[Link] 5 Plot Hacks That Just Might Save Your Novel

by Susan DeFreitas

Plot issues are the number one reason people come to me—and people like me—for help with their creative work.

And I’ve shared that, most of the time, these issues really aren’t problems with plot at all. They’re problems with character arc.

That said, sometimes the problem really is the plot. Which is to say, sometimes the problem with a novel really is what happens in the story, the order in which it happens, and the way that it happens.

And for real problems of this nature, there are real solutions. Solutions that I have seen writers apply in revision that produce changes that feel nothing short of magical.

Struggling with the plot of your current work-in-progress? Maybe one of these tried-and-true solutions will do the trick for you.

1. Shorten the time frame

Some novels really just have to be big, sprawling epics that take place over a long period of time—perhaps even over generations. But most stories? Don’t.

If you have a novel that feels slow in places, a novel that chronicles a long period of time in the protagonist’s life, or a novel that chronicles a whole historical period, my best advice to you would be: See if there’s a way you can tighten the time frame overall.

Because when you tighten up the time frame, oftentimes those slow sections just somehow magically disappear. When events occur close together in time, you get a stronger sense of cause and effect even if one event isn’t leading directly to the next. For instance, maybe your protagonist is still angry from her conversation with the antagonist the day before when he talks to his love interest later that day. If a week passed between these interactions, it wouldn’t feel like there was any connection between them.

But when you tighten up the time frame, that second interaction might feel like it’s invested with a whole lot more tension, because of the residual emotional effects of the first one.

For a novel that chronicles a long period of time in the protagonist’s life, you’re almost guaranteed to strengthen the sense of storytelling if you focus in on a shorter time frame—say, a turning point time in the protagonist’s life, which will still allow us to imaginatively fill in what happens in that longer span of time without having to plow through hundreds of pages of it.

Read the full article: https://janefriedman.com/5-plot-hacks-that-just-might-save-your-novel/