Constructing a great framework for your plot, helps you build an novel that leaves readers hungry for more of your fiction books.

It’s not an inflexible box that you put your story into, but rather it keeps changing as things happen in your story.

When I’m writing a new story, I feel free to go in new directions, as long as I stay true to the story – the goals, motivation and conflicts – and keep them clear throughout.

My current work-in-progress, is a historical novella, set on an Island in the Pacific northwest. It’s the prequel Novella for the contemporary romance series I’m planning to write. So I’m digging deeper into the details of goal, motivation and conflict.

I wanted to share some tips on how plots come about and what makes them work.

8 Keys to Constructing a Great Plot for Your Novel

Here’s some thoughts on how fiction stories are put together and what makes them work.

1.Every story needs a goal, motivation and conflict for the main characters. These need to be vital enough to take your novel from beginning to end. If it isn’t, then your plot and your story are going to fall flat and readers will put your book down at some point. The key to a great novel, is that the stakes keep increasing. This means that things get worse and worse, until your characters finally learn the lessons they are in the story to learn. The Writer’s Journey by Michael Vogler gives useful tips on how to increase tension so little by little the plot gets increasingly worse.

2.Remember your character’s weaknesses will get them into trouble time and time again and their strengths are what will save them in the end. Do you have a character who is saying yes to everyone and can’t say no to save her life? Then she will do that over and over again throughout the book. However, maybe she’s good at organizing things. And maybe while she’s over at her Aunt Carol’s business helping her organize her files and working through her bookkeeping – maybe she notices some money is missing. So now your wallflower character who says yes to everything, helped to save Aunt Carol’s business at a critical moment and send the villain to jail.

The characters have to fail time and time again, and then succeed at the very end, at the climax of the book.

3. People/and characters are slow learners and they need to have things progressively get worse and worse – where they feel their life is out of control – before they ‘get it’ and make changes in their lives. This is one of the most important things to remember throughout your novel as you increase the stakes in your novel.

4.Each scene needs to have a smaller goal, motivation and conflict. As you go back and edit your novel, look at each scene. Look at whose point of view the scene opens up in and decide what that character’s goal is for the scene, why she/he wants that goal and what is standing in her/his way.

If you don’t discover a goal, then that’s a problem. At that point the scene needs a rewrite or you need to get rid of it. A scene without a goal slows the pacing and your plot and doesn’t increase the stakes(refer to #1).

5.After you understand the POV character’s goal for the scene, make a list of six motivations why she/he wants that goal. It’s good to dig down really deep – and it takes a lot of thinking – to come up with the sixth one. The last motivation is a buried, emotional one and many times it’s quite powerful. You can rewrite the scene using the last motivation as the first one. By finding buried motivations, you can uncover that last little spark you need to make a compelling scene. Then you can bring more layers to your story with better and deeper meanings… which readers love!

6.Characters need conflict. I struggle with adding enough conflict. I’ve noticed that most of the time I don’t like to put my characters in horrible situations. As writers, we pull back from adding too much conflict into the story, because, after all we like these characters we’ve created. But still, they need conflict. And conflict is what makes a great story.

Just like people, characters don’t like change.

Give your character issues to work through and put obstacles in their path. Make them work for what they want. [Tweet this]

The conflict is; whatever is standing in her/his way. It’s the “I really want to do this, But, this situation or person is standing in my way. So if you don’t have enough ‘but’ moments in your story it won’t be compelling and you won’t meet your first goal.

7.Your characters need to grow and change. For many people, a big reason they read novels is they want to live second-hand through the characters. We want to see these characters learn life lessons, to become better people and win in the end. Just like we have a plot arc, we should also create an emotional arc for your characters. These characters we love to write about, need to be changed people by the end of the book.  It’s like real life – we go through big life-changing moments to learn a lesson and to grow and change.

8.Listen to your instincts. If you’ve worked on the above steps, then the next step is to do another read through(out loud if you can;) of your novel. Trust yourself and your instincts as you re-read your scenes. If your instincts are telling you it’s okay, you might consider asking a few beta readers to read through it. . After you’ve fixed your novel up one last time and proofread it, then you’re ready to self-publish… which is a great time to start another book.

Those are some ideas that I’m working through in my current work in progress right now. I hope some of it has helped you. But, I’d love to learn from you…

What are some other tips you’ve found to put together a great novel? I’d love it if you’d share your ideas in the comments. Lets learn from each other 😉