The Plot Form Method

Original Post: 18 April 2012
Posted Here: 4 December 2017

According to some authors,the only way to write a story is to start with some arbitrary schematic including the characters, location and plot—what I’ll call “The Plot Form Method.”

Lee Wyndham wrote a book many years ago, Writing for Children and Teen-agers.  From the book I distilled the “Story Checklist”, which included a “12-point plot” outline of how to create a story, that I sometimes tried to follow. Louise Boggess, in How to Write Short Stories That Sell, proposed her own version of how the story should be outlined before you start writing. At one of our critique group meetings, we started filling out a similar form as an exercise for writing a mystery story.

The Plot Form usually includes detailed biographies for all the major characters—what they look like, what their dreams and aspirations are, their strong points and their weak points. You don’t need to use all of this information in your story, but you should know which way your characters will bend regardless of what breeze blows. Your characters should never surprise you. You are in charge of the story, not your characters.

Filling in the Plot Form is supposed to help to make the story consistent and interesting.  I remember that working on the mystery project at our meeting resulted in  the story developing in some completely unexpected ways as we did more and more.  The same story idea can produce a multitude of radically different stories, especially when written by a committee.

The Plot Form Method often includes the requirement that the story or novel be outlined, providing a very definite structure. Again, you want no surprises.

I used the Boggess formula when I wrote my Alien Abduction short story. I have the feeling that I’ve used some variation of the Plot Form Method for a few stories, but I don’t know for which.

The Plot Form Method is not my normal way to write a story. Most of my ideas do not come with a well-defined set of characters, setting, and plot. I sometimes discover things about the characters as the story progresses. The nearest thing to an outline that I do, and this only happens sometimes, is that I will write a series of one-line phrases or sentences that state the events in the order that they occur in the story. These serve only to keep me from forgetting something important and providing a path from here to there. They don’t set anything in concrete. Unexpected things can still occur.

Knowing everything about characters, setting, and plot in advance works very well for some people. Not for me. But I will say that the information that might have been put into a Plot Form can be very valuable. Bidido wears a patch over one eye. Which one? If I had written it down somewhere, I wouldn’t have to go back to previous stories or chapters to find out what I said when I first mentioned it. At some point in my writing career this became obvious to me. So, belatedly, I began a file which contained all of this information.

This Info file was helpful to not just me, but to the folks in my critique group. Trying to critique a chapter can be very trying when you haven’t seen the previous chapter since the last meeting a month ago, and the chapter before that the month before then. What is this Dendrology Research Corporation that’s mentioned in this month’s submission? I found it helpful to email the Info file along with the chapter to critique. I eventually found it simpler to put all this information on my Stellar Economic Community web site. That way I could not just provide the information, but an Index which hyperlinked the words and phrases of interest to the actual information. Now no one has to figure out that Dendrology Research Corporation is located in the Social Institutions section, not Technology.

Keep reading/keep writing – Jack