First Draft Pharmacy: Why is My Plot Wonky?
Welcome to an issue of ‘First Draft Pharmacy’ where we discuss and hopefully solve some of your biggest writing issues. Today, we’re going to talk about something that’s often tricky for writers working on a first draft of a book: a wonky plot.
Problem #1: An element of your story just isn’t connected enough to the other elements
When I first had the idea for my second novel Privilege, I saw it as a story about a sexual assault told from the perspectives of 3 women: the survivor of the assault, the girlfriend of the assaulter, and a random girl on campus.
If it sounds like one of those things is not like the others…you’re right.
The random girl on campus wasn’t connected enough to the story for her role in it to make sense, and this was one of the major notes that my editor at HarperCollins gave me on my first draft of the book.
So I gave her a new role as his student advocate, and boom: her story played a role in the overall story.
Voila—my plot was no longer as lopsided.
One simple problem with plot can be that one element of your story—a character, or an event—isn’t connected enough to the other elements. Pulling it in, even in a small way, can make a difference.
Let’s diagnose some of the other common reasons for a plot not quite clicking and how you can fix them. I have 4 more tips to help you diagnose your plot problems.
Problem #2: Your plot lacks causality
Causality can be hard to get the hang of if you’re not used to thinking about it, but it’s a critical component for making your plot work.
Causality is just a fancy word for cause-and-effect. Something happens, and there’s a consequence.
When you think about plot—what your characters are doing, and what’s happening to them—you want to have them do things that have consequences. If your characters are running around doing things but there’s no effect that results from those actions, not only will your plot feel disjointed, it also won’t be interesting.
For example, maybe you’re writing a story where the married main character cheats on his spouse, and the spouse finds out.
Now you have a few options for what can happen next: maybe his spouse feels hurt and betrayed and leaves him, maybe she’s still upset but she chooses to stay with him, maybe she’s even indifferent, which changes how the main character looks at the nature of his marriage.
But in all of these scenarios, the main character’s action of being unfaithful to his spouse has a tangible effect on another character.
If he cheats on his spouse and everything stays the same, the reader is going to be left with a sense of where on earth is this story going, and does this author know what they’re doing?
John Gardener in his excellent book on novel-writing, The Art of Fiction, calls this profluence. It’s derived from “profluent,” meaning to flow smoothly and abundantly forth
Here’s how he defines profluence: as “...a narrative requirement best satisfied by a series of causally related events.”
It’s what gives a story coherence across the time that the reader spends reading.
Problem #3: Your plot doesn’t connect to the interiority of characters
Every year, I get at least a handful of emails from people—usually men—who want to tell me about a brilliant plot of their book idea, a plot that will change the world.
They say, "And then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens." None of these plots has ever once felt that special to me.
Why? Because their plots, as intricate and planned as they may be, aren’t connecting to the interiority of characters. What I mean by this is the plot is not asking a larger question relating to the hearts and souls of the characters.
The purpose of plot is to function as the literal journey a character goes on, but the reason why we care about that journey is because of a character’s internal change, or shift in perspective.
That’s what a story is: it’s a change in perspective.
Imagine a story about a man who desperately hates his job and wants a new one. The ending of the story could be that he finally gets a new job. Or it could be that he never gets the new job. But either way, who cares, unless we know what that outcome means to him?
How has he changed over the course of struggling to find his way out of this job he hates?
You could write the most vivid, high-drama tale of someone going a quest around the world and battling dragons, and it will read as boring if we don’t know what’s going on in the heart of this character make them go on this journey in the first place.
Stories are about people changing. Always.
Your character must change internally as a person somehow. If they don’t, your audience has no reason to keep reading.
Problem #4 is simple: Not enough is happening
While sometimes the problem is not enough stuff happening internally, you also do need things to happen externally. You can’t write an entire novel of people just sitting around talking.
In real life, we sit on our fears and desires all the time. That guy who hates his job and desperately wants a new one might actually do nothing about it for 20 years.
But novels aren’t life reflected perfectly…if they were, they’d be nanny cams, and they’d be really, really boring to watch 90% of the time.
When we’re writing a story, we aren’t writing surveillance footage. Our characters can’t just do nothing the same way we do nothing.
As writers, we must distill life into its essential events that together show an overall transformation of a person. That means we have to skip over a lot of the filler…the sitting. The not acting. The chatting.
We skip, like a rock skipping across a pond, to the pivotal events, and string these together so that we can fit an entire story into just 300 pages.
This can be awkward at first, you may feel like you’re packing too much in. But probably, you aren’t. Probably, you’re just getting used to the fact that things have to happen in novels.
“Realistic” fiction often falls into the trap of “nothing happening” because people think that for something to be realistic, it can’t be “too exciting” or “dramatic”.
But even if a character is passive, ask yourself: how do they act privately? Do they act self destructively?
We all do things when no one is watching. So, when faced with a challenge, ask how will your characters react? The answer can’t be “they don’t.” That’s your only rule.
Problem #5: You’re being too nice
Most writers will spend at least several months writing the first draft of their book.
That’s a lot of time to be spending with the same characters and in the world you’re building. So it’s totally understandable that some of us wind up caring deeply about those characters, or even identifying with them.
In some ways, this can be a good thing—if you care about your characters, that probably means your readers will, too.
On the other hand, it can make it difficult to present your characters with difficult challenges to solve.
When you identify with a character, it makes you want to be nice to them—I tend to think that most of us are good people, and good people don’t want to see people they care about suffer.
But suffering is often at the core of a meaningful perspective shift, which is what we’re trying to lead our main character to.
So if you’re not making things difficult enough for your characters to change, any change you impose on them won’t feel earned.
Just think about the last time you had a major change in your perspective on anything. What pushed you to change your mind?
I’m going to go out on a limb and venture that you weren’t content.
You weren’t sitting around perfectly happy and suddenly thought, hey, maybe I should change.
Your characters are going to have to go through similarly challenging journeys. It may not feel very good, but your plot will thank you, which means your reader will thank you.
Ready to write your book?
If you made it this far, I’m guessing that you are writing a book, or want to write a book.
If so, I want to talk to you.
When I’m not writing, my mission in life is to help talented writers write their dream books. I love it. I live for it.
If you're curious to know more, I have a free video walking you through my exact process for writing a book. You can get it by clicking below and answering two questions to apply to my program, the Book Incubator.
You can get the video whether you join or not—no pressure to enroll.
Just click below to tell me a little bit about you and your book—you can fill out a form online. I’m so excited to hear from you!
