How to Plot Your Novel from Start to Finish

All right, so, you've got this terrific idea for a novel floating around somewhere in the nether reaches of your mind. You might be happily munching down on a PB&J when, suddenly, out of nowhere, your main character finds himself in an exciting chase through the dark alleys between your synapses. While standing around waiting for something interesting to happen at work, his spectral image walks up to you and engages you in a heartfelt conversation, showing feelings you didn't know he had. While waiting to pick up little Timmy from soccer practice, you catch him out of the corner of your eye stealing a kiss under the shade of an old oak tree with a woman you've never met. Sparks of inspiration pop up everywhere, but the trouble most people have lies in consolidating them into an actual complete work.

There are quite a few people who believe that plotting a novel before writing it stiffens the actual creative process, and for some reason everyone in the opposite camp can't just agree to disagree. The simple truth of the matter is that if you can make a decent novel using either method, then you've made a decent novel. End of story. However, most people, even creative geniuses, run into the problem that human beings are undeniably creatures of habit, and mechanizing a process (even a creative process) not only simplifies it but just makes it more agreeable in general. So, for you who aren't looking to get to the end of your novel and find out that you got there with your shoes untied and your zipper down, I present to you my method of plotting a novel with index cards.

Story Elements
The first thing you need, obviously, is index cards. I suggest a nicely sized stack of them cut from heavy-duty card stock, as you're going to be writing on both sides in various and sundry colors of ink. The next time your character visits you and says, "Hey, you know, just this afternoon I found out that my best friend is actually the guy who's been following me around every night," listen carefully to what he says. Write down the general idea on one side and then flesh it out a little on the other. Like this:

John finds out his best friend is the guy who has been following him

And then on the other side...

John is out for his nightly walk, but this time he knows he is being followed and sets up a plan to catch his shadow. As soon as he's sure that someone is on his tail, he crosses a busy intersection hoping to slow down his pursuer and then ducks into a coffee shop. The hunter now become the prey, John is ready to jump out at him, but is shocked into backing down when he sees his best friend Steve in the long black coat and black cap he has been seeing behind him nightly for the past month.

With any luck, you've got a whole chapter right there, 1500-5000 words from a single index card's worth of information.

Major Plot Points
As much as it would be nice, though, a whole novel is not going to come together from a bunch of random story elements, so now we get to the main course of this meal: the major plot points. Major plot points are those story elements that, unlike the little snippets you'll be jotting down whenever lightning strikes your brain, push the story along from introduction to conclusion, and through all the untidy rigmarole your characters will undoubtedly be going through in order to get from their first conflict to their final resolution. This entire process is based on the assumption that you have already met the characters that will be populating your novel, you've already visited the world that they live in, and you've got some semblance of an idea as to what exactly they'll be doing there. There are certain things index cards can't do, and creating your story for you from scratch is definitely one of these things. Speaking of the cards, you might want to pull out about ten or so of them right now.

I've made a habit of writing my major plot point headings down on my cards in red ink, but you can do whatever best suits you. Across the top of these ten cards, you're going to write the following:

Introduction
Involvement
Initial Point of No Return
Central Story Complication (write about three of these)
Twist
Final Point of No Return
Conclusion
Resolution

Once again, on each card, you're going to want to come up with a general idea and write it down under the heading on one side and then flesh it out a bit on the other. Let's take a look at what each of these mean, while building on John's story from earlier...

Introduction
By "introduction," I don't necessarily mean the first chapter or the preface to your novel. Remember, we are thinking in terms of major plot points here. If it happens that this card eventually does become the basis for a preface or a first chapter, then so be it, but when I say introduction, I mean the point at which the idea of your story is introduced. Say John is just a regular guy who happens to notice he's being tailed one day out of the blue. What does this mean for John? Is he about to find himself thrust into a world of adventure and intrigue? In the real world, the answer would probably be a resounding, "No, he's just paranoid." However, for the purposes of our novel, he'd better be about to find himself thrust into a world of adventure and intrigue, or this is going to be the shortest and most boring novel ever written. Thus, we take the card from before that used to just be a story element and write "INTRODUCTION" at the top. Don't be shy to do this to a story element card. If you find something that you wrote down on one of these cards to be an important part of the story, feel free to plug it into the appropriate spot in your deck.

Involvement
Once John has realized that he is being trailed by his best friend, he has the choice to either let it sit or investigate it, and from there the possibilities for actions he could take branch off infinitely. Most people wouldn't just let something like that go, and would probably confront Steve. This may be what someone in the real world does, but for a novel, we decide that John is going to do something adventurous for the first time in his life and tail Steve in return to find out why he's doing this. This is the point at which your protagonist decides to get involved in the story, and as you can most likely imagine, it is a crucial point in the story. So, on your INVOLVEMENT card, you write this:

John decides to tail Steve

And on the other side...

Each night, John allows Steve to follow him, leading him on a wild goose chase, but when it seems as though Steve has lost interest, John turns the tide and follows him.

Initial Point of No Return
The problem there is that John is not thoroughly invested in the story yet. At this point in time, he could back out at any time he chose, and your readers are going to ho-hum through his adventures. Without a sense of urgency, there's no reason for the reader to keep attention. So, let's say that John follows Steve around a few times and gets into various misadventures (represented by Story Element cards), but one night somewhere down the line, something happens that buries him inescapably in whatever's going on. So, let's get our INITIAL POINT OF NO RETURN card and write under the heading:

John discovers an alien spaceship

And on the other side...

John follows Steve to an old secluded warehouse where men in black suits are patrolling. Wondering what's going on, he gets in closer, and discovers that the warehouse houses a crashed alien spaceship.

Goody. After seeing that, there's no way John is going to be able to turn back to the life he used to know. A definite change has taken place that concretes him into the story, and, in a novel, change is a good thing.

Central Story Complication
There should be several of these central story complication cards. This is how you get your novel over the hump (or rather, the deep, empty valley) that lies sagging ferociously in the middle of every writer's path toward completion. Without these, an otherwise interesting beginning will turn into a fond memory for most readers, along with any desire they ever had to actually finish your book. If they don't get through the belly of the beast, no matter how much they liked staring at it's oddly beautiful head, and no matter how much they wanted to go take a look at the destruction it left in its wake, the average reader is going to lob your book into one of those shopping carts sitting outside the library bookstore labeled "Free! Take One!" In order to make sure this doesn't happen, you need Central Story Complications.

Story is conflict. No one ever read a story where everyone was happy all the time and the exposition describes roses growing full-bloom in the street no matter how many times the characters trod carelessly over them. Even dear, sweet Heidi had to deal with the death of her parents, a grumpy old grandfather who resented her very existence, and the stigma of being an orphaned child living with a family that wasn't her own. She's a sweet little girl, but for the most part, unless she's being kicked to the curb, we don't find her in the least bit interesting or entertaining. Thus, we need to throw these complications in to make sure our story is worth reading. Three is a good number. Let's try this one out:

The men in black capture John

And on the other side...

John finally decides to confront Steve about his nocturnal business ventures, but before he gets a chance to, the men in black find his hiding spot in the warehouse and grab him, taking him to a room for interrogation.

Remember when making these particular story elements one very important thing - If, in chapter ten, John is captured, he should not escape and be home free in chapter eleven. Think more along the lines of an "out of the frying pan, into the fire"-type scenario. The action should not happen in little jumps ("Oh no, I'm captured! Yay, I'm free! Oh no, I'm captured again! But wait, I'm free again! No, wait..."), but rather in one long, driving stream that starts with the initial conflict and ends at the final showdown.

Twist
That's right. To be a good storyteller, you need to every now and then employ M. Night Shyamalan's favorite technique. The twist is the point in the story at which things turn around completely, making the story do a 180 that the reader was never, ever expecting. Let's say, in this instance, that we decide to write on one side of our TWIST card:

John turns out to be an alien

And on the other side...

John was being followed because, somewhere along the line, his friend Steve, in reality a secret government agent, discovered that he was with the aliens when they crash landed on Earth twenty years ago, and now they are trying to get him back.

Bam. Your readers just successfully got punched directly in their collective noses, and until they pick up your next novel, they will be screaming at each other, "Oh yeah! Remember the part where John found out he was an alien!"

Final Point of No Return
Just as the first point of no return showed us why the protagonist got involved irrevocably (and often involuntarily) into this whole mess, this second one shows us why he's forced to continue on to the ultimate confrontation. Once again, the emphasis here is on the "no return" part. The reader is just not going to care if the character has the capability of just stepping aside and letting the events that have been set in motion throughout the entire story just follow through to their natural conclusion. No one is going to care if John's paranormal parents just felt like dropping him off twenty years' worth of retroactive birthday presents. They will, however, care if the character they've been following all this time is faced with the world-shattering decision to leave the life he has known here on Earth for whatever awaits him beyond the familiar stars of home. We write on the FINAL POINT OF NO RETURN card under the heading on one side:

John decides to stay, but help his family escape

And on the other side...

John stealthily secrets his way through the men in black toward the hangar bay, where he will release the door locks and free his imprisoned family.

Of course, we can't make it so easy for him. Conflict, remember? A few more STORY ELEMENT cards are due after this one.

Conclusion
However, after he overcomes whatever little conflicts we decide to throw at him between there and here, there is the conclusion. What happens that ends this phase of the character's life? What cuts off the current story line so that the protagonist can finish up here and get on with life, or at least have a nap between adventures? Let's put on one side of the card:

John and Steve struggle over the controls

And on the other side...

It turns out Steve has been friends with John all this time just to "add him to his collection." But John wants to help the family that has revealed themselves to him psychically. He tries to get to the controls in order to free the ship from its moorings and open the bay doors, but Steve is there to stop him at all turns. However, since John is their family, the aliens can unite with his mind, and they use his eyes to get a visual lock on Steve, teleporting him out into space, thus allowing John to access the controls and free them.

Resolution
Finally, whatever our character has been attempting after all this time can be concluded, properly wrapped up and sent off so our hero can pick up the pieces and get back to living life uninterrupted. Of course, this part should also contain the revelation that something has changed, permanently, whether for good or bad, or else your readers are going to wonder what the point was of reading the entire novel just so John can go back to normalcy. In this example, we obviously have to work out (in a very limited number of words, since no one wants to spend five more chapters winding down) John's feelings about losing his family and his best friend all at the same time, his continued life now that he knows his true nature, his realization that he has certain inhuman abilities and how he copes with this, etc.. We need to work out one specific way to best show what's going on with John now that his adventures are over. Let's do this:

Years down the line, John has a baby

And on the other side...

John, having reunited with his girlfriend, marries her and has a son. Years later, we find that he has been watching the sky every night. One clear night, he sees a shooting star, and knows that they have come back to visit their grandchild.

So now we've shown the reader that life for John has returned to some semblance of normalcy, and for the better, but that he's still an alien and not everything is necessarily keen and dandy in the world. Will his wife find out? Will she still love him? Will his son ever meet his strange and fantastic grandparents? Will he choose to return to the heritage that his father forsook and take his rightful place among the stars?

No one knows. Leaving some of the story to the imagination of the reader is the single best way to end the story on a satisfying note. Not too much, mind you, but just enough that they can imagine exactly what they want to have happen without not having enough information to stimulate their imaginations.

That's great for starters, but there's still quite a few gaping holes that need working out. Let's fill out some more cards, shall we?

Character and Concept Introduction
There has never been a story written in all of history, from Beowulf to the final Harry Potter, that has included characters and ideas that every single reader has had intimate knowledge of. Thus, they require some kind of introduction. Even in series novels, we still need to point out whatever it is about the character that makes the situation at hand something relevant to them. That's why we use Intro cards.

I normally write the headings for these in blue ink. At the top of the card on one side I write a CHARACTER INTRODUCTION for every character that will have an important role to play in the story, and a CONCEPT INTRODUCTION on top of each card that will represent an important idea. I'll write on one set of cards JOHN, STEVE, RACHEL (John's love interest), and MEN IN BLACK. On the other set, I'll write things like ALIENS ARE REAL, JOHN HAS PSYCHIC ALIEN ABILITIES, and whatever else comes to mind. Now, on each card, I write not necessarily what happens the first time we are actually introduced to the character or concept, but the first time we actually become aware of who that character really is, or what exactly is going on with the idea we wish to portray.

For example, on our JOHN card, I don't write the part where he discovers Steve has been following him and decides to follow him in return. That doesn't really tell us who John is, simply what he's doing at the beginning of the story. Instead, I write something like this:

John is having lunch with Rachel at a restaurant, and while she is awaiting a proposal, he is bearing his heart to her about never having known his parents, his strained relationship with his best friend Steve, and how much he doesn't want to bring a child into the world that has shown him only heartbreak and trial.

Now we know something about John. He's not the most desirable of boyfriends, for one. We know that he's an orphan, and that he often thinks about his family. We know that he is emotionally deep, but that his emotional depth gets in the way of his ability to live life and take risks. We've essentially established him as a character who would never have an adventure, so when we thrust him into the adventure, not only will the reader will be interested to see how our Mr. Pansy-Pants will deal with it, but we've also shown that he's about to put on britches too big for him and are giving him room to fill them out by the end of the story.

The Orange Cards
When I first came up with this method based on several suggestions I'd read about using index cards to plot novels, I had nothing available to me when I invented this branch of cards than an orange pen. Thus, the orange card was born, and I still ritualistically use an orange pen for them. When my original orange pen runs dry, I'll either find a new color (maybe a nice green) to use, or I'll just never write a novel again.

The orange cards are the cards that contain information relative to something further on down the line. I've broken them down into four subdivisions, which are as follows:

Precursor
Foreshadowing
Flashback
Setup

Normally, if an author were to plot out the whole story in a notebook from beginning to end, they would not be able to toss any precursors or foreshadowings or flashbacks or setups in, because they haven't yet gotten to the end of the part of the story further down the line that they are precursoring/foreshadowing/flashing back about/setting up. Using the card method, we can easily see which story points need these devices, write up the appropriate event, and shuffle it into the deck at an earlier point.

Precursor
The precursor is an even which causes another event to happen somewhere down the line, or explains why an event happened. Looking back over our cards, we see that the final showdown incorporates the idea that the aliens have a psychic link with John. If we just allowed this to happen without explanation, it's called deus ex machina, and it isn't looked upon very favorably. We need to explain why this happened and show that, in our fictional world, it actually can happen, before we allow it to. Grab an orange card labeled PRECURSOR and write on it JOHN HAS A PSYCHIC LINK WITH THE ALIENS, and on the other side, possibly over multiple cards, show the precursor occurring. That way, when the time comes for your final battle, the readers won't feel cheated.

Foreshadowing
This is the card that we use to drop the reader hints in the story of something that is coming. The foreshadowing technique has been around as long as people have been writing, and serves as a way to build up excitement in the reader that they may possibly know something about the outcome of the story before they get there. Of course, of equal antiquity and frequency of use is the technique known as the Red Herring, which simply makes them THINK they know something...

So, by way of example, let's use a card from the end of the story to create a foreshadowing. We'll use the twist, that John is an alien, in order to build up a tension in the reader so they know something is unusual about him. So we pull out a card labeled FORESHADOW and write on it JOHN IS AN ALIEN. Then, on the back, we write this:

John has a very limited and uncontrolled ability to see several seconds in the future. The first time we see this in use, he is in danger of being captured by the men in black and is able to escape them by seeing which hallway they are coming down before they come down it.

We also may wish to keep track of this so we can foreshadow it multiple times. We may even wish to write something like this at the beginning of the story:

John had always had a strange way of looking at things that even he couldn't explain. Sometimes, it just felt to him as though the world was an open book, and he knew exactly what was coming. This didn't mean he always acknowledged his weird ability, which often led to nights of binge drinking after seeing the Powerball numbers he knew he should have played in the newspaper. No matter how many times he thought he knew which box to check on a lottery card, nothing could have prepared him for the discovery that someone had been trailing him every night for a month.

Flashback
The flashback, just as old as foreshadowing and just as widely used, is a technique wherein an important story element is revealed by showing something that has happened previous to where the story is in its timeline. If something happened when your main character was a child that explains exactly why he is behaving the way he is now, you write in a flashback. These fall into the category of Orange Cards because they help the reader understand why something is going on now by revealing it ahead of time. The only exception here is that the flashback is not really happening at that moment in the story.

Let's take John, our ongoing example. We want him to have a scene where he boards the ship and is confronted by a swirling vortex of a hallway that causes him to have a nervous breakdown. Well, that would just be stupid if it happened for absolutely no reason. We need to set up why something you could see on a Disney attraction would make him flip his lid. Alas, thus enters the flashback. Grab yourself an orange card labeled FLASHBACK and write this on one side:

John has a nervous breakdown in the ship's hall
And on the other, this...

While John is curled up in the corner, he has a dream that he is much younger, so young that he can't remember this actual event. In this dream, he is walking down the very hallway he's confronted with, but it begins to shake and tremble, and fire bursts into the room. The door at the end opens, and a man he believes to be his father runs out, badly wounded. Beyond, on the bridge, a large blue-green planet is quickly growing larger.

That explains why John is afraid of this hallway - he was in it when the ship crashed all those years ago.

Setup
The setup is the simple mention of something earlier in the story that makes its appearance later on a bit more meaningful. One of the best uses of the setup I have ever seen is in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, in which Hermione uses the magical Time Turner to travel back in time with Harry and Ron. Earlier in the story, several unexplained events happened to them (the setup) so that later in the story, when you read that these phenomena were actually caused by their future selves, you just find yourself having to go "Wow!"

The setup is not so much as a plot element (or even a preparation for a plot element like the other members of the Orange Card group) as it is a method to make your readers that much more excited about your story. When you purposely reiterate a section of the story to them, returning it to their memory in a satisfying way, they will remember it well beyond that one time you called it back to their attention. While the setup is a neat way to grab your readers' attention, use it sparingly for fear of appearing too gimmicky.

Putting Everything Together (Coherently)
The final step is to make sure everything is in the order you want it, and that everything fits together coherently and cohesively. Lie out the cards in front of you and spend a day just rearranging them so they all work together to make your story in an order that makes sense and keeps the story driving along at a quick but logical pace. If you have a scene where your character is in location A and the very next card finds him in location B without any rhyme or reason as to why he got there, you will find yourself having to draw up a transition card in order to keep your continuity. As a final touch, salt and pepper your newly-arranged deck with your Orange Cards, stack them up next to your keyboard, and start writing your story, card by card.

Transitions
Between each Story Element (I actually try to fit them right on that Story Element card, using a different color to differentiate) there should be a Transition. Transitions are story elements which add to the flow of the story, or rather, keep it going strong. There are hundreds of possible transitions you can use, but here are a few that I use:

Failure: Nothing keeps a story going like failure. Failure is the driving force of any conflict. When your characters attempt something and wind up sucking it up, there is no force in the world that pushes them on to try something else more than a nice steaming bowl of ruination. Actually, there are many cases in which failure can temporarily hinder your characters, or worse yet, knock them directly out of commission. In that case, grab yourself another Story Element card, or even a Central Story Complication card, and be prepared to pull them out of their funk and moving on to their next failure.

Preparation: A common device for use at the end of a chapter, the Preparation gets your characters ready for something big. The card on which John finally decides to break all the way into the warehouse could end with a Preparation transition in which he finds the ship. The chapter could end on a high note, making the reader want to continue soldiering on to find out what's going to happen. Of course, you're really setting your reader up for a fall, because if you want to keep the exciting flow of the story going, this is right where you'll throw the card that says John gets captured by the Men in Black and he won't find out anything about the ship for another ten chapters!

But...: You employ the BUT... transition when you want your readers to become so absolutely livid at you that they will read another chapter even though it's going on two in the morning just to spite your efforts to ruin their hero's success. In this type of a transition, your hero seems to have some degree of success, BUT... something happens to turn that success around. Let's switch the order of our cards for a second and put John getting captured before his finding the ship. He's escaped now (hooray for him!) and he's found the ship (keep up the good work, John!), BUT... now something is going to happen to ruin that success. Whatever could it be? Let's say that the ship's crash was caused by a hostile alien attack, and the earth's heavier atmosphere caused these evil aliens to remain dormant until they picked up on John's telepathic signal. All that work and all those successes were for nothing, because now there's a new group of baddies standing in the way!

Twist: Like the larger twist, only not so mind-alteringly drastic, the twist that comes at the end of a plot point is a small reminder to your reader that not everything may be as it seems!

Cliffhanger: Standard fare of the old weekly serials, the cliffhanger is most effective when used at the end of a chapter. It's goal is to keep your reader glued to the page, and if they do happen to put the book down, they'll be waiting with bated breath until the next time they can pick it up again. Is John going to be able to escape? Is Rachel really dead? Will the alien ship bearing John's otherworldly family be able to escape Earth before the government can scramble fighters to take it down? Looks like we won't find out unless we keep reading...

Change: Change is the single most important element in all of storytelling. Without change, why did we even just read the novel? Without change, what is the difference between our story about John and a story about two guys sitting around sipping Darjeeling? If the main character and supporting cast did not undergo some form of life-altering change, why did they just experience everything they experienced, and why did we bother to experience it with them? A story is change... without change, there is no motion, and without motion, there is no story. Every plot point should do something to translate where the story was into where the story is going. Otherwise, you might as well just throw that card out of the deck.

The End?
Hopefully, I've been able to teach you a method by which you can freely and efficiently plot your novel, with the added bonus that I have been able to teach you some of the key elements of a story in the process. Using this method, you will have an advantage over both the folks who don't like to plot their novels and the people who plot them by outlining them in a notebook. That advantage is called omniscience... you will be able to see everything at once rather than having to look at it in a linear timeline. You will have the power to move things around as you see fit without filling your notebook with scratches and scribbles. You will be better equipped to deal with setting up events that will happen later in your story (because you will know exactly what happens later in your story) and will easily be able to put these preparatory events anywhere in the timeline you please. You will be able to make sure everything fits together like a puzzle. You will be able to know exactly where your story is going without having to slave over a hot keyboard all day with writer's block wondering where you ought to take things next. In the end, you will have the powers of a god over your own little pocket universe, and isn't that why we get into the business in the first place?