This time it's about the ten tried and tested ways to get plotting your novel:
1. Work out your characters in advance.
According to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 'plot is character and characters plot'. In other words, your story must develop out of your characters, rather than the other way around. This is important because if you try to mould characters to meet the requirements of the plot, it is harder to make them life-like and believable.
2. Get a hook.
Great plots start with a great hook. Without grabbing a reader's attention from the start, you will be struggling to build and maintain interest. If you are writing a commercial thriller, the hook will probably be a grisly death which is uncovered in various stages throughout the rest of the novel. In a romantic comedy, the hook should be a situation which will help readers immediately identify with the heroine such as a disastrous job interview or a relationship break-up.
3. Don't go for obvious plot devices.
You want your story to be thrilling but you don't want to make readers feel cheated with unrealistic or frustrating plot devices. The 'it was all a dream' story is a prime example of how annoying plot devices can be.
4. Develop a conflict.
A good life depends on a lack of conflict. A good plot depends on the opposite. And by conflict I'm not talking tanks and missiles. Often it is simply a conflict going on within the psyche of the main character. For instance, it could be conflicting feelings a heroine has for her husband and lover, and the reader spends the novel wondering which way she is going to go.
5. Twist with care.
Many people think that a novel needs as many plot twists as possible. It doesn't. In fact, this often makes the author look desperate. If the characters are believable and placed in an interesting situation, the reader will automatically be interested. That's not to say plot twists don't work. They can, but only if they are realistic.
6. Build up the tension.
If you were to draw a graph of a good plot it would be a diagonal line travelling upward from left to right. Tension need to be raised rather than defused as the book progresses.
7. Think of the back story.
Every good story contains a story before. In other words if your characters are going to be believable you need to know what happened to them in their life before the events of your novel. Not everything, of course. Just those aspects relevant to the present story. Whatever your view of Harry Potter, J K Rowling is an expert of the back story, enabling new readers to get as much enjoyment from the fifth Potter book as the first.
8. Map things out.
You don't want to necessarily set out a rigid chapter-by-chapter outline, but unless you have some overall plot 'map' before you start writing you will create headaches later on. Believe me, I've learnt the hard way.
9. Have an authentic climax.
There may be some areas of life where you can get away with faking a climax, but novel writing isn't one of them. The end of you story needs to be as dramatic and powerful as possible, but it also needs to be a genuinely fitting end to your story. If you've written three hundred intelligently written pages based around a love affair taking place in a hotel, it probably wouldn't be a good idea to finish with secret service agents uncovering a terrorist plot. Because even though such an ending could qualify as dramatic, it wouldn't be a satisfyingly suitable end to a story about the complexities of the heart.
10. Go back through it.
Many people mistakenly believe writing travels in one direction. In fact, it travels backward as well as forward. For instance, thriller writers such as P D James and Ruth Rendell go back through their stories when they have finished the final chapter, and add clues for the reader to pick up. Even in romantic fiction 'back writing' can be useful as it can help you to sharpen characters and events with the hindsight of having completed your novel.
Plotting your Novel