100 Things You Should Know About Writing (Part 3)

63) How to Strengthen Your Plot

Now, we're officially done with rewrites and revisions. Which means we can enter the next phase of editing. Structural editing, as the phrase suggests, is about fixing and adapting aspects that occur throughout the structure of your story, but isn't as comprehensive as revisions. 

So, where revisions will often require you to change the entire look or feel of your story, structural editing is more strengthening your story. 

The first thing I'm looking to strengthen is plot. The reason why I do this is that a story's plot acts as its spine, or even its foundation. If plot isn't sorted out, you can do what you want with the rest of your story. It will keep falling flat no matter what you do. 

Just to make sure we're on the same page, though, I'm going to send you to read about Plot, Structure and How It All Fits Together. (Part 2, Section 43.) Go ahead and read it. I'll wait. 

To sum up, plot can be seen in two ways: 

1) Intro, Inciting Incident, Goal, Conflict, Stakes, Choice. 

2) Beginning, Middle, End. The most common form of this plot is the three-act structure. Basically, this is where you determine what shape your plot takes. Do you give your story a rising action where the climax is the highest point before the end comes? Or does your story seem to go down-down-down until your character learns something important needed to claw his/her way back? The possibilities are pretty much endless, but during editing, it becomes necessary to know what you want. 

Why? 

Because in this round of edits, you're working to clarify your plot's structure. Doing this, you will weigh every scene up against how well it drives the plot. Rule of thumb is that you do this with every scene. Even from your sub-plots. 

Sub-plots are there to support the main plot, just as much as the main plot acts as the story's spine.

All this seems a bit foggy, so let me just get into an example so you guys can see what I do to edit plot. Which means that we're back at MENEC. 

From last time, I've already revised the plot in order to make MENEC fit snugly into the epic fantasy genre. But this is basically the goal/conflict/stakes plot summary: 

Character Intro: Liz is just an average girl living with her grandmother. Sam is a warrior searching for the chosen one to defeat the king.

Inciting incident: Sam finds Liz and tells her about the prophecy. Around then, the king's evil zombies attack and kill Liz's grandmother. 

Goal: Liz decides to kill the king in revenge.

Conflict: Liz and Sam disagree a lot. The king keeps sending zombies, vampires etc. to kill them.

Stakes: Liz will feel like a total failure if she doesn't kill the king. Also, he'll kill her. And if he kills her, the country will go through a thousand years of doom. 

This has all the ingredients for awesome sauce, but for some reason, it just feels like something keeps falling flat as I (and my twenty (I'm mostly not kidding) critique partners) read. 

What to do?!

You go hunting weaknesses. 

We ask ourselves the following questions, and then we try to answer them from both beginning, middle, end (henceforth called BME) AND goal/conflict/stakes (GCS) points of view: 

Does the plot lack focus? Often, it feels like there is no clear BME structure because there's so much plot going on that the reader just can't get a sense of what's driving the story.