Common Plotting Faults and What to Do About Them
By Mark Orrin
Chuck Hellman, other combined sources
1. Symptom: Story line wanders, never seems to go anywhere.
Diagnosis: Author has started writing the story without any clear idea of its direction.
Treatment: Give your central character a stronger motivation and make things more difficult for her. Rewrite without looking at the old version.
2. Symptom: Story is confusing. Too many characters. Too much going on.
Diagnosis: Author has not decided whose story this is, or has not found a way to focus the narrative on the central character.
Treatment: Arbitrarily reduce the number of principal characters to three or four. Re-plot and rewrite.
3. Symptom: Plot structure looks complete, but the story seems curiously pointless.
Diagnosis: Author has forgotten that we must care about the chief characters, and it must matter what happens to them. Stories like this are most often written by young people who believe they have to plot mechanically in order to be published, or “literary novelists” who don’t think they need plot skeletons because their writing’s so “innovative.” Even in most popular fiction, in categories where plot is very important, the characters are more important. If you don’t believe in your own characters and feel deeply about them, your readers surely won’t, either.
Treatment: This is not a plot problem at all. Go back to your characters and build from their vividly conceived identities and circumstances.
4. Symptom: Ending is disappointing.
Diagnosis: (a) Author has failed to misdirect the reader–the ending is disappointing because it is obvious; or (b) author has failed to plan ahead for the ending, hoping something would turn up, and in despair has tacked on a weak, irrelevant or illogical ending.
Treatment: It’s useless to treat the ending alone; any tacked-on ending will still look tacked-on. Go back to the opening situation and re-plot from the beginning.
5. Symptom: Novel’s opening contains too much “backgrounding” of characters, settings, situation, thus bogging down reader in early details.
Treatment: Author probably hasn’t begun telling his/her story in the right place in the overall stream of available events to be narrated. Search for another spot at which you can establish (1) Character, (2) Conflict, and (3) Context as quickly and with as little “backgrounding” as possible. This spot will probably be the place at which you should begin telling your story, then flash back or forward as needed and fill in other, less essential background as you tell the rest of the story. Failure to begin telling a story in the right place probably accounts for 95% (at least) of subsequent narrative difficulties and nearly ensures readers will never get past, if they even get through, your book’s opening pages.
Of course, none of these guidelines should be seen as rigid little “boxes,” into which every work of fiction must be crammed. Instead, view them as ideals, to be altered, even demolished when necessary, or structures to give stories substance–though even “experimental” storytelling’s usually better if it’s fleshed over those basic “bones” somehow or other. In practice, of course, these elements mix in all kinds of ways. When you’ve grasped the basics, you can mix and combine them to make more sophisticated stories. Endless variations of these patterns can be written, and the number of possible combinations of old forms will never be exhausted. That’s why good writers never stop inventing new forms through which to tell their tales.
Copyright 2014
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