In a post on Writer Unboxed, Kelsey Allagood suggests a way to untangle your plot when too many options are available for your protagonist. In one of her current projects, Allagood knew her Point A and Point B, but couldn’t decide among a dozen possible ways to go from one to the other, all of which felt valid.
Her solution: a decision tree. “What I meant was that I’d written Point A on my whiteboard, then listed out every possible action stemming from Point A, then every possible consequence stemming from those actions, and so on until reaching Point B,” she explains.
It looked something like this:
“The first benefit was simply seeing everything laid out in a clear, logical progression,” she says. Some of the choices were dead ends and some raised questions about the protagonist’s motivation. “Finally, I went back over the tree, found the places where my character wanted something, and placed a mark by the consequences that would most severely get in the way of that want,” Allagood notes. “And suddenly, I had a plot.”
