Plot Help?

Hello Ryanna!

It’s great that you’ve planned out quite a bit of your story! Just a thought I have that I’ve seen mentioned on here, is to flip the cliche. Figure out what is expected to happen (in a certain situation, or in the plot in general) and then do the opposite.

Here is an article that Kingdom’s Pen wrote about ways to bend cliches (cliches was actually the monthly topic for March. If you type in “cliches” in the search term, a whole bunch of articles will come up that might be helpful. 🙂 )

Twenty-Seven Examples of Ways to Bend Clichés

Hopefully that helped a little. 🙂 Let me tag a few people who might be able to offer some advice.

@kate-flournoy @daeus @hope @aratrea @winter-rose

• This reply was modified 7 years, 2 months ago by DelightInLife.

@ryanna While I’m no expert, I would be happy to help! What exactly is chiche about your plot?

I’m gonna tag @daughteroftheking because she’s pretty good at thinking out-of-the-box ideas. 😉

@ryanna I wouldn’t be the one to say whether or not that is cliche. However, the one thing I do notice is that you haven’t described to me a plot. You’ve only described to me a setting.

What’s most important for stories that have unusual settings is that those setting have thematic purpose. What advantage does having intelligent animals on the island give you over having intelligent humans? Perhaps your story could explore what it means to be human. Or perhaps the animals could represent what man can descend into when he — well, begins to act on animal instincts. Or perhaps the animals want to become human. I don’t know. There are a lot of options.

Here are some questions to think about that might help you.

What is the animal’s great spiritural desire?
What is the animal’s great physical desire?
What social structure exists on the island?
What conflicts existed on the island before the humans arrived there?
What is the relationship between the two humans and how does that relationship need to develop? Is there something about their relationship that this island is specially suited to fix (or inflame)?
What ghosts do your characters have in their past?

Also, do you have a specific theme in mind for this story?

@princessfoo *blushes* Thank you! @ryanna Actually, that sounds quite original to me. I think whether your story is considered cliché hangs on your plot. My advice would be to track down the clichés in books that have intelligent animals. I haven’t read a lot like that, but the clichés that come to me first are: one group of animals is automatically evil, becouse they seem evil in real life. Sure, I would never trust a snake with my wallet, but does that mean a group of snakes are all evil? Of course not. Lions shouldn’t automatically be rulers, either. 😛 Find out what your readers are expecting, and turn it on its head. Give it a bit a real-ness, and don’t make the animals do things that are contrary to their nature (for instance, wolves hunt in packs and have a hierarchy of who’s the Alpha and who’s the Omega. If you change that, your readers will get all confused.), but have fun! I’m sorry if this is really obvious stuff that you already knew. *shrugs* You’ve got a good idea, keep it up!

Hmmm – I feel kinda compelled to mention that once again you are describing a setting and not a plot. But, besides that, I feel like a good way to twist your story would be to find out that there are people somewhere on the island. Nothing to spoil and untouched island like poeple, right?