Oh damn! I’ve hit a roadblock (you say to yourself) — this is never gonna work. I’ve got too much on the shoulders of my hero, and he’s not able to fend off this crisis. I’ve been planning on something else entirely at this point, and… that never really gelled. Now what?
Well, I recommend leaning into it instead of despairing.
Let me present a case study: Yellowstone, Season 6.
For those who have been living on the moon, Taylor Sheridan, an immaculate and inventive plotter with a stellar backlist, has produced 5 seasons of Yellowstone, a modern Western about the trials and tribs of a cattle ranching family in Montana. It’s excellent work, in the vein of a family patriarch with an historic legacy fighting obstacles. You know how those go — the patriarch orchestrates the survival campaign, and either wins or loses for his family (whether or not he personally survives). That’s the end-point target for this sort of plot.
For 5 seasons, Sheridan has been busily writing toward a final season to end the story with the maximum bang, taking his fascinated viewers through crisis after crisis along the way, meticulously, as he starts the process to its final conclusion.
Well, he has decided to do the big bang prematurely. At least, part of it.
What happened, is that Kevin Costner, who has played the patriarch “John Dutton” for lo these several successful seasons, has been pining to make his own Western shows (the early results of which are not enticing) and has broken his contract with Sheridan. So, whatever plot goal Sheridan has been aiming at for the ending of the Yellowstone series is toast.
Viewers have eagerly awaited the 6th and final season opener (which has just dropped), to see how Sheridan would ride out the presumed torching of his long-term series plot plans.
Know what he did? He produced John Dutton, dead by (staged) suicide, killed by mercenaries hired by his enemies, and (just to really put a fork in it) did it all offstage. And then he sent the remaining characters off to thwart the bad guys conspiring against them, as if the patriarch had never existed. And successfully dragged his eager viewers along with him, indifferent to the patriarch as a primary character now, and focused on the actions of the survivors. So, now it’s a different sort of plot — a revenge plot.
And that’s the way to do it. No more John Dutton? Well, OK, then. Sheridan can roll with that.
If you’ve written yourself into a corner, and don’t know how you’re ever going to get this mess to the destination you had in mind, maybe you can rethink what you’re aiming at, and come up with a better fit — a better destination. In Sheridan’s case, the prior story-so-far is already out there — putting this at maximum difficulty level. Yours might be, too, or maybe it’s all in one not-yet-published work — easy-peasy. A little prefiguring here and there, and it might work out even better.
Ever been stymied about how to proceed to a conclusion, and then taken advantage of an unanticipated sideways move? How’d that work out for you?
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Blowing up your plot”
One of the most famous examples of a runaway plot is Huckleberry Finn. Twain got Jim and Huck to the fork of the Mississippi and Ohio. Twain’s original plan was to have them go up the Ohio, because if you are a runaway slave, the last place you want to go is further down the Mississippi into slave territory. You want to go up the Ohio with free states on one side.
Only Twain never navigated the Ohio, knew nothing of it, and had the theme of going down the Mississippi (which he knew well). Frustrated, he put the manuscript in a drawer for years. It was only after he came up with the idea of getting his protagonists lost in a fog until irrevocably committed to the Mississippi that he came back to it.
Then he was stuck with how in the blazes to give it a happy ending. Tom Sawyer’s appearance and the deus ex machina ending represented another plot sticking point where he stuck it in a drawer for a while.
It’s now considered one of the great American novels. Take a lesson from that.
I recollect reading that Michael Straczynski with the Babylon 5 series built in potential exit points for all of his major cast members, after Michael O’Hare’s breakdown in health led to him having to leave the series in the first year. I suppose that kind of strategic planning is necessary when working with actors whose real lives may interfere radically with the plot.
I blew up one of my books about three-quarters done, when I realized that I didn’t really want to write the graphic death scene … and came up with a reason for having it all happen off-stage, and incorporated a really significant twist that made me go back and rewrite some episodes — and set up the plot for a subsequent book.
Think of it as a fun challenge…
The WJF (work just finished) was half-way finished when I started wondering where the antagonist was. I had no Big Bad, no villain. Was this a problem? Should it be a problem? Did I need to rewrite?
It turned into a character growth and milieu novel instead, and I think worked out.
And of course, there’s always Raymond Chandler’s advice:
This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action and if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. This could get to be pretty silly but somehow it didn’t seem to matter. A writer who is afraid to over-reach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.
…Or have a horde of zombies ambush the main character. Or the reactor start going critical. Or the oxygen recycler fails. Or…
…Yeah. I might have used that advice juuuuust a smidge too much.
When you take Chandler’s advice, you need to figure out what “a man with a gun in his hand” is.
And furthermore, is at that point in time. The only work in which it was consistent was The Firemaster and the Flames where it was “set something on fire.”
“And then a man burst through the door, holding a gun. Which was very confusing, since the door was space-grade and designed to slide, and nobody had actually seen a functioning firearm in centuries.”
(I adore the “man burst through door with gun” thing EVEN MORE in stories where it is not a serious option, because it breaks you out)