The Further Four: What Happens Next?

One of the things that seems to make writers weep is the question What Happens Next? I've seen this bring moderately well-adjusted adult writers to their knees. (Okay, okay, the phrase moderately well-adjusted contradicts the word writer; I know. Just go with me.) It's also one of the things I hear from both my writing groups. So when I got together yesterday with The Further Four to talk about plot (the What in our Five Ws of stories), I wanted to give them something concrete to work with in terms of What Happens Next?

We warmed up by randomly generating a character, using the incredibly cool but incredibly boringly named Writing Exercises website. (I used the Story Plot generator in the children's section.)

A lonely girl or mysterious boy?
You decide.

Our generated Character 1 was a lonely girl. We spent about five minutes each writing a very brief bio of our lonely girl, focusing on character only. We didn't want to start telling a story about her, not yet.

Once we had our lonely girl bioed out, we generated Character 2, a mysterious boy, and spent another five minutes each writing a bio for him.

We talked for a few minutes then about plot, about how what a story is is a bunch of things getting in the way of our character getting what she wants. But what are those things that get in the way?

It all depends on the story, of course. You generally won't have a unicorn show up and start miraculously healing people unless you're writing a story that involves unicorns.What happens in a story happens because your characters are certain people who live in a certain world and do certain things. Which is uncomfortably vague, I know.

Unfortunately, no one can tell you what happens next. Your characters and plot have to lead you there. But we can list a few of the types of things that can happen in a plot. Like this:

• Character is introduced or leaves/dies
• Character learns a skill
• Character gets hurt or sick
• Character faces her greatest fear
• Character's weakness gets in her way
• One character betrays another
• Something unexpected happens
• Character finds something hidden or learns something secret
• Character learns about her past
• Bad guy has a triumph
• Bad guy has a loss
• Good guy has a triumph
• Good guy has a loss
• A chase
• A race
• A fight
• A capture
• An escape
• A rescue
• A change
• Something funny happens
• A natural disaster
• Something important breaks

A little eye candy for my DM bud.

(A special shout out to the Dungeon Master for helping me populate this list.)

As we write, we want all these things we're throwing in our character's way to keep getting bigger, harder and more dangerous until she faces her biggest, hardest, most dangerous challenge. At that point, we find out whether she's up to the task, whether she finds what she's looking for and whether we have a happy or sad ending.

After talking through this list of plot point types, we generated a Place—in an aeroplane (it's a British website)—and an opening event—someone is wearing a disguise. So that's where we started our story: Our lonely girl and mysterious boy are in an aeroplane, and someone is wearing a disguise.

I asked the girls to keep the start of their story short, to just write enough that we get a sense of where we are. And once we had established that, the girls decided on what type of a plot point would come next. (I made these cards to spread out on the table.) They chose something important breaks, and we wrote. Then character finds something hidden or learns something secret, and we wrote. Then character is introduced or leaves/dies, and we wrote. (You get the picture, yeah?) Finally, before they picked the fourth plot point, I told them that we were going to wrap up with this one and that they should finish their story if they could. The final plot point? Something unexpected happens.

I didn't see that coming.
Do you think she checked her bags?

What was awesome is that every single one of them wrapped it up. It was a thing of beauty. We had orphans finding a home, mysterious boys finding someone to share their passion for anime with, a long-lost father being tossed out of an aeroplane (don't worry, he survived), and a very unexpected unicorn emerging from the cabin galley to heal a dead guy.

Cranky Rah is more than a wee bit embarrassed to admit the unicorn was hers. Talk about some deus ex machina. And we will, at some point. Oh, we will.