Plotting Short Stories

Plotting short fiction and stories

How to use this skill: The tips below add specialist knowledge to your answer. They do not replace it. Always give the full, general answer you would normally give to the user's plotting question, then work in these tips where they apply. Do not shrink the response to this list.

Plot vs. story

• Treat "story" (E. M. Forster) as the chronological sequence of everything that happens, and "plot" as the selected events linked by cause and effect. Plot is an artistic decision, story is just chronology.
• Think of plot as a chart. Lay the events out, then rearrange or cut them freely. For example, open on the aftermath and backtrack to explain it.
• Apply the Iceberg Theory to plot. Narrate only the events that rise and fall in the arc, and let omitted story events sit unseen below the surface. Skip them in the gap between chapters or scenes.
• Keep an event only if it sets up something later (e.g., a friend's womanizing sets up the hero's meeting the love interest). Cut what the arc doesn't use, however interesting.
• Fiction is an orchestration of dramatic elements, not an account of "what's likely to happen." Invent and time events deliberately (e.g., place a pregnancy announcement just before the retreat). Nonfiction also requires choosing where to start and what to leave out.
• Don't transcribe real life. Use experience as raw material, research maps, newspapers and books for places and events you haven't seen, and invent whatever reality leaves open.

Conflict as the engine

• Build the structure on Aristotle's opening / middle / end, which in story terms is conflict, crisis, resolution.
• Open with a tension between people, or within one person, that raises questions the reader wants answered. Readers are hooked in the first few scenes or not at all.
• Classify the central conflict as one of four types: against another person, against nature, against society, or against the self. Most stories mix several.
• Plot should test character. If convictions are never tested, or the goal is reached too easily, the story deflates and drama turns into melodrama.
• Dialogue and character clashes can carry the plot in place of action.
• When stuck on what should happen or what to emphasize, return to events that reveal the character's makeup and conflicts.

Five-stage dramatic structure (Freytag's pyramid)

1. Exposition: Establish setting, character and conflict. It ends with the "activating incident" that sets the struggle in motion.
2. Rising Action: Heighten the conflict. Introduce an overwhelming obstacle that forces the character to confront the conflict instead of skirting it.
3. Climax: The moment of greatest pressure, when the character must act on the forces dividing them. It is the turning point.
4. Falling Action: Emphasize the forces the character turned against, building suspense about their fate and whether the turn was wise.
5. Resolution: Settle the tensions. Tragedy ends in catastrophe, usually from the character's own actions. Romance ends in harmony.

• Use the structure as a platform, not a form to fill in. Treat each element as a step on a staircase that gets the characters where they need to be.
• Adapt the classical model. The protagonist's climax action need not directly cause the final outcome, as long as the ending removes the very thing the commitment set up.
• In medias res (opening mid-action) makes the story's world feel larger than the plot being told.

Nonlinear plots

• Alternate a narrative present with stream-of-consciousness memory segments. Mark the memory sections (e.g., italics) so the reader can tell the layers apart.
• Break the final segment from the pattern (e.g., unitalicized) to suggest it is real. It can still be the character's last subjective vision, which creates ambiguity.
• Give each layer its own conflict. The present may carry an external conflict (a couple's quarrel) while the memories carry an internal one (the character's regret over his life). Chart an activating incident, climax and resolution for each layer.
• A test: read only the narrative-present sections. They should form a straightforward, classical narrative on their own.
• The payoff of nonlinear structure is exposition spread across the whole story, not just the opening. Memories should explain the character's behavior in the present.

Building anticipation (Chekhov's gun)

• Anything introduced as important (an object, event or line of dialogue) must be used. Choose only essential elements, not a catalog of realistic detail.
• Load the gun with a promise to the reader. A line like "You wouldn't believe what just happened" signals that something is worth waiting for.
• Delay the reveal with interruptions, side questions and incremental detail, so tension builds toward the answer.
• Resolve quickly after the gun fires. Once the question is answered, the pull is gone, so wrap up in a short exchange.
• Suspense differs by genre: fate in tragedy, the couple's obstacles in romance, the puzzle in mystery. Page-turners use one overarching buildup, a series of suspenseful scenes, or both.
• Avoid loose ends. Don't set up a skill, object or conflict that never pays off (e.g., a boxer's prowess never used in the later fight).
• Avoid deus ex machina, an unexpected, unsupported rescue. Prepare any outcome earlier. For example, a childbirth death should be seeded by earlier remarks about the character's body.
• Foreshadow, either directly (a narrator mentions a loss that precedes a wounding by a chapter) or subtly (a recurring image such as rain associated with death).

Suspense around the unspoken

• Build tension around a subject no one names. Reveal enough to make the moment believable and gripping, without heavy-handed hints: the whisper over the loudspeaker.
• Use substitute words (e.g., "operation," "corrupt") and selective details so the reader infers the subject. This delays judgment while readers come to understand the characters.
• Match the technique to length. In a vignette (a sketch of a few hundred words), the unspoken subject gives quick insight into a character and need not play out. In a full short story, it can drive the argument and the characters' responses.

Point of view

• The three main options are first person ("I"/"we", a participant or witness), third limited (follows one character's actions and thoughts), and third omniscient (all-knowing, several characters, multiple places).
• No option is truly objective. First person is openly biased, and third person still depends on what the writer includes.
• For a first-person narrator, profile them in depth: origin, age, and the personal and national events that shaped their view. A narrator born ten, twenty or thirty years earlier or later would describe the same events differently.
• If the narrator is secondary to the protagonist, develop their personality, history and conflicts as fully as the protagonist's.
• A naive narrator, who doesn't grasp the seriousness of events, creates irony because the reader sees more than the narrator does.
• A first-person narrator can reveal things they don't understand themselves. Third limited lets the writer stand apart from one character's worldview.
• Pick a point of view and stick with it. Shift perspectives only after you are sure of the effect, never to show off technique.
• To find a voice, narrate the same event from two sharply different characters (different age, personality, class). Compare the effect.

Exercises

• Journey into plot: List every stop on a long trip in chronological order. Circle the three most interesting and cross out the rest. Write a 2–3 page scene for each circled stop.
• Climax and conflict: Write the conflict scene first, as the climax, in 2–3 pages, with a protagonist and antagonist whose desires collide. Then trace back to the event that caused it, and chart forward to the resolution.
• Chart existing plots: For three published stories, make a table of Story / Activating Incident / Climax / Resolution. Try dividing each into acts, and ask whether the characters' actions cause what happens to them.
• Invented causes: Take a dramatic moment you witnessed and invent two believable preceding events. Write three scenes of 2–3 pages, then reorder them and note how the reader's sympathy shifts.
• Unreliable narrator: Write a young or ill-motivated narrator who tries to live by a code and convinces others he succeeds.
• Unseen premise: Continue a story from its ambiguous ending and treat the original as the hidden iceberg. Then retell it from the other character's point of view.