Plotting for Clowns: A Class Distilled Into an Essay for Your Nerves (Patreon)

Hullo, you beautiful powerful narwhals.

What time of year is it? What time of day is it? What’s happening outside?

WHO KNOWS WHO CARES TIME IS A FLAT TIRE EXISTENCE IS MEANINGLESS SPRING IS A LIE.

I went into the city for supplies this week. I got a coffee at a coffee bar in the grocery store. Not espresso, I guess espresso is a plague vector? But coffee in a plastic cup with a fancy lid like they used to give you in the Before Times. I cried at the counter. The world is stuck in an early 2010s YA novel. In the Before Times, before the Big Sick, we used to stand in lines of humans stretching back like ribbons of pure life, just to get a cup of coffee we could easily have made ourselves at home, and if it took too long, we got annoyed and complained to our phones. What’s coffee, you ask? Nothing. Just a word. Just a memory of calm and unbothered supply chains. Pass me the Deeproot Brew, my child. I will sing you the songs of a dead world ruled by a furious canteloupe man…

ANYWAY.

I have tried to escape into fiction, into the worlds in my head, with some success, though setting anything in 2020 is RIGHT THE EFF OUT at the moment. I made a girl go to an estate sale, humming along with my rare contemporary present-day fiction, before pulling up and going OH NO YOU DON’T. WEAR A MASK, JOHANNA. GO HOME. And then taking the cheapest and most optimistic of all shortcuts…quitely deleting 2020 and typing 2021…hmmm…actually…2022. But much like the 2016 existential cataclysm, fiction is sometimes difficult to use as a shield against the real world. You stare at the empty page, that great equalizer, and it dares you to say anything valuable at all when the basement of the soul is on fire. It can feel purposeless, unmoored, even arrogant, a single skinny-ribbed motherless raccoon’s cry in the trashdark against something too big for stories.

Nah.

Nothing’s too big for stories.

The folks at Clarion know that, too. They have offered a huge range of free classes during the quarantine, taught by all manner of brilliant people and also me. When they inquired if I’d like to teach and what, I asked if there was a gap in their roster, anything they wanted covered that no one else was offering. They said that students were always asking for more classes on plotting, and would I care to do that.

HA HA HA HA.

HA HA.

HA.

It is to laugh. It is to laugh because ain’t nobody in the history of literature gone to Cat V. for advice on plotting. On a good day, I’m rubbish at it. On a bad day, let’s not even speak its name. 

The problem is, any formal training at all I ever had in “creative writing” was as a poet. I blundered into novels via, let’s not be coy, writing a 200 page poem and taking the margins out then going TA DA like an excited Animal Crossing Villager who’s just dying to give you the rusty can they found on the beach. I learned fiction writing as I went. In public. In full view of everyone. Over the course of 18 years. I faked it til I made it. But even now, the plot part is the hardest for me. JUST LOOK AMAZING AND SAY MY PRETTY WORDS WHY DO WE HAVE TO DO THINGS? DOING THINGS IS SO GAUCHE, SO PASSE, SO UN-MODERN. 

But then, I thought to myselfs, I thought, maybe I am the right person to talk to students about this, precisely because I have always found it so hard, precisely because over the course of my career I have had to develop hacks and cheatcodes to short-circuit my own shortcomings and stubborn trashbrain instincts. Unlike someone for whom plot comes naturally, I have had to work like a dog for everything I know now, if indeed, I know anything now.

And you know, I put in those little disclaimers about what I do and do not know because literally every time I write a book there are weeks where I feel like I am a prize fucking idiot and don’t know how to do this at all, where I believe in an empty White Claw can more than I believe in myself, and I can’t take my own pretty damned good advice, advice I ampaid to give to others, to save my life. 

And the White Claw is grapefruit flavor. Blugh.

The class is finished now, and I thought that, since it filled up faster than a bar the day quarantine ends, and a lot of people didn’t manage to get a space—hell, it was so quick I didn’t even get a chance to post the link before it was full up—I would consolidate the lecture portion (there was a practicum section as part of the multi-day course which is naturally not essayable) of it into an essay for you guys, so that you can have the Not At All Patented Cat Valente Konami Code Plot Cheat Guide on hand should you ever need it.

ALLONS-Y, ALONSO!

So here is the pretty much literal Cliff’s Notes version of Plotting for Clowns: How to Create a Plot Out of Nothing When You Have No Idea What Youre Doing and Seem As If You Were In Control the Whole Time.

Minus Cliff. Fucking Cliff. Never does his part of the group project. YOU ARE NOT INVITED TO THE FRIDAY MACARONI GRILL LUNCH PARTY WITH US, CLIFF.

A whole lot of people discuss “plot” and “plotting” as though it is synonymous with “writing” and “storytelling” but it’s really not true. Or it doesn’t have to be. That’s like thinking that hiking and geographical surveying are the same thing. Yes, both involve walking in the woods, but you wouldn’t assume crunchybeard way-too-hydrated Trevor can lead your cutting edge geoscience team just because he makes his own trail mix with way too much carob.

Writers come to fiction with all kinds of strengths, and if you feel uncertain with managing the twists and turns of what actually happens in a story, that’s okay. It doesn’t make you a bad writer, and it certainly doesn’t make you not a writer at all. Lanugage, worldbuilding, character, dialogue, mood and tone, structure, all of these are aspects of literature that move people to want to create stories, and they are all legit skills that some writers who excel at plot struggle with as much as any brainy awkward booknerd kid trying to hit a ball with a bat. Hell, when I started out, I could basically do three things well: make the words pretty, make the feelings go, and write really fucking fast. Everything else I had to grind for like XP in a really un-intuitive RPG. 

And what do we do when we are bad at games and want to play them anyway?

WE CHEAT!

So here are some ways I have learned to cheat the plot while showing off my pretty words and big feels and weird characters and worlds of horror and wonder over the years.

This is the easiest one: if you can’t plot good, just steal someone else’s.

There’s no shame in that! Shakespeare fucking copied off of every story he ever met, and then stole their lunch money, too. There really are only so many plots, in terms of the bare-bones A-B-C of what physically happens in a story. It’s everything else that makes books so different, the way it’s told, the point of view, the insights offered, the style, the world where it takes place, the ideas presented, the macguffins, the character moments. There’s like 15 flavors of cake, only 2 of which anyone uses on the regular, but there’s infinite ways to ice that bad boy, and that’s the stuff everyone is always oohing and ahhing about.

So retell a fairy tale. Worked for me. And Jane Yolen. And Robiin McKinley. And kind of literally everyone. Retell a historical event with dragons in. Worked a treat for George Martin and Naomi Novik. Take a traditional narrative shape like the hero’s journey or The Canterbury Tales or hell, Arabian Nights, and twist it in some fashion that makes it feel new. Star Wars and Hyperion and The Orphan’s Tales can’t get mad at you over it. 

These re-skins of old tales and ways of telling them work because well, they worked before. Fairy tales have been told and retold and edited and re-edited until they are honed to a fine point of human psychology. We’ve all been raised on these narrative and we intuitively understand them. So when we encounter re-imaginings of them, not only do we feel the warm cozies of familiarity and recognition, we feel excitement when the twists and subversions come, we feel that VERY special sensation of being part of a smarty-pants club where we all get the same jokes. It’s fucking effective and it probably always will be, even if fairy tale retellings themselves tend to come in and out of fashion every decade or so. When I was first figuring out how to write short stories, I retold fairy tales a lot, not only because I loved them, but also because they sort of handled the plot in the background while I worked on other skills until I felt I could take over and mess with the happenings of the narrative.

So interact with the cliches and expectations of your genre and fuck them right up. The most basic-ass plot of a chosen one in a magical world going out to fight a dark lord and become king becomes totally innovative by simply including a little goddamn representation and making that chosen one anything but a white straight cis farm boy. Give that story a lot of swears and unxpected deaths and you get Game of Thrones. Give it libertarian screeds and a bunch of BDSM and you get Sword of Truth. Give it a funky frame narrative and an unreliable narrator and you have Name of the Wind. Even if the plot is absolutely the same up until your inversion or skewing of it, really very few people care. The skew is the exciting part.

Consider the core questions of each of the big tent genres of speculative fiction: science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Now, I’m not saying these are the only things that get discussed and address in SF/F/H, but I do think most representatives of those genres interface with these queries sooner or later and in some form or another. Probably The Question of speculative fiction in general is What If? But each flavor tends to drift toward a specific iteration of that. Loosely speaking, I would propose that fantasy asks Who’s King? (Or more broadly, who rules, who is in power, how political/social power was lost and how can it be regained) science fiction asks What Does This Button Do? (How does this technology, socio-economic, political, or cultural development affect society and the people in it) and horror asks What Happens When We Die? (How are people affected and how to they respond to the intrustion of the supernatural onto their world and what is the nature of the supernatural?) 

Constructing a fantasy novel around the question of What Happens When We Die is a fundamentally interesting concept, as fantasy typically takes place in a folkloric imagined past or entirely secondary world, and magic or the mythical (as opposed to supernatural) tends to stand in for answers to a lot of existential questions that plague humans living in a non-magical universe. Contructing a horror novel around the question of Who’s King or a science fiction novel around issues relating to death when the afterlife cannot currently be quantified in a scientific way is equally compelling. All of these combinations have their examples, but would still stand out on the shelves.

If you don’t feel confident with the huge, overarching plot structures of a full-length novel, keep in mind that 12-15 short stories lined up in a row are called “chapters.” This is David Mitchell’s trick. The majority of his novels are unrelated short stories that turn out to be related by some speculative element revealed in the final chapter. It’s a good trick. You only need the one good trick. The Orphan’s Tales is pretty much the same trick, with added recursive frame narratives.

Use tricks. Tricks are good. Tricks are fun.

And hey, if you really get into a plot snarl, don’t be afraid to kill everyone all the time. This is literally what made Game of Thrones a phenomenon. It’s Joss Whedon’s favorite toy. Kill off a character, the plot has definitely done been broughten. It heightens tension and provokes and emotional response. It sets up inevitable consequences for everyone else—how was this death accomplished, who will suffer for it, who will profit from it, who will inherit, who will seek punishment, how will those close to the dead move on, etc etc. It doesn’t have to be death, but sudden, explosive developments, sometimes literal explosions, tend to torque a boring plot into something everyone pays attention to so WHY THE EFF NOT KILL EM ALL. Plus, a murder mystery is a super stable foundation to build other plots on in any genre. That’s all The City and the City is. A murder mystery with one INTENSELY cool piece of worldbuilding tacked on.

And quite frankly, the most successful books of the last 25 years are ones that take a familiar element or story and twist it in one or two important ways. More than that and people start to feel like you think you’re better than them and they get upset. But one or two are a winning formula. House of Leaves is just a haunted house story. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is a Trollope novel with magic. Old Man’s War is every mil SF 70s novel except with old dudes fighting in young bodies. Game of Thrones, we now unfortunately know, is Lord of the Rings from Sauron’s point of view. With tits and swears.

You can do it too. 

Consider trying to trick yourself into being a better plotter. We all grew up with stories that maybe were not the greatest and most innovative things ever written, whatever kinds of stories those were. Those narratives shaped our brains and made them like trash. That’s ok! Trash is tasty and easy and you can find it anywhere. But when we are cooking for others, we tend to try not to resort to the bin outside for ingredients, even if we might like a bit of old bubble wrap on our own time. You have to trick your trashbrain into kicking over the bin rather than feasting on it.

So. When you don’t know where to go with the plot, ask yourself: what would happen next in a bad book? What would make you so mad you’d start a Tumblr page just to scream about it? What would be the absolutely expected and genre-cohesive next step? Then…you know…do the opposite of that. Literally the opposite. Here’s where the wizardly father figure dies? Okay, he lives. Or he runs off with his secretary. Or he is a she. Or he just turns out to be an asshole and goes out for cigarettes and never comes back. Or he is possessed by a demonic elephant. Or he is a sentient rock and cannot die. Or he goes to rehab. I don’t know, man, it’s your wizard-elephant.

If you can’t figure out how to logically progress from A-E, consider skipping B, C, and D. Plot does not have to cover every agonizing step of the journey. You can just skip the boring parts you don’t know how to massage into being cool. I did this in Deathless because I could not bear writing another portal fantasy sequence where a wide-eyed young person learns the ropes of the world. So I just skipped to the part where Marya was integrated and competent in her new surroundings and went on from there. It’s a much leaner and more dynamic story because of it. You can just skip parts. It’s okay. I give you permission.

When considering the big picture questions of your plot, you have to consider structure. The most fundamental aspect of a story is where it starts and where it stops. And that, especially in speculative fiction, is very rarely (not never, never never) with the birth and death of a protagonist. Unless you’re doing Tristram Shandy in space. Which you are not, because now I am going to do it because it’s necessary. This is a choice you have to make, and that choice informs everything else. A perfect example is Star Wars. From 1977-1999, Star Wars was one kind of story, with a beginning, middle, and end. The prequels simply changed where the story began, no longer with A New Hope, but The Phantom Menace. And that radically altered the entire nature of the narrative. It changed the protagonist. It changed the themes. It changed the understood nature of the political universe and the traits of the characters in it as well as the meanings of their actions. And then it happened again when the sequels came out, changing where that central story now ends, no longer with Jedi, but with Rise of Skywalker, where suddenly the triumphant finale accepted as significant was in fact useless and dumb and all your heroes turned out to be jerks and none of it mattered or was the point, and ultimately, it’s hard to argue against the idea that the protagonist of the whole goddamn story is now Emperor fucking Palpatine.

SORRY, I HAVE SOME FEELINGS.

THE POINT IS, where you begin and end a story really fucking matters. People mostly hate The Hunger Games ending, even though it is inarguably the psychologically realistic and correct ending, because it just goes on a liiiiittle longer than heroic stories should. No one wants to see Katniss being miserable in a fancy housing development having kids she doesn’t want in a political regime she helped establish but that sucks all on its own by itself because that’s how revolutions do because she’s so traumatized she can only function in relation to the person who suffered that trauma with her. But that’s what happens when you don’t draw the curtain over the HELL YEAH WE WON freeze frame, mid-pumped fist in the air. And you can and sometimes should make the choice for the harder point-of-plot-termination, but it’s a choice you should be making deliberately. 

The general idea of a novel is that it’s telling the story of the most interesting shit that ever happened to the protagonist. My dudes, the Greeks, called this the aresteia. An aresteia is the moment of a person’s life when their arete is most fully expressed. What’s arete? Oh, how nice of you to ask a classicist who doesn’t get to nerd out about her field of study enough! Your arete is whatever you are best at, the thing that is finest and greatest in you. It very specifically doesn’t have to be martial prowess, it can be your loyalty or love or being a really good teacher or the best little whorehouse in Athens or weaving the best cloth or mothering babies or whatever is situated at the core of your own most essential self. Which can, for story purposes, absolutely include being an evil bastard who ruins life for everyone all the time. The classic example of an aresteia is Patroclus putting on Achilles’ armor and going out to fight and inspire the army when he thinks his BFF or BF (however you roll with them) is dead, and then dying himself. His loyalty and love for Achilles were his best self, and that was the peak expression of it.

So that moment should come at some point in your book, for your main person. And probably most of the non-main people. Ask yourself what you really, really need the reader to know before they can fully experience that moment and work your way back the smallest unit of that necessary information and that’s your beginning. Maybe. Remember that T.S. Eliot wrote the whole stupid Wasteland and gave it to Ezra Pound who whacked off the first 400 lines of the thing until he got to April is the cruellest month which is so obviously the correct first line. Writers don’t know shit about their own writing. We only know about other people’s. And when it comes to other people’s writing, WE ARE VERY SMART AND KNOW EVERYTHING.

Any writing workshop, sooner or later, will vomit up the phrase plot arises from character. And yeah, it does. Of course it does. But plot also arises from everything else. Plot arises from premise, from setting, from the inherent issues of the landscape, from imagery and anatomy. A character lost in a desert has a funadamentally different plot problem from a character lost in a rainforest, even though they are both in the same story: human dummy lost in difficult environment. That problem is water, and it must be solved before other plot fun times can be of any importance whatsoever. When I was writing the Mass Effect book, they initially wanted me to have it all take place on a cryosleep colony ship with virtually no supplies of any kind, including, specifically, food, on it, breaking down on a journey between galaxies. They told me to do it like The Martian, improvise and use real science. I told them immediately that I couldn’t, because a ship floating in space with no food on it and a virus loose isn’t a story, it’s just dead people. Food would be the only story in that situation, the premise and setting require that story be told before any other could get any air. Like, come on, man, even The Martian brought the potatoes with them. They had potatoes on hand. You at least need potatoes before you can calorically support a space virus mystery.

So you have to consider the realistic requirements of your setting and what they inevitably determine the plot to be. Failure to do this has sunk many an SFnal plot in the minds of what is at this point an EXTREMELY discerning readership. 

But yes, yes, also, plot arises from character. Which means you need characters. Which means you need characters inclined to allow plot to take precedence over potatoes. And so I’m going to hand out my secret formula for quickly creating audience investment in a character. If I ever manged to come up with a really good literary magic trick in eighteen bloody years, this is it, so huddle up.

It’s super easy. It’s a five-step plan! Everyone loves five-step plans!

Make a person. Age, occupation, gender or lack thereof, race, species, hair color, class, disposition irrelevant, you do you, boo. Then follow this recipe:

Give them something to want.

Give them something to fear.

Give them something to hide. 

Give them something to love or at least obsess over.

Then hurt them.

And that hurt? That’s where the plot starts.

The thing is, we writers and readers are such terrribly empathetic and sensitive little forest creatures. (People lacking empathy are very rarely big readers.) Our hearts break for hurt people. If you give a reader just enough to care about a character and then damage that character in front of them, the reader will die for them at a moment’s notice. This is the entirety of Ender’s character development in Ender’s Game, to the point that you BARELY notice he’s kind of baby Hitler because you feel so intensely for this brutalized little boy that you, very importantly, met about five minutes before his first Big Hurt. It’s shown to PERFECTION in The Thorn Birds, a book so intensely problematic it’s hard to understand that it’s the actual reason so many girls of a certain age are named Megan because WHAT.

Megan is six years old at the start of TTB. She is poor and she lives on a shitty farm in Australia a long time ago and she’s afraid of her brothers because they’re big dumb blokey Australian dickweeds and all she wants in the world is to go to a city someday and look at a fucking dress through a shop window and the thing she loves most in her garbage world of garbage is her adoringly desrcibed crap-ass doll. And before we are three pages into this beast, her brothers smash the shit out of that doll and laugh in her face. And EVEN THOUGH the rest of this WEIRD BOOK is about a GROWN-ASS priest meeting Megan WHEN SHE IS NINE AND FALLING IN LOVE WITH HER GROSS NO STOP THE SEVENTIES WHAT IS YOUR ACTUAL PROBLEM you basically would do anything to see Megan end up safe and happy from page four because you love that poor little girl so much because her dumb doll got broken. 

It’s mercenary as hell, but this works real good on spec fic readers because most of us got the doll-hair bullied out of us as kids, and we tend to feel very strongly about the well-being of the weak and often-harmed. 

Once you have characters, hold onto this guidepost: each step of the plot should illuminate character, and each character should illuminate some aspect of the plot. 

That is why we write stories that happen to people rather than academic essays about possible technology and how interesting the past must have been and how scary ghosts would be if they existed.

As you progress on from the beginning of the story, you have to constantly shake it up and complicate it in order to build the progression of events toward its conclusion SOUNDS FUN YEAH? At this point, basically just go watch The Good Place to learn how to do it. The status quo never lasts longer than 22 minutes on that show. And each complication arises organically from the situation and the characters, both surprisingly and inevitably, and opens up new avenues of progression. Complication upon complication upon complication equals a plot. Every time a new status quo is established (now we are on a quest! Now we have to get the thing to fight the evil!) ask yourself what the core assumption of the plot as it stands is (this thing will help fight the evil, the evil must be fought, quests work and have endings, fighting is worthwhile, the current configuration of “we” is workable and effective and pleasant to be around) and then subvert it or at least whisk vigorously in a large mixing bowl. The more basic the assumption, the more interesting the subversions can be. Fucking why not join Kylo Ren and rule the universe, Rey, at least that would be different and interesting! You’re not really BUSY ARE YOU?

Ultimately, when people talk about a book’s plot, they usually mean the exciting parts. The stuff that they hadn’t seen happen in other books. The left-field turns they didn’t see coming. But it’s a pomo goddamn world out there, and it’s increasingly difficult to surprise anyone. You have to interrogate your own world, your own premise, to get the good stuff out. So you ask a big bedrock question and the question is this: what does everyone know?

In our world, everyone knows gravity works, magic isn’t real, if you work hard you’ll get ahead, and bad things happen to bad people.

Almost every story is the story of someone finding out that what everyone knows is wrong. Except for the ones that are about finding out that what everyone knows is right after all. But the former is much more common. Just look at those last two. They’re bullshit. But everyone “knows” they’re true because their culture told them it was and the idea that they’re not is not wholly compatible with getting from one end of the day to another without a nervous breakdown. 

So what does everyone know in your story? The physical plot is what happens in each chapter of the book. The emotional plot is the part where somebody starts questioning what everyone knows because their own lived experience begins to contradict it. Everyone knows boys can’t do magic (Dune, Wheel of Time). Everyone knows girls can’t think for themselves. (Jane Eyre) Everyone knows the world is at peace under the rightful king (Lord of the Rings). Everyone knows that robots aren’t really people (Blade Runner…and every AI book ever). Everyone knows Hari Seldon’s predictions come true…until they don’t (Foundation).

And then, of course, there is the twist ending. Which everyone strives for and few achieve (because many twists are cheats, really). But there is really only one twist ending, and I’ll tell you what it is: what you saw was not what really happened. And 90% of that is that somebody wasn’t real. They were dead or multiple personalities or a robot or a dream or a hallucination or possessed by someone else or any number of other ways in which a person you thought was the person you had gotten to know was actually sneaking about being sneaky and not being that person at all. 

HAVE AT THAT TWIST. If you like, or don’t. It’s popular for a reason. Who gives one sad-whistle ghost shit about The Sixth Sense except for the ending? How much of Bruce Willis moping is what you remember about that movie? Barely none. But you do have to play fair with the audience. If you showed them something happening that wasn’t really happening, you have to give them enough clues that they could plausibly at least guess something was ever so slightly wrong, or they do feel cheated…because you kind of cheated.

But hey, cheating can work, too. Everything else just has to be so good the reader forgives you. 

So I guess the moral of this lesson is to cheat, steal, lie, kill, and maim for fun and profit. 

I’m comfortable with that.

And at the end of everything, remember this:

You can have the most basic bitch plot of all time. Your plot can wear leggings and Uggs while getting pumpkin spice lattes at Starbucks every day of the week and no one will give a fuck at all if something else in there is so cool they fall in love.

Few people remember much about what the plot of Hitchhiker’s Guide actually is. And if they do, they definitely don’t remember the plots of the other books in the series. They remember the Babel fish. They remember Vogon poetry. They remember Zaphod Beeblebrox and all the bits about how coming down from trees was widely regarded as a bad idea. Philip K. Dick determined plot using the I Ching because he gave so few fucks for literary craft theory. One of my favorite books, 2312, is the loosest of mysteries as an excuse to tour the solar system three hundred years from now. And Space Opera, my friends, is a sports movie plot with all the innovation and pre-determined outcome of a Harlem Globetrotters game. It’s all the other stuff people like. The premise, the jokes, the characters, the aliens, the feels. Plot does not have to be the star player. As long as you have a star player on your team.

So that’s my handy dandy cheat sheet for making plot out of thin gruel and spinning it into something approximating gold. I hope it’s helpful both as writers and readers, I hope it’s not stupid and shallow, even though it can be so hard to talk about plot in a general sense without an actual plot to work on.

But most of all, I hope one of these days writer-Cat learns how to listen to teacher-Cat and actually do the stuff she says when her book is lighting its farts in her face and telling her she’ll never amount to anything. Teacher-Cat knows what’s up. 

Or at least, she sounds VERY confident when she pretends to.