Been looking at plot today with my students and am interested that people who say they don't plot (e.g. Stephen King, Magnus Mills) are normally strong instinctive plotters of forward driven narrative. I mean they story starts and moves forward.

I'm not a natural plotter but have noticed that all plots that intrigue me start with the end and then go back, like the classic crime set up of corpse who/why dunnit? This isn't true of short fiction but the minute I get an idea for a novel it is always retrospective. Which maybe why they come unstuck again and again.

Just interested to know what comes naturally to others, and why. What methods do you use to plot?

My novels seem to keep being about resolving something that happened in the past, (or at least I'm telling the past through the medium of the present) so I track the forward-moving plot in one column, chapter by chapter, and in another column what's revealed of the past, chunk by chunk. That then multiplies across the two or three narrators/narratives. There may be one or two columns more to track some other element of the story, or the progress of particular themes. Quite often the later chapters are barely filled in at the start, because I don't know what they'll be. And I do it all in pencil, because as I write I move stuff around and re-pace it and change the order and so on.

Emma

So long as I have a start and an end to aim for I'm usually fine.

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It gets written in scenes in no particualr order, so plotting in the form of starting with a plan doesn't really work for me, but I usually have a skeleton of a plan by the time I'm a third of the way through it.

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A lot of plot devices do get held up and dismissed in each wip, and sometimes I run out of them at which point the whole thing grinds to a halt and I have to move on to the next wip.

I think I do both.

I started with a simple line and 'end-point', but the minute I started writing the story grew so much I realized I didn't have a novel but a series. So, while I still have that 'end-point' (maybe 3 books away) each book just starts and moves forward as far as it can.

I do try to plot, but I don't think I'm much good at it - it only really does something interesting when the characters do it for me. In my last one, a character in whose voice I was writing suddenly pulled out a knife and did something terrible, and I just couldn't stop my hands typing it. Reworking it, my notes are full of things like 'This goes nowhere!!! CUT IT!' but it stayed all the same - and 50,000 words later I knew why I needed it and it had to happen.

This is probably run-of-the-mill ordinary to you guys, but it was the first time it happened to me, and I found it almost scary.

Louise

That's a very good way of putting it Cherys. I hadn't thought of it explicitly in those terms before.

The kind of crime books I write are very much the retrospective. The story is powered by an event that took place before the actual timeline of the actual novel. I find it very satisfying to write this kind of story, but everything does have to be thoroughly worked out. That's the only way I can do it anyhow. Having said that, I still like to lay myself open to fresh directions and ideas as I'm writing. But I am probably more prescribed than most writers.

I do like to write the other way too, almost making it up as I go along. But that wouldn't work for my crime/mystery books. Horses for courses, maybe?

I've always plotted "forward", but I often find myself struggling with endings as a result - hence my intention to experiment with "retrospective" plotting for Book 3...

I'm all for a complex plot, and I like to see the whole cloth so I do tend to loosely plan a whole novel. It's like a road map for me. I can get from A to B but I'm allowed to drive down detours to take in unexpected sights along the way.

JB

Waxy - that's exactly how I see it - but I do need to know where we are heading very specifically so that the story reads like a purposeful journey and not a Sunday jaunt, if you see what I mean.
I'm happy to stop off the motorway for a spot of lunch in a pub that looks quite the thing, or pick up a hich-hiker on the way, but I won't just set off with no idea of whether I'm headed to Wakefield or Bogota.
HB x

Thanks for all the replies. Fascinating reading. Emma thanks for explaining your columns method. That is helpful. Roger I'm off to buy your books.

I struggle, in retrospective plotting, to keep the energy up in the present day story, as some of it must inevitably get used discovering what happened before. I'd love to write a strictly forward running narrative but they never present themselves. Retrospective plots are the most delicious to read (Little Dorrit, Mayor of Castrbridge) but to write - the untangling leads to such schematic plotting I tear my hair out.

I struggle, in retrospective plotting, to keep the energy up in the present day story

Hi Cherys - maybe you don't need so much energy in the present day story? As long as it does have forward motion, something that progresses what happens in the present in each of these parts, the meandering and looking back is fine...?
I tried to write a "strictly forward running narrative" and it was really boring! Not while I was writing, but to read! I love having strands of past and present running together, usually both moving forwards to a resolution that sort of 'solves the whole', tying them both together. I have a wall chart with the progress of all storylines running parallel (kind of like a horse race!) so I can see where the hell my characters and I have all got to!
I agree, you can't beat that classic crime set-up of beginning with a corpse!
Love Jane

Jane, it sounds as if my and your charts are similar, except yours is bigger - I have a chronic shortage of wall in my study for these things!

As long as it does have forward motion, something that progresses what happens in the present in each of these parts, the meandering and looking back is fine...?

I think the proportion of 'now' and 'then' can be all sorts of things, from 'now' as a pure frame, to 'then' as the slipperiest of small flashbacks. (I was interested to realise in working out ASA that each of the three narratives had different proportions of now and then.) But I think it helps to know what the proportions are, because the reader to some extent needs to know which they're 'really' living in.

Emma

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The other chart I always make at the beginning of the process is a really simple spreadsheet of everyone's ages for every year that the novel covers. It's amazingly boring to keep having to stop and think 'hang on, how old would the grandfather have been?' and do the maths. Specially when you suddenly realise that X would have been conscripted in the War, or Y couldn't have remembered rationing.

The other chart I always make at the beginning of the process is a really simple spreadsheet of everyone's ages for every year that the novel covers. It's amazingly boring to keep having to stop and think 'hang on, how old would the grandfather have been?' and do the maths. Specially when you suddenly realise that X would have been conscripted in the War, or Y couldn't have remembered rationing.

Yes, I've finally learned to do that too - and for each year I also try to put in what else was going on at the time that might impact on the characters (month by month if I know it). The danger is I then try to shoehorn in all kinds of guff just to show off useless knowledge, but it's still safer than suddenly realizing they're doing something in London at the time of the General Strike and never even mention it...

The other chart I use is for a three-act structure, just to make sure the different strands are peaking at the right times and the turning points are working. It's very vague, though - more thematic than plot, eg 'J realizes his grandmother loves him after all'. Beyond that I think I'd really struggle - what do you do when your plot starts changing? Just redo the chart?

Louise

The danger is I then try to shoehorn in all kinds of guff just to show off useless knowledge,

Yes, it's such a danger: as Rose Tremain says, you have to leave the research behind. I get funny looks when I say that I do think you can do too much research, just because you get so wedded to it. Readers love to think we're busy getting the history frightfully accurate, whereas I'm with Graham Swift: 'bugger research'.

but it's still safer than suddenly realizing they're doing something in London at the time of the General Strike and never even mention it...

Yes. I bagged one of the last copies of the Dorling Kindersley Chronicle of the Twentieth Century, and it regularly saves my life. Just wish they'd do it for the other nineteen centuries.

what do you do when your plot starts changing? Just redo the chart?

I do it all in pencil, (and used to biro over what I'd actually written, but now don't bother) so I just rub out the bits that change, and re-space them or whatever. I did have to re write (as in mostly new plot, new dates, new time-scale, half the characters, etc. etc.) one strand of A Secret Alchemy, and for that I did start a new chart, writing in the other two strands (there are two columns per strand) and then spacing out the new plot to fit it. Quite a lot of jiggling to get all the jigsaw pieces to fit, but it all came out in the wash.

'J realizes his grandmother loves him after all'

That's often as much as one character's part of the chapter will say on the plan: the where, when, why and how I discover as I write.

Emma

Yes, it's such a danger: as Rose Tremain says, you have to leave the research behind

That is so true! It took me ages to bring myself to cut one scene which was holding up the pace something horrible - until I realized it was only there to show off the fact I spent a long and disgusting time learning how a seventeenth century tanner would scrape and grain a hide.

Just wish they'd do it for the other nineteen centuries

So do I! The big things are easy - but it's the stuff 'you don't know that you don't know' that catches me every time.

That's often as much as one character's part of the chapter will say on the plan: the where, when, why and how I discover as I write.

Exactly. I also keep a big notebook beside me when I'm writing, so that when I get one of the 'eureka' moments for how something will change or turn out later I can scribble it down right away before I forget. I probably ought to use charts for this too - the last wip ended up with six full notebooks and finding anything specific in any of them was a nightmare.

I do however now use an index book so I can build up a 'bible' for characters and places as I go along. Every time I find out something new about them (eg that a minor character had 2 children who died of plague) I get it in the book together with every detail given so far. Or at least I mean to....

J realizes his grandmother loves him after all

Yes! Mine are definitely like that to start with!
My charts are in big thick colour coded felt pens, which start off all neat and tidy in my bestist writing and end up a chaotic mess. When my plot changes a lot or I run out of room I quite enjoy tearing that one down and starting afresh! (Although I don't throw the old ones away!)
I find it so much easier to know what I'm doing when it's up on the wall and I can see the shape of it. Weird!
JC x