Who Wants to Get Better?

Plot Problems: Too Many Points in a Line

I recently have had problems writing a chapter my story. The thing was that I was setting up so many plot points that I wanted to pay off before they could become irrelevant. It was an action oriented chapter, so I couldn't spend much time with explaining things otherwise it would ruin the whole thing. The chapter was becoming so convoluted that I needed to restart the darn thing and actually add a little bit of information to a previous chapter to have the whole thing make more sense and go in a direction that I wanted it to go. After a week of painful tweaking, the chapter finally resolved everything it needed to... Sort of. This just brings me to this chapter's topic of crashing plot points.

It can become very rewarding to set something up earlier in a story and bring it back later. It gives the whole story the awesome benefit of feeling like the world is a world where things outside of the plot matter. This storytelling principle is known as Chekov's Gun, where if a gun is placed in a scene in the second act, it must be fired by the third. This is a very common practice, but not something I myself keep track of in my own narratives too much. If the gun is never fired, then the audience's expectations will be unfulfilled and the experience will suffer, kind of like hearing someone start the alphabet song and never finish it.

By the time I was beginning to finish the actual story, I had managed to have every little thing make sense to myself. I'm not sure how well I communicated the conclusion of these plotlines and character moments to readers, but the fact still stands that I tried to have as many little things resurface for maximum feels(for lack of a better word). I tried to give everyone their time in the spotlight during the climax, and for the most part, I had little problems writing that chapter.

It was an earlier one that really bit me because I tried to logic out most of the decisions and interactions. The problem was that I also wanted some stuff to happen that seemed very stupid and out of place if I wrote it without thinking. There's a plotpoint involving an antagonist and two bottles that they're carrying with them. Bottle 1 is filled with poison, and bottle 2 has harmless colored water. The antagonist thought that bottle 1 was antivenom and bottle 2 was the poison. I desperately wanted to have him use the "antivenom" and get paralyzed, but then I thought that he would have been way too easy to defeat. I decided to have him pass it onto another character, but if that important character was paralyzed, he wouldn't be able to do anything for the rest of the encounter. I needed him to be a little mobile, so I had him only drink half of it and went back to a previous scene that explained the bottle and added something to convince the antagonist that bottle 1 was still good. As for bottle 2, I ended up having it used much later because there was very little time to use it in this part of the story. Overall, that particular portion of the story was very difficult to wrap my head around in explaining how things work.

I know some people can just write and let the story flow on its own. They're good at it, and they consistently have fun with their work. It translates into a good story. However, I'm not like that. When it comes to stories, I think I'm addicted to those moments where everything clicks together. If you've ever stomached the Saw movie franchise, you'd see a lot of those. It's just too enticing to plan ten steps ahead for the sake of your story's themes. I love climaxes and the grand emotions and energy that they can bring, but that means I try to get the most out of those rather than the story itself. No other person is going to see the story quite like I do, so I'm really punching myself in the gut by leveraging all of my efforts on such a small amount of words.

I'm not telling anyone to try and write a story without plotting or to plan out every little thing like I do. This is supposed to be fun, so whatever you choose is supposed to be just for you. If you want to chronicle your Dungeons & Dragons campaign in all its random chances, go for it. If you want to pin all of your characters on a dartboard to see who's getting killed next in your horror thriller, that's fine. Actually, that sounds awesome. If you want to write down the story before you start writing the story, you're probably me.