*Sorry to be late.  I am trying to pack up the house and finish a novel at the same time, and I ran out of fingers.*

Ladies and gentlemen and writers, it’s time to buy moustache wax, and twirl, because we’re going to be plotting. For you ladies who aren’t middle aged and of Mediterranean extraction (nobody is perfect) there are some handy fake moustaches in the back.

Right?

Everyone ready?

In the last lesson we discussed on plot means something must happen. But what?

I’ve been faced with newbies who think that novel is a length not a length combined with unity of plot. This means if their character gets enough facials and goes on enough shoe shopping expeditions, lovingly executed in many words, they reach the magical length of 80k and voila, they have a novel.

Needless to say this is not true. Unless you’re writing about unpleasant things happening and you aim for the school-reading-list market.

For the rest of us in genre, there needs to be cohesion and unity of plot.

What the heck does that mean?

It means that, even if you follow everything I detail below, if you don’t use the humble artifice called “foreshadowing” you still will make no sense and no one will be able to see the plot through what happens.

Unity of plot means that the actions that take place all logically proceed from each other and that the challenge or adventure set at the beginning resolves itself (for good or ill) throughout the book.

What this means is that you can’t start the novel with the character obsessed with lemons, have two chapters pursuing lemons and then for no reason whatsoever have the novel be about chickens. Or rather, you can, but it’s not exactly the sort of thing readers like. Yes, themes and challenges change, but they have to make sense in a logic chain.

One of the ways of making a story make sense is to follow the Hero’s Journey. The best way of getting the distilled-for-popular-fiction outline of that is to get your hands on a book called The Writer’s Journey and copy the list in the middle.

This journey starts in the real world where the character is called to adventure, which might happen via a messenger or via an event that’s just SO intolerable the character simply has to set it right. Characters often start by refusing the call, but this is not necessarily a condition – and if they reject the call make sure they don’t reject it through most of the book (in which case you get a plot based only on running away, which only works for Rincewind.), after the hero accepts the call he undertakes a journey, physical or mental or emotional in search of the elixir, the miracle or whatever the solution is to the intolerable problem. In this journey they find mentors and allies, including often a trickster, who is not always a traitor, but who is often a limnear personality with a fluid attachment to good, or in gaming terms chaotic good or chaotic neutral, and faces challenges some of which will be initiated by people – guardians of the portal – attempting to thwart his aim.

At the end of this, they face the greatest challenge, acquire what they came to get, and return to the “real world” where we show the problem solved or order restaured.

This structure feels right and complete because it’s the structure of most western myths, though not necessarily inevitable to a generation raised on Anime.

The plot to use instead or in conjunction to this is the W plot. In the W plot we start in the normal world, but then something disrupts it. The character’s attempt to set it right brings momentary relief, but makes things worse, bringing about the next low point and so on. A novel might easily have twelve of these (this is an alien W, shut up.) A short story will have at least three. Then you hit the low of all points, called the Mirror Moment, in which your character sees himself and his quest without illusions and in the light of that reorients, which allows him to pull out to the climax, and to win (or lose.) The Mirror Moment comes right after the Black Moment in the same low point of the W, in case you’re wondering.

Use either of these, with a dose of foreshadowing, and you’ll have a plot.

Some additional cautions: after a heavy action scene, feel free to insert a “recuperative” scene. This doesn’t mean nothing happens, but that whatever happens counters the feeling of the previous scene.

Which brings us to where I am going next week. Theme and Tone. “Waiter, there’s a theme in my novel” and other instructions on how to cook the tale.