Stitch a Plot Together

I'd like to focus today on a macro aspect of writing as opposed to a micro aspect. My writing professor said once that it's important to deal equally with both the micro side of writing -- word choice, good writing, syntax, sentence structure -- and the micro side of writing, which is the story as a whole, overarching story structure and the like. A lot of beginning writers who write very beautifully struggle terribly with plotting, so it's a good idea to get some practice in that area.

A good way to practice plotting is to imagine stitching the disparate elements of your story together into one garment. An exercise I've done is to make a list of five different kinds of people on scraps of paper (a taxi driver, an investment banker, etc.), then five different settings (a shopping mall, a doctor's office), then five different random problems (__has just won the lottery, __knows his/her spouse is cheating). I randomly pull one scrap of paper from each of these categories. That leaves me with an interesting problem of three very different elements. Say I've gotten stuck with an acrobat in a shopping mall who has just won the lottery. Now it's my job to stitch these pieces together into a story that makes sense.

After the jump: sewing the pieces together as seamlessly as possible.

I begin by asking myself the question of why. Why is the acrobat in the shopping mall at that particular time? It cannot be something arbitrary, like he's just getting some socks, because the story is centered around this place and time; something significant has to be occurring. Perhaps the acrobat is taking a stroll through a very richy-rich mall in order to enjoy looking at the things he is now able to buy, now that he has won the lottery. Maybe he is here to buy a fabulous gift for his wife in order to celebrate. Or maybe he is morose at the way his life has changed and needs to disappear in the safe anonymity of a crowd.

The next thing I've got to do is develop this idea a little more, and that means bringing in the fact that this guy is an acrobat. What is it like to be an acrobat? How did he get into this interesting profession anyway? Is he good or bad at it? Does he love doing it? What does it mean to him? Does he have some deep-seated need to fly or to break free from his life? This is important development that stitches the character closely to the plot.

Finally, I've got to stitch some sort of coherent climax to these elements. What happens in the shopping mall that causes a clash, a dramatic change to occur in the acrobat's life? Does he learn anything? Does he make a new choice? Does he change or realize that he can't change? These are the kind of questions that make a story happen, but they need to be tied to your work with character and place.

Think of this exercise as a way of planning out your story in the large sense. Pretend someone is asking you what happened in the movie you saw last night that you really liked. You've got to summarize the plot and the character in a way that points out why you liked it so much. That's the challenge for this exercise: you've got to put the pieces together in a way that makes sense, and you can worry about fleshing it out later. Try doing this exercise several times, with many different element pairings, and you'll find yourself developing a plotting instinct for putting a story together.