Large-scale plot structure

[Monarchist]

Hi friends,

Does anyone have any thoughts about the use and planning of large-scale plot structure in a story, before you begin? Do you think it's a good idea? Or does a story naturally change as events unfold in the writer's mind as they write?

For example, I feel that I should use a certain type of structure or plot for a long-time world-building idea of mine. But how should I plot it? A Virgilian/Homeric odyssey? An epic poem? A Norse saga? A modern novel?

Is there even such a thing as a trope of each of these, or do representative works from each genre follow their own idiosyncratic structure?

In a sense I'm just lost for how to begin, and where to take my ideas. Any advice or experience on your part as writers would be appreciated.

Thanks

[Alwyn]

Hi Monarchist, and (as others said) welcome back to the Study!

Yes, I like to start with a large-scale plot structure. Yes, the story naturally changes as events unfold. I write AARs rather than creative writing, so of course events will unfold in the game. But I get the impression that people who aren't writing AARs can still be surprised when they find themselves writing that a character has done something which they would not have expected. Juvenal wrote, in Where do Stories Come From?:

When I start an AAR, I have the impetus of an initial concept to get me through the early part of the campaign. I find that I can take a chunk of campaign and imagine a short story extending slightly beyond the bare events in the game. When I finish such an episode, I am often surprised at what has been created, a feeling akin to completing a painting-by-numbers piece. I am familiar with the individual passages and what prompted me to write them, but when taken together, a new level of meaning sometimes emerges, a story-shape and nuances of character that I hadn't consciously planned.

Of course, alongside unexpected twists, you'll probably want to include the traditional plot elements of dramatic setbacks, discoveries, complications (of the central problem) and a resolution. (I took the list of plot elements from Jeff VanderMeer's Wonderbook: An Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction (Abrams 2013) pp. 137 - 138.)

I get the impression that different writers generate plot in different ways. Jeff VanderMeer said, in his Wonderbook, p. 136:

Perhaps it just comes down to the way your particular brain is wired ... I realize my own personal problems with defining plot versus structure is that I never really think in terms of plot. Instead, I think of characters that more or less inhabit a structure, which they may well build, and most of the structure consists of scenes.

There are some thought-provoking discussions of plot in the Writing Excuses blog. Here in the Writers' Study, the Log Book, the index of all Critic's Quill articles started by Juvenal, is available here in the Lounge and some CQ articles discuss plot. For example, Aquila Praefotis wrote A Brief Look at the Character Dynamics of a Story in Relation to its Plot and Caillagh's Masterpiece Review: Plot, Writing and Characters of Robin de Bodemloze's Takeda discusses the plot of that legendary Shogun II AAR.

[Hitai de Bodemloze]

If you're writing a long piece of fiction, then yes, it's probably best to have some form of over arching plot structure. It helps keep you on track as the author, it helps keeps the story headed in the direction that you want it to go in, and it helps the reader follow along. What that plot structure is and how you implement it is somewhat of a different question. Yes, you can follow a traditional model, such as a Homerian epic, or Norse saga, or - my personal favourite - a classical tragedy (see below), but I don't think just telling you to follow a pattern is a useful answer in this predicament.


This ties in to your last question - how do you begin? How do you take a plot structure and apply it to what you're writing? Taking the above image, you have a beginning, a middle, and an end, with specific things that should happen at these varying points. But you can't just say, 'oh, there will be catharsis at the end' and then that's going to happen. Creating a situation where there will be catharsis at the end requires a significant investment in the beginning and the middle - it involves crafting a three dimensional character whose emotional journey will eventually be able to evoke that catharsis in the audience. This emotional journey in turn must be influenced by the other characters they interact with, the places they travel to, the things that happen to them, and the language you use as the author to describe it all.

So developing a large scale plot structure isn't simply slapping a pre-existing model on to your story, but instead building your story in composite parts so that it will eventually all fit together - in such a way that the reader wouldn't believe it was ever in separate parts to begin with. Therein lies the rub, as it were. It involves planning out the development and character arcs of your characters, and how they will interact with eachother; how your various subplots evolve alongside and eventually dovetail into your main plot; how your lexicon/semantic field will change depending on what stage you are at, and so on and so on. To use a metaphor, it's building a jigsaw, whilst keeping one eye on the picture on the box. You know what it (your large scale plot) will look like at the end, but you have to do the hard work in making sure everything in your story fits together in such a way as to make sure that plot works. So keep your overall plot structure in mind, but start small and work on tying everything together piece by piece. That's my advice at least, your mileage may vary of course

[Dude with the Food]

It sounds like you've not got a story yet, just a setting. Nothing wrong with that but if you aren't especially committed to writing with any specific plot structure in mind, it's probably better to work out what your story is and then decide how that wants to be written best. How developed is the world-building idea? If you've got to history to it then what are the significant events that have a story to tell?

[NorseThing]

I am not certain how to ever begin and I often get in trouble after I do begin a story. Not just here, but elsewhere as well. Not that it matters much, but I will tell you about my dear departed uncle with ties to the White Russians and all of the mess that we now see in the Ukraine. He was of course not old enough to be a part of the mess at the beginning of the 20th century and he was born in the USA in the 1910's I think. He had many interests and one was to ghost write for some respectable sci fi authors in the 1950's and a bit into the 1960's.

So there would be a big box of stuff. He would work with the real author and detail up a back story including a page or so on each character that may or may not get introduced in the story. That's right. A great many characters are created, but only a few are good enough to serve. They would do the same with scenery and even costume. None of this would necessarily be used and some would get reused in future stories whether it be a magazine story / short story or a novel or whatever. I always thought this was too much work and not enough writing, but maybe there was something to the madness. I really wished that box had survived, but I can still share the idea of the big box of stuff.

So he would pull out a character from the box. This became a template that had to be kept consistent as the story unfolded. If another character is met, then perhaps this would come out of the box or perhaps a new template would be created. Now I know a lot of this was to keep my uncle in line as a ghost writer. But maybe some of this could be of use here as well. Of course that big box of stuff is not files on a computer. I do not know , but maybe that was also part of what made the process work. A box of papers (100's of pages), a wall, set of pins, and a table to write / type on. That was his world to create some good stuff and to edit what others created as well.

I do not think writers need to be solitary creatures that work solely on their own. They compare ideas. They even steal (borrow) ideas that others found successful over the ages. I would hope they would not steal from a colleague, but.... I would not agree with plagiarism, but taking an idea and reworking it so that it is now your writing is okay. Just do not steal a whole chapter of a novel. Snip a little and add from your own imagination and experiences.

I don't know if any of this is clear or not.

[♔Old Dragoon♔]

I personally like a more spiral structure if you will. I like to start in the thick of things with an overall larger plot structure with a few main characters that may or may not be fictional. I tie them in the way I see fit to the overall premise of the story and write the fiction where the nonfiction is left out. I do not really like writing much other than historical fiction, not because I have trouble with creating my own world, I just think there is lot still to over in this world. I do not think there is any true wrong or right course, just the one that isn't taken because one is fear of going down that path. Good luck with your stories!

[Kilo11]

Hey Monarchist (I'm a Republican after the fashion of Cicero and Montesqiue, but I guess I'll try to help you nonetheless ),

It seems that 1) you are working on some world-building of your own, and that 2) you don't really have a story in mind yet. I think these things together can actually be a bit of a boon for you.

In doing your own world-building you get a chance to imagine every aspect of your setting. Geography, culture, language, political structures, gender relations, religions, technology... The list goes on and on. I myself am not a hugely experienced writer, but I have been working off and on on a longer piece set in my own world. The things I found most interesting and compelling about working in that self-created setting was that I actually didn't have to do a lot of structuring. Obviously I had an end goal in mind at the outset, something that moves the characters and forces them to make choices. Even something as simple as "Get from A to B" can be an immensely powerful tool to move the story along (as an example, that's essentially the entire plot structure of The Lord of the Rings).

Suffice to say, there is a goal and it must be reached or at least striven toward. However, aside from that I just let myself flesh out the world as much as I possibly could and then I waited to see what would happen. I didn't imagine scenes and how they'd fit together. Rather, I imagined people, with very particular back-stories (sort of like NorseThing's uncle) and motivations, as well as hard-grained character traits and lesser traits as well, and then I thought about what they would really really do in some situation. If you have the history of a place in mind, along with its geography, and then you have a clear understanding of who your players are, then all you really need to do is let them act as they would, with you recording their actions along the way. In fact, that is often what separates good and believable stories from ones which are just flat. A believable story follows its characters, even when they lead you into odd, unplanned, or even unfortunate situations, and you don't just find ways to "make the scenes work". If your character is supposed to be nice, but in this particular situation would probably lose his/her cool and do something horrific, then let that happen. Trying to stick to some pre-ordained plan is not going to improve the writing.

To briefly sum up my main point, I guess all in all the most important thing is to let your characters and setting dictate the structure of things, with only a few minor pushes from yourself to get the ball rolling. At the end you might not have what you planned for in the beginning, but it will probably be a good measure better than a story which is just trying to check off boxes on a "Structure" board.