The Plot Thickens!

Last month I spent a whirlwind weekend at the annual conference of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), which was also a celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the chapter.   

One of the sessions I attended was on plot.

I hate sessions on plot. I hate them because I’m terrible at plotting. I consider myself to be pretty darned terrific at characterization. In my humble opinion, I excel at theme: what a story is “about.” Plot is my weakness, my bugaboo, my Achilles heel.  So, wouldn’t I want to learn how to strengthen this crucial element of story?

No.

Lessons about plot only make me feel bad about myself as a writer, and it’s so easy to feel bad about ourselves as writers already. I get defensive, stubbornly insisting that when it comes to plotting, many writers just slavishly follow a formula (the favorite one is laid out in a famous book on plotting for screenplay writers called Save the Cat.) I am not a formulaic writer! I am a creative writer!

The only reason I attended this session on plot was that the presenter was a good friend. She talked engagingly about all the things I loathe hearing about: raising the stakes for your character, giving your character seemingly impossible hurdles to surmount, making sure that decisions by your character are what drive the story, etc. etc. etc.

As predicted, I left the session feeling bad about myself as a writer.

I felt especially bad about my current work-in-progress (tentatively titled The Angel Tree). Every single thing I was doing in this book was WRONG! This, from my journal entry for the day: “I have to say that I feel more and more that I should just abandon The Angel Tree. It is not what I should be working on now – or ever.”

But back home after the conference, I started to think about actually doing some of those irritating things plot gurus keep telling authors to do. I realized, to my shame, that while my main character, Linnet, does play an active role in pursuing her goal of trying to save the angel tree, her efforts here play no role in helping her achieve the object of her deepest longing: not moving away from the town she loves. How could I connect the two? In a way that would present escalating obstacles for her? And okay, maybe raise the stakes a bit, too.

I scribbled idea after idea… pages full of ideas… How can decisions made by Linnet DRIVE THE STORY? How can I make the obstacles Linnet faces get BIGGER AND BIGGER? How CAN the stakes for her be raised?

I became wild to start revising, finally writing in my voluminous notes for the book, “I am LOVING all these revision plans!”

 I’m still going to be wary of rigid, mechanical plot formulas. I’m still going to thumb my nose at obeying every dictatorial rule of story structure. But hey, sometimes age-old advice is age-old just because it’s excellent. Maybe it’s not a bad idea once in a while to follow it?