9 Tips for a Satisfying Plot | Writing Tips

hey everyone its Jalen and I'm here today with another video so first of all a lot of things are different all my hair is gone I moved again which is something that happens like every two days for me i'ma back to university so sadly we lost the bookshelves background which is so sad because it was the best background I ever had and I only got like two months use out of it I wasn't sure what to use as my background because this house doesn't have many nice areas and then I was just like oh what's that thing that I own that everybody turned to meme caps trees [ __ ] if you hated him now you got to look at him for real though if you did turn my tapestries into a meme you have a very special place in my heart and I love you dearly and that's all I have to say so in today's video I wanted to talk about plot um a few weeks ago I don't remember exactly when I got an ask on tumblr asking how to write a satisfying plot when I wrote about that asked I was like oh this is really useful important stuff and so I thought I would share it in videos so whoever asked the question thank you so if 9 tips for you on how to write a satisfying plot number one is genre awareness I think this is a very important thing in so many areas genre awareness is exactly what it sounds like it's being aware of the conventions of your genre not just conventions like common tropes or whatever but kind of what makes your Jean or what it is keep in mind that genres exist for a reason so that people can find books that they will find enjoyable to read so for that reason what is a satisfying plot to read for a fantasy reader in the fantasy genre is going to be different from a romance reader reading in the romance genre versus a thriller reader reading in the thriller genre I really stumbles over that sentence a lot now of course there are lots of books that really play with genre or twist Shana or transcendence or do funky things with genre it's still important to have genre awareness if you're writing that type of book if you are writing in kind of a classic genre if you were writing a thriller if you were writing a mystery etc etc it is very important no your honor well because - no your honor well and no what makes a satisfying plot in that genre you know so for example if you're writing romance what's satisfying in a romance novel is going to be the romantic tension throughout legitimate forces keeping the characters apart throughout the entire story good chemistry between the characters and then generally in a romance the story ends happily that's kind of a convention of romance and then it's gonna be a satisfying conclusion when the characters finally overcome those obstacles and finally end up together because the reader is been brooding for that because of their great chemistry throughout and it's especially satisfying because they've been kept apart to hold and a lot of those same principles obstacles character relationships really exist in all genres but they appear in different ways so that's why it's really great to have genre awareness always but I think it's especially necessary when talking about writing a satisfying plot number two is change and growth stories are essentially made of change you know a novel is made up of a bunch of little changes that add up to create the primary change that's really what a story is the story is change if there's no change there is no story happening there's no narrative then it's just a situation if you can find a moment in the plot where nothing is changing that is not a relevant moment to be including or the moment isn't pulling its weight within the plot and these little changes in the plot should be causing changes within the character if the characters emotional state and just state as a human we're not changing throughout a long period of time then that's also not really relevant to the plot you know the story is a story because of the character the character is who is making this a story so if there's no change happening in the plot and it's not reflecting its change within the character then you've created kind of a lull in your plot where nothing is essentially happening I would say change and growth are kind of the foundation of what plot is but also like what story is because that's what characters that's what makes a character a worthy protagonist is going to be change and growth across a period of time I don't know I'm kind of rambling at number three is setup and payoff this is a term that is used a lot in screenwriting but is very I think important for no matter what kind of story you're writing stead of em payoff is actually quite simple as a concept it essentially just means that what you introduce into the story pays off later on it's like that idea of Chekhov's gun if you have a gun line on the table in the first stack that gun is going to be fired in the third act things you introduced in the beginning even things that might seem in substantial turn out to be substantial and affect the plot throughout or often towards the end if you're feeding threads into your story and then they never affect it those threads aren't really necessary and aren't really necessary what's satisfying is introducing threads into the beginning and having those threads weave all the way through and then have a causal relationship where they effects the plot in the end essentially you just have an element whatever that element is introduced in the beginning it might seem important at the time or am I not and then that element is relevant and important hopefully in kind of an unexpected way that can be really satisfying later on for is unpredictability this is probably one of the most obvious ones we generally expect that a good story isn't going to be predictable and a boring story is going to be predictable it's some books unpredictability comes from actually like a drastic plot twist where everything is shaken up but in a lot of books you don't necessarily need a plot twist you don't need a dramatic turn but rather it just means that the plot progresses in a way that could not be foreseen from the beginning even if this doesn't happen in a like a kind of snap of a moment I wish I could explain concrete ways to make your plot non predictable I honestly don't know how obviously avoiding things like tropes and cliches is part of it but I don't really know how to do that this is one that I wish I could give you some good examples where I could explain how to make your plot non predictable I don't know what I'm saying I want to be able to explain how to write an unpredictable plot but I don't know how but it is important so I'm going to tell you what to do but not how to do it I'm sorry 5is causality causality this is maybe one of the most important ones it's honestly quite easy to thin leave non causally connected events as being causally connected it's it's not that difficult I've had it for EM plus I've seen it a lot of times where you have a bunch of events that are in the same book or same story they happen to the same character and they take place in the same setting and that at the time seems like it is enough to make them a story and make them causally connected but it's not those are just a bunch of events that happened to the same character in the same place or in the same book causality essentially is a domino effect you know you have every scene is necessitated by the previous scene in poetics by Aristotle which is one of the oldest books on storytelling theory he explains that a strong plot is one where you cannot disrupt or remove a single event without disrupting the entirety of the whole this really is in my opinion the ideal apply obviously it's very hard to create perfectly in a novel often in it although you'll have a couple scenes like flashbacks or whatever where it's like okay maybe I could move this slightly but I think it's best here but for the most part the majority of your plot has many scenes as possible should be caused by a domino effect so every time you're hiding the scene ask yourself if the previous scene wasn't there could this scene still happen and then ask yourself does this cause the next scene that way instead of just having you know scenes that are happening to the same character in the same place because that's not really a story then you have an actual story of cohesion that's essentially how you create a really really tight plotline it can be really difficult but if you're really consciously thinking of it in the planning stage you can avoid a lot of mishaps down the line six is mystery and revelation you know stories are made up of questions a plot line or a premise in itself is kind of a question and really it's just a bunch of little questions that make up the book and a lot of them will need to be answered for clarity but others need to be left on the table for suspense we can see this most obviously in a genre like a mystery where we have a whodunit you know that's a very obvious question for the plotline and one that we want answered but the introduction of pretty much every novel we have a of questions who is this person what's going on what's going to happen and those questions will be more specific based on the actual plot and then this pairs with revelation revelation is kind of the other part that goes along with mystery mystery sets up Revelation ties together and those two together are what make a plot satisfying and this needs to happen at the proper rate if you don't answer any questions your plot will be really confusing there's going to be a lot of information you're going to need to setup at the beginning and those are questions that are being answered so essentially you want to answer the questions that you need to answer for clarity and then there gonna be some questions you want to leave open seven is suspense and snap and I think this goes along with the previous one now suspense is obviously a common term snap is one I just made up because it seemed right for what I was trying to express so I'll explain what I mean by snap in a moment I think suspense is often tied to mystery but I think it's a little different I think mystery is kind of a question that you have whereas suspense is a bit of more of a like a visceral stress that the reader is feeling it's kind of like waiting for a jump-scare would be the most obvious example characters walking down the hallway in like a horror film and you know something is about to jump out and you're like you're tense you're you're physically 10 I think mystery is more of an intellectual thing whereas suspense is more of like a visceral reaction it's this stress you feel related to unknown outcome rather than kind of this craving to find an answer similar to mystery and revelation I think suspense goes with snap snap is the equivalent of revelation it's like suspense is waiting for the jump-scare snap is the jump-scare snap is the culmination of suspense in this energetic moment this is often a key moment off an important one in the plot it's that you've been building up so much suspense and then it snaps I think those moments especially in certain genres like thrillers or but lots of genres really this kind of snap moment can appear in different forms but I think horror is the most obvious one but you could have similar kinds of ideas and other genres staff is the is the actualization it's action like making use of that suspense you've built up eight is emotional balance and cohesion I hear writers often say I want my reader to be taken on an emotional rollercoaster or I hear readers say the book was an emotional roller coaster but I wouldn't be careful with this notion obviously emotional range is really great and important if it's the same emotion throughout this goes back to an earlier point of lack of chain if this emotional rollercoaster you've created is lacking in other elements like logic or causality especially then it's actually not very satisfying and it can really impact the it can actually really impact your characterization if your character doesn't have a stable emotional thread whether they are an emotionally stable person or not it can be really hard to track and feel their emotions if they're just jumping from emotional state to emotional state to make the reader fuel those emotions can actually be really hard to invest in the character and develop a sense for who the character is because we've just been we're not actually getting a chance to experience who the character is or learn about them or what their emotional threat is because of this jumbled mess of emotion so emotional range is good as long as it's cohesive and there's causality to it another aspect of this is something I made a post on once because it was a tip I learned from a professor that I thought was a great writing tip and it's the push and pull of hope and despair so it's essentially the idea that at any point in time in your story there should be both hope and despair there's always despair in the hope and there's always hope in the despair without hope in the despair then there is no point going on because there's seemingly no possible way that this problem could be resolved it's just despair hope is what keeps the reader and the character going whereas without sparing hope then there is no tension at all only hope means that there's no conflict everything is resolved and finally nine is unrest and resolution continue it on my theme of saying a story is essentially this story is essentially unrest you could kind of essentially think of most plot lines by this model you have a character who has some sort of emotional or internal unrest but they don't have a way of changing it the inciting incident half which gives them an opportunity to change this unrest that they feel within their life no matter what kind of form it takes they have this opportunity to change and then the resolution doesn't necessarily mean they've achieved what they wanted but it means their opportunity their time in which they could kind of change their life has kind of come to an end so through L we have unrest and then the resolution caps it off whether this is positive or negative whether the character has succeeded or not whether they've changed their life or themselves for the better or not resolution basically means that the plot is now going to de-energize the reader kind of knows that the story is over because the in this aspect of the character's life or maybe the character's life as a whole is not going to be changing substantially anymore it doesn't have the opportunity to change substantially anymore in the way we were exploring throughout the novel sometimes this resolution isn't always fully explored sometimes it's kind of like the imminent promise of resolution we know that resolution is about to happen shortly after the end but that's basically the same thing the imminent promise of resolution or resolution itself signals the end of the period of unrest no matter what the characters emotional state is so as kind of nihilistic as it sounds basically it means the character can't affect or change their life any more really to any significant margin so the reader kind of feels that sense of closure the story is over no matter what that means emotionally that's kind of what makes your story feel like a whole so that's everything I wanted to say on writing a satisfying plot thank you guys so much for watching like I mentioned this was originally a blog post it is all the same information and I went more in depth in the video but if you do want to revisit these points or see them written down in note form I will leave that post linked in the description if you want to check that out so thank you guys so much for watching if you have any questions you can always send me an ask on tumblr and I'll see you in another video bye [Music]

Channel: ShaelinWrites

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Keywords: writer, writing, author, novelist, creative writing, writetube, writetuber, writing advice, how to write a book, how to write a novel, writing vlog, creative writing degree, books, nanowrimo, writing tips, plot, plotting, how to plot a book, how to write a strong plot, how to write a satisfying plot, structure, how to structure a book, book plot

Id: 9xM7vMk5oX4

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 28 2018