A while back on Reddit a user made a post asking “How do you actually finish a story/book [or come up with plots]?”

Good question.

It’s something that has haunted me since I first started writing. When I was twenty I managed to finish a story that had a solid plot and reasonably good pacing. People loved it. I was published in a little literary mag and I figured that I had cracked the code. Everything would be cake from there on out.

It took me fifteen more years before I wrote something with a discernible plot. Yeah, mate. Fifteen. In the meantime I everything I wrote fell into one of three categories: vignettes, half-baked stories that ended with non-sequiturs, and stories that just plain didn’t get finished. Then, eventually, I started finishing things. Lots of things. In the last two years I’ve written one serial novel, twenty-odd short stories, a graphic novel script, and I’m halfway through a rewrite of another novel draft. That might not be impressive to some of the genre authors that crank out four novels per year, but for someone just getting the hang of things, it feels pretty good.

What changed?

I’ll spare you the story about deciding to focus on writing. That’s here if you really care. The key takeaway was the decision to approach writing like a craft. Which means means actually, y’know, learning the craft.

It also means, to paraphrase Ira Glass, you have to be okay with sucking until you actually do learn the craft. And for quite a while afterward, to be honest.

Tackling the plot

When I got serious, I picked up several books on the craft of writing. Stephen King’s On Writing, Robert Kee’s Story, Jeff Vandermeer’s Wunderbook, . . . and so on. One thing I gleaned was that there are a near infinite number of ways to go about structuring and plotting a story. Everybody has a favorite approach.

My advice for learning how to plot? Study the shit out of screenwriters. The Nerdist Writer’s Panel is hit and miss but can be an amazing resource. These are people who have to come up with plots frequently and consistently, and they understand what makes a story click.

The technique that worked best for me both for story breaking and for plotting has been Dan Harmon’s famous Story Circle. It’s based on the Joseph Campbell Hero’s Journey/Monomyth, but it’s simplified and easy to diagram.

After I have the eight parts mapped out I like to take it one step further and write out a beat sheet for each of the eight subsections in the Story Circle. I’ll post more on that at a later date.

Learning to finish

Now that you’ve got a plot that you’re excited about, it’s time to start. Starting is awesome. I’ve done it hundreds of times. I’m pretty damned good at writing beginnings. Middles and endings took me a long time to get the hang of, though. The reason?

The first, most intuitive answer might be that they’re trickier because they depend on the setups in the beginning. But the beginning depends on the ending, too. And the ending depends on the middle. In fact there’s a big orgy going on where every part of your story depends on every other part to make it work. And, like an orgy, if one part isn’t doing its job sometimes you can ignore it because there’s something really kinky going on between the beginning and the end. Still, the stuff that stands out hits all the notes, all the way through.

So why are middles and endings tough for some people? Practice. When I started all of those doomed projects and vignettes I was getting practice at beginnings. When I shitcanned things halfway through because I didn’t know how to plot, I was denying myself the opportunity to practice those middles and ends.

Doing it over and over again

Which brings me to the last bit. It’s really simple. Keep writing. Even if it sucks. Especially if it sucks. Then do it more. Every day or as close to it as you can manage.

Rinse and repeat.

And that’s it in a nutshell. Next up will be a post on actually hitting word counts (and those beat sheets I mentioned earlier).