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Write On! Preptober plot mapping, or try this one weird method to untangle your 15 subplots [1]

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Date: 2022-10-13

Hat tip to Chitown Kev

Hello all, and welcome to our weekly writers’ meet up.

National Novel Writing Month is sneaking up on us. Two more October Thursdays follow today, so in total, we have 18 days left for project planning. For someone like me, who tends to pants my way into plot corners, the idea of plotting something from beginning to end before ever writing anything sounds like the kiss of death to any project. For example, this line in this article about plotting vs pantsing causes me to make inarticulate noises from my sinuses.

This outlining process usually takes me about six months.

But hey, for those of you planning on taking part, this might be a tool to help you avoid (or row out of) those 20-30k doldrums where you suddenly run out of steam or start wondering where it was you were hoping to end.

Why is a pantser writing about plot mapping?

I am trying to get better as a writer, and part of getting better is actually finishing things. I tend to write about a third to half way into a book and then I get stuck around 20-30k words. I am making progress; I used to get stuck at 10-15k. I acknowledge I am terrible at the finishing of things. Once I have a lot of decisions to make (after I’ve spooled out all the fun plot spaghetti that’s been stewing in my brain — [I mixed those metaphors special, just for all of you] ), I stall out and turn to something new. Instant gratification blossoms as I work on a new shiny story, but that habit certainly doesn’t move me forward as a writer. I never get to editing a complete plot, much less line edits. And I like editing.

I need some new writerly tools to keep moving towards novel completion.

So what is plot mapping, then?

Different people mean different things, and certainly as an image search of plot mapping shows, there’s a heavy emphasis on Freytag’s pyramid, by which we teach the basics of following or constructing a story’s plot. Another example of plot mapping: what we have here is visually interesting and slightly more in depth than Freytag, but still a fairly high level overview of a plot. It’s getting closer to a more useful tool for writers though. I like the idea of intersecting plot points as subway stations.

The particular iteration of plot mapping I’m laying out tonight is a fairly flexible tool to either a plotter or a pantser. The main difference is when a writer chooses to apply it. The inveterate plotter may feel compelled to write out their entire plot and use the plot map as a guide as they write. I did tiny baby steps of this when I participated in the “Write your first novel” on Coursera (free course, and you do get what you pay for, lol). For each 2500 word chapter, we were supposed to write a chapter outline. Most times I ended up revising those outlines afterwards, because what actually came out on the screen was quite different than my outline. Personally, I wouldn’t choose to plot map from the beginning of a project. Might it behoove me to do a bit more outlining? Probably yes . Yes. Yes, it would.

The basic organization of this type of plot map is as a spreadsheet program. Each scene or chapter gets its own row. It is up to you and your story how many columns to add. Here’s the first five scenes of my current project:

Plot Map - Basic (MC — main character) Scene time plot subplot 1 subplot 2 SP 3 Sp 4 location characters changes/notes 1 of day; length of scene; time of year? MC and G hang at work MC job one — pizza shop MC and G (Charis mentioned) name consistency — pizza shop mgr 2 same day; minutes later MC meets R who she’s been avoiding BP insists on a meet-up alley behind pizza shop MC and R R needs a name; BP leader needs a name 3 none, bc this is backstory infodump backstory info dump on pgs 6-8 none MC should be moved, parceled out elsewhere 4 morning; half an hour; Thurs MC takes down a threatening person at her second job; cops come; MC now on cop’s radar MC meets the cop sandwich shop MC, cop, Celia (asst. mgr) (too many C. names already) 5 a day later; minutes; time of day unclear Cop introduces himself more formally, pushes MC to come downtown for a formal statement Cop wants more than just an interview; MC is reminded of someone from her past. alley behind sandwich shop MC and cop cop name consistency

This is fairly elementary so far; these 5 scenes take place over the first 14 pages. Subplots 3 and 4 don’t show up yet, and I can already see that having given my main character two jobs, I’m writing similar scenes at each job. Gonna have to jumble that up on the rewrite. These are things I wouldn’t necessarily have twigged to just rereading on my own, but now I have a record of it. Other questions that I had I was able to answer as I did this exercise (say, what time of year did I set the story, and am I keeping to it? — page 36 for the first mention of the season: spring).

I’m not intending to go back and heavily edit the first part before writing more, but I will do some scene rearranging and evaluation of whether I like the plot directions that I took. One of my writing group friends took a look at it and confirmed my suspicion that I’d let drop a key piece of back story too early (note to self: what page is that on???). There’s a scene that probably tracks too close to Teen Wolf, but I like it so it’s staying for now. If I go a different direction with the mayhem-laced scene directly preceding it, it’ll have to go.

The other thing that jumped out at me is that I am seriously bad at writing my villains. As in, I just don’t write them. I don’t know who they are, they just stay in the shadows, and their only appearance in this story so far is the dude who works as their ‘fixer’. This is a problem in my previous bogged down work as well. Absent villains is a fairly significant problem, but one so obvious (after having done the plot mapping) that I just have to laugh. Subplot 1 people are minor antagonists and patsies of Subplot 3 people; Subplot 2 people are the cop characters who are ambiguously helpful/not helpful and somewhat subordinate to Subplot 3 people; Subplot 3 people are supposed to be the worst — they’re so bad they can’t get any page-time. Subplot 4 people are my main character’s group who are non-existent at the beginning of the story and who get built up over the course of the book. Glaring omissions FTW!

The last thing I’ll mention from this experience is that it made me think about the timeframe of the book, and what I might want it to be. If it’s going to be more tightly plotted, then I should think about what kind of story I can tell over the course of a few days, a few weeks, or a few months. I’m a big fan of Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series, and while I haven’t sat down and kept track, most of those books are action-packed stories that take place over a handful of days or weeks at the most. The story I’m working on is paranormal urban fantasy (no detectives or PIs, tho), so if I’m going to hew to at least a few reader expectations, I should think about how compact (or not) to make the timeframe of the story.

The kicker with this method is — you’re supposed to write this all out longhand. And I did. I have 30 scenes in 96 pages, and it took me four evenings of intermittent work (say an hour per 5 scenes?) to finish going over approximately 30k words. Five 8.5x11 inch sketch pad pages. Lots of pencil sharpening. And then I typed it into Excel.

Non-specific to my example, this sort of plot map file could be very useful at the revision stage. For instance, SenSho mentioned taking multiple passes through her manuscripts, investigating various things to cut/add. Throughlines! An example revision column might be “tighten dialogue” and once you’ve edited a scene, change the color of that box to green. Other revision columns might be “evoke senses”, “check punctuation,” “cut 1000 words per chapter”, “remove excess adverbs” or whatever your pet writing tics are.

Since plot mapping is in no way a quick and easy task (should you choose to embark upon it), let’s do a simple unrelated challenge:

You have 250 words. Evoke 3 of the 5 senses and a sense of urgency. Feel free to use any of your stock challenge characters. Build a scene using this line (or something like it): “I didn’t like the way it looked at me.”

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