Craft a Plot using 6 Simple Steps

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Let me guess: You love making stories—there are these cool characters living in your head that just want to get out on the page. You love hanging out with them, know their quirks, how they speak, how they interact. You came up with dramatic scenes and a hundred thousand beautiful details to bring your world to life. But when you write, the problems start. Perhaps the first scene is still easy because it's right there, ready in your mind. But then you grind to a halt, not knowing where to take your plot, or you keep adding scenes but it all starts to feel too random or too boring.

If the paragraph above describes your problems, then this page is for you. Once you have read the next section, you will be able to craft powerful storylines quickly and easily without any tools except your imagination.

Six questions

When you tried to plot your stories, you probably tried thinking through them chronologically from beginning to end, but this turns out to be really hard. There is always the temptation to drift off to certain scenes you have already imagined countless times. More importantly, you face a structural problem: Did you notice how in many movies the beginning feels a bit random and we are basically just wandering around enjoying the world? The truth is, none of this is really random. It is all carefully crafted to set up the elements that we need later, but we don't know what these elements will be until we have planned how things will end.

Instead of thinking about your story in chronological order, let's start by first making a skeleton of a storyline to which the meat can be added later. To create this skeleton, we must answer six questions:

1. Who is the protagonist?

I am assuming you want to create a piece of fiction with a strong character arc, which means we need a main character, your protagonist. So go ahead, give your protagonist a name and some basic characteristics, e.g.:

Clera is a small-time thief living in a fantasy world.

Okay, we are making a fantasy story and the protagonist is vaguely interesting. It's good to make your protagonist interesting in one way, not in a million ways (Harry Potter is a wizard, not an undead dark-elf conjurer-assassin with a pet crocodile and a Mountain Dew addiction.)

2. How is the protagonist special?

A protagonist with an interesting role in life will attract readers to your story, but if we want them to care about the protagonist, the protagonist must also be special in some way. For example:

Clera excels at hiding, but what makes her really special is that she is the sole survivor of a famous shipwreck in which dozens died.

Interestingly, your protagonist doesn't need to be nice, good, or brave to make the reader care. But they need to be special in some way. The same goes also for any other character. Maybe it's an ability, a past experience, something they did, a character trait, a secret, a disability, or someone just cares about them very much (Nemo in Finding Nemo ticks the last two boxes: Nemo's father cares about him (character trait) and has a past experience. Dory has a special ability and also a disability).

3. What is the protagonist's real problem?

There wouldn't be a story arc if there wasn't a problem to overcome:

Clera still has nightmares from the shipwreck that killed her family. In the dark, she is prone to experience flashbacks to the night the storm struck, which makes her afraid of darkness and shadows, undermining her extraordinary ability to hide.

Note that a good problem is not the obvious outward problem that you would first think of. It is more of a subtle inward problem, a character flaw, problematic relationship, or bad habit that needs to be overcome. In Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukács calls this the inner form of the novel. Consider Alien: Ripley's problem is not that there is a murderous alien on her spaceship, rather it is the fear that paralyzes her and makes her passive. Once desperation helps her overcome this fear, she is capable of fighting back.

4. How do we bring the character into the second act?

We don't write stories about small problems; we write about momentous problems that are so huge that the protagonist could never overcome them under normal circumstances. To solve their problem, they must be thrown into a completely new world that operates under different rules: the world of act two.

While hiding, Clera accidentally slips into the shadow world, where she can move around while appearing as nothing more than a shadow in the real world. She starts to rely more and more on her shadow-travel abilities, but in the dark shadow world, she is constantly terrified, and that limits her to short journeys: quick jumps of a few seconds that she uses to cover small distances when she needs to escape tight situations.

The world of the second act might be a different place (The world outside the Shire in The Hobbit), a different level of existence (The real world in The Matrix), a different time (the past in Back to the Future), new circumstances brought on by an event (the terrorist attack in Die Hard or the interior of the bank during the robbery in Killing Zoe), or it might be a different social circle or relationship (High society in Pretty Woman, the world of high fashion in The Devil Wears Prada)

5. Why is the protagonist forced to address their real problem?

Even in the new world, the protagonist is at first not able to solve their real problem. They are still in denial. But the new world comes with new dangers, and eventually, they cause a crisis where the real problem must be addressed (this is called the outer form in Theory of the Novel).

The creatures of the shadow world don't like intruders and start hunting Clera. Eventually, she is captured by the Shadow Lord and imprisoned in a night-black prison in the darkest corner of the shadow world.

You want the contrast between the normal world of act one and the new world of act two to be as stark as possible. The more isolated and inescapable the world of act two is, the more intense your story will be. In our example, Clera spends only short moments in the shadow world at first, and this tells you that the real world of act two is not only the actual shadow world but also the criminal underground that she will be sucked into as her life becomes more and more dominated by the shadow world. To make this world of crime inescapable, we have to take away everything that tied her to the world of act one, e.g., her home, her friends, etc. She will be constantly on the run.

6. How will the protagonist ultimately overcome their problems?

This is where it all comes together. The protagonist must first solve their real (deep, internal) problem, and that will enable them to solve their external problem. So here we go:

In the prison of the Shadow Lord, Clera must face her fears. She is plagued by flashbacks of the shipwreck she experienced as a child, but this time she embraces them, and we learn the truth. The shipwreck wasn't a shipwreck at all but an attack by shadow creatures who abducted all aboard. Clera was dragged into the shadow world but managed to flee because she can not only open portals that let her escape into the shadow world. She also has the opposite ability, ripping open the shadow world and letting in the light, which she can use to destroy the Shadow Lord and escape his prison. Finally free from her fears she has become a full shadow walker and maybe even gets to rescue her parents who were imprisoned in the shadow world all those years.

There you have it; we made a story. This six-question method will give you quick storylines. Give it a try, it's fun. If you memorize the questions, you will be able to do this whenever you are bored. Try using the questions to make up stories to tell to kids, or to make stories together with your friends.

Does this work for other examples?

Sure, here are five more quick stabs at different genres. I will write them in the form Protagonist / Why Special? / Problem / Act II / Crisis / Resolution

1. Joe is a cowboy / he is also a small-time magician who entertains people by making things vanish / he has an alcohol problem and frequently gets drunk / while drunk he gets into a shootout and kills the son of a notorious gang leader; now he is on the run / eventually he gets cornered and forced into a duel with the gang leader, who arranges for a bottle of whiskey to be delivered to Joe hours before the duel; now he must withstand the temptation to get drunk a final time / He shows up to the duel bottle in hand, completely drunk, bumps clumsily into his opponent, and then predictably gets shot dead; then we learn that he poured the whiskey away, put on the act of being drunk, and used his sleight of hand to exchange the bullets in the gang leader's gun with blanks. Now officially dead, he rides off into the sunset.
2. Anna is a PhD student in physics / She has the ability to solve complex equations / Her supervisor is an asshole / An experiment fails; expensive equipment is destroyed, but this failure points to a groundbreaking discovery; the implications are huge but dangerous; now they have to finish the research before competitors might do a similar experiment that could destroy the whole town / The strain grows; tensions rise; Anna gets into an argument with her supervisor and quits the lab; unemployment gives her time to think and she solves the puzzle, she is happily accepted into the competitor's lab, who is a much more reasonable person.
3. Paul is a stockbroker and financial genius / He is a food nerd and an absolute wizard at the cooking pot / He is also a lonely, greedy and callous man, who is bored by other people / After a stock market crash he is laid off and, not knowing what to do, gets a job in the corner coffeeshop he used to visit; after hours he uses the kitchen to secretly prepare wild creations; when this is discovered, he starts getting close to the owner, Sarah, and they start offering food / Their success leads to a crisis when the lease for the shop is not renewed and Paul realizes they could use the secret of their success to start a franchise chain, leading to a confrontation with Sarah / Paul realizes that he doesn't want to be rich. He wants to cook and live with Sarah. He declares his love, and they open a diner in the countryside.
4. Sandrine is an airport security guard / She has had a rough life, this job is her final chance / She feels insecure in the role, and wielding authority seems wrong / When she takes an aerial tramway across the motorway back to reach the airport parking lot, the crowded tram gets stuck, the AC fails, and it looks like they will be stuck in blistering heat for hours before rescue arrives / people panic, fights start, the tram rocks wildly, it might fall / Sandrine shouts at people to get a grip on themselves and manages to calm the situation, she has proved to herself that she can take control.
5. Frederick is a hamster / He is super-intelligent / His home turf is slowly being degraded by nearby construction work, but he is too stubborn to leave / When he can't find food he ventures into the city, meets new friends, and leads a heist on a supermarket / Returning home with his loot, he finds his burrow concreted over, but his adventure has helped him to overcome his reluctance to leave, and so he ventures out to greener pastures or maybe a life of urban crime.

With the six-question method, these story skeletons are quick to make. Not all of them will be great, but you since you can just make more until one strikes you as so powerful that you have to turn it into a full story.

Is that it?

No, there is more. The six-question method gives you a story skeleton for one storyline. You still need to put meat on those bones. But for a quick story, you may be able to do this by the seat of your pants once you have the skeleton to guide you.

Unless you have a lot of experience, producing smooth, well-rounded stories with gripping pacing will require a bit more planning. After you have the basic skeleton, there are two more steps that you might take: the beat sheet and the scene weave; I might write about those in the future.

Also, you might wonder if one storyline is enough for your project. It depends. Single-plot stories work for many movies and short stories. A novel-length work or a slightly more complex movie plot will have multiple plots interweaving. Moreover shorter subplots and even longer scenes will have their own miniature versions of the six-question story skeleton.

But I want to create a storygame!

The six-question method can help you create strongly branching (Cave of Time) storygames quite easily. You just give the player the choice between different answers to the questions.

Say you want to write about a certain protagonist. So you introduce them, show in which way they are special, and to make this more interesting you probably want to give them some kind of initial problem to face. Now we can give the player the choice of how to overcome this problem. The player could choose violence, so maybe this is your character's true problem: they are prone to violence. Since the player chose violence, they probably want action, so we throw more action at them, and watch the protagonist be drawn into a spiral of violence. Since the player has already chosen that the protagonist behaves violently, they will not get the choice again until the end, where they will get the chance to solve their true problem and overcome their violent behavior.

Of course, the player could have chosen to flee the first confrontation. Now they will be hunted throughout the game; instead of an action movie, the game becomes a thriller, and maybe we are having some regrets about what could have been if we had had the courage. Again there will be the choice to remedy this toward the end when the protagonist overcomes their fears and throws caustion over board to save the day (if the player makes the right choice).

The same also works for the other choices. Say, now that we have chosen cowardice and flee, but how? Vanish in the criminal underground? Catch a flight to a foreign land? Get a job on a fish trawler? Whatever the player chooses, that will be their act two.

The places in your story where you answer questions 3-6 will always give you deep character-forming decisions that make a rewarding storygame. Also, the story will naturally have a decent pacing and will nicely come together in a dramatic showdown.

If you want even more branching, you could make a slightly more complex protagonist that has the potential to be developed in different directions. Joan Threeflames in my storygame Rainbow-1 is an inmate firefighter, and the first choice the player makes is whether they want to fly out to a fire, which will lead to a story about fire and firefighting, or if they want to make a more radical choice, which leads to stories that focus on dealing with his criminal past.

Doing it well

Perhaps you are wondering if the six questions make it too easy to make stories? Isn't there a chance that any such method makes your stories too uniform and formulaic? I don't think this is the case. The questions revolve around elements that almost any plot will need.

Being able to answer the six questions doesn't automatically mean you have a great plot, but not being able to answer them almost always means that you don't have a plot at all.

Instead of trying to come up with plots that defy the six questions, it is better to focus your creativity to answer the questions in creative, novel ways:

• Can you think of a character that has a role in society that makes them uniquely interesting, somebody you want to read a story about?
• How can you make the character special? What sets them apart from the masses? And can you convey this in a subtle way, showing the reader that the protagonist is special without blatantly telling them?
• Are you able to come up with an unusual internal problem that hasn't been explored much? A unique character flaw, a very weird relationship, a cool secret, experience, or character trait?
• Can you create events that quickly rip the protagonist into the world of act two, with no chance of return, completely isolating them from the world of act one?
• And, how many difficulties and predicaments can you pile on top of each other for the protagonist to face in act two, until the extreme pressure finally forces them to solve their true inner problem? Can you stack these problems without making the result seem artificial?
• Are you able to craft a sequence of events where everything comes together? Perhaps even in an unexpected way? So that the protagonist solves their problem, and combines the solution with what makes them special to overcome the outer threat in a surprising way?

If you can come up a great answers to one of these questions, you have the foundation for an amazing plot. If you haven't got the right answers yet, it's always good to draw inspiration from the masters. So let's finish with an exercise: Think of your favorite movie or book, and figure out how the author answered the six questions. If you have a pen at hand, write the outline down in the form of five brief summaries from the second section. This is fun to do when you are bored, but also too tired to make your own stories. Often you will find that the authors of your favorite stories came up with very neat ways of answering the six questions.