I was asked on Instagram last week how I go about structuring my stories, whether there’s a set way I like to do it, or if it’s different for every story, or what. I promised an answer last week, and that didn’t happen, but hey! It is this week and now I can answer! 😀
The truth of the matter is, I feel very self-conscious about plot structure. It’s the area of writing I’m least comfortable with, and so my attempts either end up with me just writing and ignoring structure entirely (A Fox Of Storms And Starlight), or else plotting everything else in meticulous detail, usually with the help of Liana Brooks (How Not To Acquire A Castle, as evidenced in our epic plotting video).
And then there is everything else, which tends to fall in the middle. Honestly, it depends on the book, and the mood, and how much of a concrete, specific handle I need on the story before going in.
Because that varies widely, too. When Worlds Collide, the final book in the Sanctuary trilogy that won Best Children’s Book 2019 in my state? You’re reading the first draft, prettied up with some proofreading for typos. The first book in the series, on the other hand? That’s the …eighth, I think, draft? And again, everything else falls somewhere in the middle, though generally speaking I plan my novels more than my short stories, and things that feel “fast paced” more than things that luxuriate more in the prose. Though even that’s not entirely true. And it overlaps with the length tendencies.
SO. Rather than continuing to ramble about my actual processes (variable), I thought I’d share with you a range of resources that you might find useful (if you’re a writer) or simply interesting (if you’re not, or even if you are I guess).
1. Liana Brooks’ Outlining Sheet
Liana, who you probably know is my writer-buddy and co-conspirator with regards to Inkprint Press, is excellent at plot. She does developmental edits for a really reasonable rate, and is absolutely stellar at what she does. So it’s without shame that I recommend first up her outline sheet, which is a take on the Lester Dent Plot Formula (google it).
2. Beat Sheets.
For when a general outline with key touch points isn’t detailed enough, there are beat sheets. The best ones I’ve found came from Jami Gold, and you can download them here. I’ve also converted them to word docs with scenes numbered for a 40-scene/chapter book and a 20 scene-chapter book, and you can grab those here (word docx download).
3. MICE Structure.
I posted this video on Friday, but Mary Robinette Kowal’s MICE theory has been hands down THE most useful plotting resource I’ve encountered for me personally. I’ll elaborate on this a little more below, where I’ll talk specifically about a project I’m working on right now.
4. Brandon Sanderson’s Plot Lectures.
I listened to these nearly a year ago, then relistened recently and was interested to discover I’d done something similar with Moon Shot, the project I’m currently plotting. Definitely worth a listen. It’s a little more general in scope than the preceding resources, but very necessary for a sound understanding of what your plot should be DOING.
You can also check out the posts I wrote on plot structure years ago, starting here.
Okay, now to the specifics. On Tuesday, I posted the following to Instagram, which is what precipitated the question that resulted in this post:
This is me working on Moon Shot, and it’s the first time I really used the MICE process on a longer work very deliberately, and I LOVED IT.
So I thought I’d quickly delineate for you here exactly what I did. (ETA: Quickly, ha.)
- Worldbuilding. I had a giant conversation with Liana about the worldbuilding for the world, and how the main sci fi element works. She took notes and emailed them to me.
- Brain Dump. I did a stream-of-consciousness dump into my notes just rambling through things roughly sequentially, and stopping to research the sciencey stuff I needed.
- List Of Questions. From this, I listed out on my small whiteboard (A4-ish size) all the questions that would be asked and answered in this book. Will they escape? Why can’t they go to Earth? Who are the kidnappers? Etc.
- MICE. I then colour-coded each question according to it’s MICE category: milieu, inquiry, character, event. If that doesn’t make sense, go watch Kowal’s video first (resource 3 above).
- General Plotting. I broke out the bigger whiteboard (A2 size?), separated it roughly into quarters across the ‘page’, and added every question to the board. Some questions are asked right at the start of the story, so that’s where their coloured line started, then I estimated roughly when the question would be answered in-plot, and ended their coloured line there. This was hands-down the most useful part of plotting, because it let me see a bunch of things in macro: I’d overloaded the third quarter with too many answers, and there wasn’t enough in the second quarter. Certain questions COULDN’T be asked until other ones were answered, and if I left the answering too late, the next arc would be too squished before the end of the book. And so forth. So I played around, adjusting arcs until I got a fairly even spread of questions and answers across the book, with little clusters at the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 marks. I also looked to make sure that I had enough strong questions asked in the beginning that weren’t answered until the very end.
- Specific Plotting. For each arc, I now knew WHEN in the book it had to be. So I grabbed three A3 pages, taped them together in a long line, divided the page into 25 columns (see point 8 for why), and wrote headings with the basic beats of a story. Call to action, midpoint, final puzzle piece, act 2 antagonist, and so forth. See resource 2 above. Then I took my MICE arcs and started filling things in: this scene needs to answer this question and raise the next one. This scene needs to answer this question. That sort of thing. Not the specifics of what the characters are doing, but the underlying bones of what the SCENE needs to be doing.
- Conflict! Once the beginnings and ends of each MICE arc were in place, I referred back to the MICE principle to figure out what kinds of conflict I needed to add. For example, one of the opening MICE arcs is a milieu question: How did the kids escape? Knowing that this is a milieu, I know I need to add points throughout the story where they run into dead ends in their attempts to escape, all the way until they actually make it out. Another MICE arc revolves around a mystery, so I knew I needed to throw red herrings and misleading information in there to influence the decisions the characters are making. I used different coloured highlighter to mark the main long-running arcs to make sure I was sprinkling them evenly throughout the book, and not accidentally ignoring one for too long.
- Point Of View. I now had a really good idea of what was happening in each scene, so on to POV. Most books wouldn’t need this step necessarily, but part of the POINT of this book is that it has POV scenes from all 25 of my Year 8 students from a couple of years ago (you have not LIVED until you’ve tried this, oy, my head). AND on top of that, every character has one of eight different superpowers. So I wrote out all the character names on sticky notes, colour coded according to superpower. Then I played around. Which superpower would be useful in this scene? Which would lend an interesting lens to the events? Post-its meant I could test things and swap them around easily, until I got an order I was happy with, with the superpowers kind of evenly sprinkled throughout the book (as much as possible; they’re based on Myer-Briggs personality type, which, yes, most of the students were kind enough to do the test for me so I could allocate their powers accurately, HA, but it means some superpowers are more common than others).
- Text Type. One of the only ways I could think of making this book hang together cohesively was to tell it via epistolary, which means including a bunch of other text types as well as narration (or instead of). So there are story bits, but also emails, letters, maps, interviews, transcripts and more. So once I had everything else in place, I figured out which scenes were going to be which text types so that again, there was a balance of them throughout.
PHEW. What a process. Still, overall it only took me about three hours, and it was SUPER FUN AND SATISFYING to do. I’ll DEFINITELY be doing at least steps 1 – 7 for a couple of future books, because it was just a really inherently enjoyable process for me, and makes me confident going into the book that the scenes will do what they need to do.
Here’s a sneaky peek at what some of the final outline looks like… 😀
