More On Plotting

by Jane Toombs

1. All plots need complications.

2. Every complication must make the heroine's and/or hero's situation darker.

3. Every complication must arise from what has already happened or is happening--a direct result of the characters' present or past actions.

4. Avoid coincidences.

5. The final complication must be the worst, not easy to solve.

6. Your heroine and/or hero must win the final battle.

7. End the story with a clever and, if possible, unpredictable solution.

To Maximize Emotion in Plotting

1. Grab the reader immediately.

2. Show right away where the story is going.

3. Build the conflict.

4. Speed up the pace as the plot advances.

5. Provide peaks and valleys to action and emotion.

6. Giving the reader information the heroine and/or hero doesn't have can work well.

7. Try to surprise the reader.

8. Create curiosity.

9. Foreshadow the major events without being too obvious.

10. Echo certain events, objects or dialogue to show characters' growth and change.

11. Put a character in jeopardy.

12. Keep the story credible.

13. Teach the readers something without boring them.

14. If possible, leaven stories with humor without foregoing seriousness.

In all genres of romances, no matter what problem the hero and/or heroine are faced with, their relationship is of as much concern and as important a plot element as the "other" problem--perhaps more so. All steps of the relationship must be set before the reader as the plot develops.

From the first meeting, through the subsequent ups and downs of the man and woman getting to know one another, the reader must be kept involved in how the relationship is progressing and must be shown why it's developing in a particular way.

Keep in mind that a relationship is composed of far more than physical intimacy, important as that is. Remember that sex alone is not enough for a true love relationship.

The relationship problem must be solved along with whatever other elements contribute to the plot, and solved in a way the reader can identify with and believe.

The plot elements above should be applied to the romance as well as to the rest of the plot.

According to James Gunn, conflict is a matter of intelligence and will pitted against obstacles. The problem must be one to make your characters' suffer, to drive them to act, to try their utmost to resolve that problem.

A plot shows all the necessary steps of the character(s) working their main problems out to a conclusion. Plots begin with a:

Situation: Character(s) are confronted with a problem.

Complication: The problem forces the character(s) to take some kind of action--which may or may not make the problem worse.

Climax: The character(s) must solve the problem or be crushed by it.

Resolution: The problem unwinds, the character(s) succeed or fail.

Anticlimax: The tag ends are tidied up.

Why Editors Reject Plots

1. Weak, too-obvious or old-fashioned ideas.

2. Lack of conflict.

3. Is not convincing.

4. Does not resolve.

5. Lectures.

6. Overwritten (purple prose), awkward, wrong word choices.

7. Opaque, murky and lacking focus.

8. Futility (another way of saying the story is depressing and/or doesn't end happily or even satisfactorily).

The master plotter Mark Twain wrote:

1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.

2. The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale and shall help to develop it.

3. The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses and always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

4. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.

5. When the personages in a tale deal in conversation, the talk should sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.

6. The character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and the conversation of that personage shall justify his description.

7. When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a Negro minstrel in the end of it.

8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the tale.

9. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.

10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.

11. The characters in a tale must be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

12. The author shall say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.

13. The author shall use the right word, not its second cousin.

14. The author shall eschew surplusage.

15. The author shall not omit necessary details.

16. The author shall avoid slovinliness of form.

17. The author shall use good grammar.

18. The author shall employ a simple, straightforward style.

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