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Greetings, fellow Kapeefers!
I need some help. 🙂
Lately when I’ve sat down to write I’ve realized that I have a bunch of amazing characters (& personality) ideas, but almost no plot. 😀 Do you guys have any tips or suggestions for how to come up with a great plot? What do you do if you have a lot of amazing characters you’re really excited to write about, but have barely any idea for an interesting plot?
Thank you!
Now to tag a few people… (Feel free to add your thoughts even if you weren’t tagged 🙂 )
@kate-flournoy @daeus @aratrea @ethryndal @dragon-snapper @jane-maree @brandon-miller
@graciegirl @winter-rose @hope@delightinlife Oh yeah. I totally get you on this.
What I did to fire up my plot was to find a problem among the story world and among the characters. What about the story world could allow for conflict. This character feels this way but the other feels this way.
So first, I’d try to work a bit on your world if you are lacking plot, then you can find where and how this action starts.
Or, you can take your characters bad side and pit them against each other. Make a villain.
Questions?☀ ☀ ☀ ENFP ☀ ☀ ☀
Hm, hm, hm… This can be tricky.
I’ll use my current WIP as an example. See, back when Prison was just a tiny whisper of an idea, I had my main character, Kara, wandering around a random, nameless city, on the run from a random, nameless group of government affiliated guards. Probably. See, a lot of the details were weakly tied together, and so, I struggled to get a plot together. It wasn’t until I twisted the details around a bit, threw my main character in prison and sent away her best friend, that the idea came together, and thus, my current work-in-progress was born.
The point? Sometimes, when you have frail characters and bare ideas, all you need to do is throw them together and see what happens. See how they react with each other. Are they friends? Enemies? Siblings? Rivals? The characters are the most important part of the story, in my opinion, and once you figure them out, the rest becomes a bit–not much, but a bit–easier.
Writer. Dreamer. Sometimes blogger. MBTI mess. Lover of Jesus and books.
Thank you! Yes, that makes sense. Right now one of the ideas I do have for the plot is to have a spy go to the kingdom in which the story takes place, in order to spy out the land to prepare for an attack.
I don’t really want betrayal or treachery in my story, but I need a place to go from there. I am really stuck on a couple questions, and was wondering if anyone here had an answer for them.
I love to write in kingdoms set in a world of my creation, with castles kings, and knights, but I do take things from the Middle Ages (like what they drank, ate, and some of the lifestyle, etc) and incorporate them into my stories. Right now I am stuck because one of my characters is a lord but I’m not entirely sure what kind of things he would do.
What kinds of problems did lords have to deal with in the Middle Ages?
Also, another one of my characters is the spy that comes to prepare for an attack to bring justice, but I have no idea what kinds of things a medieval spy would do. What kinds of things would he try to figure out about the kingdom? What would his first step be upon arriving there?
Does anyone have any suggestions or thoughts?
So that is kind of where I’m at right now, is trying to figure out an interesting plot that does not involve betrayal or treachery and that ties all the characters and their stories together, while making the story itself interesting. (As I like adventure and interesting plots! 🙂 )
Sounds to me like you need to worldbuild a bit. Build a government, build the landscape, build the people that operate within the government. Once you’ve done that, you can create characters that live inside that world, that government, and then you can create their ideals, their views, their beliefs…
I feel like @daeus or @aratrea would have more information on this… @delightinlife
Writer. Dreamer. Sometimes blogger. MBTI mess. Lover of Jesus and books.
@delightinlife Well, some lords would have to deal with the problems in their fief. Thieves, disputes, war, and everyday business of running a fief in general, such as selling the stuff that his serfs make, and divvying out his soldiers to the king’s army, and a myriad of other things. Since you have your own story world, you can be really creative with what he does. Maybe he loves gardening, but there is a drought. To what extent will he go to fix it? Maybe he can’t stand the way that the serfs dress, so he goes to great lengths to find them silk from the Orient.
So, I guess a spy would try to find out a king’s weaknesses, his plans (particularly in a war), how much gold there is, what the king plans to do next. Or maybe his boss wants some other information that the king for some reason wants to keep away from the people. How many children does he have, or why does he sleep during the day and stay awake at night??? (just brainstorming here. Feel free to use these ideas).
If I were this spy, the first thing I would do is actually show myself. Be disguised as a soldier or a merchant or something, and gain the inside trust. But if he’s into sneaking, I would immediately find out what I wanted to find out, and then get out. (and the word ‘out’ is suddenly overused).
Let me know if you need more help…I’d be happy to! 🙂
Oh, and @northerner , you know a bit about medieval stuff, don’t you?☀ ☀ ☀ ENFP ☀ ☀ ☀
@delightinlife, one of the best ways to start is by. . . reading! (What a surprise.) Sometimes it’s called research, but don’t let the name scare you. When you’re digging into sources for stuff you’re interested in, it becomes lots of fun. Medieval fantasy (fantasy in a world similar to the Middle Ages * of our own world) is a pretty common genre, with various levels of research. Some stick to a pretty generic “medievalish” world, while others go so deep they practically are historical fiction, only with different names for people and places. You get to choose how you fit in the spectrum.
May I say before I go any further that I like the fact that you’re looking for conflict that arises naturally from the character and setting.
So, do some reading. There’s a lot of medieval literature extant, from poetry (Dante, Chaucer, Marie de France, Christine de Pisan) to theology [Thomas Aquinas! Abelard (heretical, just so you know), Margery Kempe (a bit weird to the modern taste. . .)] to practical advice for everyday life (Christine again, and I’m sure there are others), to plays (don’t even think Shakespeare, think passion plays and miracle plays, like the one we get the Coventry carol from). . . and on and on. And loads of it has been translated into English, which is always nice. Get to know what people from your chosen time thought by reading what they wrote. *Good* secondary sources are nice too. The usual. The point of that is more to get the mood of the era. Was it youthful and idealistic and rushing off to Crusades? All doom and gloom and plague? Somewhere in between (usual)?
Knowing the names of things is also helpful. Find out what weapons they use and what clothes they wear and the houses they live in and things like that, and learn the names those things went by at the time (‘cotehardie’ is more specific than just ‘dress’, and specificity is good). That will make it easier while you’re writing, and you won’t have to stop so often to look little things up.
It all boils down to research.
The position of the spy is an interesting one. With the rules of chivalry and all, spies were officially frowned on, as being unsportsmanlike, but in practice were often used. (It is not impossible that some people refused to spy or use spies.) So that’s interesting right there.
The lord. This is fun. Society had several classes, and by the end of the Middle Ages, thanks to the plague, you could go up or down classes more easily. Not that it was impossible before, but it was harder. So lots of different classes could be called “lord”, ranging from a little lonely knight with one lance, one horse, one squire, and (if he’s lucky) one ice-cold lady to his name, to a man who has the ear of the Crown. Find out where this lord falls on the social scale. Find out how many different ranks exist in your time and place. (Guess what — research.) Don’t just trust anything you see on Pinterest.
What kind of problems might a lord have? Depends on whether he’s living in the path of the war, or in a comfy little valley no one’s ever heard of. Whether he’s happily or unhappily married. Whether he’s in danger of going bankrupt, called to attend (or send spears to) a king he really doesn’t like, needs an heir and doesn’t have one, has heirs plotting to do away with him, his farm having a bad crop or a totally failed one. . . he’s human, you know, and a lot of his day-to-day problems won’t have anything to do with his social status, they’ll be because of his sin nature and that of the people around him, because of the effects of the fall. He doesn’t have problems in isolation — voila, conflict!
What I think could be an interesting twist is if your spy is working for Person A, spying on Person B, but the more he spies on B the more he likes him and thinks he’s actually in the right. So by the end of the story he’s broken all ties with A, and is probably a hunted man, and entirely, and openly, on the side of B. It could be an awesome story of moving from a comfortable lie to an uncomfortable truth. See? No allegory needed, but an awesome theme right off the bat. (Now I want to write this. . . . And if the spy ends up working for B, who’s the lord we mentioned, and the lord doesn’t approve of spying on principle, and won’t compromise. . . oh dear me, such awesomeness (and now I have used a -ness suffix in public, and Hope and Daeus will be all over me).)
*variously defined. Some people say from 1066 to 1500. Others say from around 600 (the fall of Rome) to the Tudor era. It varies. But the 12th, 13th, 14th, and usually 15th centuries ( 1100s, 1200s, 1300s, and 1400s) are just about guaranteed fair game.
You will draw water joyfully from the springs of salvation. (Isaiah 12:3)
@Dragon-snapper, I seem to be getting a reputation. Well, I like to help, if I can, and this is my geek. I may not be a dragon, but I can be that side character who has to be dug out of the stacks in the Royal Library whenever a character needs something.
Which is probably good, because dragons do occasionally get killed accidentally on purpose, whereas no one ever notices the librarian.
You will draw water joyfully from the springs of salvation. (Isaiah 12:3)
@northerner
Yeah. I have to watch my back at times. There’s a reason I melt chairs. 😛☀ ☀ ☀ ENFP ☀ ☀ ☀
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@delightinlife I didn’t read though everything, but I do have a thing or two to say.
Plot is all about goals. Plot and conflict is born when your two main characters, your protagonist and antagonist/villain, both want something. As it turns out these goals are in opposition. The two characters will clash because they are reaching for opposing things.
Say your MC’s goal is to stay alive. It’s not really a complicated goal. However, he witnesses something that the government doesn’t want the world to know about. Therefore, the gov is going to try to kill him. Both parties have a goal, but both goals can’t both be reached. Only one goal can survive in the end.
Goals can change throughout your story too. Say the MC starts to realize life isn’t all merely about survival and that what he witnessed is something the public needs to hear about. His goal is going to shift from just surviving to trying to tell the world what he’s seen. The plot will change as a result. The government is still trying to kill him, but they have to make sure they destroy all the rumors he’s spreading and dissuade the followers he’s gathering around him.
And then you can throw in all the side character’s goals as well to make it more complicated. Say the MC’s mother wants to bring him home to say goodbye to his dying father, so she tries to hunt him down. The gov is tracking her however, so the MC has to run away from her too, leaving a break in their relationship. Now he’s not only tormented that he can’t say goodbye to his dying father, but now he’s completely alienated his mother. Say an evil assassin, a minion of the gov, wants nothing more than to see the Grand Canyon but doesn’t know how to get there and the MC does. The assassin might form a strained mutual agreement with the MC in order to reach the Grand Canyon.
That was all really random, but I think you get the picture. 🙂
Anyway that’s a whole lecture you probably didn’t want. XD In summary, goals are important. XD
@that_writer_girl_99 Thank you for your suggestions!
@winter-rose Thank you Gabrielle! I actually was more stuck on the two questions I mentioned to Northerner and Dragon Snapper in relation to the plot. I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts! 🙂 Goals are super important!
@dragon-snapper Thank you! Yes, I think I want the spy to make himself known in disguise, and I appreciate the suggestions!
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@delightinlife XD Yeah I was thinking your problem might be something else. Oh well. I fear I don’t know a lot about Lords and kingdoms. XD Good luck with your brainstorming!
@northener Wow, thank you so much! That was really helpful and really got me excited to start writing!
Actually, I love reading (primarily historical fiction.) I have done a lot of research online, and have documents with links and pictures for different aspects of the Middle Ages (such as castles, heraldry\knights, medieval life, etc) I have certain websites I go to that I like and don’t actually use Pinterest for writing. 😀 I’ve realized that the last few days I need to do more writing and less research. 🙂 That’s when realized that I was stuck on those two specific questions, as well as figuring out the plot and conflict in general.
Hmm, the spy idea sounds interesting! Thank you for your suggestions. I really appreciate it and it has made me more excited about writing! If I have more questions I will defiantly ask you & @dragon-snapper for ideas!
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