How To Avoid Common Plotting Errors

Plotting is one of the most crucial elements in writing a novel. A well-structured plot keeps readers engaged, guides characters toward meaningful growth, and ensures that the story’s emotional arc resonates. However, even experienced writers can stumble upon common pitfalls when plotting their stories. Let’s look at some common mistakes.

Lack of A Clear Quest

A protagonist without a clear, well-defined quest can make the plot feel aimless. The quest provides both the external and internal driving forces of the story. Whether it’s to find a lost artifact, to find love, or save the world, the protagonist’s goal must be be clear at every stage of the novel.

Fix it: Clarify the protagonist’s quest early on. Ensure the goal is both internal and external: it has to do something externally but the protagonist changes internally.

Low Stakes

If there are no real consequences for failure, the protagonist’s quest becomes unimportant. Your reader must understand what’s at risk and why it matters. No clear purpose, and no real risk, can lead to disengagement.

Fix it: Define the stakes. By the end of Act One, the reader should understand what’s at risk if the protagonist doesn’t go on the quest and succeed. The consequences of not doing so or failing must be significant and emotionally resonant. Keep raising the stakes. As the story progresses, stakes should escalate. Increase the risks for the protagonist, tightening time constraints, add a ticking clock, reveal betrayals or new threats, make the antagonistic force feel more dangerous than before.

Overcomplicating the Plot

You can include too many subplots, twists, or unnecessary secondary characters. It’s important to have depth and complexity in your story but there is too much of a good thing.

Fix it: Focus on the main narrative. Cut unnecessary narrative lines or events that do not serve that main narrative; don’t include things just because you fancy doing so. Use twists sparingly and strategically: too many makes them feel less impactful and less believable, and drains energy from the plot.

Character Motivation Fails

Characters drive the plot forward, characters go on the quest, characters feel and want things, and they change and transform. But they need to start out with a quest – and motivations. Failing to establish strong or consistent character motivations can lead to plot points that feel forced or unearned. Alternatively, it can make the narrative feel inessential.

Fix It: Develop character and clarify motivations quickly, especially around the inciting incident and the end of Act One, breaking into Act Two. Make sure motivations evolve and change, but in a logical, believable way. The choices they make, and the challenges they face, should reflect this growth. Review your character’s decisions and actions to ensure they are still in line with their motivations, and make the characters do things to correspond with changes and transformations in them.

Getting Pacing Wrong

Pacing is often difficult to balance—too slow and the pace dissipates; too fast and it feels too much. Poor pacing can lead to the reader feeling fatigued or bored. You can have too much introspection without action or you can have so much action that the readers feels exhausted or intellectually unstimulated.

Fix it: Balance plot-heavy scenes and quieter moments that allow for character development and create good pace. After an intense action sequence, slow down the pace to explore the emotional impact of what happened. Create a chapter or scene list to see what your pattern of high-action (high) or reflective scenes (low) are. You could have a strict high-low-high-low pattern or maybe a high-high-low-high pattern, depending on how much stress you want your readers to feel at that moment. Shorter, fast-paced scenes drive action and excitement, while longer, introspective scenes can deepen reflection. Rather than frontloading the story with all of the action, introduce conflict and obstacles in increments. Tension should always grow more intense in the second half of the book.

Poor Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing involves subtly hinting at major plot events before they occur. A common mistake is introducing a major twist or revelation without any foreshadowing. Twists then feel like they come out of nowhere, breaking the reader’s suspension of disbelief.

Fix it: Drop a few small clues throughout the story that hint at this twist. Create a sense that “something is not right” in a way which makes the reader go “a-ha!” when the twist is revealed. Make twists shatter the status quo and hurt the protagonist and their view of the world. Foreshadow emotional outcomes by (subtly) telling us how such an outcome would affect the protagonist, so that we know as soon as it happens why it matters.

“It Felt Unearned”

The resolution of a novel is the final tying up of everything the protagonist has experienced and learned, and is also the outcome of the promise of the quest made way back in Act One. Make sure the resolution is satisfying and true. It should arise organically from the events and character growth that have gone before it.

Fix it: Ensure the climax of the novel leads to the resolution of the quest. It should come naturally from the choices the protagonist has made towards and during the climax. If the protagonist succeeds or fails, it should feel like logical and evocative and again, true. Give your characters agency. Their desires, motivations, actions, successes and failures should be their own, and should matter to the reader. This makes their journey feel more meaningful and fulfilling.

How To Write A Novel Chapter By Chapter available here: https://www.amazon.com/How-Write-Novel-Chapter-Outlining-ebook/dp/B0DJ8TMVWL?ref_=ast_author_mpb

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