Hey guys! So, this week we’re going to talk about growing plots. This one is going to be a little difficult to explain because I’ve only actually had a couple of these before. Hang in there. I promise that I will try make sense. So, without further ado.
Getting Started: Growing Plot Lines
So, a growing plot line, in my personal opinion and in no way actually related to a real written reference of writing, is the mark that your story is a real story and a good one. I know that a lot of the time, plotters have a hard time with growing plot lines because they feel like once they have outlined their story it has to stay that way. I think that plotting your novel can be a good idea but sometimes you just need to let your story be what your story is going to be. Part of writing is listening to what your character is trying to tell you. A lot of the time when I have problems writing its because I took a story a different direction from where the character wanted it to go and I have to go back and change that part to get out of writers block. I think that writing a good book means that your book changes from where you originally had to become a better version of what you first thought of. Part of this is getting advice from others.
A lot of my books are good ideas. But sometimes the outside view of others who have not been mellowing in the world of your story are really good at coming with plot twists for your straight-line story. Some of my best book ideas came from friends and family. For example, in my book Thieving Heirs I struggled to find a title but one plot description to my little sister and she instantly had an amazing title for my book. In my book Hex I didn’t know what to do after they got captured. It was actually my aunt who came up with the idea of poisoning the prince and escaping in the cause. In my untitled current work, it was my little sister and mother who helped me to fix up the acronym for one of the AI characters. In one of my earliest stories called Scarlet: Deeper than Red, it was my writing friend who helped me come up with the plot twist of a sudden new power for the super villain. Most of my stories would not be where they are now without others. But sometimes your characters tell you that the story is wrong, and they are the ones who grow the plot for you.
A growing plot line in the roughest definition is when a story has a simple plot, the first plot that you come up with and it gets better. Sometimes more characters are added, sometimes the plot just gets longer, sometimes a whole section of the plot is taken out and then replaced, and sometimes you decided to change the characters backstory, sometimes its more dramatic like completely recreating the world because the one they live in isn’t conducive to the story. Whatever the thing you change is if the story evolves beyond what it was yesterday it’s a growing plot line. My first experience with a growing plot line as a beginning writer made me mad. I had written the whole story and I hated it. I changed little bits here and little bits there until it didn’t really look like what I’d started with. And I still hated it. So, I had to recreate the whole world. Small parts of the story changed because the story took place in a fantasy world instead of a historical fiction world. But that worked way better. All in all the story was completely different in every aspect from the original idea but it was also better than the originally idea. It took me a couple more growing plots to accept that I actually enjoyed them better.
The book that I am working on now is a growing plot line. I started the story in August of 2014. I have continued to work on it to this day only leaving to sit for brief periods of a month or two. It has almost completely filled two 250 page notebooks and is still not complete. It originally started as a typical YA fantasy novel. Girl lives on a spaceship community. Hates the government because of [insert tragic backstory here (usually involving a father)]. She finds a rebellion and decides to create a machine (because she’s a mechanic) to destroy the government. After a long story of plot twists, betrayals, and love triangles, she defeats the government and saves the ship. Now the story takes place on 6 different planets, 4 different ships, over 56 different characters (some more developed than others, most of which die 😉), 4 different rebellions and a whole new plot line. The original rebellion was kept for a while and labeled the Mothership Rebellion as opposed to the other three called the Earth Rebellion, the Arillian Rebellion and the Final Rebellion. After a while the Mothership Rebellion and all the plot points involved in that where deleted. None of her motives in the original story fit into the new one. The old one was typical. The new one is better. There are AI, love but not a love triangle (not even once), family, revenge, peace, acceptance, death, love, gladiators, military service, mechanics, underworld crime lords, and, of course, a motherly figure after her family is gone.
Growing plots are important. Without them a story can’t improve. That’s the beauty of writing compared to real life. Once our past happens it’s the past. We can’t go back and change that. (Yet. If anyone knows someone who had built a time machine I would love to borrow it. There are some things that I would like to slap my younger self for). The beautiful part about writing a story is that you can change it. If something doesn’t fit you can fix it. The world can change to whatever makes it better. And you have the power to change it. That’s why growing plots are important. So use them.
That’s all I have for this week guys. I hope that you found it interesting. I’ve found growing plots sometimes happen without our knowledge and so I hope that you can identify the growing plots in your early writing and use them to improve. Next week I’m going to be talking about writing different genres. I hope that you can join in so as always,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!