Write Out Loud (Reviews and Writing)

Or How to Become a Thief

“…I want to give you…the principle behind all the various tricks and methods. It’s this: steal the plot...”

If you want to write fiction – be it a novel, short story, screenplay or whatever – you need to plot. There are some out there who are ‘pantsers’ – writers who just go with the flow and let their characters dictate the story. There’s plenty of writers who claim to be like this but, honestly, most don’t realise just how much plotting they actually do. There’s very few who genuinely don’t know where the story is going next.

That is not to say that sometimes, as you’re writing, you realise this story isn’t going in the direction you thought it was. That’s absolutely okay but it isn’t the same thing as not having a plot at all. Plots, like all devices, are subservient to the writer. If they need to change, change them.

But the vast majority of us need to have at least a rough plot mapped out so we know the direction the story is taking. This is Writing 101 and if you’ve read any books or courses on writing I’m pretty certain you’ve come across this advice already.

If you are wanting to do a lot of writing, however, particularly if you’re a short story writer and fancy hitting the magazine market, there’s almost certainly going to come a time when you need to come up with a plot to inspire you and allow you to write something. It’s unlikely you have hundreds of stories already formed inside you. If you’re new to the game, you probably have a few. They will run out though.

Alternatively, perhaps you might want to come up with a load of plots that you then play around with and see which ones bear fruit? That’s totally good too.

I’ve done all of this – plotting for ideas already in my head, plotting for magazines and competitions, plotting just to see what bears fruit etc. How deeply I’ve plotted has varied from situation to situation, but there’s always been a plot.

So how do you come up with plot ideas? You’ve probably been told ‘look at life’, ‘write what you know’ etc. You may well have a book of plot-generating ideas or have a website, app or set of flashcards to help come up with ideas. All this is good and if you’ve not come across these, I urge you to go shop around online and find some.

I want to give you one big idea that, if you look carefully, is largely the principle behind all the various tricks and methods. It’s this: steal the plot.

Must writing mentors don’t put it so bluntly but honestly that’s what you’re doing. Whether the plot forms out of a writing prompt, or a set of cards you mixed together, or from what you’ve experienced in life – you’re stealing the ideas. And if you reconcile yourself to that, then the two main ways I want to encourage you to use won’t seem half as strange.

The first is this: take your plots from news stories (or these days, stuff you come across on social media).

Simply put, look at stories you read or videos you watch and imagine where you might go with these. Peter Shaffer famously admitted that his astonishing play, Equus, came as a result of hearing a news story about a stable boy who had blinded several horses with a red hot poker stick. “What on earth would bring someone to do such a thing?” Shaffer wondered. And so he wrote the play giving his fictionalised version of what might have led to that terrible, inexplicable crime.

You can do much the same. You don’t have the ending – as Shaffer did. You can have any part of the story or even the whole thing. You don’t have to stick to the actual event or events – as Shaffer did. You can adapt the idea.

As I write, Donald Trump has just become US president for the second time. Could that be the inspiration for a story? Directly it would be: old man avoids going to prison by running for president and, against all odds, wins. Or I could take it as a starting point: Ordinary guy is so enraged by someone he doesn’t like becoming president that he sets out to assassinate the leader even though the guy has been a peaceful, law-abiding person all his life. Or it could be shifted obliquely: Our hero has been beaten down by something (people, the system, his boss or whatever) and to escape it he takes up something new and, against all the odds, becomes brilliant at it, solving all his problems along the way.

That latter example leads me to the next way of finding plots…

Second: steal your plots from books

I know this sounds like plagiarism but it isn’t – trust me! You’re going to do that sideways shift again. Take the basic story ideas and put them into a new situation with new characters.

As an example, I’m currently reading Count Zero by William Gibson. I’m not greatly fond of it – the book is well written but I’m finding his futuristic sci-fi world too confusing to follow. But…the story has an interesting angle. There’s three different characters all going through their own story with different motivations, obstacles and characters they encounter. In the end, it all comes together as the stories merge. For most of the book though, the stories are independent.

What if I took that idea of three separate stories that come together to be one eventually? I can’t do it directly, but I’m going to put that story in a new environment. Perhaps a workplace? Or a school? What about on a plane? Or in the court of King Henry VIII? All of these would be so very different to the Matrix-cum-Bladerunner world of Gibson’s. They’d all make very different stories too. The plane one might be about three different characters – say a pilot, crew member and a passenger – dealing with a terrorist onboard. The school one might be three teachers battling against a new principal. The workplace could be three different types of employee who all, separately, realise something sinister is going on in their massive corporation.

That’s the principle: take the basic premise and transfer it into something you feel comfortable with or excited by; then rebuild the story around the new setting. In Count Zero you’ve got a hacker, a soldier and an art dealer (I’m sure Gibson used a plot trick himself to come up with those totally separate characters) all having their strings pulled by someone or something. They all have to act in a certain way and that leads the plot in certain directions. My three flight people, or teachers or employees would all act in completely different ways with different motivations. The story will develop and become its own thing. No one will know, unless you choose to give them references that are clues.

This trick has been used for a long time. West Side Story is just Romeo and Juliet. Star Wars was, in part, based on old Samurai movies. Chicken Run is inspired by The Great Escape. I could go on, but you get the picture.

So whatever you’re reading (or watching, or listening to), ask yourself: what is the basic premise and how could this be put into a new setting with new characters?

When you’ve firmed that up, you have the beginnings of a plot. Of course, then you’re going to need to develop the idea into more fully rounded sections that will, if it is a novel, become chapters. That needs more tricks.

That’s for another time.

Read all A Brief Guide to Writing here:

A Brief Guide to Writing: 1 – Introduction

A Brief Guide to Writing: 2 – Why you shouldn’t be a writer

A Brief Guide to Writing: 3 – Thinking like a writer

A Brief Guide to Writing: 4 – Budgeting income as a writer

A Brief Guide to Writing: 5 – Mistakes, editing and you

A Brief Guide to Writing: 6 – The Writer and The Black Dog of Doom

A Brief Guide to Writing: 7 – Feedback

A Brief Guide to Writing: 8 – What Happened to That Damned Turtle?

A Brief Guide to Writing: 9 – Instant Plots

Social Entrepreneur, educationalist, bestselling author and journalist, D K Powell is the author of the bestselling collection of literary short stories “The Old Man on the Beach“. His first book, ‘Sonali’ is a photo-memoir journal of life in Bangladesh and has been highly praised by the Bangladeshi diaspora worldwide. Students learning the Bengali language have also valued the English/Bengali translations on every page. His third book is ‘Try not to Laugh’ and is a guide to memorising, revising and passing exams for students.

Both ‘The Old Man on the Beach’ and ‘Sonali’ are available on Amazon for kindle and paperback. Published by Shopno Sriti Media. The novel,’The Pukur’, was published by Histria Books in 2022.

D K Powell is available to speak at events (see his TEDx talk here) and can be contacted at dkpowell.contact@gmail.com. Alternatively, he is available for one-to-one mentoring and runs a course on the psychology of writing. Listen to his life story in interview with the BBC here.

Ken writes for a number of publications around the world. Past reviewer for Paste magazine, The Doughnut, E2D and United Airways and Lancashire Life magazine. Currently reviews for Northern Arts Review. His reviews have been read more than 7.9 million times.

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