Fleshing Out Your Plot

There are many ways to put the meat on the bones of your plot skeleton. Your selection of setting and character will do a lot in this department, but you also have to carefully craft the sequence of events that will take place between the event that starts the story moving and the event that brings it to its conclusion. A straight path between the two is rarely interesting. Twists and turns that increase the sense of struggle provide an opportunity for the readers to build stronger emotional bonds with the character and build suspense.

Your character doesn’t necessarily need to be aware of the forces moving him or her along through the various steps leading to the resolution of the complication—or that the complication itself even exists. Your sad teenage girl likely won’t know that she is searching for a sense of identity. She might be selfishly seeking all forms of self-gratification in her quest for popularity without truly knowing what it is she really wants. It could be a complete surprise to her that she enjoys working with the socially outcast girl from her class as a volunteer at the hospital—that she wants to be her friend more than all the popular girls at the school.

The most important thing in fleshing out your story is that you don’t lose focus. A plot is a complication and its resolution. Everything that happens in your story must, in some way, move your story forward towards that resolution. Let’s take Detective X for example: Detective X arrives at the scene of a crime and is charged with catching the killer—this is the complication. Detective X then goes through a number of events that provide him with clues to the killer’s identity. Any scenes that develop his relationship with his rookie sidekick or his romance with the sexy District Attorney have to play some role that is specific to the case. For example, let’s say Rookie has botched something up in the past and now Detective X doesn’t trust his partner’s abilities or insights. They end up arguing a lot and that affects how efficiently they do their job. Maybe the Rookie is on to something and X ignores it—allowing the killer to escape and further complicating the plot. Maybe after that he is consoled by the lovely DA and is then able to pick up the reins and get the investigation going again. An occasional flashback to his childhood may explain how he reacts to a particular situation. However, everything must be related to the case at hand or the story will get bogged down with extraneous “stuff.”

Following in this vein, the plot of “the story of Character X’s life” is never a strong plot because it lacks the focus that keeps the story and interest going. You need to give your character a particular aspect of its life to tell the story through. If your story is about a woman who was sexually abused as a child, you will need to flashback to some areas of her childhood but relate them to how she is reacting to something happening in the present. For example, a man passes her that is wearing the same cologne that her father did—that could set off a memory of him coming into her room on the nights that her mother went out to her church meetings or her bridge club. After going through a series of events—meeting with a good friend or a therapist, etc.—that help her find the road to healing, let the story end with that sense of hope for the future. Don’t keep going for one more chapter that talks about how her kids turned out and how she died. The story is over when she is able to put the ghosts to rest. Don’t drag it out.