Plot – Make It Resonate With YOU

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, if you read my post from last week “Digging for Characters,” well… second verse, same as the first.

When it comes to plot – whether coming up with the first draft, or going through it in revision – it needs to resonate with me, with my values and my interests. Shonna and I were recently talking about the romance novel I’m writing and I said I just can’t write about people who seem to hate each other in the beginning and then wind up madly in love at the end. It doesn’t ring true with my experiences, and it doesn’t echo what I would like to see in a fantasy about people falling in love. I could write it, but I wouldn’t want to write that kind of plot because I wouldn’t enjoy it.

As I mentioned last week, I love stories full of sacrifice and grand gestures and redemption from something awful. It can be on a large or small scale – I appreciate my husband telling me to pick the movie next weekend as much as I appreciate him telling me I get to choose our new apartment when we move. What I love is when someone does something for someone else because they love the person and care about their opinions.

This is important to me when coming up with a new plot. When I take someone’s advice for where my new plot should go just because they’ve been in the business longer and have a good business sense about these things, I tend to make a mess of the story. The pieces of the story are no longer from my heart, but are simply ideas that sell well. If it doesn’t come from my heart, how will it touch a reader’s heart?

When it comes to finding a “routine” for coming up with characters or plot, or revising them to make them ring true, I have to think about whether the plot points and plot twists resonate within me. If they don’t, no matter how “ripped from the headlines” they may be, I know I can’t make my writing resonate with the reader.

For instance, I have a book I’m still revising that has an evil villain doing genetic experiments on children. He also happens to be the biological father of the protagonist, unbeknownst to her at the beginning. He is evil, and it makes sense to get into the science and the experiments and the results. But I’m more of a relational person, so I wanted to know how he became who he is now, and does he have any regrets, and how does he feel about his children that he walked away from when they were toddlers, and how can he do genetic research on children knowing some of them die horrible deaths as a result. Even though I know intellectually that more of a hard science, investigative approach sells well, it doesn’t do a thing for me.

But when I started thinking about my own father, why he left, things he did, what regrets he might’ve had, the soft qualities he still had deep down as well as the harder qualities that were easier to see – well, my brain just starting going and going! Suddenly my villain, while still truly evil, had human qualities that anyone could understand.

If I were going to give you advice about how to write or revise your plot, I would say the most important part is finding something that fascinates you and makes your heart beat a little faster. Then go for it!