Plotting Insight

It wasn't a bad week on the writing front. I didn't get as much done as I wanted, but I beat my 10k words per week goal. And the week isn't over. How long does it take to wash an elephant? I had to look that up. I never found a straight answer, but it seems to take about 30 minutes or maybe less. I had a character washing an elephant. On a spaceship. It can take too long to find hands-on information like that.

I'm a little over 2k words to the midpoint, and I've been thinking about plotting. I have a list of plot points and all that, but I've been wanting to come up with my own plotting method instead of relying on the 3-act formula. As I've mentioned before, a saggy middle(25-75%) is a common problem. As I've been getting closer and closer to 50%, I've been wondering if I've put enough work into the outline for the second half. I had to move the 25% plot point to the 37% mark in the first half.

While fretting about the plot, I thought about all those people with a drawer filled with the first halves of novels and how I didn't want to become one of those people. I had the thought that the first half always seems to be the easiest part of the book to write. That's when it hit me. What if I plotted the second half the same way as the first? It would be like having two halves with the second half being as easy as the first. Let's look at plot points for 3-act doing it that way.

0%    50%

12.5%    62%

25%    75%

37%    90%

50%    100%

I'm sorry these are double-spaced. Blogger messed with the formatting a while back, and I haven't seen any way to fix it. I need to dump them for that alone. Anyway, the plot points for both halves match up fairly well, thought they're not all equivalent. The 12.5% one is something that catalyzes the hero to action. The 62% one is the villain flexing his muscles. Nevertheless, the minor and major plot points are almost mirrors of each other. Maybe, instead of worrying about saggy middles and such, I should approach the second half the same way as the first with the difference being that the stakes get higher and higher toward the end.

It also occurred to me that I could break any book into thirds with each third being plotted the same way as the first half of a novel. The 3-act structure is in thirds already. However, I could plot the middle the same way I plotted halves the old way. From 25% to 75% could be its own book in a way. Whichever way I did it, no saggy middle worries.

Or I could use this as a basis for a try/fail cycle plot structure. I'm not a fan of the rigidity of the 3-act structure, and I like the idea of try/fail instead. Maybe I need to work out a hybrid model.

Well, I don't think I'm going to change horses in mid-stream on this project. I'll probably tweak the second half in a fine-tuning kind of way but no major overhaul. The middle grade trilogy project on the other hand would be a great place to experiment with plotting. When there's time for that after the B'vellah War series.

You see those authors who have dozens or scores of books in print. I bet they're using the same formula for each book and plugging in different characters and plot points. If I could work out my own system, I could do the same thing and increase my productivity.

Have a great weekend.