6 Ways to Create a Better Plot

Are you staring hopelessly at your manuscript yet again? Are you stuck at a plot point, wishing your plot would float magically towards you on a silver platter? It’s a common question on every writer’s mind: How can I make my plot even better than it is? How can I create a plot in such a way that it draws the reader in and has tension oozing out of the pages? While there is no one-size-fits-all, clear answer for this, there are many ways to speed up, tighten, and generally make a bland plot better. Not even plot holes can go on forever.

1. Balance the Internal and External Conflict

If you’ve ever read a book that could be summarized with “This happened then this happened then this happened then they all lived happily ever after”, chances are, that book had too much external conflict and not enough internal conflict. It’s fun to read about villains beating the crap out of heroes and duels to the death, but too much of that and the story is bogged down by the constant stream of Things That Happen. But wait! Even if your plot has too much external conflict, it can still be saved. Take out the parts that do not directly lead to the climax and/or parts that could be taken out and not royally mess up the plot arc, and there you have it: significantly less pointless, tension-lacking external conflict.

On the flip side is the story with too much “I thought about this and then that and then oh yeah we lived happily ever after”, where there is too much internal conflict and not enough external conflict. Signs of this include boring stretches where nothing action-related happens, the only tense scenes happening when the character is talking to themself, and a climax that seems entirely out-of-the-blue. An overload of external conflict will make the reader feel disjointed from the characters, but an overload of internal conflict will make the reader feel too deep in the character’s thoughts. Overall, try to create a plot where the character(s) has to address their problems on the outside and on the outside.

2. Have The Protagonist Drive the Plot

In real life, you’ve probably heard the sound advice to be proactive rather than reactant, and that advice holds true to plotting your story as well. A character who only reacts to the things that happen around them will make readers antsy and sit there wondering why Bob can’t just do something productive for once instead of pretty much waiting for the villain to attack him. The plot should not be squeezed out like toothpaste through the conflict; it should flow naturally through what the protagonist does or doesn’t do. If all the protagonist does is react, react, react, there can be no build-up or character arc, and the story will probably be guilty of having too much external conflict (see above).

That said, just because the protagonist is driving the plot doesn’t mean your antagonist can’t hold the strings. After all, you don’t need to be in charge of the whole game to do things you want to do. In order to pull this tip off, definitely still make the antagonist a threatening force – just don’t make everything the happens in your story be based on the antagonist. You’re writing a book, so not every one of your protagonist’s actions should be able to be predicted on a business major’s cause-and-effect line chart. Why don’t you just fast-track your plot to make the protagonist do something not influenced by outside forces?

3. Have the Antagonist Focused on Defeating the Protagonist

Just think about it: What has more tension: someone who is running away from a killer organization who doesn’t know they exist, or someone who is running away from a killer organization who does know they exist and will stop at nothing to hunt them down? The second situation, of course! If the antagonist does not make stopping the protagonist’s goals a priority, the story will fall flat and readers will question how urgent the problem actually is. In fact, one of the quickest ways to relieve your story of all tension is to take away the roadblock/threat that is stopping the main goal from being achieved. So don’t just make your power-hungry dictator hate the minority group the hero is a part of, make the power-hungry dictator hate the hero the most out of all of the people in the said group.

4. Create A Time Limit for the Main Goal

Not only is creating a time limit a neat little trick for moving things along faster pacing-wise, it’s also handy for when your story is lacking a little push. Deadlines are a wonderful motivating force and the plot thickens considerably when you introduce that not only does Bob have to save his mom, he must do it before the evil dictator takes over the world in two weeks. If he has or acts like he has all the time in the world, then the question will arise: Why isn’t he using more time to prepare, to think about what he is doing? To raise a large army to defeat the dictator rather than going about it himself? Not making the story line urgent for the main character/reader will create a bunch of plot holes won’t be able to solve.

As mentioned above, another repercussion of not creating time limit is that the pacing will dawdle and slow the plot down. When you feel like you have all the time in the world, you tend to do things that really do not need to be done. Bob would never take even five minutes to make a sandwich if he new his mom was in danger and needed to be rescued within a fortnight, but you would have written that boring sandwich scene in if you hadn’t created the fortnight-long time limit – just because both you and Bob had nothing better to do during those five minutes. Essentially, by the time you got to the resolution, your whole story would be filled up to the brim with these kinds of non-relevant, bland scenes.

5. Make the Subplots Related to the Main Plot

It’s funny: What we call the plot is actually a series of many different plots layering over each other like thread. Of course, there is one main plot thread that is more important than all the others, but the smaller plot threads can work to support it and make it better. Anything can be a subplot as long as the main plot doesn’t already do it: a romance, a murder mystery, a redemption arc, a revenge quest…the list goes on and on. Some books, such as the Harry Potter series, use a lot of subplots. Some books use just a few. Regardless of quantity, the one thing you need to make sure about your subplot(s) is that it enhances your main plot in some fashion, whether it is by increasing stakes, intrigue, making the characters and worldbuilding more developed, or something else. If it is just there because your second cousin dared you to put it in, you either need to find a way to make it more relevant or take it out.

However, some writers like to use a split-POV method where they introduce two sets of main characters with two sets of conflicts and goals, neither of those plot threads touching each other at any point in the story. Is that bad? No, of course not! As long as those plot threads are both set in the same universe and are not in totally different genres (a high fantasy and a nonfiction about chinchillas would be disastrous indeed), they can only support one another through worldbuilding. If, somewhere along the way, you decide you want them to meet, that is fine too, or maybe your plot threads started off together and split apart somewhere along the middle. There are many types of subplots and plot threads, and there is no wrong way to do them as long as they build on one another.

6. Tie it Up Neatly

A plot is only as good as its ending, its resolution, its denouement, whatever you want to call it. It is arguably the trickiest part in the whole story because you’ve got all these loose threads and you need to tie them up in a way that feels satisfactory, but not too forced. And let’s just make it clear: ‘tying it up’ is not synonymous with ‘happy ending’. However many threads you decide to tie up is your choice and will vary depending on what type of ending you are writing. For example, if you are writing a cliffhanger ending, you might only tie up a few plot threads, just enough that the story feels like a story. If you are writing a uncertain but not quite a cliffhanger ending, tie up the threads you know for certain and then tie up some more with knots that are purposefully ambiguous. This also holds for when you are writing a book in a series. If you know for certain that your story ends happily/sadly, tie up nearly all the threads but leave some so that the reader will still be thinking as they read the last word.

So now it’s time to tie up the post for this week, the first post of October, actually. Where I’m living, fall is officially upon us and the chill is already apparent in the air! See you next week, lovely friends!