"Plot is the series of events that moves your characters and story forward." – Holly Lisle, Holly Lisle's Create a Plot Clinic
Without a plot, you don't have a story. But there's a lot of confusion around what exactly a plot is, and how it differs from your story's structure and conflicts. In our October 1st meeting, we'll discuss and illustrate the differences between plot, structure, and conflict. We'll look at some tools for organizing your project, and tools for breaking plotting logjams, and we'll hopefully help you think of plot as a process rather than a product.
Presenter: Janice Carello & Eric Scoles
Location: Barnes & Noble, Pittsford
Meeting Time: October 1, 2013 from 7:00 - 9:00 p.m.
Resources
We've made reference to a lot of resources for organizing your plot and structure and generating new plot choices. Here are a few.
Our Source Material
First: Much of the material we're presenting borrows shamlessly from Holly Lisle's Create a Plot Clinic and Professional Plot Outline Mini Course. We've found both of them useful; the 'mini-course' is available very inexpensively as an ebook, and would give you a good idea of how Lisle thinks about plot and structure. We encourage you to take a look at them.
Tools for Organizing
In addition to simple hard-copy tools like index cards and Post-It notes, we've either used or had recommended to us a number of software solutions, ranging from the simple to the complex, and sometimes we've applied lateral thinking to apply a tool to our purpose.
Microsoft Word has an outline view that allows you to group items under up to 9 levels of heading. You can collapse the headings into an outline, and drag whole sections around easily. If you're morally opposed to Microsoft software, the open source OpenOffice / LibreOffice has essentially the same features.
Microsoft PowerPoint is ubiquitous for presentations, but its slide-sorter and outline views can make it useful for creating plot outlines.
Scrivener allows you to simulate shuffling index cards around on a cork board, but better than that, it then lets you drill-down through that outline into your individual chapters and scenes. It lets you organize your entire project in one place, along with your research, character and place notes, and so on. It's inexpensive ($40 to $45), and is now available on both Macs and Windows computers. When it's time to sell the book, you can "compile" all your chapters into a single manuscript, which you can output as hard copy, Microsoft Word / RTF, HTML, or ePub ebook format.
Liquid Story Binder is a Windows-only tool that lets you organize your entire project in one place -- but in addition to the simple outline mode, it gives you tools for mapping timelines, relationships between characters, and so on. It's complex, so there's a bit of a learning curve, but it's also inexpensive ($45.95) and has a free demo.
We'll add tools to this list that are suggested during the session.
Tools for Plotting
Sometimes the most important thing you need is the wherewithal to keep plo[dd/tt]ing forward. The 'Net is thick with lists of tools and suggestions for finding new plot directions (PK Dick even famously used one as the core conceit of his novel The Man in the High Castle). The important thing is to not give up if one tool or trick doesn't work. Here's a very partial list of tools we've used or seen used -- we'll add a few if we get suggestions:
- Tarot cards can suggest characters, character aspects, and plot events or twists.
- Picture postcards can suggest settings.
- Random selection from a phone book can give you a business that your character must go to.
- Random selection from a dictionary can give you something the character encounters (a dog? a clock?), something they have to do (run? paint?), or an attribute of something (blue?) or someone (stingy?) they encounter.
- Dice or other sources of chance (like PKD's I-Ching sticks) can force you in random directions.
Janice Carello teaches Composition at Buffalo State College, and has taught composition, creative writing or literature courses at area colleges including MCC and SUNY-Brockport. She has previously lead a workshop for R-Spec on breaking writer's block. Eric's story "Interesting Times" appeared in R-Spec's anthology 2034: Writing Rochester's Futures, which they both helped to edit.
