How to Start a Plot PDF

In The Beginning: How to Start a Plot  Getting a plot started is a daunting prospect for most writers, but the reason it’s daunting varies from writer to writer. Some writers know so much about the story even before they start that they don’t quite know where to begin. Others have only a si...

In The Beginning: How to Start a Plot  Getting a plot started is a daunting prospect for most writers, but the reason it’s daunting varies from writer to writer. Some writers know so much about the story even before they start that they don’t quite know where to begin. Others have only a single episode or character in mind, and they’re not sure how to spin that situation into a complete narrative. Three Ways to work a writer works out plot, outlined by John Gardner  Borrowing some traditional plot or an action from real life;  By working his way back from the story’s climax;  By groping his way forward from an initial situation. WORKING OUT PLOTS Borrowing involves changing an earlier plot in significant ways or using it for a purpose that the original author may not have intended or even foreseen. Many writers, for example, have retold Homer’s Odyssey setting it in completely different contexts. Others have retold well-known stories from a different point of view. Sometimes, writers borrow types of plots rather than specific stories. Beginning writers of mysteries or romance novels, for example, probably have templates for those sorts of stories in their minds. Although such a template can be a straightjacket, it can also be a convenient way to at least get a plot started, even if you plan to change it later on.  Another approach to plotting is to start with the end of a story and structure the rest of the work so that it leads to a particular climax. Obviously, this method requires that you know how the story ends before you start writing. It also probably works best if you’re writing a binary narrative, that is, one with an either/or conclusion. With this type of narrative, figuring out how to start by working backward should be relatively easy: if there`s a crime to be solved, you start with the crime or its immediate aftermath; if the two lovers finally get together, you need to start with their meeting or the situation that leads to their meeting. This is the method where you`re most likely to find that an outline is useful. If you already know what happens at the end, that means you know, or at least can infer, what the plot needs to do to reach that point; what characters you`ll need, what the setting will be, and roughly what steps the characters need to take to get there.  Finally, many writers start with an image, a character, or a situation and, as Gardner put it, “grope” their way forward. William Faulkner famously said that he created his great novel The Sound and the Fury by starting with a single image of a little girl with muddy underpants sitting in a tree, peering through a window at a funeral. This method is probably more time consuming and frustrating than sticking to an outline, but it may result in a more complex narrative structure. OTHER WAYS OF STRUCTURING A PLOT: Starting in Medias Res Limiting Choices Opening Examples  Starting in Medias Res  The plot which starts in the middle of the story and provides flashbacks (events which took place prior to the story`s initial action) to promote reader`s understanding of the story.  In fact, it`s tempting to say that all stories begin in medias res because there`s really no such thing as a story that begins ex nihilo, “from nothing”. In medias res usually means is starting the plot at a point where the story is already underway.  FOR EXAMPLE:  Homer`s Iliad is not really about the Trojan War in its entirety; by the time the Iliad opens, the war has already been going on for 10 years, and the present-time narrative depicts only a few weeks near at the end of the siege of Troy.  Starting in medias res shows us that choosing where to begin is not so it is choosing the most dramatically productive moment. Shakespeare could have started Hamlet with the funeral of Hamlet’s father or the subsequent marriage of Hamlet’s mother to his uncle Polonius, but he chose to open it with the moment that was most likely to make Hamlet reconsider recent events, namely, the appearance of his father’s ghost, demanding vengeance.  Limiting Choices  You could limit your time frame, having the story or novel take place in a single day, week , or month, or you could limit the point of view, telling the story from the point of view of only one character. You also have a number of choice with the first line of the narrative, which will both dictate and be dictated by what comes later. FOR EXAMPLE: If you’re telling a story from the point of view of a character who dies at the end, for example, you will be limited to third person narration—unless you want the character to narrate the story from beyond the grave. If you’re writing a story that features a surprise later on, you might want to start in the first person present tense or in the close third person, so that the reader lives in the moment right alongside the main character and is just as stunned as the character when the surprise finally comes.  Opening Examples One category of story opening is simply beginning at the beginning, the way Tolkien does in The Hobbit. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” This opening sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale, with an unspoken “once upon a time” at the start of the sentence. As brief and to the point as it is, that simple 10-word sentence tells us right away that we’re in a fantasy world, inhabited by creatures called hobbits, and it tells us something important about hobbits, that they live underground. THANK YOU FOR LISTENING 