Plotting Genre Stories: Structure and Endings

Plotting speculative stories, openings, and endings

Rule: This skill only adds specialist tips to your answer. Always give your full, normal general answer to the user's request first, using everything you already know about plotting, openings, and endings. Then work in the tips below wherever they apply. Never replace or trim your general answer to fit this list, and don't force in tips that don't fit.

Generating plot ideas when out of ideas

Song-title shuffle outline

• Open a blank page in any word processor and number 1–30 down the side as imaginary chapters.
• Put the whole music library on Shuffle. Write the first song title as chapter 1, hit Next for chapter 2, and continue to 30.
• Link the titles into scenes and plot: treat each as a starting point, reorder, drop the useless ones, keep the good ones.
• If the finished book shouldn't have chapter titles, delete them once the outline is done.
• Movie titles and TV episode titles work as substitute sources. Repeat as often as needed.

"Put it in space" mash-up

• Make a list of three: a personal story (own, a relative's, or a friend's); a historical figure or moment; a real-world book, movie, or TV show.
• Tack a phrase onto each: "in space", "with dragons", "with time travel". Alternatives are zombies, wizards, elves, aliens, in a future dystopia, in an enchanted forest, in an alternate universe.
• Write a one-sentence logline for each: somebody must do something before something bad happens. Example: a team of crime scene investigators must prove a young dragon did not kill the king before the beast is hunted down.
• Pick the favorite. Set a timer for 15–20 minutes and start with "This is a story about . . ." Write without stopping and do not cross out or edit. Repeat as many times as wanted.
• To sidestep copying worries, start from a core archetype instead of a specific title (rags to riches, grail quest, rebirth), e.g. "rags to riches . . . on the moon".
• Make it your own with original characters, your own language and style, and a plot that emerges organically rather than being forced into the source's structure.

Six-word story skeletons

• Describe the novel or concept in six words, as a six-second elevator pitch.
• Put six-word descriptions on index cards for protagonist, what the protagonist wants, the obstacle, the theme, the world, and the rules of the world. Use the back of each card for notes.
• Write six-word "nano-memoirs" for each main character.
• Build a new story as a six-word headline plus a short paragraph. Write 3–6 of these, then order them so there is a beginning, middle, and end with story and character arcs.
• Writer's-block fill-ins, adding only one word and optionally as dialogue between characters:
  • "Didn't recognize you without your ______."
  • "My, what happened to your ______?"
  • "Please don't tell anyone about ______."
• Expand a six-word tale into a one-paragraph story. "Describe an imaginary world in six words" also works as a prompt.

Protagonist character arc (esp. dystopian)

• The world is only the setting that highlights the protagonist's arc. Don't get so absorbed in worldbuilding that the characters are neglected.
• Make the goal more than survival, e.g. becoming a better, happier person. This stops the story becoming a string of familiar action scenes.
• Answer these six questions:
  1. Who is the protagonist outside the dystopia? Avoid defining her by one hammered flaw such as a dead father or shyness. Imagine her pre-collapse daily life: what she read, ate, listened to, watched, and did before bed. The contrast with what she has now creates stakes.
  2. Main character strength: a quality, not a physical attribute (compassion, intellect, leadership). Build scenes that challenge it.
  3. Main character weakness: a real flaw blocking fulfillment (lack of discipline, misjudging people, needing to be liked), not "talks too much". Plot scenes where it makes the protagonist fail sometimes. This keeps the climax uncertain.
  4. Main practical skill: shows passion and makes the character likeable. It also gives a backstory vehicle that avoids info dumps, and it sets up payoff later. The more seemingly useless the skill, the better the payoff (the breath-holding playboy saved in a gassed elevator).
  5. Main practical weakness: e.g. out of shape, bad knee, weak eyesight. Check whether it mirrors a psychological weakness or is used as an excuse not to try.
  6. Likeable? If not, give a "redemptive quality" hinting at hidden goodness, such as Alex's love of Beethoven in A Clockwork Orange. A compelling, unpredictable character with a strong voice also helps.
• If the disaster has already happened, show the old world through objects, memories, and flashbacks. If it hasn't, the pre-event scenes show who she was and who she must become.
• Younger YA tolerates thinner characterization. Sophisticated teen and adult readers need nuance.
• Show these traits in action, not in talking heads or monologue scenes.

Character choices and scene engines (anatomy of choice)

• Every choice has four elements: crisis, cause, crucible, (con)sequence.
• Crisis: force an urgent choice, ideally binary (do/don't, live/die), that must be made NOW. Choices under crisis reveal character; a routine choice reveals little.
• Cause: the reason must be established in the story's own terrain. Readers need to understand the choice, not agree with it. Six causes:
  • obsession with a quest, passion, or goal
  • moral/ethical essence
  • primal emotion (fear, love, envy, anger)
  • duty
  • psychological scar (abandonment, abuse)
  • revenge (for the murder or mistreatment of a child, spouse, lover, parent, or sibling)
• The causes carry different weight with the audience. Revenge for a child's death outweighs a vague obsessive passion.
• Crucible: define the boundaries around the choice. Close the walls and limit the escapes to raise tension and reveal character.
• (Con)sequence: each choice must produce consequences that drive the next sequence of events. Events without that spark confuse.
• Diagnostic checks:
  • Are the lead characters' choices heightened by the four elements?
  • What is the character's most human flaw, and does it shape the choices?
  • Diagram the chain of choices and consequences. Stakes should rise with each step.
  • Is the character's first choice revealing? The first introduction sells the character.

Openings: the five-beat grab (first five pages or minutes)

• Readers and script readers may discard a script that hasn't grabbed them in five pages. The five beats come one per minute (or page), in this order:
  1. At-tension: open on tension, chosen from danger, anxiety, hostility, unease, or sex.
  2. The Build: escalate with the prompt "Not only does . . ."
  3. The Ratchet: tighten further with "Not only that, but now . . ."
  4. Another Notch: one more turn with "If you thought that was bad . . ."
  5. The Jaw Dropper: show the characters something extraordinary they have never seen, as a twist to keep the audience off guard.
• Exercise: write a minute-1 grabber using each of the five tension types and pick the one that suits the story. Then apply the minute 2–5 prompts in order.
• It works for novels and graphic novels as well as plays and screenplays.

Endings

Avoid the guessable ending

• If the reader guesses the ending by the halfway point, the story fails, whatever the prose or characters are like.
• The protagonist must change meaningfully between first meeting the reader and meeting the monster.
• The final action must reflect that change and come at great cost to the protagonist or their beliefs. A final action that evokes strong emotion moves the reader.

The three standard monster endings (avoid all three)

1. The protagonist sees the monster and fights it (wins, nearly dies, or dies).
2. The protagonist joins the monster and turns evil.
3. There was no monster.

Alternatives

• The monster evolves and is no longer a threat. Does the protagonist become the worse of the two?
• The thing fought is not the real monster; the real one waits to strike just after the apparent victory.
• The protagonist makes the monster suffer endlessly instead of killing it humanely.
• The protagonist discovers everyone is a monster, or that the "evil" is no big deal.
• Monsters can be human, as in thrillers, space opera, and military SF.

Clichéd setup to avoid

• A kind protagonist, often a child with a single parent, faces an unseen evil signaled by murky pool water, dark grass, or sudden wind. A friend or relative then turns up dead in the middle.

Exercises

• Read an unfinished story. At the halfway point list every plausible ending, then finish and ask whether the ending surprised you yet stayed plausible, whether the protagonist changed, and whether it moved you.
• Write 2,000 words of SF, fantasy, or horror with one monster threatening the protagonist, her family, or her way of life, and a protagonist who will learn something about herself. List all plausible endings, cross out the standard three, pick one of the rest, and write the remainder.

Plotting backward from the ending

• Write the ending first, even the final paragraph, especially for a multi-book series. Know the climax of each book and the series ending before starting. Multi-book series mean years of work, so fix the destination first.
• Work backward asking "How did that happen?" and "What happened before that?" until you reach the beginning. This exposes weaknesses and strengths in the tale.
• Do the same for characters: define them at the climax, then work backward to the starting state. If they're unchanged at the end, something is wrong.
• A fixed ending also means you never reach a point where you don't know what happens next.
• Exercises:
  • On a finished work, summarize the last chapter or section in a few sentences on a file card, then the one before it, and so on back to the start. Check that the ending is the natural consequence of everything before it.
  • Use a news headline as the story's final sentence and work backward with "And what happened just before that?"
  • Build the same character two ways: a standard biography (likes/dislikes, background, family), then a fully formed character worked backward. Ask which story elements shaped them.
• Writing the ending first is not the only valid method; some writers don't plan, but this is the recommended approach for big series.