After finishing my primary characters yesterday, I’m starting my plot work today. But at the same time, I’m really struggling with how to do this.
I think one of the reasons my last book didn’t work was because I tried to stick too closely to a plot template, and as a result, my book didn’t have a consistent desire spine and satisfying conclusion (at least, I don’t think it did. . . it’s been about a month now that I’ve had that book on the back-burner, so it might be time to go back and review it again with fresh eyes).
In any case, that was my impression with it, and I want to avoid that with this story. I know that I need to stick to a consistent desire line and a single focus to make the story satisfying and keep readers interested, so I’m not going to make the mistake of forcing it into a template for the template’s sake.
The other problem I have faced in working with templates in the past is that they’re generic and generally deal with character development, rather than story development. That runs the risk of writing literary crap with no plot whatsoever, and to hell with that.
One of the most important lessons I took away from the How to Write a Bestseller Course was that in series fiction, you should not try to resolve a main character’s character problems in each book. Instead, I need to take the templates and guidelines that are typically about character growth and make them about resolving a story issue. Instead of resolving an overall character growth issue, each book in the series needs to be about resolving the story problem my character is currently facing. Since this series is intended to be a fixed-length arc, I will resolve my hero’s issues at the very end, instead, when she has finally conquered her story problems.
That’s all well and good, but for now, my struggle is figuring out what that looks like on a scene-by-scene basis.
For today, I’ve taken Truby’s 22 steps from Anatomy of Story and made them into folders in Scrivener to hold my scenes. I’ve also dropped in a few scene cards for scenes that were already in my head from the earlier character work. My next step is going to be understanding what those 22 steps mean for my specific story and customizing them to meet my needs. Then, I’m going to come up with story events that need to happen and finally see how I can combine those into scenes.