Looking at Plotting Examples

My shoulder's doing much better this week. It only bothered me a little bit in specific situations. The rest of the time it felt back to normal.

My main reason for wanting to do a middle grade series was to practice plotting novels. Middle grade has a low word count, so I could do a trilogy with roughly the same number of words as a normal novel. It would come out longer but not excessively so. It depends on how many words per story I used, which kind of depends on the market. For the price of a normal novel, I could get three practice "novels" done. It seemed like a more efficient use of time than practicing on full books. The books on the front burner need to come first, though I did have a random idea for the middle grade trilogy that solves a problem I didn't know I had. Like Messengers, it involves travel to another world. I had the idea for how to get the main character there but hadn't put any thought into how he gets back. I had an idea pop up for that this week. I'm thinking something like a maze. I'll have to look it up and see how it's been done before. Surely, the idea can't be original. If it's been done by a best selling book, I'd probably need to do it a different way.

This week I looked at a lot of plotting examples. In theory scenes should do more than one thing. I saw some real world examples of scenes that do that and and even do three things. A good example was a scene in which a fugitive cop called his old partner, but the partner didn't report the call. Later when she presents evidence that shows the fugitive's innocence, it looks like she's covering for him just like she covered up the call. Later when the fugitive tracks down the real killer, it was foreshadowed by the phone call. The phone call scene does three things: 1) Sets up inadmissibility of the exonerating evidence. 2) Foreshadows the confrontation between the fugitive cop and the real killer. 3) Gives a brief sketch of what the fugitive is doing while he's on the run. I suppose a fourth thing would be that it shows the relationship between the fugitive and his former partner.

The ending for the B'vellah War series is already plotted, but it never hurts to take another look at plotting in general. That and I'm still tired from this tooth abscess. It's hard to concentrate and be at my best behind the keyboard at night when I'm dragging through the day. 

Have a great weekend.