Flexible Plots


Now, taking what we talked about yesterday with the Three Act structure, feel free to take that structure and mess with it until you get Your story. Breaking the rules is the fun part of writing, and the best part of Nanowrimo. Nothing is in cement, this is all hypothetically in pencil, so things can be rearranged, added, removed or whatever as you see fit. This outline and everything you put in it is flexible.

My stories tend to start with the five point structure, and branch off into something that resembles the three acts. It works for me because I have space to figure out what I want to have happen in my story, and I tend to rewrite the overall plot points several times until I'm happy. 

Plot twists are fun to add, and challenging your MC to really see what they're made of makes the story interesting. It's always interesting to throw things at your characters to see where they bend or break. Yes, that sounds sadistic, but if you think about it from the reader's POV, we want to see people struggle and eventually win! Or if they fail, we want to see how they get back up. Resilience is one of my all time favorite character traits, and each character I see with it is different. 

But maybe your character isn't so much resilient as devious. Maybe they use their weakness and failure to grow and tackle the challenge from a radically different avenue. It's your story, so you get to decide what happens and how your characters react.

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