Lecture 13: How To Start A Plot

Getting a  plot started is a daunting prospect for most writers, but the reason it's daunting varies from writer to writer. Some writers know so much about the story even before they start that they don't quite know where to begin. Others have only a single episode or character in mind, and they're not sure how to spin that situation into a complete narrative. In this lecture, we'll explore three ways to work a writer works out plot, outlined by John Gardner: "by borrowing some traditional plot or an action from real life ... by working his way back from the story's climax; or by groping his way forward from an initial situation."

Working Out Plots

Gardner's first method of approaching plot is borrowing, but it's important to note that this is not the same as plagiarism, which generally involves passing off someone else's work as your own. Borrowing, in contrast, usually involves changing an earlier plot in significant ways or using it for a purpose that the original author may not have intended or even foreseen. Many writers, for example, have retold Homer's Odyssey, setting it in completely different contexts. Others have retold well-known stories from a different point of view.

Of course, historical novels take their stories from famous people or events in history. As with novels that adapt earlier works of literature, the best historical novels reimagine history in interesting ways. For example, Robert Graves's novel I, Claudius and Marguerite Yourcenar's The Memoirs of Hadrian each tell the story of a Roman emperor from the emperor's point of view.

Sometimes, writers borrow types of plots rather than specific stories. Beginning writers of mysteries or romance novels, for example, probably have templates for those sorts of stories in their minds. Although such a template can be a straightjacket, it can also be a convenient way to at least get a plot started, even if you plan to change it later on.

And sometimes writers borrow a plot when they need to provide a structure for the material that truly interests them. The science fiction writer William Gibson structured his first novel, Neuromancer, as an old-fashioned noir thriller in the style of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. He was interested in evoking a rich, complex, and colorful future and in playing with the cultural, social, and political implications of the computer revolution; thus, he used a thriller plot to provide a framework for this material.

Another approach to plotting is to start with the end of a story and structure the rest of the work so that it leads to a particular climax. Obviously, this method requires that you know how the story ends before you start writing. It also probably works best if you're writing a binary narrative, that is, one with an either/or conclusion.

With this type of narrative, figuring out how to start by working backward should be relatively easy: If there's a crime to be solved, you start with the crime or its immediate aftermath; if the two lovers finally get together, you need to start with their meeting or the situation that leads to their meeting.

This is the method where you're most likely to find that an outline is useful. If you already know what happens at the end, that means you know, or at least can infer, what the plot needs to do to reach that point: what characters you'll need, what the setting will be, and roughly what steps the characters need to take to get there.

Finally, many writers start with an image, a character, or a situation and, as Gardner put it, "grope" their way forward. William Faulkner famously said that he created his great novel The Sound and the Fury by starting with a single image of a little girl with muddy underpants sitting in a tree, peering through a window at a funeral. This method is probably more time-consuming and frustrating than sticking to an outline, but it may result in a more complex narrative structure.

The methods of structuring a plot are not limited to these three, of course, and the methods can be combined in interesting ways. Even if you're borrowing a plot, you may find yourself monkeying with it, and even if you're trying to stick to the facts of a famous life such as the life of Hadrian or Copernicus-it's what you discover in the process of writing, as you imagine yourself into their minds, that makes the narrative come alive.

Starting in Medias Res

As mentioned in an earlier lecture, many stories begin in medias res, "in the middle of things." In fact, it's tempting to say that all stories begin in medias res because there's really no such thing as a story that begins ex nihilo, "from nothing." Even if you start a novel with the birth of the main character, that character already has parents and relations, a family history, and a social and historical context.

What in medias res usually means is starting the plot at a point where the story is already underway. Homer's Iliad is not really about the Trojan War in its entirety; by the time the Iliad opens, the war has already been going on for 10 years, and the present-time narrative depicts only a few weeks near the end of the siege of Troy. Even though it makes reference to how the war began and how it ends, the Iliad does not dramatize the kidnapping of Helen, which started the war, or the fall of Troy, which ended it.

Starting in medias res shows us that choosing where to begin is not so much a matter of figuring out the chronological beginning of a story as it is choosing the most dramatically productive moment. Shakespeare could have started Hamlet with the funeral of Hamlet's father or the subsequent marriage of Hamlet's mother to his uncle Polonius, but he chose to open it with the moment that was most likely to make Hamlet reconsider recent events, namely, the appearance of his father's ghost, demanding vengeance.

Limiting Choices
Another way to approach the start of a plot is to limit your choices. As we've mentioned, real life flows ceaselessly and infinitely in all directions; it's knowing what to leave out that turns life into fiction. Thus, you could limit your time frame, having the story or novel take place in a single day, week, or month, or you could limit the point of view, telling the story from the point of view of only one character.

Neither of these limits necessarily means that you have to leave out other settings or other times in the characters' lives.

You can start the narrative at a particular moment and limit it to particular time, the way Virginia Woolf limits Mrs. Dalloway to the events of one day, yet still range backward and forward in time and place, incorporating flashback scenes that take place at other times and in different settings.

You also have a number of choices with the first line of a narrative, which will both dictate and be dictated by what comes later.

If you're telling a story from the point of view of a character who dies at the end, for example, you will be limited to third-person narration-unless you want the character to narrate the story from beyond the grave. If you're writing a story that features a surprise later on, you might want to start in the first person present tense or in the close third person, so that the reader lives in the moment right alongside the main character and is just as stunned as the character when the surprise finally comes.

Look at the openings of books and stories you admire, paying attention to not just the immediate effect of the opening moment but also how the opening prepares the reader for what comes later.

Opening Examples

One category of story opening is simply beginning at the beginning, the way Tolkien does in The Hobbit: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." This opening sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale, with an unspoken "once upon a time" at the start of the sentence. As brief and to the point as it is, that simple 10-word sentence tells us right away that we're in a fantasy world, inhabited by creatures called hobbits, and it wells us something important about hobbits, that they live underground.

Another way to begin at the beginning is simply to state the premise of the story as bluntly as possible, the way Franz Kafka does in the first line of his story "The Metamorphosis": "One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin." This sentence is only 19 words, but at the end of it, we know the name of the main character, that he is a man ridden with anxieties, and that he has undergone a horrific transformation. The rest of the story works out all the implications of a man being transformed overnight into a giant cockroach.

Both of those openings are in the third person, but many of the most famous American novels begin with a first-person narrator speaking directly to the reader. Herman Melville's Moby-Dick begins with "Call me Ishmael," and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins with "You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain't no matter."

As we've said, writing is about imposing order on chaos, about making decisions-often arbitrary ones-out of what seems to be an infinity of choices. It's also as much about what you leave out as what you leave in. Your decision about when, where, and with whom to begin a narrative opens one path for you even as it closes off many others.

Just like making decisions in real life, you sometimes don't realize what the consequences of your choices are until much later. But unlike life, if you find you've made a wrong decision about the opening of your novel or short story, you can always go back and change it or even start over.

Writing, especially plotting, is not a science; it's an organic and wildly inefficient process of trial and error. But it's the stuff you don't plan for, the stuff that surprises you, that makes fiction worth reading and makes the writing of it simultaneously frustrating and rewarding.
—James Hynes.

Another Lecture that actually does make more sense because it stays focused on plot and why it makes fiction so alluring and very appealing to anyone who is a fictional reader, Skylights. —Lumna10.

Writing Exercise Prompt
Without thinking about it too much, imagine some sort of striking or intriguing situation. For example, imagine a man and woman who are eating at a candlelit table in a romantic restaurant, but they aren't speaking to each other; in fact, they don't even look at each other. Or imagine a woman standing in an alley in the rain at night, holding a knife. Then, again without thinking about it too much, try imagining the very next thing that happens, then the next, and the next. If you find yourself running out of steam or boxing yourself into a corner, go back to the original situation and try something completely different.

Enjoy!