Plot with Me, Day 4: Situation
If you’ve been following along The Plotting Workshop, by now your character is practically three-dimensional.
She has a signature side braid and the mouth of sailor. She likes to write poetry but will only read it to her pit bull, Blunt. She lives on a dilapidated farm where corn stalks grow 6 ft tall in the fall and she, um, well, what does she do? What does she want? Why are we reading about her?
Unless something is happening in your story, you only have a character sketch.
We need a situation. A problem. A ruckus, of sorts.
In this Plotting Workshop lesson, Shaunta Grimes suggests keeping a notebook of situations for story ideas, current and future.
Ask questions. The best is “what if?”
Teaching my younger students results in silly situations:
What if it rained hot dogs and mustard? (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs explored that situation)
What if a boy discovered he was a wizard? (hello, Harry?)
What if a girl dreamt of a world on the other side of the rainbow? (Wizard of Oz)
For older readers/writers:
What if you fell in love with someone you couldn’t have?
What if you witnessed a horrible crime? What if it was committed by a family member?
What if you discovered your best friend was a clone?
What if a missing toddler was later found dead, under the family room couch? (this was an actual local news story a few years back)
The higher the stakes, the more interesting the story.
In writing, you want to come up with situations you’d never want to be presented with in real life, but would love to read about someone else experiencing.
My Witchy Novel situation began, for me, with the question: What if a tree uprooted from the back of a school baseball field and just walked off into the woods, human-like?
It made me think of a curse. And a boy. And the girl who fell for him.
Here’s the Situation* I’m working on for my Witchy Novel:
Gem cheats with her best friend’s boyfriend, Ash. (needs to be an understandable, forgivable reason for this.) She loses her bff and any social standing at school. Especially hard as she’s dealing with hallucinations and creepy nightmares and feels more alone than ever.
Because she’s alone and confused and intrigued by the mystic and magick of the coven girls at school, she easily falls in with them and absorbs their chants, beliefs, spells and friendship.
But, she meets a boy of mystery. A cursed boy with his own secrets and loneliness and she falls hard for him. He is beautiful and kind and feels like home to her for the first time in her life.
Then, she learns, one of her coven was the witch who cursed Reed. Gem cannot stay with Reed lest she be disowned by the coven and sent away from Timber County (why? how?)
As Gem gains magick powers, her body deteriorates (risk of loving a cursed boy while practicing magick) She needs the powers to release Reed’s curse, but could perish in the process.
At this stage, you don’t need to have it all figured out. You don’t even need to have half of it figured out. Just a character, with a goal, a motivation for that goal and the conflict that will get in their way. Everything else is editable.
Many of these ideas will change as you work through this Plotting Workshop. And that’s okay. *I’ve already changed this main situation several times and tightened up some gaping plot holes.
As Shanon Hale said,
“I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”
Come back tomorrow to hear about testing your story idea with Shaunta’s 5 Plot Point exercise. This is the real deal, yo.
Challenge for you: What is your character’s goal and motivation? What or who will stand in their way? Maybe you need to learn more about your character to find out what is really at stake for them.
If you’re really stuck: Here’s a list of questions you can ask your MC to get in their head.
Read the two questions I asked my MC, Gem, that made me realize she’s living with a lot of guilt. And this guilt will be a big block in her ability to take risks to reach her goals.
When Mary Jo Campbell is not caving in to her two spoiled dogs or two spoiled teenagers, she’s inspiring young writers to find their unique voice and share their story with the world. Wanna join the Writing Revolution? Visit WriteLikeCrazy.com for more info and to receive a Free ebook of story prompts!
