How to Plot Your Novel FAST | Writing Advice

hey guys it's Ellen Brock novel editor one of the most common questions that I get asked is how to move quickly from an idea to an outline or a synopsis for your novel so today I'm going to walk you through what my process is like when I work with a client on story development or plot development how we would go about that in a way that's efficient and really wouldn't take all that much time so I'm going to walk you through what my process would be like and to facilitate that I'm going to use a writing prompt generator just to sort of simulate the experience of a client coming to me with a relatively simple idea and so you can see how you could take that idea of your own and build it up into a full outline or at least a pretty good sense of what you want to happen in the plot okay so here is the prompt that I generated a sailor from Reno is delighted when she gets the chance to take part in the final of a baking competition however her chances are scuppered when she finds out her arch rival is also going to compete despite the setback the sailor comes second in the competition and vows to come back next year and win okay so if a client came to me and said that this is all the story that they wanted to write and they needed assistance to develop it into an outline I would first make sure that there weren't any additional details characters images tone even or style or anything else that I needed to take into consideration but for this demonstration we're going to assume that this is the only thing that the client has come up with so what I would start with is coming up with questions to ask about every individual element of this story and I may seem relatively simplistic but it's absolutely the best way to move from idea to outline you need to find out what you don't know so that you can start to fill in the blanks so let's look at each sentence individually and what kind of questions we can ask to help develop the plotline so the first sentence is a sailor from Reno is delighted when she gets the chance to take part in the final of a baking competition so firstly what we would want to figure out is why does it matter that she was a sailor what does that have to do with her baking and how are these two things connected to each other does she give up sailing does she retire it's said and secondly I would want to figure out what is the deeper reason that she wants to bake is there some sort of underlying motive here and how can we use that to help to build up the character arc so let's look at the second line which is however her chances are suffered when she finds out her arch rival is also going to compete so firstly we want to figure out the history of this rivalry where did this arch rival come from and what is the history there is it's a sailing rival a romantic rival a baking rival next we would want to look at the character arc most likely we're looking at a situation where this arch rival brings out the flaw or some sort of insecurity in the main character given the fact that she seems to believe that she can't win if this arch rival is participating so we'll want to flesh that out a little bit more and lastly we would want to figure out is this rival truly in antagonist in the story as in is this rival actually taking actions to try to sabotage her or to try to make her fail or is this a rival that the protagonist interprets as a rival but that isn't actually serving as the antagonist of the story so let's take a look at the final sentence despite the setback the Sailor comes second in the competition and vows to come back next year and win so because she vows to come back next year and she doesn't win this year there are a few things that I would want to figure out relating to the character arc so firstly if she doesn't win that implies that she either fails to achieve her character arc so she doesn't improve or she has a negative arc or she doesn't change at all or it implies that in order to have her character arc she needs to give up the win or losing is somehow a component of that because she comes back we can assume this isn't some kind of full defeat she doesn't just completely give up on this baking competition so probably we're looking at a character arc that has something to do with accepting failure or learning to not have to be in first place or something along those lines something that would motivate her to come back next year but something that would also justify why she doesn't win this year so if I were working with a real client at this I would send them these questions and have them answer them and throw out ideas and then we would take those ideas and try to make the synopsis or a basic idea of the plot a little summary at this way we're not looking to plot out the whole novel we just want to get a basic idea of what the story is about and we want that idea to answer all the questions that we laid out previously so in the first part we asked every question we could think to ask and in this part we want to answer those questions in a pretty seamless logical way so that they all work together and that all of the answers help to create a cohesive concept of what the story is going to be like so here is my basic little synopsis that I came up with that sort of answers the questions that we laid out so my version of the story is going to be based on the protagonists having just recently lost her job as a sailor she's feeling kind of down and kind of useless and then she hears about this baking competition and feels like it's going to be a way to give her life some meaning and some excitement again so she signs up but she soon discovers that her archrival is also competing and this urge rival beat her out for a baking job when they were both young women and ever since then she's sort of blamed this woman for why she she became a sailor instead of a baker so this old wound is open she first thinks that maybe she's just going to give up and I even try to compete in the competition but then she decided that she's going to win she's going to humiliate this other woman her rival and she's going to actually come out on top for a change so in the end the rival wins and the protagonist realizes that all along it was her own insecurity and her lack of perseverance that made her fail at baking and made her fail in the competition it wasn't this Earth's rival at all she could have gone out for other baking jobs but she gave up as soon as the arch rival beat her out for the first job she applied to so not only have a basic outline of the plot I would then look for the major conflicts and I think what makes the most sense is that this is a man versus self story that she's really her own worst enemy because she needs to learn to persevere and did not give up in the face of adversity or when things don't go her way the second thing that I would look at is the subplot and to me I most logical option is a romantic subplot because I think that'll play really nicely with this idea that she doesn't persevere or that she doesn't follow through when things get difficult so now that we have a basic sense of the plot I would start to create the outline by listing out scenes that we know will need to happen at this point I'm not going to worry about exact chronological order I'm not gonna worry about any gaps that come up I'm not gonna worry about any information that I don't know or any details or specifics about the scenes that are not sure about all I'm trying to do at this point is list out what I do know so that I can see it all written out in front of me so that then again I can start to fill in the gaps so you might feel like you don't have any ideas for what's gonna happen or you don't know any of the scenes that are going to occur in your novel but I promise you that when you start to do this you will realize that you actually do have a pretty good sense of a lot of the scenes and you can start to infer what scenes will need to be inserted or added into the story so I'm going to walk you through what my thought process would be and my reasoning and how I would come up with this basic list of scenes for this idea so firstly we know that the inciting incident is that she loses her job as a sailor and we might decide later that this actually happens before the start of the novel but for now we're not gonna worry about that we're just gonna indicate that she loses her job as a sailor maybe some other stuff will happen in the meantime but we know for sure that she needs to find out about the baking competition and probably we're going to want her to have some kind of reaction to this so maybe she'll Nick initially be unsure if she wants to compete and then we know that she has to find out that her archrival is competing because that's a requirement of the story and we can assume that she's going on a negative reaction to this probably she's going to consider even dropping out of the competition entirely but obviously if we need her to compete so she's going to bow to instead humiliate and defeat this archrival instead of just giving up and and quitting the competition and again some other stuff might happen in the meantime but what we absolutely know is that she needs to travel to the location of the baking competition so let's assume that she travels there and then settles into her hotel or wherever she's going staying next we know that she needs to meet her romantic partner we need to get that guy into the story at this point so let's assume that for whatever reason he's involved in the baking competition and we don't know what that reason is at this point but we can figure that out later so she meets her romantic partner at this point and they start to get involved at this point we don't really have a sense for how this baking competition works so let's just assume that we'll figure that out later and for now we're going to just say that she does some kind of preparation or in some way she figures out how she's going to win or what her strategy is going to be for the competition next we know that we don't want her to interact with her rival directly just yet because if she does so if she interacts with this rival in a competition setting we know it's going to trigger her character her character flaw and that she's probably going to end up dropping out entirely or if she's going to have a big drama and we don't want to force her that hard to face her character flaw at this point so let's assume that the first competition the first event doesn't require her to directly interact with her archrival and she succeeds because again we don't want her to face failure yet because we know that that is a struggle for her and that she tends to just give up entirely and we want to keep her in the competition for the time being so let's assume that she succeeds and then she's probably going to be feeling pretty good and pretty confident so let's say that she goes out with her romantic partner at this point and they go out and have a nice celebratory dinner and they have their first kiss and their relationship sort of starts to develop again but of course we know that we need to get her involved with this archrival so let's say that in the next event her and her arch rival have to go directly up against each other and interact she gets totally flustered and fails and has a meltdown and ends up not getting first place and at this point because she's not succeeded in this event she knows that it's not even possible for her to win first place anymore and she has a total meltdown and she thinks that she might as well just quit the competition because if she can't have first place she doesn't want to compete at all and as a result of this let's say that she doesn't return the calls of her new boy friend and ultimately he breaks things off with her feeling like she obviously hasn't grown or developed as a person so at this point she's going to be in a very dark place and there may not be an obvious direction to take at this point but we know that we need her to face her rival and to face her issue that she has with this woman so let's say that she plans to sabotage her she's gonna go to her kitchen area for the event and switch all the labels or something like that to make this one fail but when she gets there ultimately what happens is that she sees that actually her archrival worked really hard and is there practicing her baking in the middle of the night and trying to figure out the best recipe to use and we know that we want this to happen rather than the archrival doing something mean or aggressive towards her because we want to demonstrate that it's her own problem holding her back not the archrival so that's why I'm I wouldn't have the archrival do something overtly mean to her at this point so the protagonist sees that the archrival of hers is actually working really hard and she realizes it her own failures that have held her back it's the fact that she doesn't persevere and that she gives up at the first sign of trouble and so as a result we want to demonstrate that in an external way so we'll want to see some sort of demonstration of this character arc so we know that we want her to then go compete in the competition even though she knows that she can't win first place she's going to compete anyway and that's going to demonstrate a huge amount of growth and an ability to accept not being number one and persevering anyway so she goes and gets second place and we know that we're gonna want to show some more growth and to wrap up loose end so we're probably gonna want her to congratulate the winner of the competition her archrival and maybe sort of make amends between these two characters and lastly to tie up loose ends we can assume that she is going to have some sort of interaction with her boyfriend to apologize for not calling him back and to demonstrate to him that she has actually grown and changed as a person so I can tell him right away by looking at this outline that the middle is too short and we probably need to add one or two more events to the baking competition maybe one or two more dates or maybe several more dates between the romantic partner and probably we're gonna need at least a couple of flashbacks to demonstrate your history with those this romantic partner as well as her history with her archrival so at this point now that you have a pretty good outline you would want to just keep going back through it in adding things and fleshing out the scenes and answering the questions of the things that we still don't know so we have a pretty good idea of the elements that we don't know about yet so you would want to go through and start to answer those questions for ourselves and to start to sort of build up a more complete plotline so to recap how to move from idea to outline start with your basic idea write it down then write down every question you can think to ask about that idea then write a brief synopsis that seeks to answer all those questions a synopsis that gives you at the main sense of the plot and that holds together and answers all of those questions then make a list of all of the scenes that you know you want to include in the plot and then keep going back through and adding and adding and adding until you have a fully fleshed out outline ideally if you have a good sense of character or plot structure pacing and your genre and scene structure this will go a lot smoother for you and again I have a lot of videos that cover those subjects if you need assistance with any of those things but in the engine should end up with an outline that works pretty well and that will guide you to create a strong first draft of your novel that won't require a full rewrite and that will hopefully hold together and convey what it is that you wanted to convey with your story so I hope you found this video helpful I won't be back on Wednesday and Friday with examples of real successful query letters and we'll be talking about how they succeeded and why they succeeded and how you can apply those techniques to your own query letter so make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any future videos happy writing guys

Channel: Ellen Brock

Views: 199,484

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Keywords: novel, writing, plot, plotting, outline, outlining, brainstorming, planning, synopsis, creative, fiction, book, writer, editor, editing, story, idea, how to, demonstration, example, ellen brock

Id: v-I9N5LsvPM

Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 27 2018