Joy asks:
"Not a question because I have so many: Plot writing for people who are only good at world building."
Hi Joy,
Let me start by saying that I. Feel. This. I have a long history of coming up with detailed worlds, and even some complex, relatable characters, only to stall out when it comes time to have anyone do anything. What I have for you is a list of strategies, some of which can be combined with each other, and most of which should be able to be combined with any notion of a plot you already have in mind. You may already have tried a few of these, so feel free to disregard anything that doesn't work for you.
1. Start, then outline. (Then repeat).
Write an opening, introduce your characters, their world, and the place the story starts. Let it be infodumpy if that's an inclination you have; you can always edit later. (And honestly, the world could do with more books, especially in fantasy, that actually establish their premise rather than dribbling out basic information for fear of infodumping). Establish the time of year, the time of day, when in the timeline of your world this is all happening. It's totally okay to pick all these details essentially at random. If you already have a world, you probably know the calendar, the geography, and at least some of the people well enough to make lists and then roll dice to choose a starting point, if that's what you need to do to get started.
Then, see of any next steps present themselves. Is there a major holiday coming up? A war on the horizon? Are one or more of your characters approaching a major life event or milestone? If anything occurs to you, write it the fuck down. Gwythyr sets up his apple cart for the weekly market. Lily goes to dance rehearsal. Gaar stops in at a planet to pick up passengers. Whatever you've got, write it down, either in a separate document or in a separate section of the one you're writing in. If you have any notion what's likely to happen after that, write that down as well, even if you're not sure about it. When you're out of "and then"s, start writing that first thing on your list. As more of the future opens up, write that down too. Hopefully at some point an ending will occur to you, and then you'll have something to aim at in a larger way, but it may take a while to figure out what the story is actually about sufficiently to have an ending.
See also: The Flashlight Method
Drawback: A draft created this way is likely to be a mess, structurally, and the first serious edit is likely to involve rearranging entire scenes and then doing a lot of detail work to make it make sense.
2. Road Trip!
This approach takes a longer view, while but has in common with the above that the plot is going to be permitted to emerge, rather than planned.
Choose a physical place in your world to start, and another place somewhere far away. Come up with some characters, who can be rough, sketchy ideas for now; you'll have time to get to know them. (3-5 people is good, but you can have any size group as long as there's more than one person). Give your group of characters a reason to go from the place they start to the place far away. The reason can be something big and important and high stakes (a dangerous religious pilgrimage, the retrieval of a magical artifact to defeat a great evil), or something smaller and more personal. They want to get out of this stupid town. They're visiting a pen pal. They've been exiled. There's supposed to be a thriving community of the kind of supernatural creature that they are. Maybe they literally just want to see the faraway place. With a larger group, you may need more than one motivation, since it's usually difficult to persuade more than like two other people to come along with you just because, unless you're writing about 16-21 year olds, or the equivalent, for whom "Woo, road trip!" is usually reason enough.
Thinking about the geography of your world, the characters' reasons for making the trip, and what in your world you want to show off, pick out a few stops they might make between point A and point B. Then just start, send them on their way and see how it goes. Try to get into the spirit of the road trip. Unexpected delays and detours, changes in motivation and even destination are part of the fun. You get weirdly close to people, and they drive you sort of crazy, and you have to navigate all kinds of strange new situations together. Unexpected obstacles abound.
This is a mode of creation where the experience of writing should mirror the experience the characters are having. Be persistent, be flexible, be open to the unexpected.
3. Start from characters.
Create detailed descriptions of one or more characters in your world. You can use a character profile format, or just write paragraphs, but if you're doing profiles, make sure to include a "notes" or "other" section so you're not leaving anything out just because there isn't a field for it. Don't be afraid to randomize details if you're stuck on something. A lot of good writing comes out of going ahead with decisions that were initially arbitrary, but you can also always change things later if you need to. When you've written down everything you can think of, look over it for the following:
1. Do they have any goals or aspirations the pursuit of which could make a plot? (This can be as small as getting a cat or as big as overthrowing a globally powerful dark lord. A vastly detailed world doesn't obligate the story to epic-level stakes).
2. Are there any events in their backstory that you would, as a reader, want to know more about?
If you find anything like that, make a quick note of it. (The story of how Gwythyr got that scar on his face. Gaar trying to afford a bigger spaceship so he doesn't have to leave his family behind when he works). Then, start writing that story.
4. The Scholar
If you haven't already written down everything you know about the world, start doing that. Put together loose notes, write encyclopedia entries, do a 20 page research paper. (Feel free to get silly with this and cite texts that only exist in your world). Write up tourist pamphlets, government memos, healthcare handouts for beings or circumstances specific to your world. It helps if you can think about who in your world would be writing this down, and to what purpose, and write from that perspective, but you don't have to. Now, similarly to the character approach, look over what you have and try to spot anything that you might, as a reader, like to know more about. What was that horrible war like from an on-the-ground perspective? Who was the King's secret lover, really, as a person? How did the government of Kansas end up deciding that the fae aren't legally people, and why didn't California do the same? This may tend to suggest more grand scale plots than the character strategy, but it also might not, if what jumps out to you is a small, personal struggle a person might have when interacting with a piece of your worldbuilding.
5. Use a random plot generator.
Seventh Sanctum has a decent one, and links to several others. The plots these kinds of generators produce will of necessity be pretty vague, but they're often enough of a skeleton that you can start working out the specifics of how, when, and where the suggest plot might happen in your world.
6. Steal the plot of another book.
Seriously. Think of the plot of a book you like, in the genre you're writing in, and write out a rough outline of it, or copypaste the Cliffs Notes into a Word document and change the names. Most of what's interesting and unique in a story comes from the characters and the worldbuilding, not the basic plot. Even if anyone notices, they're more likely to be impressed with your literary acumen than anything else. Also a lot of the particulars will need to change, because you're writing about different people in a different world. What you'll end up keeping is structure, a much as plot, and some idea of where you're going at any given point. You can also deviate whenever it feels right. You can say "I don't think this story ends with several tragic deaths after all. I think they manage to resolve their differences in time, and come through better people for having done it. You can also combine plots, like, okay, it's basically Pride and Prejudice, but it's on a spaceship and also the plot of Gaudy Night is happening at the same time. This will have some more logistics to work out to make it fit together nicely, and massive differences in scale may be harder to work with (if you want to combine Lord Of the Rings with Murder On the Orient Express, you'll need to work out how it affects things not to have them all stuck on an actual train, and how the invitation continues after the groups split up), but if still gives you a framework for who does what when.
Drawback: Once you start using this technique, you will see it everywhere. What uses the plot of Pride and Prejudice? Like 1/3 of dystopian YA, and at least one of the Twilight books. Meanwhile, Pokemon: The First Movie is essentially 'What if Frankenstein happened faster and instead of just running off across the ice at the end, the monster went and became Prospero and the rest of the story is The Tempest?'
7. Steal the plot of a lot of other books.
Some genres, like Romance and certain subgenres of Mystery, have one or more established formulas that you can use if they're appropriate to the kind of story you're trying to tell. It's important to note that this doesn't mean you have to restrict yourself to the kinds of characters, settings, or themes that typically show up in that genre. This is also another place to remember that you can always tell more stories in the same world, with or without the same characters. I often hear from newer writers how they have this really cool world, but they're saving it for when they have a worthy story idea. Don't do that thing. Wanting to write a radically different story in the same world later might make publishers nervous, but that's an after-you-have-a-book-deal problem. I know I would read this shit out of a series of science fiction or fantasy novels set in a detailed world, each of which uses the basic plot of a typically-formulaic genre.
Another extremely valid resource here is folklore studies. There are people who will tell you that there are only two stories ("I set out on a journey" and "A stranger came to town") and people who will tell you there are a few dozen, but what's important here is that a lot of those people made lists. (It may help to google Master Plots to find more of these lists. Writers Digest has a PDF with 20 of them.) Or check out the Aarne-Thomson-Uther Classification Of Folktales. Lots of people have made lots of lists of kinds of stories that exist. See if anything on those lists looks like something that could happen in your world, and if it does, take a shot at writing it.
8. Start with short fiction.
This is more an approach to skill building than a technique per se. Short stories are easier to plot than novels, if only because there's generally less to figure out. A short story has less Great Swampy Middle to wade through, and it can be easier to feel comfortable with a lower stakes story, which removes one barrier to figuring out a good plot. It's also an opportunity to go through all the steps of planning and executing a plot in a reasonable timeframe. Unless you are literally Seanan McGuire, writing a novel normally takes at least a year, and a first novel tends to take more like 5. If you can get as far as a basic idea, there's a lot to be said for actually executing the whole thing, getting through writing and editing and if the plot turns out to be terrible, you haven't spent a novel's worth of time and energy on it.
It's always possible that the idea you start trying to write as a short story will turn out to want a novella or novel's worth of space, and that's fine. Figuring out how long any given story needs to be is its whole own skill, and most writers do better not to try to determine in advance the word count of any given piece until they feel like they have a solid handle on plot and structure.
9. Writing exercises.
I really like books of writing exercises. I have about a dozen on my shelf, from the academic and somewhat abstract The 3AM Epiphany to The Amazing Story Generator, which puts together story concepts in the same way PorGuaCan puts together mixed up animals. If you're needing to work on having actual characters doing actual things in your setting, just assigning yourself something to write about this way, and a word count to write to (if the source of the exercise doesn't provide one, I suggest choosing a target between 500 and 1000 words) can be very helpful, and sometimes either spawn ideas for an actual story or serve as usable pieces once you have one.
10. Read. (And reread).
If you're a writer, presumably you already read a lot, but when you're working on any particular thing (in this case plot) you need to read for that thing. Pay attention to how the plot is put together, make notes, try to write out actual plot summaries. Reread whatever books you think of when you think "really good plot", and try to figure out how they do it. You can also learn a lot from paying attention to the plots in movies, TV, and video games, but different media work differently and there is no substitute for actually experiencing and studying the medium in which you're trying to work.
That's what I've got for you, Joy, so I hope some of these suggestions are useful to you. To the rest of my readers, please send in your questions for next month's Advice Column, either in the comments here, on Facebook, or on Patreon.
In the meantime, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!
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