Blog: How to Write Your Plot

Coming to the simplest part (in my opinion) of how to write a book, it’s time to talk about the plot, i.e. the story itself. If you haven’t already read the other two posts on how to write your villian and your protagonists, I highly suggest that you go do so before reading this since the characters are what your story is about.

First of all, the basic parts of the plot that you need to know about are the beginning, middle, and end. Pretty simple, right? The beginning is also known as the exposition. It’s the part where you introduce the main characters, set them up, and introduce the main plot and theme of the book. In other words, this is where you come up with the who, the what, the where, the when, the why, and the how. You can make the exposition as long as you would like, but try to read it from the reader’s point of view. If you think it’s too short, make it longer. If you think it’s too long and tedious to get through, make it shorter. You do not want to make the beginning boring because you will lose the reader’s intrest very quickly if you do that. The beginning needs to hook the reader and pull them in.

After the exposition comes the middle of the plot. This is the beefiest part of the whole book and is comprised of the rising action and ends with the climax. This is the main part of the quest that your characters are undertaking and you can give this as many twists and turns as you would like. As you go, if the story is taking place in a fictional world (for example: Middle Earth), you can take your time building it as the story progresses. You can give the reader a sense of the scale of the world and the many different climates and people groups that inhabit it. You can also introduce more sub-plots, character arcs, etc. However, as you do this, make sure that you don’t get side tracked by all the sub-plots or world building to the point where you forget the point of the original plot. If you do this, you will confuse the characters and lose their intrest. This is where it would help to draw out some sort of outline or story map to sketch out how you want your story to go. If you need to, you can always revise your outline as you come up with new ideas.

Finally, there’s the ending after the climax, which is made up of the falling action and denoument where everything is tied up. There’s two ways you can write the ending: open or closed. Open endings are endings where you’ve successfully tied up the plot ends that you set up but still let a few threads hang lose. For example, perhaps the villian may have been temporarily defeated, but is going to come back in the next book. This type of ending is also called a “cliffhanger” and leaves your readers wanting more.

The closed ending is where everything is wrapped up in a nice, coherent plot ribbon and is good for stand-alone books. The characters get a nice (or tragic) ending, the villian is defeated, the story has ended. Ther’s no more that you can look forward to.

Finally, now that you know how to write your plot, your villian, and your protagonists, it’s time to get writing and start drafting your plot’s outline. Stay tuned for the next blog post where I’ll be talking about how to build your world in a fictional story.

Until next time,

M.J.