What’s the best way to plot a novel?

by Stephanie Morrill

Stephanie writes young adult contemporary novels and is the creator of GoTeenWriters.com. Her novels include The Reinvention of Skylar Hoyt series (Revell) and the Ellie Sweet books (Birch House Press). You can connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and check out samples of her work on her author website including the free novella, Throwing Stones.

(This post is part of the Writing A Novel From Beginning to End series. You can find other posts from this series on the Looking For Something Specific? tab.)

What’s the best way to plot a novel? The quick answer is that there isn’t ONE best way, despite all those book titles declaring that they reveal the secrets to book plotting perfection. As I've talked about before, I spent a lot of time trying to find The Perfect System before deciding that not only does it not exist, but even if it did, it might do more harm to my stories than good to think I'd discovered it.

But I do believe there's great value in honing your personal way of doing things. A good place to start is by taking a quick inventory of who you are, what your time is like, and what kind of story you're writing:

1. Consider your natural bent.

Even before we've read a single craft book or blog post about writing, we tend to come to the page a certain way.

Some like to think the story through and have every scene figured out before they put pen to page. Others prefer bullet points, or to figure out just a few key scenes that will take place in the story. Still others are discovery writers, or “pantsers” who just want to get to the good stuff and sort it out later. (We’ll address tips for discovery writers June 29th. The blog will be closed next week because Jill and I are teaching at a summer workshop.)

Of course we'll evolve and grow as we write, but as a pantser who tried desperately hard to become a hardcore plotter, I can tell you from experience that you're fooling yourself if you try to completely stifle the way you naturally approach telling a story.

2. What season of life are you in?

This plays a bigger role in how we get stories written than I once gave it credit for. In high school, I rarely plotted a thing because between school, homework, and a social life, I never really blocked off regular time to write. Sometimes I wrote for thirty minutes during Geometry, other times I wrote for hours at night or on a slow weekend. But it was sporadic, so I didn't feel like plotting and planning. I just wanted to write.

After I was married but before McKenna arrived on the scene, I was lucky enough to write full time. I wrote thousands of words everyday—still without planning a thing—and then took my time during revisions.

Fast forward a few years to when I have multiple children, a house in the suburbs, and contracts with deadlines. I quickly learned that pantsing my novels was going to make me crazy. (Or, rather, the rewrites they involved and the fear of "is this story going to come together in time???" would make me crazy.) 

Not only that, but as a published writer, I could sell books based on proposal (three chapters and a 2-3 page outline of the story) instead of writing the whole thing. In my life situation and with the current expectations of the industry, I needed to learn how to write with an outline.

So don't be shocked if as life moves on, your style of  getting a novel written changes.

3. What kind of story is this?

I feel different stories have different needs. If we run with Stephen King's belief that stories are found objects, like fossils in the ground the writer is trying to carefully extract, then it's been my experience that some fossils come out with less resistance than others.

For many of us—dare I say most of us?—we build our own hybrid method that’s part planning and part writing by the seat of our pants. The balance of these elements depends on the three points above.

My writer's heart rebels against the method of figuring out every scene before I start writing, but if you think you might be that type of writer, Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method is fascinating. Even if you’re NOT that type of writer, you might find—as I did—that you pick up a thing or two from experimenting with it. I also really like how Rachel Aaron lays out her process in 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love. The structure would make me crazy, but for some I think it could work great. (I consider that book one of the best craft books I've ever bought, but there's a bit of language.)

But I have found several ways of plotting that helps with the intensity of my edits and doesn't make the pantser in me throw a fit. (As a note, I've learned that I have to write a chapter or two before I can think through the rest of the story very effectively. So that step comes before I do any of these.)

Plotting using a key scenes list:

This is where you take a list of scenes that commonly appear in modern story structure and apply your story to it. I’ve blogged about this before, so you can learn more about it here.

With this method, I like that I can be confident the story structure is there. Also, I haven’t invested a ton of time, so I can change things on the fly without feeling like I’ve just wasted days of planning.

Plus lists make my heart happy.

What I don't like is that sometimes this method can feel like a checklist, and the draft lacks an element of surprise. Probably since I knew exactly where everything was going to lead. So this always has to be fixed in edits.

Plotting with a written-out description:

After I finished my first historical suspense novel and turned it into my agent, I had an idea for a second book.

Just like with the first, I printed out my key scenes list and thought I would bang out the plot over the next few days. Only I couldn’t seem to get my thoughts organized enough to list them out. Instead, I wanted to write out a description of the story details.

So that’s what I did. It's about ten pages long and describes the story from start to finish. Well, finish-ish. Endings never come easily to me.

What I don’t like about this method is that it's harder to see at a glance. Also, it's a lot more time consuming. But if a publisher asks for a detailed synopsis, I have it ready!

Pantsing the first half and plotting the rest:

The book I’m currently working on was one of those where I knew how I wanted it to start … and then not much else. I tried the list. I tried the written out description, but neither clicked.

So I kept plugging away at scenes, thinking eventually I would find my groove and figure out the rest of the story. Which I did (I think, anyway). But not until I hit 30,000 words.

The bummer is I can already tell I have a decent amount of rewrites waiting for me in the first part of the book. But I also feel like the rambling, wandering chapters helped me unearth the story I really wanted to tell.

Who knows how I’ll write a book next time, but that's part of the fun!

What ways have you tried? How did they work for you?