Plots and Plotting
Okay, so if you were here for Part 1 of this little series, you’ll remember that we laid the foundation. We talked about the eight elements that make a plot actually work – character, goal, conflictConflict is the struggle a character goes through in pursuit of a goal. It's what makes it harder for her to accomplish a task or make a decision in the novel. It's at the core of every scene and what has to be overcome for the character to achieve her goal. It can be both external (a plot conflict) or internal (a character arc conflict). Basically, conflict is what makes things emotionally harder for the protagonist to make choices that affect the plot of the novel. The opposition driving the entire plot of a story and presenting obstacles to the protagonist on a macro and micro level., stakes, cause and effect, rising action, climax, and resolution. We talked about how plot is character in action, how a goal is the engine, how stakes are the reason we care. If you missed that one, go read it first, because I’m going to assume you’ve got the ingredients on the counter. This post is the cooking part. This is where we get our hands dirty.
And I want to warn you right now, the title isn’t a joke. We are going into the nitty-gritty. We’re going to talk about beat sheets and story engines and outlines and the eternal war between the architects and the gardeners. We’re going to talk about why some scenes feel inevitable and some feel random. We’re going to talk about subplots and the dreaded “and then” syndrome. And along the way, I’m going to share the plotting habits that pulled me out of a writing slump, because I think if they work for me they can work for you too.
Grab a coffee or tea. This is a long one. And it’s good stuff.
A little history: How we learned to plan the unplannable
Before we dig into technique, let me set the scene, because the history of plotting as a discipline is genuinely fascinating, and it explains a lot of the arguing you see online about whether outlines are a blessing or a crime.
It all goes back, as most things in story craft do, to Aristotle. In the Poetics, he basically invented the idea that a plot should be engineered – that events should connect through necessity and probability, that there’s a right way to assemble a story’s parts. That was revolutionary because before Aristotle, people just… told stories, in spoken words to others. He turned it into a craft with principles.
Then, in 1863, Gustav Freytag came along with his pyramid, and for the first time people had a diagram of a plot. Exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. You could draw it on a blackboard. That was a huge deal. It meant storytelling could be taught in a systematic way, and for the next hundred years, that pyramid pretty much ruled the world of dramatic writing.
But the modern plotting renaissance – the stuff you actually see people arguing about on Twitter at two in the morning – really starts in Hollywood in the 1970s. In 1979, a script consultant named Syd Field published Screenplay, which introduced the three-act structure to the masses and gave us the phrase “plot point.” It was a revelation. Suddenly screenwriters had a shared vocabulary. A few decades later, Blake Snyder published Save the Cat in 2005, and gave us the now-legendary fifteen-beat beat sheet. And around the same time, all these other systems were blossoming: Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, which George Lucas practically built Star Wars on, John Truby’s Anatomy of Story, Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid – a whole library of maps, each promising the same thing: a reliable way to build a story that works.
Meanwhile, and here’s the fun part, a counter-movement was rising. Discovery writers – the people who write to find out what happens – were pushing back. They argued that over-planning killed the mystery, the spark, the thing that makes fiction feel alive. And so the great divide was born: the plotters versus the pantsers. The architects and the gardeners.
I want to spend a minute on that divide, because I think it’s the most misunderstood argument in all of writing craft, and it’s costing people real time and real joy.
The Architects and the Gardeners
George R.R. Martin – who has spent twenty-five years caught between these two instincts, bless him – put it better than anyone ever has. He said there are two kinds of writers. The architects (also known as ‘plotters’) plan everything in advance, draw up the blueprints, know where every wall goes before they pour the foundation. And then there are the gardeners (also known as ‘pantsers’), who plant a seed and water it, who know roughly what they’ve planted but have no idea how many branches it’s going to sprout or exactly where it’s going to wander.
Here’s the thing that drives me crazy about this debate: it’s almost always framed as a personality test. Are you a plotter or a pantser? Pick a side, that’s who you are forever. But that framing is wrong. Plotting isn’t an identity – it’s a toolkit. And here’s the secret nobody tells you: almost every successful writer uses both, just in different proportions at different stages of their project.
I used to be a gardener. I’d open a blank page with nothing but an idea and a first sentence, and I’d write and write and write, and usually around page eighty the whole thing would collapse like a souffle taken out of the oven too soon, because I had no idea where I was going and I’d wandered so far off the path I couldn’t find my way back to anything. And, like most people do, I blamed my tools. I told myself I was “just not an outliner.” Then one day, out of sheer desperation, I spent an afternoon scribbling a bare-bones chapter-by-chapter outlineAn outline is a map of all the events that make up your story. An outline is usually done before the first draft so the writer can map out all the structure points and identify any weak spots – not a detailed map, just a rough itinerary or a list of things that were going to happen and when they’d happen, like “things get worse here, big revelation here, disaster here” – and that draft finished itself. Nothing magical. I just finally had a shape to hold on to.
The moral of that story isn’t “outlines fix everything.” It’s that plotting and pantsing are on a spectrum, and the trick is figuring out how much structure you personally need to stay alive without suffocating. Some writers need a full blueprint. Some writers need a compass. Some writers just need to be pointed in a direction and left alone. All of those are legitimate. The goal isn’t to be a good plotter. The goal is to finish a story you’re proud of, and to enjoy the process enough to do it again.
The nitty-gritty: Tools you can actually use today
Alright. Enough philosophy. Let me hand you the actual tools. These are the ones that changed my practice, and I’ve ordered them roughly from big-picture to micro-level.
Tool one: The story engine
Here’s a concept I wish somebody had handed me on day one: the story engine. It’s the three-part machine that produces forward motion in almost every successful plot – a concrete goal, an opposing force that’s structurally at odds with that goal, and an urgency that explains why the character has to act now rather than later. Goal. Opposition. Urgency. That’s the whole engine!
What I love about thinking in terms of an engine is that it works for both architects and gardeners. If you’re an outliner, the engine is the first thing you write down, and everything else hangs off it. If you’re a discovery writer, the engine is the invisible wind pushing you along – you don’t need to plan the beats, you just need the engine running, and the story will unfold inside it and find its own conclusion. I’ve seen this described as the difference between plotting a road trip mile by mile versus just filling the tank and knowing your destination is west. Both work. Neither works without fuel.
Tool two: The “Therefore / But” test
This one is deceptively simple, and it might be the single most useful plotting trick I’ve ever learned. It comes from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the South Park guys, of all people. In a commencement speech at NYU, they explained how they develop a story: you write out the beats, and you connect them with “and then.” “This happens, and then this happens, and then this happens.” And they said – I’m paraphrasing, but this is basically verbatim in spirit – that is how you lose an audience. “And then” is random. “And then” is a list.
Instead, they connect their beats with “therefore” and “but.” This happens, therefore this happens, but that gets in the way, therefore this, but that. Now you’ve got a chain. Now every event grows out of the last one and trips over the next one. Now you’ve got a plot, and not a sequence of unrelated incidents wearing a plot’s coat.
Let me show you what this looks like in the wild. Take Finding Nemo. Marlin loses his son, therefore he swims across the entire Pacific Ocean to find him. But Marlin is a neurotic, terrified clownfish who is afraid of absolutely everything, so the journey terrifies him at every step. Therefore he has to learn to trust the world and other people. But the ocean keeps throwing obstacles in his path – sharks, jellyfish, a whale with digestive issues – each one worse than the last. Therefore he arrives at the dentist’s office just in time, and he’s a different fish than the one who left.
See how that works? Every beat is the result of the one before it and the cause of the one after it. That’s causality doing its job at the scene level. I literally run my chapter transitions through this test now. If I can’t connect two chapters with a “therefore” or a “but,” I know something’s missing.
Tool three: Scene and sequel
Now we’re getting into the atomic level of plotting. There’s a technique that’s been around in the craft world since Dwight V. Swain wrote Techniques of the Selling Writer back in 1965, and it’s still the best description of how to structure a single unit of story. Swain divided story units into two types: scenes and sequels.
A scene is a unit of conflictConflict is the struggle a character goes through in pursuit of a goal. It's what makes it harder for her to accomplish a task or make a decision in the novel. It's at the core of every scene and what has to be overcome for the character to achieve her goal. It can be both external (a plot conflict) or internal (a character arc conflict). Basically, conflict is what makes things emotionally harder for the protagonist to make choices that affect the plot of the novel. The opposition driving the entire plot of a story and presenting obstacles to the protagonist on a macro and micro level.. It has three parts: a goal, a conflictConflict is the struggle a character goes through in pursuit of a goal. It's what makes it harder for her to accomplish a task or make a decision in the novel. It's at the core of every scene and what has to be overcome for the character to achieve her goal. It can be both external (a plot conflict) or internal (a character arc conflict). Basically, conflict is what makes things emotionally harder for the protagonist to make choices that affect the plot of the novel. The opposition driving the entire plot of a story and presenting obstacles to the protagonist on a macro and micro level., and a disaster. The character enters the scene wanting something, bumps against opposition, and leaves the scene worse off than they came in. Not necessarily catastrophically worse – but the scene ends with a failure or a complication.
A sequel is the emotional and intellectual processing that comes after the scene. It also has three parts: reaction, dilemma, and decision. The character reacts to what just happened, they face a choice, and they make a decision – which sets up the goal for the next scene. Scene, sequel, scene, sequel. Goal, conflictConflict is the struggle a character goes through in pursuit of a goal. It's what makes it harder for her to accomplish a task or make a decision in the novel. It's at the core of every scene and what has to be overcome for the character to achieve her goal. It can be both external (a plot conflict) or internal (a character arc conflict). Basically, conflict is what makes things emotionally harder for the protagonist to make choices that affect the plot of the novel. The opposition driving the entire plot of a story and presenting obstacles to the protagonist on a macro and micro level., disaster. Reaction, dilemma, decision. It’s a perpetual motion machine, and it is impossible to write a flabby, directionless section of story if you’re honestly following this structure, because every scene ends by forcing a new decision, and every decision launches the next scene.
I remember the first time I read about this, I laughed, because it’s so mechanical and so right. Half my problems as a writer came from scenes that were scenes, then more scenes, then more scenes – all conflictConflict is the struggle a character goes through in pursuit of a goal. It's what makes it harder for her to accomplish a task or make a decision in the novel. It's at the core of every scene and what has to be overcome for the character to achieve her goal. It can be both external (a plot conflict) or internal (a character arc conflict). Basically, conflict is what makes things emotionally harder for the protagonist to make choices that affect the plot of the novel. The opposition driving the entire plot of a story and presenting obstacles to the protagonist on a macro and micro level., no processing, no decisions, so the story was just a treadmill of disaster after disaster with no engine steering it. The sequel is the steering. Don’t skip it.
Tool four: Beat sheets (without becoming their prisoner)
Let me talk about beat sheets, because they’re the most famous plotting tool in the world and they deserve a fair shake. A beat sheet is essentially a map of where significant moments should fall in your story. Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat is the most famous – fifteen beats spread across a hundred-and-ten-page screenplay, from the Opening Image to the Final Image, with the Catalyst, the Midpoint, All Is Lost, and the Dark Night of the Soul in between. There are also beat sheets for the hero’s journey, for the three-act structure, for romance, for mystery. You can’t swing a dead cat – sorry, Blake – without hitting one.
Here’s my honest advice about beat sheets: use them like you’d use a recipe the first time you make a dish, not like you’d use a law. They’re a starting point. The first time you plot a novel, having a skeleton of beats to hang your scenes on is genuinely invaluable – it shows you where the story needs a punch, where it needs a lull, where it needs the rug pulled. But the moment you find yourself moving a scene just because the beat sheet says the midpoint should be here, or cramming in a “fun and games” section you don’t need, you’ve crossed the line from using the tool to being used by it.
The way I think about it now: beat sheets are training wheels. They teach you where the weight of a story should sit. But the goal is eventually to ride without them – to feel where your story needs its turning points because you understand your characters and your engine, not because a spreadsheet told you to.
Tool five: Subplots and the second train track
A plot with only one thread is like a song with only a melody and no harmony. It works, technically. But it never gets that depth, that richness, that makes you want to live inside it. That’s what subplots are for.
The trick to a good subplot – and this is the part people get wrong – is that it can’t be a detour. A subplot that just sits alongside the main plot, unrelated, is not a subplot, it’s filler. A proper subplot interacts with the main plot. It complicates it. It echoes its themes. It creates complications that spill over into the main story. Think of the romance in Casablanca. It’s not a side quest – Rick’s love for Ilsa is the thing standing between him and the mission, between his cynicism and his redemption. The romance and the plot are one machine.
Here’s the practical advice: when you plan a subplot, ask yourself what it’s doing to the main plot. If the answer is “nothing,” you’ve either got a subplot that needs to be woven in tighter, or a subplot that needs to be cut. A story isn’t a collection of tracks; it’s a web.
Tool six: The reverse outline
This is the tool I recommend to literally everyone who’s stuck, because it works no matter which camp you’re in. The reverse outlineAn outline is a map of all the events that make up your story. An outline is usually done before the first draft so the writer can map out all the structure points and identify any weak spots is exactly what it sounds like: instead of outlining before you write, you outlineAn outline is a map of all the events that make up your story. An outline is usually done before the first draft so the writer can map out all the structure points and identify any weak spots after. You take your finished draft – or your half-finished draft, or your giant messy lump of a draft – and you write a short summary of every chapter. Two or three sentences each. “Chapter seven: they get to the city, meet the smuggler, he betrays them.”
And then you step back and look at the outlineAn outline is a map of all the events that make up your story. An outline is usually done before the first draft so the writer can map out all the structure points and identify any weak spots you just made. And suddenly all your problems are laid out on the table where you can see them. You’ll notice that chapters three and fourteen do the exact same thing. You’ll notice that nothing happens for five chapters in the middle. You’ll notice the subplot that just… vanishes. You’ll notice where the causal chain snapped. It’s like putting a broken machine on a workbench. You can’t fix something you can’t see, and the reverse outlineAn outline is a map of all the events that make up your story. An outline is usually done before the first draft so the writer can map out all the structure points and identify any weak spots shows you everything.
I can’t count how many writers I’ve talked to who told me their book was broken and didn’t know why, and the reverse outlineAn outline is a map of all the events that make up your story. An outline is usually done before the first draft so the writer can map out all the structure points and identify any weak spots showed them in twenty minutes. It’s the closest thing to magic this craft has.
Tool seven: The skeleton first
Finally, a small structural habit that saves me every single time. Before I write or outlineAn outline is a map of all the events that make up your story. An outline is usually done before the first draft so the writer can map out all the structure points and identify any weak spots anything in detail, I put up a skeleton – just the big turning points, written as a handful of sentences. Plot point one, where the story really starts. The midpoint, where everything changes direction. The dark moment, where all seems lost. The climax. The resolution. That’s it. Five or six bones on a board.
Then – and this is the part that matters – I let the story grow around those bones, and I allow the bones to move. The skeleton isn’t a commitment; it’s a spine. If the story needs the midpoint to happen earlier or later, I move it. If a character wants to do something that blows up my plan entirely, I let them, and I rearrange the bones around their new path. The skeleton is scaffolding, and scaffolding exists to be adjusted.
Guidelines: How to make all this work in real life
Okay, let me distil all of that into a set of practical guidelines you can actually apply. Some of these are going to feel like they contradict each other. Good. Plotting is a tension, not a formula.
- Decide how much structure you need – and be honest. If you’re a gardener, don’t force a blueprint. If you’re an architect, don’t force chaos. Start where you naturally lean, and steal techniques from the other side when you’re stuck.
- Write the engine before you write the story. Goal, opposition, urgency. One sentence each. If you can’t do it, you’re not ready to plot – you’re ready to think harder.
- Run your transitions through the “therefore / but” test. Every chapter should hang off the last one. If you find yourself reaching for “and then,” stop and find the missing link.
- Alternate scene and sequel. ConflictConflict is the struggle a character goes through in pursuit of a goal. It's what makes it harder for her to accomplish a task or make a decision in the novel. It's at the core of every scene and what has to be overcome for the character to achieve her goal. It can be both external (a plot conflict) or internal (a character arc conflict). Basically, conflict is what makes things emotionally harder for the protagonist to make choices that affect the plot of the novel. The opposition driving the entire plot of a story and presenting obstacles to the protagonist on a macro and micro level., then processing, then a decision that launches new conflictConflict is the struggle a character goes through in pursuit of a goal. It's what makes it harder for her to accomplish a task or make a decision in the novel. It's at the core of every scene and what has to be overcome for the character to achieve her goal. It can be both external (a plot conflict) or internal (a character arc conflict). Basically, conflict is what makes things emotionally harder for the protagonist to make choices that affect the plot of the novel. The opposition driving the entire plot of a story and presenting obstacles to the protagonist on a macro and micro level.. The machine never stops moving.
- Let your subplots earn their place. If a thread doesn’t complicate the main plot or deepen the themeTheme is the unifying idea of a story, tying everything together. It gives larger meaning to the events and people in the novel. An idea or point at the heart of a story. A theme can be exemplified by the actions, utterances, or thoughts of a character in a novel., cut it or weave it tighter. There is no in-between.
- Reverse-outline anything that’s not working. Don’t guess at the problem. See it.
- Use a skeleton, not a straitjacket. Lock in the five or six big turning points, and let everything else be fluid.
- When in doubt, escalate. If you’re bored, your reader is bored. Raise the stakes, complicate the goal, make it personal.
- Re-plot after you finish your draft. The draft will have wandered. That’s fine. Now you know what the story actually is – use that knowledge to make the second draft sing.
Five common mistakes to avoid
And because every craft post needs its warning labels, here are the five plotting sins I see over and over, in my own work and everyone else’s:
- The over-outlined tomb. Planning every single scene in advance until there’s no mystery left, no room for the characters to surprise you, and the actual writing feels like transcription of a document you already hate. If your outlineAn outline is a map of all the events that make up your story. An outline is usually done before the first draft so the writer can map out all the structure points and identify any weak spots bores you, your book will bore everyone.
- The pantsed-into-a-corner disaster. The opposite sin – no plan at all, writing blindly until you hit a wall you can’t climb, and abandoning the project in despair. The fix isn’t more faith; it’s a skeleton.
- “And then” syndrome. Events that don’t cause each other. Random obstacles. The reader feels it as “stuff keeps happening but I don’t know why I should care.”
- The plot that’s busy but empty. Lots of running, lots of explosions, zero emotional weight. A plot without stakes and a protagonist we care about is just noise. (I feel like we’ve said this in every post in this series, and I will say it in every post, because it is the most common failure in all of fiction.)
- The vanishing subplot. A thread that gets introduced with fanfare and then disappears for two hundred pages. Readers remember. They will hunt you down.
Five key takeaways
If you remember nothing else from this whole rambling post, remember these five:
- Plotting and pantsing are a spectrum, not a personality test. Use whatever mix finishes your book.
- The story engine – goal, opposition, urgency – is the fuel, and it works for both camps.
- “Therefore” and “but” create causality; “and then” creates a list. Choose your connectors carefully.
- Scene and sequel is the atom of plot: conflictConflict is the struggle a character goes through in pursuit of a goal. It's what makes it harder for her to accomplish a task or make a decision in the novel. It's at the core of every scene and what has to be overcome for the character to achieve her goal. It can be both external (a plot conflict) or internal (a character arc conflict). Basically, conflict is what makes things emotionally harder for the protagonist to make choices that affect the plot of the novel. The opposition driving the entire plot of a story and presenting obstacles to the protagonist on a macro and micro level., disaster, reaction, dilemma, decision. Build your chapters out of that rhythm.
- Your outlineAn outline is a map of all the events that make up your story. An outline is usually done before the first draft so the writer can map out all the structure points and identify any weak spots is a tool you own, not a master you serve. The skeleton exists to move.
Wrapping up
So there it is. The nitty-gritty. Story engines and beat sheets, scenes and sequels, reverse outlines and subplots, and the eternal, unresolvable, wonderful argument between the people who map and the people who wander.
Here’s what I hope you take from all of this, more than any single technique: plotting is not a talent you’re born with. It’s a set of skills, and skills can be learned. You don’t have to be a natural architect. You don’t have to be a fearless gardener. You just have to be willing to try tools until you find the ones that fit your hands, and to treat every draft as practice rather than judgement.
If you’re stuck on a project right now, do me a favour. Reverse-outline it. Or write your engine in three sentences. Or run your last five chapter transitions through the “therefore / but” test. Ten minutes of that will tell you more about what’s wrong than a month of staring at the ceiling wondering why it’s not working.
And when you’ve done that, come back for Part 3, because next time we’re going to talk about the shapes – the different kinds of plot, from revenge to romance to the heist, and how to pick the architecture that actually serves the story you’re trying to tell. It’s a good one, I promise.
Until then: keep the engine running, keep your causal chain intact, and for heaven’s sake, let your characters surprise you sometimes. They usually know where the story’s going better than you do.