Wattpad Block Party - Winter Edition II

Brucerelgin Presents: All About Plot

Hi everyone!  I'm Bruce Elgin, a long time Wattpad Ambassador and the person who is in charge of the @improveyourwriting profile, where you can get a lot of information about the art and craft of writing.  And, after I introduce myself, this post is all about your writing!

If we haven't met before, here's a bit about me...I got my Masters of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing in 2007 and have continued to study writing since then.  I've written a lot of different things, and I won a Watty for my book Voodootown.  That' s the award I'm the most proud of.  I also teach a lot and the last class I helped with was an online class for the University of Iowa that had over 11,000 students.  I didn't sleep a lot during that class, to say the least.

And, even though I sometimes teach for the U of I (the most famous literary fiction writing school in the world), I am not a lit fic kind of writer.  I love science fiction, fantasy, horror, paranormal, romance...just about everything.  I get ticked off when genre fiction isn't given the respect it deserves, because it can be just as well written as any literary book.

One of the things I love to do most is to help people feel more comfortable with writing and to become better writers.  I think that, as writers, we have to constantly try to improve, because our readers deserve our best efforts.  Plus, it just feels amazing when you get a story down just the way you know it should be.

In this post I am going to share with you a bit about plot, a few varieties of structure, including the Hero's Journey, character arc and one of my favorite tools, the backwards pass.

My goal is to give you tools that can get you out of a jam and help you write stories and novels that readers will love.  You don't have to use any of these methods, I just want you to have options.

Okay, we've got a ton of stuff to cover, so buckle in!

First off, let's talk about Plot vs. structure.

Every story has a plot.  If anything at all happens in a story, then there is a plot.

The question about plot is...is it a plot that will interest just a few readers or a whole lot of readers.

Structure, on the other hand, is how you organize your plot, how you put it together.  It's a picture of your story, without being the story itself...if your story is a house, then structure is your blueprint.  It shows you how to put your story together.

Some people worry that structure is a formula, that it stifles creativity.  Well, formulas are for math and chemistry, not for writing.  Remember, all houses (at least the ones that most people want to live in) have a floor, roof and walls.  Does that mean they all look alike?  Of course not!  You are the architect and you aren't designing houses for some scary suburb where all the houses are identical.  Instead, you can use the basic concepts of story structure to design your own house, one people will love to step in and that also reflects who you are as a writer.

Now, as we get into structure, we are going to be talking about what Robert McKee calls classically structured or Archplot stories.  Basically, classical structure has a protagonist pursuing a clear goal with a clear beginning, middle and end point.  These are stories that generally very approachable and that resonate with the largest group of readers.  We see them everywhere, from bestsellers to scripts to young adult novels.

And, McKee also talks about two other types of stories, minimalist and anti-structure.

In a minimalist story, the protagonist still tends to have a goal and there is usually an end.  The difference is in how the events are presented.  A three act type structure is probably there, but the order of the plot events may be moved around or the focus may be more internal than external.  The stakes of the story might also be more personal than in a classically structured story.