The Plot

***Bit of a warning ***- this Plot section is quite long - I’ll look into breaking it down further, but sorting your plot out is basically the biggest part of the process!

Before I even started typing a single word of my novel, I spent a few weeks drafting out the entire story in skeleton form, from broad sweeps of the brush down to relatively small details. This meant that when I sat down to actually do the writing, I knew almost exactly what I needed to achieve structurally and thematically in every passage. This entirely prevented writer’s block, and it even allowed me to write passages out of order, depending on where my enthusiasm on that particular day took me.

The document I created outlined these factors:

PLOT STRUCTURE – THEMES – CHARACTERISATION

…And it made the actual process of writing far more rewarding.

General plot STRUCTURE:

Stories come from inspiration. It might have been something you read, something you dreamed up, or something you yourself are interested to read.

Your story might only start as a moment, or a scene, or a vague concept. But you CAN develop any of these into an entire story – that’s how Winter Solstice Pact came into being. I woke from a dream of the opening scene at Stonehenge, and within five minutes of rubbing my eyes and scrambling for my phone to record the idea, I had the bare bones of the entire story scripted out.

My first notes read like this:

“Harry, now in his 40’s, badass Auror. Sick of letting Death Eaters go, became a bit of a vigilante, killing Dark Wizards rather than capturing. His Vigilante Alter Ego called in by Aurors at Stonehenge who are getting killed by unknown assailants. Wipes the floor with them, disappears on a broomstick in a flash of light. Turns out he’s actually tired of capturing, sees it as too risky. Sick of defending everyone all the time, needs to pass the torch. Health problems, needs Ron and Hermione’s help with one final investigation before throwing in the towel for a quieter life.”

That was my premise. The idea of a really tired, long-suffering Harry: an Auror who’s wondering if his job will ever be “done”, feeling he might be past his peak, worried he’ll lose his edge and end up coming home in a box.

For my novel then, the problem Harry needed to face seemed obvious: give Harry a massive, original, insanely powerful enemy to deal with which brings all these issues he’s got into sharp perspective, and force him to make a choice about his future.

Everything else in the actual story came rushing in after I came up with this problem. So, once I had a general idea of the plot and the problem, I went about actually piecing one together.

Plot: S.T.AR

So, once your general idea is nailed on, you need to establish a chronology. Even if there are black spots in your idea, start with nailing down a Beginning, a Middle and an End. This sounds basic, but you’d be surprised how helpful it is.

Every story is essentially a problem. There have been countless pages written on the various core story structures, but it all comes down to a Problem, and how it plays out either being solved … or not solved. Crime novels are easier to get into, as the Problem is normally a murder or series of murders. The story then becomes how the main character or characters find out Whodunnit.

Like the original canonical Potter novels, The Winter Solstice Pact is an investigation. In the canon, various Antagonists – in various forms, but all leading to Voldemort – are up to something throughout the school year. The story is always the Trio working out what’s going on, and then trying to resolve it, while they weather various difficulties and interpersonal issues along the way.

That is the basic framework of some of the biggest-selling, most loved novels of all time.

An investigation.

Without shame, I made every effort to emulate that most successful of blueprints in creating The Winter Solstice Pact.

The stories of the canonical novels all occur generally through the school year, with the Beginning in September (ish), the Middle throughout the school year and the Ending in June – I immediately felt I wanted to reverse that, and have the story begin at the end of term time in the summer and end some time into Winter.

Setting a timescale for when YOUR novel takes place – even if it’s across years, decades… gives you an idea of how much time your novel will occupy.

BEGINNING – MIDDLE – END:

At the risk of sounding obvious, each of these sections serves a purpose. It’s worth bearing their purpose in mind when populating your plot into these sections, so that the story makes sense. The percentages next to the headings are for how much of your overall story you want the sections to form.

It’s important to realise that you can expand these concepts across multiple works, if you’re doing a series… The Potter series actually fall into these sections as well, as a kind of ‘meta’ Beginning , Middle and End.

Beginning: 20-30%

This is where you establish your world, your character, your themes and - most importantly - the main POINT of the story, the “quest”, if you like. This can take time to become apparent to the reader, but it needs to be defined nice and early so your reader knows what the drive of the story is. It doesn’t need to be as long as the other two parts, but it’s important to get it right, as it is what will make a reader continue reading your work.

In the Philosopher’s Stone, the Beginning is Harry finding out he’s a wizard, getting kitted out, then arriving at Hogwarts and realising something’s up. The minute he starts working stuff out with Hermione and Ron, the story is into The Middle.

The Beginning could be described as ‘Situation - > Task’. Here’s where you are, here’s what it’s about.

Middle: 40-50%

This is where the bulk of the story will occur. It’s largely “what happens.”

The Middle is a transitional phase between the Beginning and the End, where the characters need to run round doing all the things you’ve got planned for them, to the point where they start looking at a resolution. “We’ve discovered [X], now what are we going to do about it?” is a line that should ring in your ears to tell you The Middle is over, and you’re starting The End.

In terms of an Investigation, actions must lead to information being gleaned (or not gleaned, more on that later). ACTION > INFORMATION.

Action without anything coming from it is just… writing, for writing’s sake. It’s just a pointless 80’s movie, or one of those Japanese cartoons where the screen flashes a lot and there’s no discernible point to any of it.

A tightly-written piece remembers that anything that occurs has to have ramifications either immediately, or some time after. In Winter Solstice Pact, every physical confrontation or investigative action of reading books or checking equipment or speaking to another department LEADS to something – nothing is wasted, something is always learned, even if it’s ‘we need to try something else.’

The Middle could be described in one word as ‘Action.’

End: 20%

Every good story needs a solid end. There’s no point having a cracking Beginning and Middle, only for the Ending to fizzle out. The End is the solution to the problem, where the Characters resolve the issue. Where everything they’ve worked towards comes to fruition.

Length-wise, the End doesn’t need to be extensive, but there needs to be an identifiable turning point where the endgame really jumps off the pages, and the reader is rewarded for sticking with the tale. Readers should KNOW instinctively, without feeling the remaining pages in the book, that they are in The End. The pace should pick up, this is where you need to deliver the Big Moments. Planning this section carefully and having a good ending lined up is critical to the overall value of a story.

As an Author, defining this section makes you consciously realise that you need to start resolving your plot threads and giving the payoffs, where everything the characters have been through comes to mean something, for better or worse.

The End could be described as ‘Result’ – leaving the three sections described as STAR – Situation, Task, Action and Result. Ooooh, I hate mnemonics…

But this one really fits.

Investigations:

For an investigation into something it’s CRUCIAL that you first map out what the Antagonists have done/do throughout the story. Think about how, for example, the Chamber of Secrets attacks develop and escalate throughout the school year. The main character is always, to a degree, at the whim of the Antagonist and events that occur.

So, to establish this, detail out your problem/Antagonist action by writing down

“who/what/where/why/when/how the culprit(s) did what they did.”

These details need to be precise, as the precision of the facts of what the Antagonists did/are doing is what your characters need to establish with their investigation, to then be able to do anything about it.

Once you know precisely what your Antagonists have done, you have established an ANTAGONIST TIMELINE.

The Antagonist Timeline then gives you the initial blueprint of your HERO TIMELINE – and more importantly forms your characters’ eventual “Solve.”

The body of the story then becomes what your characters do to work towards the Solve, and then what they do once they’ve got it… which completes your HERO TIMELINE. It goes without saying… The two timelines must match up.

When creating an Investigation plot from scratch, it’s really helpful to begin with identifying the final discovery that breaks the whole case open and work BACKWARDS from that.

The Solve can be an identification of the culprit, or whatever fact causes the “AHA” moment. It’s the one key piece of information that leads to the characters finally being in the position of what to do about it.

A really obvious but very good example of this is the incomparable Hugh Laurie as Dr House, when he sees something or has that “aha” moment about 35-40 mins into the hour long show. Something triggers his Solve, every episode. It’s formulaic, but we love it, and we’re waiting for it.

So then, working backwards from the Final Solve becomes a case of establishing what information/action led to this final Solve, and then what led to that information, piece by piece, backwards. A one-moment solve is not as edifying or as realistic as a gradual, multi-faceted Solve, normally involving elimination.

Here is where the Sherlock Holmes investigative maxim comes in: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” This is a fantastic way to address your investigation: pick out elements of your problem and have your character/s go through each and eliminate them.

Think of an Investigation as what ACTION leads to what INFORMATION is gleaned, like a chain.

The link between ACTION leading to INFORMATION along the chain then becomes the basis of what your characters do throughout the novel... which you can work out without breaking a sweat.

Once you have worked the very basic links out backwards, you obviously then re-order them into chronological order and hey presto – you have a basic chain of investigation “beats”.

You’ll notice a lot of American cop procedurals focus on establishing “Means, Motive and Opportunity.”

UK shows aim at the 5W’s – Who / What / Where / When / Why (and How) as this is what UK Detectives are taught to establish in any criminal case.

Some of these differing investigative elements may already be known due to the circumstances of what’s being investigated, leading the remaining factors to be the focus of the investigation. The fact remains that when you have established these factors of your problem, you have your Solve.

In the Winter Solstice Pact, I blatantly put this concept into Harry’s mouth, describing his lack of progress over the attacks on Muggles: “Entire villages have been destroyed, hundreds of Muggles killed and there's not a single lead to work on. We don't know WHO's doing it, WHY they're doing it, or even HOW they're doing it.”

As he obviously already knew WHEN and WHERE the attacks had taken place… the rest of the factors were clearly outstanding and were what he was after. In one short sentence, the reader understands where Harry’s at with his investigation so far and what he needs to find out. It’s me, the author, telling the reader what Harry et al are going to establish throughout the rest of the novel.

The chain of beats leading from the beginning all the way to the final solve become the direction of the story. Your chain of investigative beats targetting the 5W’s becomes the bare Skeleton of your whole story.

But how to physically record this??

Exactly like JKR, when writing WSP I used a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet. The reason for this is really straightforward – the cells are really easy to edit/move by dragging and dropping, rather than tables in MS Word which do not like being changed/moved around etc. Once some information’s in a cell (or set of cells), such as an investigation beat, you can then shift it around your timeline with consummate ease by dragging and dropping until you’re happy with where it sits.

So, with your basic plot outlined, you now need to start building the novel properly, putting it on a screen.

To start off, I put the words ‘BEGINNING, ‘MIDDLE and ‘END in three different cells, vertically in the first column. I expanded these cells very large by merging several into one (merge and centre), as multiple cells will need to be aligned to each category by the end of the process.

In the next column over, I then added in the basic plot points established from the Investigation Chain, positioning them aligned to the relevant sections of Beginning-Middle-End.

As an example, for my ‘Beginning’ section, I started off with “Harry’s problem – Muggle Attacks – need investigating. Gets help from Ron & Herm.”

For the ‘Middle’ – I had “They all investigate, leads to the culprits”

For the ‘End’ – “What they do about the culprits, resolving with a lot of help”

Then, I combed back through each of these points and fleshed out each part by putting in the ACTION-INFORMATION section, then asking myself “How?”

So, “HOW… does Harry Get help from Ron & Herm.”

Then, “HOW… do they all investigate?” and

“HOW… does it lead to the culprits?”

and so on.

Each answer to those “How?” questions led to a bullet point, or a succession of bullet points, which sounded like this:

Question: “How does Harry get help from Ron & Herm”?

Answer: “He asks them for help.”

Question: “How/what/where/why/when?”

Answer: **cue brain buzzing, playing with some ideas…**

How - In person, with absolute honesty between old friends

What – asks Ron and Hermione for different things, based on their strengths

Where - at Harry’s surprise birthday celebration in the Ministry for Magic, in a private room

Why - because he’s desperate, he’s getting nowhere, people are dying.

When - once he’s done his public-facing duties.

And that’s your first passage outlined.

So this is how I progressively fleshed out the Skeletoned, vague, general bullet points, into passage-ready scenarios.

And, as is life, each bullet point inevitably posed further questions, which created a series of further bullet points.

Question – Why is Harry Desperate?

Answer – People are dying, his investigation’s got no leads, Aurors under his power can’t help.

Question – Why does his investigation have no leads?

… and so on and so forth.

Of note, I wasn’t even thinking about chapters at this stage, just individual passages.

I eventually started examining my bullet points to be sure they got to where I needed to have happened by the end of the passage. This made each and every passage get the reader somewhere further into the story: this is considered “tight” writing, where there is no flabby passages, no wasted writing time AND therefore, no wasted reading!

After some time delving down into the questions in the manner described above, the ‘BEGINNING – MIDDLE – END’ became pretty well populated with

- where characters went,

- what they did there, and

- what they learned/established.

This is then a story ‘Fleshed out’, beyond that initial Skeleton.

Problems:

Nobody wants to read a story where everything just goes swimmingly.

So after I had fleshed the Skeleton out – it was time to add in some problems.

A red-herring/dead end makes for a good problem: not every line of enquiry leads to a golden answer or moves the investigation forward. To have an investigation that just keeps pinging back positive results is not the least bit credible.

A spanner in the works thrown by the Antagonist can be a good problem. Whatever it is, it can be something unexpected, technical, impromptu or even entirely predictable/planned such as an unavoidable appointment which takes your character out of the game for a while.

A problem is literally anything that makes the Hero’s desires harder to obtain.

Problems are what make a story exciting, and worth reading.

Without realising it, every single good story you’ve ever read or seen isn’t a list of stuff just happening, it’s a portrayal of “what went wrong, and how [character] got around that problem.”

Think Star Wars: Luke and Obi-Wan charter the Milennium Falcon and go to Alderaan to deliver the Death Star Plans to the Alliance: did they just do all that, then get home in time for tea and medals? No. They were hounded by Stormtroopers as they flew out of Mos Eisley, the Death Star obliterated Alderaan while they were en route, and when they arrived, they got traction-beamed into the Death Star. NOTHING seemingly went right for them, and yet when that photon torpedo plopped into the exhaust vent with the help of The Force, finally – finally – the Good Guys got a win. THAT’s why it felt so good – because up to that point, it had been hard going.

A great story is actually a series of misadventures. Look at Game of Thrones: it’s eight seasons of things going wrong for the Starks: misadventures, interceptions, double-crosses, frustrations, and deaths. GRRM is the master of making his characters’ lives miserable. (Poor Arya)

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: – if Steve Martin and John Candy just got on a train and were home in time for Thanksgiving, it wouldn’t have been a great story.

Home Alone: If the Wet Bandits gave up after Kevin McAllister convinced them there WAS someone at home? No film.

It's allll about problems.

So, once you’ve layered in AT LEAST one problem per significant action, you’re onto a half-decent plot. A story that lists ‘What happens’ becomes ‘What a Character Wants, and What Goes Wrong.’ This is what makes the information the characters obtain seem EARNED, which makes for a better read.

I used Red Herrings/Dead Ends to introduce characters and events that otherwise would have been missed out, giving strength to the heart of the novel and giving the readership some of what they will have come to the novel to read a bit of: nostalgia. So problems don’t always need to just frustrate your character, they can actually highlight how your characters deal with problems, which is a great way of readers getting to know the characters and getting a feel for them, and their capabilities.

I’ll come back to Arya in GoT – her trials and tribulations mature her from a girl to a young woman. They harden her. They make her who she becomes. They give her a reason to leave Westeros, and eventually a reason to return.

As an author, Problems are your FRIEND. They can serve almost any purpose you set your mind to.

In the VERY FIRST SCENE of Winter Solstice Pact, after the prologue, Ron is taking the lift to the Minister for Magic’s floor. He doesn’t just press the button and arrive, he has a minor argument with the lift. It was a priceless opportunity for readers to be reintroduced to Ron Weasley, to things we loved about him (his grumpy humour), and to quietly establish that Hermione became Minister for Magic for a couple of years before very recently stepping down. The Problem of the argumentative lift gave all three things in one very short passage.

Focusing your drafting to make each plot beat encounter a problem or focus on an outcome means each plot point/passage serves a purpose. No wasted words, no wandering in no-mans-land. At no point will the reader think “what was the point of that passage?”

So, once each cell on your spreadsheet has a “what happens – what goes wrong”, you can build the cells down towards your ending, and feel sure the plot will land logically. You can read the entire novel’s plot in a few moment’s glancing down the beats, and get an idea of how it progresses.

If there are too many plot points in the Beginning section, for example, consider trimming them down, merging them or shifting them around so that the BEGINNING-MIDDLE-END sections work out to nicely balanced percentages of the entire work. This will help towards the story developing steadily, and stop your plot feeling lopsided.

WHO’s INVOLVED:

In the next column along, I found it helped to list WHO is involved in that passage, and add any date/time/location that’s relevant into it. This is really a screenplay technique, but it really helps in novel creation to keep up with who is where, which was very helpful for The Winter Solstice Pact and it’s three main investigators. If you are wanting an even character spread, or indeed all your POV to be from one character, it still helps to know who appears in each passage for reasons of overall balance or just awareness later on in the editing phase.

PACING:

With my initial Antagonist Timeline fleshed out before I even started writing prose, I was able to pair the trio’s investigation beats to the date of the beats of what the Baddies were up to, which subsequently formed a n action-specific timeline that literally wrote itself.

In WSP, because the Antagonists were literally working to a schedule of fairly regular dates throughout 2022, the Antagonist timeline wrote itself. I escalated every proceeding attack, detailed their locations and the magical effects used, and added detail around the significance of the date chosen. It took all of 30 minutes to generate a heartbeat-like effect of Attacks which would keep the pacing steady.

My research for the timeline read almost exactly like Ron’s big Solve at home with Hermione, where he studied a calendar, picking out the dates of the attacks by the relevant cultural/astrological significant dates. Ron did it backwards after the attacks and projected forward, whereas I had to research the 2022 calendar and set the events in motion on the dates I chose. I wanted to keep a relatively regular schedule on hand for reasons of keeping the Trio’s investigation URGENT, which in turn added to steady timing of big plot points. The Trio were obviously playing catch up with the Antagonists which coincidentally gave the story a degree of regularity and urgency that would be difficult to synthesise under other circumstances.

PACING is really important, especially for longer works, but it can be difficult to gauge if you just free-write.

I colour coded my plot beats with red for an ‘action’ scene, blue for ‘reading/intrigue’, and green for ‘reflection/decision making’.

As ridiculously simple as it sounds, I knew that if these colours were interspersed nicely enough, the pacing of the piece would feel consistent. It’s a nice easy visual way to work out where your entire story has too little/too much action or intrigue, and it helps you understand how a reader will experience the book.

SPOILER: if your very first scene doesn’t have action AND intrigue, it’s not going to hook the reader and get them turning the pages. Again, it sounds contrived, but you need to consciously weave the opening scene of your work to ensure the rest of your hard work is seen. The last two thirds of your work could be amazing, but if the reader never gets there, it’s all been for nothing.

Next > Themes