Plotting For Beginners Part 1

[This is a two-part article; part two is here.]

Okay. You have an idea. Now, write it down. Just the idea part! Don't worry about plot details, characters, whatever, except those that are important to your idea. Don't worry about length; that's not the concern. Just write as long or as short as you want. Come back when you're ready…

Done? Good. Now, right down a logline for it. A "logline" is used in Hollywood as part of the decision-making step before a script is bought; it's the simplest concentration of the idea. If you take more than 50 words to write it, then you're story is way too complicated and you may need to simplify it a little bit. Seriously: You need to get the description down to the brass tacks. Only worry about the main plot here; the subplots are cool but not that important for our purposes here.

And keep in mind that you can use other properties to describe your project. Remember "Die Hard"? It became part of a lot of loglines. "Under Siege"? "Die Hard" on a sub. "Under Siege II"? "Die Hard" on a train. "Speed"? "Die Hard" on a bus. "Masterminds"? Die Hard" at a school. If you liken your idea to a popular movie it makes life easier, even if it's a couple of them. You can also combine a property with a general description to make a point.

Example: "Sex Percussions": "Cast a Deadly Spell" in Vancouver, with the detective backed by a band of capoeirista mages.

You also want to create an elevator pitch, or describing your project in less than 30 seconds. Summarize it in about 200 words or less, bolding important parts. The idea is that you're looking for tropes and other important parts. Again, ignore sublots and go straight for the main plot.

Example: "Sex Percussions": A Mayan GODDESS has CURSED THE WORLD to be less fertile. A Vancover-based DETECTIVE has FIGURED IT OUT, and ASSEMBLES A TEAM of MARTIAL ARTISTS / MAGES to HELP him THWART HER PLANS and SAVE THE WORLD.

You're going to want to do that for each subplot and running gag. A subplot is any smaller plot that strengthens what's happening in the main plot; romantic subplots are an obvious example, but you can also track what the sidekicks are doing, or the villain, and you can use them to do some world-building if you want. A running gag doesn't necessarily need to be funny, even though most are; they are there to act as a diversion from the other plots going on and tend to be small parts of the writing.

[By the way, the main plot is usually referred to as the "A-Plot,", the subplots are referred to "B-Plots," and the running gag is a "C-Plot." This is good if you want to sound all fancy.]

Once you have done that, the next thing is to start plotting it out. Now, if this were a movie, you'd need to do about 40–60 scenes (drama-40, action-60). The number of scenes is going to be different for different media: Comic books only need 10–12 scenes of 1–2 pages each while fantasy novels may have closer to a hundred scenes of about 3–8 pages each. I personally prefer to go about 60 scenes of about 3–6 pages each for my books, 4 scenes of about 300–600 words each for my short stories. Then it gets fun.

To your main plot, add some sort of sub-plot (may or may not add to plot, or even parallel the plot. For comics and movies, this translates into for every 60 pages, figure you should have one subplot (so a good 120-page movie will have 2–3 sublots), and for every 90 pages, there should be two pages of running jokes. For regular books, that's one subplot for every 25,000 words and subplots should be more than 25% of the writing per subplot. You should have one running gag for every 50,000 words but they should take up only 10% of the total.

Example 1: "Sex Percussion" is a short graphic novel about 60 pages. It has one subplot (Detective Tate's romance problems) which I allocated 15 pages to and a running gag (Alistaire's romance problems) which I gave about 5 pages. I also threw in a smaller running gag (why Xquiq is a bad person) of about 2 pages. The remaining 38 pages are for the main story.

Example 2: "Brass Ring", my novel WIP, is going to be about 50,000 words. This means one running gag (5000 words max) and two subplots (about 12,500 words for both total). This leaves about 32,500 words for the main plot.

Remember those scenes I mentioned above? The 40–60 scenes is for a 120-page comic or movie, with subplots taking up to 10–15 scenes per subplot and the running gag a total of about 4–6 scenes. That 120,000-word novel you're planning? You're looking at the subplots having about 30,000 words each and the running gag about 12,000 words. These may sound like huge numbers, but once you get writing the words go by relatively fast. Also, these numbers are approximate; don't sweat them too much.

Yeah, math. But all of this is just planning…You're not quite ready for plotting yet….