Fuse Blog

What makes you keep reading a story? I keep reading a story if I am waiting for a conflict to be resolved, a mystery to be solved, or to see the fairytale ending. Without a clear well defined plot you cannot hook your readers and keep them reading. I have recently reviewed several works that did not have clear plots. These stories had a lot of adventure and conflict but at the end of the story I couldn’t identify what the plot was. Some of these works had 3 or 4 mini plots but not an overarching goal linking them together.

The plot is all the events in a story related to the achievements of the protagonist, primarily consisting of the conflicts the main character faces in opposition to the antagonist. The plot should have a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. The beginning should give readers a chance to learn about the characters, the setting, and the problems/conflict that needs to resolve. The middle should contain the majority of the action and reveal why the problem cannot be easily solved. The end is where the protagonist finally resolves the problems or conflict.

You can start developing a great plot by developing a believable character with a problem that has to be solved by the character’s bravery and cleverness. Truly engaging works often have the main character try and fail several times before solving the problem or resolving the conflict.

Would you like to know how well you have developed your plot? Submit your story to Review Fuse and let our writing community critique your plot.

Jacob

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Tags: Improve Your Writing, Plot development, Writing tip

This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 4:07 pm and is filed under How To, Write, Writing Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.