive past events by examining the bones of the dead. Quite a boon for a forensic anthropologist who works on archaeological digs, well, except for the fact that she cannot find a job due to a tarnished reputation from a prior, impulsive mishap.
With only a month of savings to spare, Kate is unexpectedly asked to join a secret excavation in the Gila wilderness run by Dr. Adam Richter, the world’s foremost archaeologist. Arriving at the site, she is stunned to find a pyramid built in the same talud-tablero architectural style of Teotihuacan. It appears that the king of the fallen city and the remnants of his people lived out their final days in southern New Mexico, news that will entirely rewrite the region’s historical record. Of course, there’s also the promise of treasure – lots of it!
Even so, the king, his burial chamber, and the bones of his entourage remain hidden, refusing to be found, the pyramid simply a monument to his elusive presence. Complicating matters further, Dr. Richter has been missing for days, and an underlying tension amongst the crew threatens to derail any prospects of finding the tomb at all.
Kate, once again disregarding protocol, surveys the surrounding mesa on her own, and experiencing another vision, stumbles upon the king’s burial chamber. The descriptions of the cavern and its marvelous contents (including a rare codex) are thrilling and completely involve the reader, moment by moment, in the exciting find.
Her discovery is met with hostility back at camp, particularly by Dr. Richter who has returned. He confiscates her notebook and map, intending to take full credit for the find, but the issue becomes insignificant when a murderer in their midst suddenly strikes. The complex interactions between characters leave everyone suspect, including Sam Gallagher, the crew’s lithics specialist - and the man Kate finds herself drawn to. The sense of unease at being isolated in the woods with a killer, as well as the twists up to the final revelation, make for fast, edge-of-your-seat reading.
The very possibility of finding a pyramid in the wilds of New Mexico bespeaks an alternate reality. However, in this case, Gilbert’s portrayal of the discovery is so convincing that one would expect to see a feature article about the find in tomorrow’s newspapers.
Gilbert’s fourth novel is an enthralling mixture of archaeology, dark family secrets, and suspense, balanced with a touch of humor and romance, which makes it a worthy contribution to the Southwestern mystery/thriller genre. And while it could be said that mystery series themselves are rapidly becoming clichéd, Kate and Sam are fascinating enough characters that they merit some extended adventures.
Reviewed by David J. Corwell, author of “Legacy of the Quedana” (see Cloaked in Shadow)
GISH, ROBERT FRANKLIN
Lost in the Gila
Five Star, 978-1-59414-732-6
$25.95 Amazon
Kate Donovan has an unusual gift – she can relive past events by examining the bones of the dead. Quite a boon for a forensic anthropologist who works on archaeological digs, well, except for the fact that she cannot find a job due to a tarnished reputation from a prior, impulsive mishap.
With only a month of savings to spare, Kate is unexpectedly asked to join a secret excavation in the Gila wilderness run by Dr. Adam Richter, the world’s foremost archaeologist. Arriving at the site, she is stunned to find a pyramid built in the same talud-tablero architectural style of Teotihuacan. It appears that the king of the fallen city and the remnants of his people lived out their final days in southern New Mexico, news that will entirely rewrite the region’s historical record. Of course, there’s also the promise of treasure – lots of it!
Even so, the king, his burial chamber, and the bones of his entourage remain hidden, refusing to be found, the pyramid simply a monument to his elusive presence. Complicating matters further, Dr. Richter has been missing for days, and an underlying tension amongst the crew threatens to derail any prospects of finding the tomb at all.
Kate, once again disregarding protocol, surveys the surrounding mesa on her own, and experiencing another vision, stumbles upon the king’s burial chamber. The descriptions of the cavern and its marvelous contents (including a rare codex) are thrilling and completely involve the reader, moment by moment, in the exciting find.
Her discovery is met with hostility back at camp, particularly by Dr. Richter who has returned. He confiscates her notebook and map, intending to take full credit for the find, but the issue becomes insignificant when a murderer in their midst suddenly strikes. The complex interactions between characters leave everyone suspect, including Sam Gallagher, the crew’s lithics specialist - and the man Kate finds herself drawn to. The sense of unease at being isolated in the woods with a killer, as well as the twists up to the final revelation, make for fast, edge-of-your-seat reading.
The very possibility of finding a pyramid in the wilds of New Mexico bespeaks an alternate reality. However, in this case, Gilbert’s portrayal of the discovery is so convincing that one would expect to see a feature article about the find in tomorrow’s newspapers.
Gilbert’s fourth novel is an enthralling mixture of archaeology, dark family secrets, and suspense, balanced with a touch of humor and romance, which makes it a worthy contribution to the Southwestern mystery/thriller genre. And while it could be said that mystery series themselves are rapidly becoming clichéd, Kate and Sam are fascinating enough characters that they merit some extended adventures.
Reviewed by David J. Corwell, author of “Legacy of the Quedana” (see Cloaked in Shadow)
GISH, ROBERT FRANKLIN
Friday, December 18, 2009
How to Design an Irresistible Plot
Why do some plots thrill us and others don’t?
A few years ago I was feeling pretty smug about my writing career. My novels were published, my work was translated into German, Russian and Italian, and there was even a movie offer in the works. I thought I didn’t need to know any more about writing because, hey, I was making money. Then I wrote a book that didn’t sell. After nursing my bruised ego for a few months, I wrote another book, and that didn’t sell. What became painfully clear to me during those years was that I’d lost the gift for writing a book that other people wanted to read.
A short time later I was hired to give a few lectures on writing, and while I was doing the research, I was mortified to discover how much I never knew about plot design. When I reread the first few chapters of each of my failures, it was crystal clear to me—four years too late!—that neither one of them had a decent plot. The storylines meandered, they poked along, they were murky about why different characters were doing what they were doing, and, well—I hate to say it about my own work—but they were boring. I had lots of great research and some good ideas, but the plots just didn’t work. So please, let my mistakes serve as a warning, and let me share what I’ve discovered about how to design a great plot.
In the simplest possible terms, a plot is the stuff that happens in your story. A good plot is a joy to read, luring us on, seducing us page by page to the final resolution of the story. We want to see what happens next, and what happens next is absolutely the result of what happened before that. Watching a good plot unfold is like watching a long line of dominos cascading down, each piece falling inevitably into the next and forming an unexpected pattern. A bad plot is like listening to a four-year old tell you a story: this happens, and that happens, and all kinds of cool stuff happens, but none of it is connected, and none of it is really plausible.
Plotting a story is as old as humanity. It predates writing. Story telling is in our blood, in our bones. Once upon a time our earliest ancestors lived in bands that had to wander for their food, and when these people ate all the food in a certain territory, they had to send out hunters to find meat in the forests and jungles beyond the territory they knew. Then the hunters came back, with food or without it, and they all sat around the fire and told the story of where they went and what they found when they got there. Stories like these were a key to survival. They were important. They registered deep in human consciousness, and that’s why we know a good story when we hear it. It’s in our DNA. We recognize a good story, because a good story brings us the same kind of deep emotional satisfaction that our ancestors felt thousands of years ago, and on some primitive level, we understand that a good story is a lesson in survival.
So how do you create a good plot? It all begins with desire, and this desire propels your main character into a quest with obstacles. This means your main character has to want something badly enough to go to a lot of trouble to get it. Maybe they want a date for the prom, or maybe they want to solve a murder, but if your plot is going to keep us up way past our bedtimes, we need to know exactly what it is that they want, and why they want it.
The key word here is WHY. If we know exactly what your hero wants and why he wants it, we’re happy to go on reading. If we don’t, then we’re lost. Consider the story of Romeo and Juliet, as told by a kindergartner: two teenagers fall in love, and then there’s a big fight, and then the girl fakes her own death, and then the guy drinks poison and then the girl stabs herself. Who cares? When Shakespeare tells us the story, he shows us in exquisite language exactly what these teenagers want. We clearly understand their desire, and the obstacle to that desire. And every scene is connected to the next with tragic, inevitable logic.
A plot is what your characters do to attain their desires. Every action they take to attain these desires forms a logical sequence of events, and these events grow out of an initial incident that changes the status quo. Say your hero is fired from his job, or discovers a dead body in the woods, or meets the woman of his dreams. These are all inciting incidents that can tip over the first domino of your plot quite nicely. It might seem obvious, but an inciting incident should happen right away, not halfway through your book. Your inciting incident will hook our interest, and all subsequent events in your story will arise from this change in the status quo of your main character.
So a main character needs a strong, compelling desire—to get a new job, or find out who killed his brother, or to capture the heart of a woman. Romeo and Juliet see each other for the first time, fall in love and want to be together forever. If you’ve ever been a teenager, you get it. There’s a reason romance endures as one of the most compelling plot lines in the world, because it’s all about desire, and most of us have felt the kind of love that leaves you stunned and breathless and desperate.
But it just wouldn’t be a satisfying plot if Romeo and Juliet got married right away and lived happily ever after, or your hero immediately found a new job, or the murderer stepped forward and confessed to the crime. Where’s the suspense in that? A character needs a glitch. A character needs an urgent and difficult problem, an obstacle to his desire, and the problem is whatever the character needs to resolve before he can get what he wants. As readers, we’ll keep reading because we want the resolution of that conflict.
Without conflict, you’re dead. Your book is dead, your plot is dead. One of my writing teachers said “If your character’s not in trouble, YOU’RE in trouble.” We want to watch characters get pushed beyond the envelope of our own comfort level by the trouble they get into. In other words, we want to see a character suffer. We want to see him face an impossible situation. Anticipating this resolution of conflict is what makes us stay up late at night, turning the pages to see how the character will wriggle out of his predicament, and overcome—or not overcome—his problem.
In a classic plot design, your character will have three qualities that drive the action: an urgent desire, a strong point, and a fatal flaw. In “Gone with the Wind,” Scarlett O’Hara has an urgent desire to marry Ashley Wilkes, which propels her to make one disastrous choice after another. Her strong point is her incredible determination to succeed, in spite of Ashley’s indifference. Even after the war takes away her home, her money, and the future she took for granted, Scarlett finds a way to thrive.
Margaret Mitchell gives Scarlett a raft of shortcomings--greed, selfishness, insensitivity—but what hurts Scarlett most is her refusal to face reality. You can see this fatal flaw right away, when she refuses to face the fact that Ashley Wilkes has no romantic interest in her. But she doesn’t give up! Using her strong point—her determination—she manipulates everybody around her to get what she wants, and when that doesn’t work, she makes an enormous effort to attain her desire by becoming a successful businesswoman and marrying Rhett Butler. This leads us to the climax of the story, when their daughter dies, which in turn leads the reader to the final resolution, when Rhett abandons her. In other words, the heroine goes up against the obstacle--Ashley’s indifference--and in spite of all her strenuous efforts, she fails to win what she thought she wanted—marriage to Ashley. She realizes that Rhett Butler could have given her the love she craved, but it’s too late, and Rhett tells her that he doesn’t give a damn.
Every plot is a series of events designed to create anticipation by opening up new dramatic questions in each chapter. How will Scarlett trick Ashley into loving her? What will she do when her home is destroyed and she’s left with nothing? How will she get Rhett to marry her if she owns nothing but a burned-up plantation? Will the Capulets make peace with the Montagues? Will Romeo figure out Juliet isn’t dead, but only sleeping? What will he do if he believes she’s never going to wake up?
Designing a plot may sound mechanical, because it IS mechanical. And this is one of those little-known secrets of becoming a successful writer: sometimes you have to be mechanical about creating suspense. It really helps to identify each element of your story and put it together as carefully as a mechanic on a pit crew at the Daytona 500. If you don’t, your story could blow up halfway through the race. Plot is the engine that revs your story up to speed and keeps your readers up at night. It keeps your editors buying your work. It’s a solid technical framework for all your writing skills. Writing is like driving, but plotting is like building the car.
But that doesn’t mean a plot has to be predictable. Aristotle believed the perfect plot was constructed so that reversal and recognition take place at the crisis point of a story. “Reversal” means that events that seem to be headed in one direction abruptly change and go in an unexpected direction—the Wizard of Oz has no magic power after all, or the lovely young woman you least suspect in an Agatha Christie mystery turns out to be the murderer. In Scarlett’s story, Rhett decides to leave her. “Recognition” means that the hero achieves an important self-discovery, which is not always pleasant. In the case of Oedipus, he finds out that he killed his father and married his mother. In the case of Scarlet, she realizes that Rhett Butler is the love of her life.
Joseph Campbell reduced the pattern of a classic plot to three different components: separation, initiation and return. George Lucas admits he was heavily influenced by Campbell when he prepared the Star Wars trilogy, one of the most successful film franchises of all time. In the opening to the first movie, Luke Skywalker is safe at home, surrounded by love and dependent on others. This is his cozy status quo, until his home world is attacked, he’s separated from his family and he becomes hell-bent on defending the empire from the dark forces. He wins the battle against the evil empire by performing a series of nearly overwhelming tasks, which initiate him into manhood—and give him the ability to use “The Force,” the warrior-wisdom/intuition he lacked. When he finally returns to his home, he’s changed forever by the knowledge that Darth Vader is his father. You can see this same pattern of separation, initiation and return in stories ranging from Rambo to Anne of Green Gables to King Lear. You can see it in those earliest hunters who went off into the unknown for meat and returned with a story for their tribe.
Here’s one way to make sure your story delivers the kind of plot that people will want to read. First, write down a description of each scene on a note card. Then answer the following questions about that scene: What happens? What does each character want? Why do they want it? What is the obstacle? What new dramatic question is opened by the scene? If you’ve already written a draft or two and your plot still isn’t working, answering these questions will help you diagnose what’s missing from it.
Make sure your scenes connect, with one leading easily into the next, causing the action to unfold. Every scene should lead the reader to logical high points of drama, followed by a climax, then resolution. And most importantly, each scene should further your story by bringing the hero closer or further away from his goals. Don’t let your character stagnate. Don’t give us a big wad of backstory while your plot just hangs there, neglected and abandoned. Let each revelation about your hero’s past tell us something about his present, and let him take some action—no matter how small—that will open up the story to new angles, and new suspense.
So there you have it. Desire leads to obstacles which lead to resolution. These are the three vital elements of plot. You can call it separation, initiation, and return—it’s basically the same thing. The status quo is interrupted, desire is born, the hero has to go beyond the envelope of the known to fulfill that desire, then return with new knowledge. Your character will use his virtue or strength to try to achieve his goals, and come face-to-face with his inner demon.
If you’re a genius and you write like an angel, never mind—you can get away with having no plot whatsoever. The rules don’t apply to you. But for the rest of us mortals, let’s face the fact that we need to build our stories from the ground up, one character at a time, one desire at a time, one obstacle at a time, until we’ve made all the brain-aching choices we need to support our gorgeous, high-flying prose on the sturdiest plot we can write.
A few years ago I was feeling pretty smug about my writing career. My novels were published, my work was translated into German, Russian and Italian, and there was even a movie offer in the works. I thought I didn’t need to know any more about writing because, hey, I was making money. Then I wrote a book that didn’t sell. After nursing my bruised ego for a few months, I wrote another book, and that didn’t sell. What became painfully clear to me during those years was that I’d lost the gift for writing a book that other people wanted to read.
A short time later I was hired to give a few lectures on writing, and while I was doing the research, I was mortified to discover how much I never knew about plot design. When I reread the first few chapters of each of my failures, it was crystal clear to me—four years too late!—that neither one of them had a decent plot. The storylines meandered, they poked along, they were murky about why different characters were doing what they were doing, and, well—I hate to say it about my own work—but they were boring. I had lots of great research and some good ideas, but the plots just didn’t work. So please, let my mistakes serve as a warning, and let me share what I’ve discovered about how to design a great plot.
In the simplest possible terms, a plot is the stuff that happens in your story. A good plot is a joy to read, luring us on, seducing us page by page to the final resolution of the story. We want to see what happens next, and what happens next is absolutely the result of what happened before that. Watching a good plot unfold is like watching a long line of dominos cascading down, each piece falling inevitably into the next and forming an unexpected pattern. A bad plot is like listening to a four-year old tell you a story: this happens, and that happens, and all kinds of cool stuff happens, but none of it is connected, and none of it is really plausible.
Plotting a story is as old as humanity. It predates writing. Story telling is in our blood, in our bones. Once upon a time our earliest ancestors lived in bands that had to wander for their food, and when these people ate all the food in a certain territory, they had to send out hunters to find meat in the forests and jungles beyond the territory they knew. Then the hunters came back, with food or without it, and they all sat around the fire and told the story of where they went and what they found when they got there. Stories like these were a key to survival. They were important. They registered deep in human consciousness, and that’s why we know a good story when we hear it. It’s in our DNA. We recognize a good story, because a good story brings us the same kind of deep emotional satisfaction that our ancestors felt thousands of years ago, and on some primitive level, we understand that a good story is a lesson in survival.
So how do you create a good plot? It all begins with desire, and this desire propels your main character into a quest with obstacles. This means your main character has to want something badly enough to go to a lot of trouble to get it. Maybe they want a date for the prom, or maybe they want to solve a murder, but if your plot is going to keep us up way past our bedtimes, we need to know exactly what it is that they want, and why they want it.
The key word here is WHY. If we know exactly what your hero wants and why he wants it, we’re happy to go on reading. If we don’t, then we’re lost. Consider the story of Romeo and Juliet, as told by a kindergartner: two teenagers fall in love, and then there’s a big fight, and then the girl fakes her own death, and then the guy drinks poison and then the girl stabs herself. Who cares? When Shakespeare tells us the story, he shows us in exquisite language exactly what these teenagers want. We clearly understand their desire, and the obstacle to that desire. And every scene is connected to the next with tragic, inevitable logic.
A plot is what your characters do to attain their desires. Every action they take to attain these desires forms a logical sequence of events, and these events grow out of an initial incident that changes the status quo. Say your hero is fired from his job, or discovers a dead body in the woods, or meets the woman of his dreams. These are all inciting incidents that can tip over the first domino of your plot quite nicely. It might seem obvious, but an inciting incident should happen right away, not halfway through your book. Your inciting incident will hook our interest, and all subsequent events in your story will arise from this change in the status quo of your main character.
So a main character needs a strong, compelling desire—to get a new job, or find out who killed his brother, or to capture the heart of a woman. Romeo and Juliet see each other for the first time, fall in love and want to be together forever. If you’ve ever been a teenager, you get it. There’s a reason romance endures as one of the most compelling plot lines in the world, because it’s all about desire, and most of us have felt the kind of love that leaves you stunned and breathless and desperate.
But it just wouldn’t be a satisfying plot if Romeo and Juliet got married right away and lived happily ever after, or your hero immediately found a new job, or the murderer stepped forward and confessed to the crime. Where’s the suspense in that? A character needs a glitch. A character needs an urgent and difficult problem, an obstacle to his desire, and the problem is whatever the character needs to resolve before he can get what he wants. As readers, we’ll keep reading because we want the resolution of that conflict.
Without conflict, you’re dead. Your book is dead, your plot is dead. One of my writing teachers said “If your character’s not in trouble, YOU’RE in trouble.” We want to watch characters get pushed beyond the envelope of our own comfort level by the trouble they get into. In other words, we want to see a character suffer. We want to see him face an impossible situation. Anticipating this resolution of conflict is what makes us stay up late at night, turning the pages to see how the character will wriggle out of his predicament, and overcome—or not overcome—his problem.
In a classic plot design, your character will have three qualities that drive the action: an urgent desire, a strong point, and a fatal flaw. In “Gone with the Wind,” Scarlett O’Hara has an urgent desire to marry Ashley Wilkes, which propels her to make one disastrous choice after another. Her strong point is her incredible determination to succeed, in spite of Ashley’s indifference. Even after the war takes away her home, her money, and the future she took for granted, Scarlett finds a way to thrive.
Margaret Mitchell gives Scarlett a raft of shortcomings--greed, selfishness, insensitivity—but what hurts Scarlett most is her refusal to face reality. You can see this fatal flaw right away, when she refuses to face the fact that Ashley Wilkes has no romantic interest in her. But she doesn’t give up! Using her strong point—her determination—she manipulates everybody around her to get what she wants, and when that doesn’t work, she makes an enormous effort to attain her desire by becoming a successful businesswoman and marrying Rhett Butler. This leads us to the climax of the story, when their daughter dies, which in turn leads the reader to the final resolution, when Rhett abandons her. In other words, the heroine goes up against the obstacle--Ashley’s indifference--and in spite of all her strenuous efforts, she fails to win what she thought she wanted—marriage to Ashley. She realizes that Rhett Butler could have given her the love she craved, but it’s too late, and Rhett tells her that he doesn’t give a damn.
Every plot is a series of events designed to create anticipation by opening up new dramatic questions in each chapter. How will Scarlett trick Ashley into loving her? What will she do when her home is destroyed and she’s left with nothing? How will she get Rhett to marry her if she owns nothing but a burned-up plantation? Will the Capulets make peace with the Montagues? Will Romeo figure out Juliet isn’t dead, but only sleeping? What will he do if he believes she’s never going to wake up?
Designing a plot may sound mechanical, because it IS mechanical. And this is one of those little-known secrets of becoming a successful writer: sometimes you have to be mechanical about creating suspense. It really helps to identify each element of your story and put it together as carefully as a mechanic on a pit crew at the Daytona 500. If you don’t, your story could blow up halfway through the race. Plot is the engine that revs your story up to speed and keeps your readers up at night. It keeps your editors buying your work. It’s a solid technical framework for all your writing skills. Writing is like driving, but plotting is like building the car.
But that doesn’t mean a plot has to be predictable. Aristotle believed the perfect plot was constructed so that reversal and recognition take place at the crisis point of a story. “Reversal” means that events that seem to be headed in one direction abruptly change and go in an unexpected direction—the Wizard of Oz has no magic power after all, or the lovely young woman you least suspect in an Agatha Christie mystery turns out to be the murderer. In Scarlett’s story, Rhett decides to leave her. “Recognition” means that the hero achieves an important self-discovery, which is not always pleasant. In the case of Oedipus, he finds out that he killed his father and married his mother. In the case of Scarlet, she realizes that Rhett Butler is the love of her life.
Joseph Campbell reduced the pattern of a classic plot to three different components: separation, initiation and return. George Lucas admits he was heavily influenced by Campbell when he prepared the Star Wars trilogy, one of the most successful film franchises of all time. In the opening to the first movie, Luke Skywalker is safe at home, surrounded by love and dependent on others. This is his cozy status quo, until his home world is attacked, he’s separated from his family and he becomes hell-bent on defending the empire from the dark forces. He wins the battle against the evil empire by performing a series of nearly overwhelming tasks, which initiate him into manhood—and give him the ability to use “The Force,” the warrior-wisdom/intuition he lacked. When he finally returns to his home, he’s changed forever by the knowledge that Darth Vader is his father. You can see this same pattern of separation, initiation and return in stories ranging from Rambo to Anne of Green Gables to King Lear. You can see it in those earliest hunters who went off into the unknown for meat and returned with a story for their tribe.
Here’s one way to make sure your story delivers the kind of plot that people will want to read. First, write down a description of each scene on a note card. Then answer the following questions about that scene: What happens? What does each character want? Why do they want it? What is the obstacle? What new dramatic question is opened by the scene? If you’ve already written a draft or two and your plot still isn’t working, answering these questions will help you diagnose what’s missing from it.
Make sure your scenes connect, with one leading easily into the next, causing the action to unfold. Every scene should lead the reader to logical high points of drama, followed by a climax, then resolution. And most importantly, each scene should further your story by bringing the hero closer or further away from his goals. Don’t let your character stagnate. Don’t give us a big wad of backstory while your plot just hangs there, neglected and abandoned. Let each revelation about your hero’s past tell us something about his present, and let him take some action—no matter how small—that will open up the story to new angles, and new suspense.
So there you have it. Desire leads to obstacles which lead to resolution. These are the three vital elements of plot. You can call it separation, initiation, and return—it’s basically the same thing. The status quo is interrupted, desire is born, the hero has to go beyond the envelope of the known to fulfill that desire, then return with new knowledge. Your character will use his virtue or strength to try to achieve his goals, and come face-to-face with his inner demon.
If you’re a genius and you write like an angel, never mind—you can get away with having no plot whatsoever. The rules don’t apply to you. But for the rest of us mortals, let’s face the fact that we need to build our stories from the ground up, one character at a time, one desire at a time, one obstacle at a time, until we’ve made all the brain-aching choices we need to support our gorgeous, high-flying prose on the sturdiest plot we can write.
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