In a guest post on Jane Friedman’s blog, Tiffany Yates Martin examines why plots fail and how to fix them.
She identifies two main causes of plot failure. Sometimes individual scenes are not connected to a whole, but presented as something your characters do for a few pages until they get to the next thing. Other times, the characters encounter interesting situations, but have no goal in mind and therefore no reason to act.
“Creating an elaborately structured plot and calling it story is like mapping a trip and calling it a vacation,” Yates Martin says. “What makes it complete is the character’s experience of it. Character drives plot, not the other way around.”
First, you have to define what your character wants. “What drives your characters is the engine and the fuel for the actions they take and fail to take in the course of the story, the reason they—and we—take this journey,” Yates Martin writes. Goals and motivation determine action, reaction, inaction, and interaction. In other words, every choice your character makes. Those goals might only be your character’s starting state, but they are what new goals will build upon.
Many times your character’s want will be intangible – to feel loved, to be independent, to be respected. That’s great motivation, but it’s also vague. After you have your character’s emotional background, you need to envision what success will look like as a tangible goal. “Pinning your character’s intangible longings to a concrete goal gives readers something to root for—or against—and tells us when the character has ‘won’ (or lost),” Yates Martin says. “Without that, momentum may stall, like a footrace with no definitive finish line for runners to orient themselves toward or to tell them when they’ve reached it.”
This also can lead to a plot that feels disjointed, as scene follows scene without any links between them. For a character to feel loved, perhaps they crave literal applause. A car or amount of money in the bank might represent independence. An award or prestigious job might represent respect. Giving your character a series of concrete, tangible goals helps create links between your scenes, as your protagonist keeps a laser focus on the steps they need to take to win.
Finally, Yates Martin notes that plots fail because character change is not related to the path they took to get there. If your plot points didn’t force your angry character to soften, their change will fall flat. “But if you let their goal and motivation dictate their actions and behavior at every decision point, then readers will see on the page, step by step, how your character moves along her arc: how each challenge she faces, every choice she makes, affects her, shifts her perspective, and causes her growth or change,” Yates Martin says.
