How to build a complex plot based on a simple message (Part 6)

Part 6: Choose your conflict. Again. (Turning Point Two)

After Turning Point One passes, you arrive at the middle of your story where you can do a little more work on developing your characters and their relationships with each other. This is where Confused Robin Hood will struggle to maintain the façade that he’s accepted, the façade of a hero.

Much of the Middle of the Story (also called the Second Act in the Three Act Structure) can be created after you have finished plotting the overall story. But in the beginning stages of your planning process, the middle shouldn’t take up much room, except for you to lay out the basics that occur.

The part to focus on right now is Turning Point Two, which marks the end of Act Two.

Turning Point Two has to be bigger and more captivating than Turning Point One. You have to up the ante even more. Your stakes have to jump from just a personal level (the relationship between Confused Robin Hood and Unlikely Maid Marian) to a public level. The conflicts that begin on a smaller scale have to jump up to a larger scale, making it even more necessary that the whole problem be brought to a resolution . . . hopefully, a happy ending.

So where do we go from here? Let’s refresh where here is:

Message: Stealing is wrong.
Direction: External.
Genre: Steampunk.
Character: Confused Robin Hood.
Conflict – Turning Point One: Confused Robin Hood chooses to accept the accolades of his people even though he neither wants nor deserves them in order to preserve his relationship with his Beloved Uncle and Unlikely Maid Marian.

How do we punch up the possible problems in this plot? (yay for alliteration!)

At this point, I like to start incorporating details about the setting. The history of the world. The people in the world. The cultures of the world. Remember, this is a Steampunk book, so you can have all sorts of fun rearranging history to suit your needs.

However, you don’t always have to make up something new about your world. Look back over the resources you’ve already created to see if there’s some aspect of your story you can reuse and deepen.

For example, let’s talk about what Confused Robin Hood stole. What did he steal from Unlikely Maid Marian’s house?

A blanket? A toy? A can of preserved beets? Anything will work. But can you make it something that will advance your story and deepen your plot? Absolutely.

What if Unlikely Maid Marian is a nanny for an eccentric gentleman who invents things? What if the object that Confused Robin Hood stole was an invention that has the ability to change the world? What if this invention has the potential to bestow ultimate power on whoever unlocks it? Whoever figures out this invention could rule the world.

Let’s say that Confused Robin Hood stole this invention—we’ll call it the Golden Arrow—from the eccentric Professor Nottingham. Confused Robin Hood didn’t care what it was and brought it back because that is what he does. Of course, he got caught returning it and is now regarded as a hero. Both his Beloved Uncle and Unlikely Maid Marian think he’s wonderful.

So what would happen if someone else knew about the Golden Arrow? What about someone who already suspected what Confused Robin Hood was up to? If we create another Supporting Character, one who already suspected Confused Robin Hood was up to no good, one who already understood the power the Golden Arrow could bestow, and one who wanted it for himself so that he could rule the world, what would that character look like? What would that character do to replace Confused Robin Hood as the hero? What lengths would that character travel to come out on top?

That character would be a villain.

Even if your protagonist is something of an antihero, you still need a villain to balance out the story. You still need an antagonist to push the plot forward. Your villain is just as important as your hero. He needs the same amount of back story. He needs the same (if not more) amount of development. And he can’t just be evil. He has to have a motivation behind all of his choices. The really awesome bad guys aren’t evil. They’re just regular folks who had to make a choice.

So, just for continuity’s sake, I’m going to name our villain Sheriff.

And just to keep things moving in the romantic sense, I’m going to say that Confused Robin Hood, Unlikely Maid Marian, and the Sheriff all grew up together as good friends. And I’m going to say that Sheriff was always a just little kid who didn’t believe in mercy but because of the culture he was okay with stealing . . . just not when someone stole from him.

And let’s say he grew up to be a fairly influential business person in their area and is pursuing Unlikely Maid Marian, one, because she’s hot; and two, because he wants to make an inroad with Professor Nottingham. Why? Because Professor Nottingham knows the secret to the Golden Arrow and with it he can rule the world and keep law and order everywhere.

Let’s say that, as a lawman, Sheriff already suspected Confused Robin Hood of stealing and returning things. He just couldn’t ever pin it on him. Until the Golden Arrow incident. But let’s say that the Sheriff now believes that Confused Robin Hood holds the power to controlling the entire world because he thinks he unlocked the secret of the Golden Arrow.

So what would he do?

Well, one, he’s going to want to get the Golden Arrow.

Two, he’s going to want to get the secret from Confused Robin Hood.

Three, he’s going to want to use them both to obtain his goal.

He’ll make a plan, and he’ll start implementing it. But unless you’ve chosen to write your story from an Omniscient Third Person Point of View (we’ll talk about that later in the section on points of view), your reader isn’t going to know that. All your reader is going to know is that Sheriff starts appearing and things start going wrong.

So you’ll need to know how your main character is going to react to the unseen plans that the antagonist is implementing.

In our case, let’s say that Sheriff sneaks into Professor Nottingham’s house and kills him to obtain the Golden Arrow. As the hero of the area, Confused Robin Hood is asked to weigh in on the subject, and he tries to sound like he knows what he’s talking about for Unlikely Maid Marian’s sake.

In the mean time, some people can start becoming suspicious because this is the second time someone broke into the Professor’s house. And their first person of suspicion will be Confused Robin Hood because fame is fickle.

So as Confused Robin Hood and Sheriff try to catch the person who killed the Professor, more and more evidence starts pointing to Confused Robin Hood – because Sheriff keeps planting it. And Confused Robin Hood gets more and more nervous because he can’t defend himself because he did break into the Professor’s house.

After however many pieces of evidence point to Confused Robin Hood, the whole city is in such an uproar that he has to be put in jail to protect him. Meanwhile, Unlikely Maid Marian never doubts him, and he feels more and more like a heel. A judge gives him a lie detector test, and when they ask him if he broke into the Professor’s house to steal the Golden Arrow – he must answer yes.

That is Turning Point Two. Where the whole world gangs up against your main character. And his choice will either take him closer to his goal or cause him to fall farther away from it.

Part 7 will deal with the dreaded, overwhelming doom of the Point of No Return!

Two submissions out the door!

I got two submissions out the door yesterday, a 2,000-word humorous short (“Drifting)) to American Short Fiction and a 4,600-word fantasy (“The One without a Book”) to an odd-sounding place called Barbaric Yawp Literary Magazine.

Now comes the fun part: waiting!

=)

How to build a complex plot based on a simple message (Part 5)

Part 5: Choose your conflict (Turning Point One)

Conflict is one of the fun parts of plotting because you get to exercise your “what if” muscles. You get to ask yourself what happens if such-and-such happens. Well, before you can find out what if, you have to decide on such-and-such.

Such-and-Such can be natural disasters. It can be political upheavals. It can be the zombie apocalypse or December 21, 2012. It can be alien invasion. Or it could be discovering that the person you’re marrying is already married and has locked his crazy wife in an upstairs room in his old creepy mansion. It can be anything. Anything at all. But it’s a good idea to keep the “anything at all” limited to something that can realistically happen in your genre and your world.

Let’s review what we’ve put together so far:

Message: Stealing is wrong.
Direction: External.
Genre: Steampunk.
Character: Confused Robin Hood.

We haven’t gotten to the world building stage yet, but by this time you know enough about what you’re writing to know if an alien invasion is going to suspend disbelief too much. This is a steampunk book about stealing. If it were going to include aliens, that should probably be brought up much sooner in your planning stages.

For our purposes and for Confused Robin Hood, our protagonist, we’d better keep the conflict to a relatively normal level. No aliens involved.

Confused Robin Hood, our well-to-do bored rich kid, gets his kicks by stealing from the poor only to return the pilfered goods under the cloak of darkness the next day.

Well . . . what would happen if Confused Robin Hood got caught stealing? That would be bad. There could be all sorts of consequences. Disowning. Jail time. Lots of troubles. . . . But to me that’s clichéd. Of course thieves always get caught stealing. And there’s nothing worse than a predictable story.

So, what would happen if Confused Robin Hood gets caught—not stealing . . . but returning?

Let’s say that he returns some item to a poor family, and they catch him in the act. And he has to make up some crazy story about how he found it and brought it back to them. And then—he is regarded as a hero! The whole town decides they were wrong about him and elevate him to the level of a champion. After all, in the world they live in, it’s unusual for the Governor’s son to care about the common people. He can be celebrated. Given parades. Maybe they name streets after him.

What would our poor Confused Robin Hood do?

Remember, this isn’t what he wanted. We already identified his wants, and this is the opposite of what he wanted. He wanted to be normal. He wanted anonymity. So being paraded around in the spotlight as a conquering hero is the last thing that’s going to make him happy. And that will wear on his moral conscience too. That he is accepting praise and adulation for something he never meant to bring him fame—for something he caused in the first place.

When you reach this point of the story, you have reached a turning point. Some people call them plot points. In either case, it is the place in the story where your main character has a choice to make. And that choice will determine the direction of the rest of the story.

In our case, Confused Robin Hood has two options: He can come clean or he can allow the lie to continue.

Here is where your back story will come in handy. Your back story will define who your main character is. It will help you understand the decisions he will make.

Yes, Confused Robin Hood has always wanted to be normal. But what if he has an ailing uncle who means the world to him, who has always held him to a high standard, who he wants to please. And what if discovering that his favorite nephew is a thief would kill this Beloved Uncle? Normalcy may be what Confused Robin Hood wants . . . but does he want it badly enough to sacrifice his Beloved Uncle’s expectations? We’re going to say no. So Confused Robin Hood will allow the lie to continue to protect Beloved Uncle from disappointment.

Turning Point One is traditionally the end of Act 1 (in the Three Act Structure). So in our story, Turning Point One is that Confused Robin Hood will accept the undeserved praise and adulation of his people for returning an object he stole from a poor family.

Now, that sounds pretty intriguing. But let’s be honest. That’s still pretty bland. At the moment, we have only Beloved Uncle’s expectations and Confused Robin Hood’s fate hanging in the balance.

If you want to really hook your readers, you have to up the ante. You have to raise the stakes. You have to make it so that your protagonist has a really moving reason why he has to make the decision he made.

This might be a copout, but it’s the only thing that’s coming to mind. And nothing can play with a guy’s head like a girl. So let’s make it a romantic issue.

Let’s say that Confused Robin Hood has an Unlikely Maid Marian. We can say that they grew up together as kids, and she was the only person who ever treated him like he was a normal person in spite of his wealth.

So let’s say that the house where Unlikely Maid Marian lives is the family that Confused Robin Hood stole the object from and then got caught returning it. By doing this, his reputation with Unlikely Maid Marian is also on the line. He will want her to think that he’s a good person because her opinion will matter to him.

Unlikely Maid Marian, as well as Beloved Uncle, will fall into the category of Supporting Characters, which we can deal with later on after your basic plot is established. Supporting Characters are also essential to a well-plotted story and to a fully rounded main character. But we’ll get there after the first round of plotting is finished.

So . . . where are we?

Message: Stealing is wrong.
Direction: External.
Genre: Steampunk.
Character: Confused Robin Hood.
Conflict – Turning Point One: Confused Robin Hood chooses to accept the accolades of his people even though he neither wants nor deserves them in order to preserve his relationship with his Beloved Uncle and Unlikely Maid Marian.

Part 6 will deal with choosing the next level of conflict in your story, which will lead you to Turning Point Two.

How to build a complex plot based on a simple message (Part 4)

Part 4: Choose a character

Character and plot are two ends of a Chinese finger trap. You can’t write without either, and both of them refuse to let you go once they have you.

Character is important enough that you can actually plan a novel around a character instead of a message. Yes, you still need to have a message, but you don’t have to start with a message. You can start with a character. But since this series is about plotting a story based on message, this is the order we’re going in. (Please remember that this is how my brain works, and it probably breaks every rule in the book.)

So how do you come up with a character? Where do they come from?

Well, you can start with archetypes. Archetypes are fun (check out 45 Master Characters by Victoria Schmidt) and a good baseline if you want to build characters. I also like to draw characters from real life.

However, what I like to do personally is to start with a VIRTUE that I need to best communicate my message and build a character around that quality.

What is our message? Stealing is wrong.

What is our direction? External.

What is our genre? Steampunk.

If our message is “stealing is wrong” and our direction is external, that means whatever character I’m going to have as my protagonist (my main dude or dudette) is going to start out one way and remain the same throughout the entire story (think Jack Sparrow or Indiana Jones).

But that still doesn’t limit the options. My character could be a thief. My character could be someone who never steals anything. My character could be a high-born, high-brow, racist, chauvinist. My character could be a low-class, uneducated mother of five who lives in a shanty on the riverbank. The choices are as vast and random as the world and history itself.

Okay. So I’m just going to make something up.

When you start planning at this point, remember that you need to avoid cliché as much as possible. If you start with a good foundation of original ideas, it will be easier to build on that foundation later.

Since I’ve already said I like scoundrels, I’m going to choose to create a character who is a rebel. Someone who lives on the outskirts of society, an outcast. And we’ll make this character a thief. And let’s choose—male. Guy characters are easier for me to understand. What is the stereotype for a thief? Poor, out of work, homeless types who steal to survive or to provide for their families. Right?

Okay, so how what would the opposite of that stereotypical thief be? How about a rich person? Let’s make him well off – with all the resources he could want but with no interest in them. And since he is a rebel, he doesn’t like the restrictions his well-to-do society puts on him. So why does he steal? Well, we’ve already determined that he can have anything he wants if he just asks for it; so there’s no thrill in obtaining his dreams and goals since he doesn’t have to work for it. So instead, he finds satisfaction in taking things from other people.

Okay. Stop right there.

Read over that bit again. Is it just me or does this sound like a villain? While villains are fun as villains, they aren’t always fun as protagonists. One of the biggest rules of character design for protagonists is that you have to create a character who is sympathetic. Your reader has to identify with your character, or they’ll stop reading. There has to be some redeemable quality in your protagonist or your readers will lose interest.

If you had created a thief character who steals to provide for his family, that is automatically a sympathetic character. Clichéd, yes. But sympathetic. And a spoiled rich kid who steals from the less-fortunate because he’s bored doesn’t sound like a character with any redeemable qualities.

So how do we give him redeemable qualities?

The best redeemable qualities are the virtues that are the opposites of our flaws. For those who have terrible tempers, compassion and mercy. For those who struggle with addictions, service to others. For those who have jealous hearts, generosity. It demonstrates that we all have a dark side and a light side to our personalities, and people can identify with that.

Okay. So what about a thief?

Well, let’s say that after he steals something and enjoys his thrill for a little while, he returns it. After all, he doesn’t need it. So why should he keep it? If he were a villain, he could keep it just for spite. But this isn’t a villain. This is our main character, and we want people to like him enough to keep reading about him. So – after he steals from the less fortunate to get his kicks, he silently, stealthily returns what he stole the next day. He doesn’t take credit for returning it. He doesn’t seek spotlight for “doing the right thing.” He just covers his tracks.

This goes deeper into character development. Because if you have a wealthy character who is stealing just for the thrill of it only to return the pilfered items without seeking spotlight, that means you have a real psychological puzzle on your hands. There are all sorts of directions you can go with a character like this. But the main point to focus on is that he’s a bored rich kid who doesn’t really mean any harm.

The next step of my process of character development is to determine what your character wants.

Let’s say our Rich-Boy Thief is the Governor’s son, and the one thing he has always wanted was to be normal. He doesn’t want to live in a mansion. He doesn’t want butlers and maids. He doesn’t want riches and wealth. He wants to be just like his friends, who are all poor.

Remember since we have decided to make this a Steampunk book, we can design the setting and the culture and the world however we want. So let’s say that theft is what identifies you as a common person. If you’re normal, you take things that don’t belong to you. That is what he grew up with, and that is his desire as he has become an adult. So now that he is free to do whatever he wants to do and his desire is still to be normal like everyone else, he leaves the house at night and goes out among all the common people and takes things that don’t belong to him. But because he knows deep inside that he doesn’t need them and that the people he steals from do, he takes them back a day later.

Names can come later. So for now, I’m going to call him Confused Robin Hood.

NOTE: You must know why your character is like this. You must develop a back story for all your characters. Back story may never ever appear in anything you actually write, but you need it so that you understand the motivation and intentions of your character. This would be history about your character, his parents, his family, his schooling, his hobbies. These are things that are essential to how he has grown up as a person but things that may not be 100% necessary to drive your story forward. We’ll focus on Back Story later in this series, but you need it to fully flesh out your character.

Okay. So where are we?

We have our message: Stealing is wrong
We have our direction: External
We have our genre: Steampunk
We have our basic character: Confused Robin Hood

What happens next?

That is the question. That is actually the question that drives everything. That is plot.

Story is conflict. Stories can’t happen while the status quo is still functioning as it always has. Stories happen when something goes wrong.

Part 5 will be about choosing your conflict.

Legal issues regarding True Story magazine

I thought I would post an update on the legal situation with True Story Magazine. I’m still in the beginning phases of this whole ordeal, so I thought it might be a good idea to keep track of everything that happens, not only for my own benefit but for the benefit of anyone who gets to experience the same thing some day.

I submitted a short story I had written called “Chris Maher’s Left Hand” to True Story Magazine in fall 2011. On September 14, 2011, I received an email from someone at Dorchester Media who wanted to accept the story for publication. They offered to pay me if I’d turn over all rights. I’ve been writing for years, but this was the first time I’d submitted a story and had it accepted. 

I was slightly concerned about it because I couldn’t find any evidence of the magazine online. But I did some Googling and found enough history about the magazine (and the person I was in contact with), that I decided to go through with it. After all, the story (while it was cute) wasn’t the absolute best thing I’ve ever written, and I didn’t mind giving up the rights for it if I were going to get paid.

I signed the contract and send it back to them, agreeing to sell them the rights to the story for payment. The contract indicated that the story would be published in December 2011 and I could expect to receive payment the month afterward.

December came, and I received two copies of the magazine in the mail with my story in them. The title had been changed (“Caught Left Handed”), and the story was altered only slightly (probably for word count). But it was the story I had written. I was super excited.

Then January came and went.

Then February came, and I still hadn’t received payment.

I figured that they were probably busy, but I went ahead and wrote just for a status check. I didn’t hear anything back.

Then March came. Finally, I decided to start Googling again, and I discovered that True Story Magazine apparently stopped publishing a year ago and only offered an online version. I also discovered that they had pretty much gone under, filed for bankruptcy, and canceled all the subscriptions for all their customers. And from what I gather, there are a number of legal suits against them because they have not refunded the subscription money to many of their customers.

So, I wrote to my contact again. But this time I received an email back saying that her account was no longer functional.

I have a friend who is an editor so I wrote her and asked her opinion, and she recommended that I wait six months and then write them to reclaim my rights to the story. She also gave me a link to the Author’s Guild, which looks like a legal site for writers. I think the six months is a good idea because I’m sure they’re all buried in legal problems, and I agree with my friend that they’re probably not going to squabble over the rights to one goofy little short story.

At this point, I really don’t care if I get paid or not. I just would like to have the rights back so I can submit it somewhere else. If it doesn’t work out, that’s all right. I can always write something else, but it’s difficult not to be discouraged when my first official success turns out to not be so official. =)