I am terrible at plot. (And character, description, mood, theme, setting, and everything else, but particularly plot.)
Andy Duncan taught me this plot trick. I don’t know where he got it.
You write the names of your characters on a sheet of paper. Now draw an arrow to and from each character. Each arrow represents the relationship between those two characters, from that direction.
For example, in my story, “Keep Talking”, my first rough draft had just two characters.
(I hadn’t named them yet.)
Andy said, you could turn each arrow into a scene. That’s it. That’s the plot trick.
Trouble was – my diagram only has two lines – two scenes. And it wasn’t telling everything I wanted the story to be about. So I drew a third circle, and after some thought, decided my third character would be a girlfriend for the father.
Figuring out the arrows between the daughter and the girlfriend were where my story really took shape. I’d set up a number of problems between the father and daughter and father and girlfriend, but between the daughter and girlfriend I found a place to put a solution, and that made everything else click.
Then, bam, I had a story that sold to Apex Magazine, becoming my sixth sold story, and also won Story of the Year for 2014!
Yay! Tools and tricks. Take that, Writer’s Block!
