Hello, good human beings of Notebook.ai:
Whenever I come up with a story, I have a lot of character ideas. All of my characters are well-developed and fleshed out.
Not so much my plot. I struggle to find things for my imaginary human beings to do and trust me, I've read every writing blog and used every tool I've heard of.
Essentially, I have half a million concepts floating around in my head but no real plot.
So, does anyone else struggle with this? And how do you cope?
Thank you <3
Yes! I have the same problem frequently.
Before you have a plot, you need to find your genre, and that should narrow things down a bit. To generate a plot, I think a good place to start is to figure out what it is that your characters want, and how they're going to get it.
Try making your story around things characters would do, conflicts they are likely to have and address certain flaws or problems they have using elements of the story. For example, X is greedy and has ruined their relationship with Y. X then goes on an adventure with Y where they must transport a relic that could be sold for millions of dollars. X learns they shouldn't be tempted by their greed, and make amends with Y along the way.
What I usually do (And It might not work for you) but what I do is I have a vague idea of what my story is, then I Create my characters and then I slowly work everything out from there. And sometimes, my plot isn't order. If I have ideas with my character, then I will write it out, and when I have like 20 short writings, I link them together. Sometimes I have to write little bits for in between, but it works.
Personal slightly chaotic technique:
-Work out beginning
-Work out end
-Character husks (things like race, ethnicity, role)
-Develop favouritism and work on only one character
-Feel bad about it and work on other characters
-This goes back and forth a bit until I have decently fleshed out characters
-Remember there's a story too
-Come up with a bunch of conflicting scenes and endings until I finally settle on the final ones
-Continue to have headcanons
-Change my mind
-Done…or is it?
For plot making, there are lots of useful graphs, charts, and outlines. (I like Plotfactory's outlines.) If you need an actual story idea, you need to do some "what if's." "What if's" are what the story will do. Example- "What if humans genes got mixed with animal genes, and now we have their abilities?"
Then, you need to have a problem. You need to have something to go wrong. Or the first "what if" may be the problem and you can work on it from there.
Example- "What if there's an evil group of predators that want to take control of the world?"
Then you can make your plot using exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, or beginning, middle, end, etc.
I start with the characters before the plot, and the plot forms around them.
For me, I've had my main character rolling around in my head for years, I just needed to flesh him out more and create a world in which he can inhabit. Once I had a world, or at least a basic concept of one, I then came up with a simple plot and expanded from there.
The characters usually come first for me, then the plot.
I usually start with plot first. I do have one story where I came up with characters first and it's… not going very well :/
I usually get struck with a vague concept of something I want to write. An aesthetic, a word, a place, a theme, something. Then I create a main character with depth and motivation, and I use their motivation to create conflict: What does my character want? What do they need? What's stopping them? From there I build the plot and other characters.
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