A Rookie Writer Contemplates Plot (Part 1)

As a rookie novelist, I’m always on the lookout for good advice on the writing craft, lifestyle, etc. I read books and articles by experienced writers, subscribe to their newsletters, peruse their blogs, and attend their seminars and classes. But over the past months I’ve also found it to be very illuminating to watch the thought processes and growth of the fellow rookies in my on-line writing group. We are all struggling, but when one of us has a breakthrough – coming up with a particularly compelling conflict or plot twist, serving up a particularly delicious piece of prose, discovering something new and significant about their characters – we all know that something important and good has happened. We may not always know what we’re doing wrong, but we’re pretty sure when we’re doing something right.

Being of an analytical bent, I’m always pondering the lessons and insights I get from all these sources and trying to condense them into a set of pithy guidelines that I can use during my own struggles with understanding this craft. For me, writing about something is one of the best ways to understand it and to distill its essential truths. So, I thought, why not do just that, and post it as my blog for this week?

The subject I’m putting through the distillation process for this blog is plot, since it’s something my group has really been wrestling with for some time now.

At first plot seems so simple. After all, it can be defined in two words: “stuff happens.” But while that may describe the essence of what a plot is, it doesn’t in any way touch on what makes for a good plot, one that will keep the reader turning pages right to the end of the book.

Let’s put this in perspective. Romance fiction is far more character-based than plot-based. And I, personally, far prefer character-based books to plot-based ones. So how important is plot, really, in a romance novel? After all, we know what’s going to happen before we even start reading: the hero and heroine will start out apart, and end up together.

Of course, if that’s really the case, then only one romance novel need ever have been written.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the plot is very important to the romance novel, but not for the reason I originally assumed. The really important stuff that happens is not the sequence of external events, but rather the emotional journeys of the main characters. The characters need to change and grow, to find what they’re capable of, to develop new insights about life. Yes, they will fall in love, but first they have to go through some fundamental shift in their personality, in the way they view and deal with life.And it is the plot that takes them on that journey. In other words, the external events in the story are those that precipitate the journey, and then both facilitate and impede the character's progress along the way. The stuff that happens is interesting, not for its own sake, but because of the impact it has on the characters. If the reader is going to care about the stuff that happens, it has to be pretty significant stuff. Not necessarily earthshaking, like a hurricane or a war or global warming. It can be something very personal, but it has to be really important to the character it happens to. So I now have three bullets to describe plot:

-- Stuff happens.
-- The stuff that happens has to be really significant to the character it happens to.
-- Because of the stuff that happens, at least one of the characters must change, and must end up in an emotionally different place at the end of the story than they were at the beginning.

So the question that the romance writer ends up asking herself is not, “What will happen in my story?” so much as “Where are my characters, emotionally, at the beginning of the story, and where do I want them to be at the end? And what events will get them there?”

Given that we’re talking about romance fiction here, I’m going to add the perhaps obvious observation that the change must be for the better, at least for the hero and heroine. This is not true in all women’s fiction, and certainly not in all literature, but it’s true in romance. Our characters may not end up in a better place physically (maybe he broke his leg leaping to push a kid from the path of an oncoming car) or financially (maybe she gave up a high-powered career or a rich fiancé to be with the hero), but they are better off emotionally. They’re in love, after all, and we readers are happy to believe that this is true love and will see the couple through their lives. But there has to be more to it than that – some other kind of emotional growth that allows the love to ultimately happen. Looking back on my favorite romance novels, or my favorite novels in general, I believe it's this extra depth and dimension that differentiates and ordinary story from a truly absorbing and memorable one.

To condense this into more bullets:
-- In romance, the emotional change must be for the better.
-- To be really compelling, the change can’t just be that the characters fall in love. They have to go through some significant emotional growth that allows them to fall in love, and commit to a relationship, where before they weren't able to.

And I’m going to add one obvious corollary:
-- The reader has to really care about the characters that change

There's a lot more to plot than this, of course, but I'm going to save those for a part 2 and maybe even a part 3. After all, I've got other things to get done. For one thing, I've got a novel to plot.

Happy writing,

Samantha