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BUILDING YOUR PLOT ONE PROBLEM AT A TIME

You can build a plot by using the principles of cause and effect. Things don't happen in isolation; every decision you make and everything you do has consequences. In real life, most of those consequences are minimal and easily overlooked, but they're there. And sometimes they're not minimal at all.

Your kid's soccer uniform is dirty and he needs it for practice tonight, so you stop on your way out the door to throw in a load of laundry, which makes you five minutes late to work. You aren't there yet when the phone rings, so your boss answers it instead and he finds out you've applied for another job, so when you come in he starts to yell at you for arranging a job interview on company time, so you yell back and quit. ...

One event leads to another, which leads to another. Every event in your plot should be both an effect of what came before and a cause of (or at least an influence on) what will come next. Thinking about cause and effect can help you create a plot that builds, rather than a series of unrelated events.

Using What if? to Enrich Your Problems

Once you have your main character's first basic problem in mind, you can use What if? to begin building events and consequences: What if the heroine is out of a job and she's evicted from her apartment? What if her preoccupation with her job loss makes her careless, and she causes a fire that forces her to move? What if it's a college town with the school year just starting, so apartments are in short supply? What if she loses control of her car and totals it? What if somebody assumes she wrecked the car on purpose, despondent over the job? What if she has no insurance?

Let your mind roam freely as you brainstorm. At this point, don't worry if you create contradictory scenarios. (You probably wouldn't want to use both the eviction and the car accident, because you're writing about a heroine, not about Poor Pitiful Pearl tied to the railroad tracks.) Later, you can choose which lines of thought work best, which ones fit together, and which ones rule out other possibilities.

What if? allows you to start with the nugget of an idea and develop it into the future. This technique works well throughout the writing process. Look at the problem as it currently appears and ask What if?

Backward Plotting

Backward plotting is almost the opposite of the What if? technique described above: You start with the situation or scenario you want to create, then figure out what you need to have in place beforehand to make that scenario logical, believable, and inevitable. Backward plotting can work on any specific plot point—especially one that the readers may find hard to swallow.

One of my favorite examples of the value of backward plotting is a story in which one of the main characters is eventually revealed to be the long-lost grandson of another major character. To reveal that relationship out of the blue stretches the readers' credulity. But if two supporting points are established beforehand—that there's a mystery about the family, and that the grandson is investigating and searching for something—the revelation, while still surprising, is emotionally satisfying rather than confusing. Of course, you can't be obvious about those things, or you won't have much suspense.

Using What if? and Backward Plotting Together

By using the two plotting techniques—What if? and backward plotting—in tandem, you can easily create a believable scenario: What if instead of having your hero openly admit that he's searching for his roots, you give him another very good reason for curiosity about this mysterious family? And what if he has some possessions that indicate there's something not quite on the up-and-up about him? But what kinds of possessions could he have that would offer clues and help him search, without giving him an easy answer? Backward plotting can help you figure out not only what items he has but how they came into his possession and what they mean.

By using the two techniques