Lesson 5: Plot

A lot of times when I see people asking questions about their plots, it’s because they lack a clear endpoint or guiding line that can help them orient themselves towards what the story needs from them. So, I’m going to try my best to break down some of the basic principles that can help you maintain clarity in your workflow at every stage of the story. 

As a side note, I will be mentioning a concept which I have developed in a separate blog series, narrative capital, and though I will give a more refined version of its definition here, you should know that I have some more specific, but kind of ranty, lessons that go into more detail. 

Second side note, by now you might be wondering why I use so many movie references like Star Wars. It’s just because movies are usually easier to dissect in how they tell their stories just by the nature of the medium. And also Star Wars is cool. 

Structural Problem and Core Goal

There are two very broad categories that you can divide your plot into: structural problems and core goals.

Structural problems are usually the easiest ones to start with because they’re often where a lot of the action happens with your story. For Lord of the Rings, it’s carrying the McGuffin to the end of the journey. For an MLP season finale, it’s usually defeating a big villain. For Star Wars, it’s defeating the Empire. 

Structural problems are usually the sequence of events and obstacles that your characters have to go through in order to get what they want, whether that’s peace, revenge, happiness, et cetera. The core goal, conversely, will usually be more intimate with the characters, focusing on what they’re going through in their personal life as they progress through the structural problems.

For example, the episode “The Hearth’s Warming Club” is a who-done-it mystery plot, with everyone interrogating each other about their holidays to find the prankster, mixed with the discovery that it’s driven by the core goal of Gallus wanting to be with his friends. The episode isn’t written just to be a series of inquiries, the end goal of the plot arrives at Gallus’s backstory and his lonely home life. 

Core goals, thus, are usually going to carry the emotional weight of your plot. They’re the moments when the characters say “it’s personal now.” Core goals drive the revenge stories, personal fulfilment quests, the things that make it matter to the person. 

Narrative Capital: Investment, Inflation, and Return

So maybe we want to focus on the core goals of our character, or maybe we want an epic adventure with a lot of problems for the hero to solve. Either way, how do we do that? Like money, we have to earn it. Narrative capital is not a new idea, it’s just the framework I’ve developed as I’ve come to understand the basics of setting up a plot, progressing it, and delivering the payoff at the end.

Narrative capital can be defined as the perceived value or tension in the story at any given state. I developed it from the concept of social capital found in sociology/psychology. Social capital comes up when we interact with our peers, doing things and acting a certain way that we believe will gain us favour from others. We generate social capital, and in return that good behaviour can “purchase” a good reputation, favours, even a promotion if that social group is also a professional setting. 

That is exactly what we are doing with narrative capital. You are creating this theatre of the mind with your readers, and in order to get them to suspend some of their disbelief to allow your scenes to play out in their head, you have to have enough narrative capital in order to “buy” their attention. So, when we start, we have to start with our investments.

Investment

The investment phase of the plot is basically the entire section of your story where you are showing your hand to your reader, giving them a sense of what they can expect to get out of the story if they continue reading. 

This is where you establish the tone of the story and leave hints about what your characters’ arcs might be or what kind of problems they’re going to end up facing, and it is why the prologue or cold open is such a popular staple in writing and film. Good cold opens often throw the reader right into the middle of a plot at a point where they can grasp some threads about the later story.

If you are planning to have a really serious and dark adventure, for example, you can use an intense opening scene that captures that tone before shifting focus onto your hero who hasn’t answered a call to action yet. It doesn’t necessarily have to include your protagonist. All you are doing is showing your reader a lot of action so they are invested enough when you eventually pull back the intensity and take time to introduce some worldbuilding or new characters.

Am I saying all investment phases have to include a prologue or cold open? No, not at all. But the principles that apply to prologues are the same as any other investment phase. What is your characters’ first core goal? What’s going to push them forward into the conflict instead of stepping back? What is the conflict even going to be about? Whether or not these will work is going to depend on whether you can fulfil your investments by the time those questions are answered. 

And don’t try to rush investment if you don’t need to. Cold opens are fast so they work great for films and short stories. But if you’re planning a 30-chapter novel, your investment phase can end at chapter one, or at chapter four or five. Maybe even longer, if you can make it interesting.

Inflation/Progress

If you’ve done your investments correctly, you should be prepared to deal with inflation by slowly providing answers to the questions you have laid out. You are creating a sense that your characters are moving closer and closer to where they are supposed to be.

Here, the skills we have discussed previously come into play. How do you show your characters making progress? Well, between the action beats, use your dialogue to your strength and let your characters assess their situations and make plans. During your progression, if you decide to move your characters back a step, it’s generally going to be more interesting if your characters recognize their setback and react in a way that feels as if there is still progression. 

This is where the concept of narrative capital, in my experience, can be the most useful. The more complex a plot becomes, the easier it gets to lose yourself in your own twists and make it feel as though nothing is really happening. At the same time, unless you’re writing a short story, you’re not always going to go from one intense scene to another. An adventurer needs to rest, a detective needs to assess the clues, and a romance will usually have some breakups.
Narrative capital helps us keep track of these plot beats as long as we treat major upsets in the story as if we are purchasing them. Let’s use the G4 My Little Pony movie as an example and look at how the movie twists the structural plot and core goal by paying the narrative capital it had earned.

This happens during the pearl scene when Twilight deliberately misleads her friends into distracting the hippogriffs/hippocampi so she can go steal the pearl for herself. Until that point, Twilight had been becoming more and more on edge as she and her friends get them into more trouble with Tempest. 

The tension with her friends, and the urgency of Twilight’s core goal, provides the narrative capital that makes the audience suspend their disbelief that Twilight would resort to stealing the pearl. Thus, the act of theft is the point of transaction. It’s when you are “cashing in” the status quo to purchase a new paradigm.

Before, the quest was more or less a fetch-quest: Get help from Mount Aris and restore the world to how it was before. After the transaction, the structural problems and the core goal changed. Not only do the characters have to figure out a new way to defeat their enemy, but now Twilight’s personal idea of returning to the way things were includes having to restore the relationships she damaged.

It’s easy to keep track of in a movie, as I said in this lesson’s intro, they’re much easier to pick apart because their stories have to be done in about 90 to 120 minutes. But if you’re not writing a short story, or sometimes even if you are, it is important to keep in mind what you are doing to add narrative capital and when you are trading in the tension to convince your readers of a paradigm shift. When you have the option to write an extra chapter, it’s easy to lose the urgency to be efficient, which often ends up making the middle portion of our stories drag on longer than they need to.

Keeping in mind our stories’ narrative capital trims off the extra fat because when we feel we have built up enough capital, that means it’s time to trade it in for a paradigm shift. How you do it, whether it’s a fight scene or a character death or the hero’s hometown burning down all depends on your story, but progressing your plots is a game of inflating the stakes until you can purchase the next big stage.

Return/Payoff

The second biggest question next to “I don’t know how to start my story” may very well be “I don’t know how to end my story.” A large part of this is not just about writing, but it’s the nature of practice and human psychology. We start stories a lot more often than we finish them. That’s just how time and practice works, we don’t always get to the end. So it makes sense that finishing the task ahead feels like uncharted territory. 

But, if you’ve done your set-up and progression properly, the payoff should require the least amount of effort. It won’t be easy, but there is a life hack to doing it. 

The trick is to have it written already because having your ending in mind makes the “inflation” section so much easier than it needs to be. When you know what ending you want before you even write your story, you can look at every little increment and judge whether you’re moving forward or making wise backsteps.

Twists and Subversions

Let’s say you’re writing horror or mystery and you want to have a twist towards the end, but you don’t want it to be cheap expectation subversion like the last season of Game of Thrones. If you know what twist you’re going to do, then it’s just a matter of leaving a thread of questions unanswered so that the audience is not dead-set on expecting a certain ending.

That is why the “deus ex machina” trope is avoided like toxic waste, and why “expectation subversion” is so terrible when lazily executed. Those tropes break the flow of the story and cheapen the rest of your narrative capital. Sudden and unexpected twists will often forcibly inject so much capital into the story, like a government printing money, that the reader loses confidence in the value they’ve built up to.

There’s a big hoo-ha over spoilers and trying not to be predictable, but for the really big details, it’s perfectly fine to let your audience know what’s going to happen. It’s why we bother with the investments, we make promises to our readers on what they’re going to get out of it. Some surprises are good, but if you are going to subvert and surprise your audience, you have to understand that those moments are massive paradigm shifts, and the last stretch of your plot is going to have to focus heavily on developing the new problems and goals, just like the investment phase. It’s why twist endings can feel like such an abrupt end when they’re done poorly. In terms of tension and emotional investment, a bad twist ending doesn’t close off the story, it just overextends the inflation phase. Hyperinflation. 

You don’t always need a twist at the end to make your story good. A story with a strong start and middle, but a mediocre end, will still usually do better than a story with a spectacular ending but a mediocre investment and progression. Why? Because if the start and middle are great, at least your readers will have actually gotten to the end.

The Actual “How”

This is a separate section because it actually applies at any point when you’re writing your plot, whether it’s beginning, middle, or end, and it’s the nitty-gritty details of how we actually execute on these broad ideas of narrative capital.

Contrast

One of those ways is by focusing on contrast and contradictions between our plot and our characters. Let’s take a look at one of my stories, “Spreading Kindness”. The core goal, and what the story is actually about, is a fish-out-of-water plot about a foreign student getting used to life at the School of Friendship. Everything that Mistwake embodies, strict formalism and hierarchy, is a direct contrast to her setting, and the unease she feels plays up the Gothic horror tone of the entire story.

Sure, the structural problem is that a vampire is loose in the school, but that’s just an idea. And ideas are cheap, execution is everything. What drives the conflict is the disharmony between the protagonist and everything around her. There’s friction, she’s unhappy, and because of those things, she pushes the plot along and uncovers the vampire.

Contrast is why the high technology vs low society of the cyberpunk genre is so popular, and why the man and beast dichotomy of werewolf stories are so thrilling. If you’re writing romance, that’s why opposites attract is such a popular trope. If you’re writing fantasy, that’s why high elves and brutish orcs have captured our imaginations for decades. 

Progress

Another way to make it easier for yourself to track whether or not you are progressing is to give your story some geographical markers so the reader knows when progress is being made. Lord of the Rings is the classic modern example of this, where every step of the adventure is trying to bring Frodo closer to Mount Doom.

This is generally great for adventure stories that explore across a large world, but you can also apply it to any story where the core goal or structural problems involve trying to get somewhere. 

Inspiration

If you feel stuck in your inflation phase, or you can’t figure out how to get the final return on all your investments, take a step back and try to find where your story has contrasting elements. If too many things are working together as they should, or the plot feels stagnant or repetitive, that is a sign that you don’t have enough conflict anymore to drive the story forward.

And, if you’re really out of ideas, we end up going back to Lesson 1, and that is iteration. Look at what has been done before and use abstraction to figure out the general shape of what they are doing. Which leads us to the next point.

Plot Archetypes

So, we’ve established that it’s usually best to have some kind of end goal in mind so that the ending is all but written for us when we reach it. What, then, are some of the archetypes that we can use to set our ending point and figure out what is required in our investment and progression?

I’d rather use examples than speak in generalizations, so let’s take a look at “Spreading Kindness” again. First plot archetype: the vampire horror story. That’s pretty easy, there’s a massive body of work that I can draw inspiration from. Vampire stories usually have victims, the vampire is hidden and has to be discovered, and the behaviour of the vampire tends to make some kind of comment on human nature, allowing the plot to tie into its themes. 

So, what did I do? I placed the protagonist in direct contact with the vampire’s victim, through whom she slowly uncovered the identity of the vampire after realizing she wasn’t burnt out from schoolwork, she was just missing a lot of blood.

The reason why the story doesn’t automatically seem as dull and derivative as my summary makes it out to be is that I was able to combine it with another plot archetype, which I’ve already mentioned as the “high school fish-out-of-water” plot, where the foreign student must acclimate to their new life.

Within that, there is an “opposites attract” relationship subplot, where the main character and her roommate have opposing personalities but have to work together to catch the vampire, which ties into a final “catching the beast” or “facing your fears” subplot where they go and face the monster they’re afraid of.

It’s a common practice among many writers to look at what has been done across genres and see if they can mash them together in a way that conceals what they actually are. Why was Star Wars: A New Hope so great? After all, it wasn’t the first science fiction story ever told. But the structural plot is from the high fantasy genre. It’s not about facing the final frontier, it’s about a farm boy hero getting magical powers to save the princess. 

Another example: why was the episode “Surf and/or Turf” such a well-written episode? Because it wasn’t a CMC story about finding Terramar’s “true purpose,” it was a divorce story, just without the divorce.

One more for the road: Is Iron Man 3 an underrated superhero film? Probably. But it’s also a spy thriller that has been cut apart and disguised as an underrated superhero film. An evil scientist with a top-secret weapon? Check. Mysterious and undefined villain? Check. Kidnapping the president and backhanded political deals? Check. It’s a spy thriller.

There are many plot archetypes out there, and if I were to delve into all of them, this lesson might never end. So if you want to write a story that combines certain archetypes, the best thing you can do is read books and watch films with those archetypes and find their key elements. And, if you want to create something a little more unique, see if you can take plot archetypes from genres that are different from the story you are writing.

Archetype Examples

Here is a very short list of the archetypes I am familiar with to help you jog your memory on what archetypes might influence your writing:

• Life Adventures: These are adventures that take place from a character’s childhood to their early or mid-adulthood, sometimes even further. They’re usually defined by an early phase of training or learning how the world works, applying that knowledge as they become adults, followed by a dramatic event that changes their adult life to make it distinct from their formative years. 

  • Examples of this are the first 3 books of the Age of Fire series, the Warded Man, and the Way of the Shadows. 
• Far-Away Adventures: These are the adventures that send its heroes on a journey to a distant location. 

• Gothic Vampire Horror: The true horror was the sexual predators we met along the way! These stories usually start with an encounter with the vampire, followed by an inflation phase where things get worse because of the vampire or the heroes start to put two-and-two together to figure out they need some garlic and a stake, followed by confronting the vampire and sometimes destroying it.

  • Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” (obviously) as well as “Carmilla” by Sheridan le Fanu and “The Vampyre” by John William Polidori

• The Tragedy: (of Darth Plagueis the Wise) It’s not a story the Jedi will tell you. But Shakespeare will. “Tragedy” is a very broad category and there are a lot different sub-archetypes, like a revenge tragedy or romantic tragedy. But one of the key features of these plots is that the core goals and the structural problems have different tones. The narrative capital is built up from the hope that the positive side of the plot will work out (Oh, I hope Romeo and Juliet get together!) when we already know the structural problems are beating them down (Mercutio, you good bro? Mercutio!). Or the structural problems can be tonally positive while it’s a character’s destructive core goals that tear everything apart. 

  • Examples: See, like, basically half of Shakespeare’s body of work. Also Arcane is a modern tragedy set in a magical steampunk modern fantasy. I cannot hype up Arcane enough.

If you’re wondering how to dissect existing plots and how to know what plot beats need to be hit in order to make your story feel like the archetype, this is also where narrative capital is really useful. When you’re studying your reference, find those “transaction” moments, the points where the paradigm of the story is shifted. That moment is probably a plot beat. From there, you need to ask yourself “Did I enjoy this? If so, how did they build up to it and what kind of narrative capital did they pay to make me suspend my disbelief?” If you end up thinking that you didn’t enjoy the plot beat, apply the concept of narrative capital to see where it fell short.

Plot Structures

While plot archetypes can inspire the general tone or content of our story, plot structures refer to the acts or pacing. I’m not going to focus too much on these, I think enough has been said on all of them, and I’m certainly not an expert on a lot of them. 

The hero’s journey, the three-act structure, the Fichtean curve, and cyclical plots are some of what I have done in the past, and of these, I’m going to go into cyclical plots and the Fichtean curve. The hero’s journey and three-act structure are both staples of writing and you don’t need me to learn about them. 

Actually, I think I’ve even posted a link to a documentary about the hero’s journey in a previous lesson, and I’ll be sure to include more in the homework section.

So, the feature of cyclical plot structure is that in terms of the structural problems, the main character(s) haven’t really progressed. At the surface, it seems like a status quo has been reached, but in reality, it is the character who has changed. As a result, though the structural problems may kind of revolve in a circle, your core goals are the plot elements that are still moving forward. 

I do this in “Fighting to the Top,” a story with an incredibly simple structural problem: Sunset Shimmer wants to win a fencing competition. That’s pretty much it, and for three chapters, I focus on pushing Sunset closer and closer to victory while ultimately making her lose and go back to the way things were (spoilers, I guess).

The core goal, however, is a “proving oneself” plot where Sunset desperately wants to win a trophy to leave behind as a positive legacy. When she fails that core goal, that’s how I force the character to be introspective about what she really wants in life, ultimately realizing that she wants to get better at fencing so she can become a real professional, not just win a one-time trophy.

The story also features a Fichtean Curve, a variation of the traditional sequence of inciting incident, rising action, climax, and falling action. The rising action, what we have come to know as progressing the plot or “inflation,” is dotted with “mini-climaxes” and even smaller falling actions that gradually build up to the final climax.

In “Fighting to the Top,” each chapter (apart from the first) follows the pattern of Sunset fencing her way towards the final bout, only to fail and become more stressed. Every mini plot bumps the action up, but is followed by a small period of recovery where Sunset can assess herself and find a way to push forward. 

These “mini falling actions” don’t bring the story all the way down to the status quo, however. Every time Sunset pushes herself to face the next stage of the tournament, there’s still the urgency that she is running out of time. And every loss only makes her more and more desperate. 

The Fichtean Curve is quite useful if you’re a discovery writer, meaning you prefer to figure out the story as you write, or a writer who prefers short stories. This is because each mini-climax can be seen as a climax for a short story within the larger narrative. Discovery writing and short stories is something I want to cover in a later lesson, but for now, I will leave you with some resources and assignments to practice your writing.

Homework

• The Hero’s Journey in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nOE7tBnYaU
• Visualization for the Fichtean Curve and other plot structures: https://blog.reedsy.com/guide/story-structure/#5__fichtean_curve 
• 3 Act Structure (more for film, but can still help with writing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pZnl3oPrX8

• Assignments:

  • Write an ending. Give yourself approximately 250-500 words to write an ending that you would like to see. 
  • Write a beginning. Take your ending and write an opening that sets up a plot that would eventually lead to what you’ve already written. No more than 300 words.
  • Create a list of your favourite plot archetypes and highlight the story beats that define that kind of plot. What makes a mystery a mystery? What makes a heist a heist? That sort of thing.