Four Aspects of a Riveting Plot and How to Apply Them

By Jodi Clark

There is nothing quite like losing all sense of time and space when you are deeply absorbed in a story, whether you’re in a movie theatre or reading a book late at night. Stories that can capture your attention or long periods of time are unique in their excellence and are remembered for many years past their publication dates.

However, as you likely know, a story that fails to capture a reader’s attention will ultimately be forgotten and may even become actively disliked by the reading community. To effectively capture a reader’s attention, you must not only intrigue them at the beginning of the story, but also maintain that intrigue throughout the entirety of your tale.

Today, let’s dive into the four aspects of a riveting plot and how you can apply these aspects to your stories to make them unputdownable.

1. Use Your First Chapters to Create an Emotional Bond

There’s this moment I have when I get started on stories. I’m excited to meet the main character, I’m excited to see what their goal is, what they care about, and what they’re struggling with, and I’m excited to watch the character interact with their story world.

But about halfway through the story, I’ll find myself glancing at the clock and wondering when I can quit reading or watching the story I’m trying to focus on. I’ll have completely lost interest in the story, not because the plot isn’t technically exciting, but because I have no emotional connection to it.

 Source: Giphy

So how do you get your reader to become emotionally connected to and invested in your plot? You start by connecting your reader to your main character. And there is no better place to do that than with the first plot points of your story.

Use the beginning of the story to your advantage. Like a house, if a story has a poor foundation—a poor beginning—the rest of the story will be rickety and may eventually collapse under its own weight. Don’t let this happen to your story. Here are some ways you can take action and use the first parts of your story to emotionally bond your reader with your main character and their struggle, which makes up the plot:

1. The beginning of a story should show the main character in their everyday life. Who is this person? What do they do? Who and what do they care about? Giving the audience a glimpse of a character in their normal life helps to establish that things are about to change. But that feeling of imminent change can’t happen if you don’t utilize #2.

2. Make sure you also show that your character has a problem. What is their goal? What lie do they believe about themselves? What are the obstacles to their goal? How is their lie holding them back? What other characters, situations, or conflicts can you place in the beginning of the story that will showcase the main character’s goal, their lie, and their problems?

3. Start hinting at what will happen if the character doesn’t achieve their goal. Set up the what if, the stakes, whether those be physical—the character might die—or other ways. You can use other characters and situations that your main character takes part in in a minor way or observes to hint at the main character’s dilemma to come.

4. Remember not to info dump. This means sharing way too much information up front, like you’re writing the character’s and the world’s whole backstory out in one long paragraph. Leave some things to the imagination. This can work to your advantage, especially when you are trying to get your readers to think. Making them wonder about things will have them wanting to turn pages to find out what happens next.

Creating an emotional bond between your character and reader right at the beginning of your story will help your story immensely. It may seem challenging, but it is also exciting, because in the first few chapters, you get to introduce your readers to a character--and the plot of that character’s story--that they will care about for years to come.

2. Use All the Chapters to Answer One Question & Bring Up Another

You may have seen this advice before. Allow me to explain.

The minute the reader stops being curious about the story, about what happens next, the minute the story dies. The reader will become bored and turn away, since there is nothing left that they care about discovering within the context of the tale.

How to remedy this? You keep the reader curious. Readers stay curious when they have unanswered questions: what is his mysterious past that no one knows and that he won’t talk about? Why does she keep running from any mention of the antagonist? Do they know each other? How will the hero stop the villain before it’s too late when time is running out and the odds seem impossible?

Now, to keep the reader both curious and satisfied, you must eventually answer some of the questions, but not all of them. It’s even better when an answer to a question leads to more questions because that evolves the complexity of the story and can lead the reader to discovering more about the story world, the plot, and the characters.

In How to Train Your Dragon, Hiccup shot a Night Fury with his weapon. He went to find its body in the forest and found that it was still alive. The question then became whether or not he could kill it after all, and the answer turned out to be no. The next question, raised by this event, became what he would do now. He let the Night Fury go, which later led to Hiccup finding out that the Night Fury’s tail fin was broken. New questions were raised when Hiccup decided to fix what he had broken by creating a new tail fin for the Night Fury. 

Source: Giphy

Hiccup going against everything his culture stood for by helping the dragon raised the stakes as well as more questions. How would Hiccup hide his dragon taming skills from his village? How would he hide them from his father? What would he do if anyone found out about his secret life?

Use your plot to your advantage to create tense situations and difficult questions. Answers should always lead to more questions that raise the stakes even further. Remember, the most challenging questions can come from people having to choose between two things that they deeply value, like Hiccup having to choose between his relationship with his father and his relationship with Toothless. Which leads me to the third section of this article...

3. Use Your Plot to Force Your Character to Make Impossible Choices

Now, no matter how interesting the mechanics of a plot are, the reason the reader really cares is because of the character who has to go through the plot. A reader will root for a character who has to make extremely difficult decisions, since the reader will be dying to know what happens next. The decisions our characters make push the plot forward, after all.

Think of the impossible situation in Captain America: Civil War. Tony didn’t want any more people to get hurt because of the Avengers. He felt guilty and responsible for the damage he had caused even while trying to save people. On the other hand, Steve knew that if the Avengers were locked into the commands of an authority that dictated their decisions, they would no longer be able to make any kind of meaningful difference in the world. In addition to that, he needed to save his friend, Bucky, knowing that Bucky was brainwashed and was truly innocent of the crimes of the Winter Soldier.

Tony and Steve didn’t want to fight each other. They were friends. But each of their powerful moral conflicts drove them to make decisions that rocketed the plot to its painful conclusion. The impossible decisions each character had to make left the audience wondering what would happen next. Tony was Steve’s friend, but so was Bucky, so Steve had to fight Tony to defend Bucky. All the while, Steve knew that Tony had deep-rooted motivation for wanting to end Bucky’s life, since Bucky killed Tony’s parents.

 Source: Giphy

Give your characters deep-rooted motivations, critically important moral conflicts, and then set them loose in the plot. Make your characters want and need things so badly that they can’t back down, even if they might not make it out of the situation alive or with their relationships intact. The inevitable and impossibly difficult decisions they will have to make as a result of this will keep your readers on the edge of their seats.

4. Use Your Plot to Escalate Conflict and Danger

You’re going to want to start out with small problems to intrigue your reader, then escalate into larger ones that keep your reader glued to the pages. Your characters and your readers will have to adapt to increasingly difficult challenges until your hero faces the villain at the end of the story.

What constitutes a large problem? A large problem is one that has far-reaching, dangerous consequences. You’re going to want to increase the stakes--the consequences--gradually throughout the story, so each new problem is more dangerous than the last.

Put your characters in dangerous situations. Don’t let them escape the consequences of their failures. Have them taste failure and then face an even bigger and more important obstacle to victory, knowing they just failed and are even more unlikely to succeed now that it matters most of all.

In The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, Bilbo is a simple hobbit who lives a simple, happy life in the Shire. His biggest problem at the start of the story is that a wizard and twelve dwarves show up on his doorstep and ask him to join them in a quest. His small problem escalates into larger ones when he accepts their invitation and goes out into Middle Earth, only to face trolls, goblins, massive spiders, and a dragon, not to mention the Battle of Five Armies.

Despite Bilbo’s best attempts to ward off the Battle of Five Armies, the dwarves refuse to back down, and important characters are slain. Bilbo ends up in the combat--his largest and most dangerous problem yet--and though he manages to survive, the audience is afraid that this terrifying conflict may end the simple hobbit, which keeps them reading.

Source: Giphy

Here are some questions to get you started on developing your own plot’s conflict and danger:

1. What obstacles does my hero face?

2. If the hero fails to achieve their goal, how can the consequences be made worse?

3. How can I gradually raise the stakes throughout the story?

Conclusion

Now that you know all these details about how to write a riveting plot, you can probably recognize them easily in all the stories that you love. The next time you’re enjoying a story’s plot, try thinking about why you like it so much, and write down your thoughts. Recognizing the elements of a good story is half the journey to being able to write them yourself.

To sum all this up, you can write a riveting plot by:

1. Using your first chapters to create an emotional bond.

2. Using all your chapters to answer one question and bring up another.

3. Using your plot to force your characters to make impossible decisions.

4. Using your plot to gradually escalate conflict and danger.

As always, thanks so much for reading this article—I hope it has been helpful to you. Riveting plots are getting harder to come by these days, but it doesn’t have to be that way. You can use these tips to write the next fantastic, gripping story. I’m excited to see where your writing takes you!

Which one of these tips resonated the most with you? Are there any other ways you can think of to write a riveting plot?