What is plotting?
Plotting is a technique that some people use to help write their stories. This is where someone will sit down before they write and come up with an outline of what their story will be, giving them the chance to look at the structure of their stories beforehand, or to give them a roadmap of what’s to come so that they do not get stuck.
If this sounds interesting to you, let’s get into some methodologies that people can turn to, from the most structured to the least.
Save the Cat or Romancing the Beat
If you really like structure, be sure to look up Save the Cat or Romancing the Beat, depending on what kind of story you want to write! These two methods will help you break your story down into arcs, sub-arcs, and in some iterations of them even down to what plot points need to happen on a chapter by chapter basis.
Hero’s Journey
This is a basic story arc for your character that can follow. This works best in stories in which you have a single focal character who is going through a change and has to learn and grow. It will help to give you a structure to how to format the narrative and when to put which obstacles, as well as when to lend your character a hand.
Once you have that worked out, then you can break it up into chapters if that’s what works for you.
Timeline
A timeline plotting structure is a lot of fun for more complicated stories, often with many different things that have to be kept track of, such as a mystery or a thriller, or with multiple characters with overlapping and imperfect knowledge of events. This involves using something such as a spreadsheet or a calendar app and putting all of the events of your plot into it, moving those events around until they all make sense, then breaking up each plot point into a different chapter.
Snowflake method
This method starts with an idea that you can branch off from! One idea leads into the next and into the next in a giant mind map until, in the end, you have a story idea that looks a bit like a snowflake that you can then work into a plot. Often this is a method used as a starting point and the story you come up with becomes a plot structured in a different way, though I’ve known a few people who have used this as a means to figure out their entire series.
Index cards
This is one of my personal favourites and one with the absolute lease structure to it. Take every one of the ideas you have and put them all on different index cards. Things you want to have happen in the story, characters, everything. Once you have all the ideas down, start to rearrange all of those cards until it turns into something like a plot, adding and removing ideas as you go, storing some of them for later.
What is your favourite method of plotting? Or do you plot at all?
