How to Plot (For Better Stories)

Amy Tibbetts, Odyssey Class of 2004

All my life I believed I was an intuitive writer. I felt like stories came from a mystical place deep within me, over which I had no control. Outlining felt wrong, felt like it destroyed the story before it was told. I despised outlines for anything, including and especially English essays and history notes; nothing was more revolting to me than organizing information with Roman numerals and letters, and I spent my school years getting A's on papers while refusing to outline them beforehand.

Then at Odyssey, I discovered I had no concept whatsoever of Plot. I mean really none–I had never written a story that had any semblance of a plot arc with rising tension or crisis points or things for characters to react to or make decisions about. I did not even have clear character goals or consistent overall conflict. If my stories came to a vague climax, it was by accident, entirely haphazard and not directly connected to any previous events. My rich settings and well-formed prose could fool readers into thinking they were reading stories, but in fact they were reading plotless rambles about characters who did nothing in particular.

Beginning scenes or settings are usually what come to me first when I think of a story. I had many unfinished stories that I had been unable to get more than halfway through. I had also never gotten beyond the first one or two chapters of any novel I attempted to write, but hadn't understood why. Jeanne summed it up nicely for me by telling me it was because I expected the story to unfold as I wrote it, the way books unfold to readers as they read, but I had not formed an overall plan or even found a main conflict for the characters to overcome.

So my stories went nowhere because they had nowhere to go.

So I devoted myself to the study of Plot: story structure, plot arcs, three-act structures, etc. At first I was surprised to discover how I lacked even a basic grasp of it! Which seems weird to me because I love strongly plotted novels, but I had never internalized plot structure. It doesn't come easily to me; sometimes it's like pulling teeth for me to figure out how the arc of a particular story is supposed to go.

But at least I figured out that I could NOT get there by just jumping in and hoping the writing will lead me to it as I go. I just can't plot naturally or intrinsically. I learned that the hard way, over years of being unable to finish stories.

Now I am a happy, productive devotee of outlining. I tried various plotting methods (such as index cards, flow-charts, plot maps, diagrams) to little success before settling on outlining. I don't use a rigid outline structure–and certainly no Roman numerals–but simply an orderly list of scenes, what happens in each scene, details to include in each scene, summaries of dialogue in each scene, and what the result of each scene is (character's success/failure, conflict increased/resolved, or whatever).

Then, I make sure each scene logically leads to the next, and that there are key crisis moments forming an arc towards the climax.

This outline/list is very detailed, dense, and nearly as long as the story itself will be. It might even be considered a first draft by some writers. It also takes me a long time to do this kind of outline: weeks or even months. But it's worth it, because the story is easy to write from the outline, and I really could not complete a story without one.

If I find my outline isn't working when I come to write the story, I revise the outline before moving on. Otherwise–I know from experience–I'll get nowhere.

Sometimes I'm afraid that outlining will make my writing rigid or predictable, but I will overcome that as I go. So far, figuring out how to outline has been the best thing that ever happened to me as a writer.

I wish Plot weren't such as struggle for me, but that's the way it is.