Critic and Editor for Hire | OPEN FOR A LIMITED TIME

Master The Elements: Chapter 2 - Plot

I'm going to make this very simple, and refer to the King of bestsellers and New York Times #1 books:

"Plot is a bad writer's first resort, and a good writer's last." ~Stephen King

Unfortunately, Wattpad doesn't allow me to make the above quote any larger. If I could, I'd set it to Helvetica Bold and up the font size to 72. That's how important this quote is.

You're probably sitting over there scoffing at my audacity. Teachers "taught" you about the importance of planning out every little step, and that's always what got the A+++, right? WRONG. That is grade school. You're performing for grades alone. This is writing school. You perform for writing. That's it. No nagging teacher. It's you and your readers. Therefore, no plot. If you didn't go to grade school, here's a refresher:

*PLOT /plät/
noun        1. a plan made in secret by a group of people to do something illegal or harmful.
                 2. Also called storyline; the plan, scheme, or main story of a literary or dramatic work, as a play, novel, or short story.

So, enough convincing. If an international bestselling author's words can't convince you that plotting is bogarting all the fun from writing, I'm afraid there is no hope.

For those of you who realize plotting is crushing the organic potential of your work, welcome aboard! There's plenty of room on the party boat for open-minded people!

Of course, a few of you have probably hopped on with an undeniable fear of uncharted waters. That's alright. School has conditioned us to be afraid of unplanned events. We're Pavlov's dogs, drooling at the sound of a bell (cool science experiment you should look up). But have no fear! There's a simple way to fight your trepidation, and it's called character believability.

I will get more into detail on character believability in the next chapter, but for now, bear with my basic definition.

If your character is believable, that means it is its own master. Woah. Woah, woah, woah... X_marks_the_0... that's impossible. I made my character up. I'm the master. My character is pretty much me, just doing stuff I don't actually do... like be a sexy billionaire. Right you are, reader. Your character IS a part of you. But unless you're writing your biography, it isn't totally you. You've given it qualities that aren't your own. It acts different. Thinks different. Talks different.

Your characters can become so real --if you let them-- that you aren't writing anymore. They are. BOOM!

If you're still new to writing, I don't expect you to understand the idea quite yet. It will take some time to develop your character until they are so believable, they actually write your story for you. So it's best to get really familiar with them until the magic starts. Take them out to coffee, butter them up, and kindly slip the question of whether they'd like to do all the heavy lifting for your plot now... or later? When they say now, and you can see and hear them do it, then you're in!

I'll do further chapters, if you all want, about how to recognize if you're the only one writing your story.

I hope you enjoyed this chapter of writing advice. There's more to come, so don't forget to vote, comment and tag a friend who needs this!