Create Drama in your Plots

Create a dynamic to keep your reader interested. Content needs planning and decision-making.

A Plot Diagram can be helpful if you want to decide what to include and the order of inclusion. This works for individual sections/chapters as well as the overall structure of longer pieces or novels. You can apply it to personal writing as well as fiction.We took familiar stories and broke down the “beats” so we could see the underlying pattern. Can you guess the story being described here?

1. A girl finds herself in unfamiliar surroundings and is tempted to sample what’s on offer.
2. She explores the preferences of others to see what it feels like.
3. She tries more and more things, assessing each and accepting or rejecting as she goes. In the process, she breaks what does not belong to her.
4. She exhausts herself and takes a rest in the comfort of the “life” she most feels comfortable with – uninvited.
5. Her intrusion is discovered and outrage ensues.
6. She is rejected and she leaves never to return.

*Answer at the foot of the page.

You could then take those six points and hang a new story on them. For example, a student party gatecrasher rifles through things in people’s rooms or otherwise. Or someone having an illicit affair gets the chance to discover the other partner and cannot resist trying on their clothes/makeup. bed!

The theme of the story is how our behaviour can hurt others and we can explore that theme simply or in a complex manner. But each time we explore it, we need to ensure there is a sense of tension – internally or externally – or both. Anticipation and relief are all part of the readers’ satisfaction when reading.

So, when planning your writing, think about creating tension and use foreshadowing to keep the reader interested in where the story is headed and lead up to your climax with a sense of direction and inevitability.

Use your senses to describe and entice your reader into your world viscerally. If you can see, hear, smell, taste and touch it in your mind, then your reader will be there with you if you choose your words carefully.

Here’s another Plot Diagram with spaces to help you plan your next piece of work. Happy writing folks!

 

• It’s Goldilocks and The Three Bears, of course.

 

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