Plot Points & Character Arcs: How to Avoid Paralysis and Focus Your Story

Writers often feel overwhelmed by the endless possibilities when developing their plot and characters, leading to “paralysis by analysis.” The fear of making the wrong choices can stall progress and derail a story’s direction.

Learn how to break through that overwhelm and stay focused with key insights on organizing your story structure, making sure every choice serves the larger narrative.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Our villains are bad because we are creating them as villains instead of writing them as the heroes of their own story 

[00:00:07] ​

[00:00:18] you brought up the idea of multiple protagonist arcs and The reason this is tricky, of course is if you're writing a book where you have multiple protagonists and You, they each have to have their own arc and yet it has to be interconnected.

[00:00:37] And how do you do that? So my first tip for you and for anybody who has multiple protagonists is Make sure you know whose story it primarily is you might think, well, they're all equal, but they're not. There's one person, always, there's one person whose story it primarily is.

[00:00:58] Um, and that's important because it means then everybody else's arc somehow has to play into the main character's arc the interconnections with the main character. How does it support the primary storyline, whatever that might be. So, for example, has anybody here read the Red Rising series at all?

[00:01:24] Mm hmm. I love it. It's so fabulous. If you like sci fi fantasy, it's great. The author said that he is basically writing vikings in the future, you know, vikings in outer space. So it's kind of neat, but and when you get to books four, five, and six, It's no longer, so, books one, two, and three are narrated, you know, it's always through Darrow.

[00:01:49] He's our main character. He is clearly our hero. Everything is through his point of view. But then when he gets to books four, five, and six, what he realized is, now the story shifts because it's about this world that Darrow has created in this, you know, war. Basically to subvert the society that has oppressed and enslaved a lot of people.

[00:02:12] And so Darrow is our hero that subverts the system, but he's had to create war with the society. But once that happens then, what happens to the characters in his orbit in all of these different facets? So now you've got five, I think he has four or five. Narrators that we are seeing and each of the stories are separate, and yet they all play in to the same, the to Darrow's arc.

[00:02:45] They're all coming, they're all culminating to whatever's happening in the main story, but they each have their own peace, their own. Trajectory their own arc, which means every single and this is where it gets tricky every single character 

[00:03:01] Then has their own inciting incident Every single character has their own Act one turning point every single character has their own new world that they have to be in, new rules in that world, new characters that we meet in that world, their own wants, their own need.

[00:03:22] They, so you're doing, you're actually having to use a plot map for every single character's journey because that is the trajectory of their story. But then you have to figure out how their plot map fits in with the big plot map. Harry Potter. If you read Harry Potter, you know, you've got, I mean, it's obviously Harry Potter's story, but you've also got these other huge characters and all of it comes together at the end for Harry's story, you know, uh, Dumbledore, Snape, Of course, Hermione and the Weasleys and, and the uncle, you know, the, the prisoner of Azkaban or whatever, all of it ends up culminating for Harry's journey as he takes on Voldemort, because that's the ultimate story, the big picture story that's driving everything.

[00:04:23] So, but Snape has his own storyline. Completely where he's where we don't exactly know what he's doing But then at the end it all culminates and that's the beauty of it. That's where magic happens Does that make sense? 

[00:04:36] Leslie: Let's say they're in a different place and they never meet each other They never it's going back and forth they say in this one Do so the what about the timing of the climax climax?

[00:04:50] So they're different arcs might have a different timing of the climax, right? 

[00:04:56] Right. So, okay. So you're going to, they all have their own climax climax, uh, but the big storyline, the big, the biggest climax climax should be that main character. 

[00:05:09] So for example, again, in red rising, one of the characters we follow is this character named Ephraim, who's a thief and he's a very, um, he's even kind of a drug addict and he's, uh, he's been very disillusioned.

[00:05:24] His fiance was killed and, and, uh, now he's a thief for hire and he gets, he gets, the syndicate ends up kind of entrapping him and he has to do a job for the syndicate. And through the course of the story, He's actually trying to find redemption, you know, he he does these bad things, but then he starts realizing he That there can still be meaning in his world and he wants to be a good person and he starts changing But his story actually ends really tragically But it ends a couple of chapters and that's his climax climax Like he actually dies in the story, but it happens a couple of chapters before You We have the climax, climax of that particular book.

[00:06:16] So his story comes to a climax, climax, but it's not the climax, climax for the main storyline. Does that make sense? 

[00:06:23] Leslie: So does the main character have to have the final climax, climax, or could they have theirs sooner? 

[00:06:29] Nope, it's, it's, it's the same progression that we talked about with the, um, how during the, uh, act three climax, you have a hierarchy, right?

[00:06:41] First, first you have to go across the moat. Then you've got to scale the walls and you fight all the minions and then once you get inside then you, you have a smaller group of the inner circle that you fight and then finally you take on the actual villain, but you have to follow that hierarchy. The same thing is true when you have multiple protagonists.

[00:07:05] Leslie: Your main storyline should be the most exciting climax climax. Otherwise it's anti climactic and why are they the main character if theirs is less exciting than these other ones? And then the other one is the villain or the antagonist. Um, do you spend a lot of time on the possible that he could find redemption and doesn't, or, you know, I guess how much? 

[00:07:33] It depends on the story. So again, using Red Rising as an example, there's a character that we follow in the four later books.

[00:07:44] Lysander and we really cheer for him, but he turns out to be one of the biggest villains But we can't we we don't know that he's a villain at the you know, he becomes a villain He becomes Darrow's primary Adversary and now Darrow has to stop Lysander But we were totally invested in Lysander storyline and we thought he was gonna be another hero So it just depends on your story let me just say this about the villain.

[00:08:17] You must give your hero a worthy adversary. A weak villain

[00:08:23] really undermines the power of your story. You want to make sure that your villain is really formidable So that that's what gives the victory Meaning and also what gives the suffering meaning and I think sometimes we're not very good at fleshing You know partly because we tend to make our villains, you know, very cartoony, you know, they're twirling their mustaches They're just evil and they're doing evil for evil's sake Instead of actually fleshing them out and giving them Um, it should be compelling.

[00:09:05] Like they should make good arguments. They should actually, it should, it should, it should almost persuade us. Like, that's what I loved about, um, personally loved, um, the Avengers. I don't know if anybody's into the Avengers movies or anything. Uh, but, okay. Well, Thanos is the bad guy, but Thanos in some ways, his reasoning really makes sense.

[00:09:32] And in some ways you're like, well, he's not wrong like okay I can kind of see that and and so you see how it's just a skewed perspective But but they are they don't see themselves as the villain and I think most the time Our villains are bad because we are creating them as villains instead of writing them as the heroes of their own story 

[00:09:57] Leslie: Because to them it makes sense. 

[00:09:59] Yeah, and it should make sense to us too. In fact, the best villains, I mean, with the exception of say like Hannibal Lecter or something, but even Hannibal Lecter, my goodness, we're like, we're kind of cheering for him, which is crazy. You know, when he goes after Dr. Chilton at the end of Silence of the Lambs, We laugh because we hate Dr.

[00:10:25] Chilton, but that's evil, right? Like Hannibal Lecter is evil and there's nothing about him that, um, isn't evil. And yet he doesn't go after Agent Starling. So we kind of respect him and he, and, and we're, and we like him. You know, he's, he's a villain. We love, we love that villain. So in any case, though, he doesn't see himself as the villain.

[00:10:53] He sees himself as just so much, so further above all these, you know, these mere humans that they are kind of cattle to him, you know, and, and he sees himself as, as being pristine and, you know, like he's set apart. He's not like the other animals. He's not like the other monsters. And that's why he's so damn scary anyway.

[00:11:20] Making your villain, help him be the hero of his own story. And that's what's formidable to the actual hero. And if you can actually almost convince people that the villain's reasoning is sound, that's going to be good. And that's, that lacks propaganda then, and it lacks caricature villain.

[00:11:39] It'll prevent you from writing a caricature. Okay. I want to go to, how do you narrow it down and not have paralysis because of the overwhelming choices ahead of you? And I kind of already addressed this a little bit. And I do believe that just as you continue going through the course and you start getting into the specifics of the plot map, it will start narrowing things down because you'll start to see where pieces have to go.

[00:12:10] the number one thing 

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[00:12:45] No matter what genre you're working in, whether it's a thriller, or a comedy, or a romance, and yes, whether it's a sci fi, or a fantasy, these are the essential plot moments that you need to hit in order to deliver a powerful, compelling, page turning story. So be sure to check out my free training video on the seven deadly plot points.

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[00:13:17] the number one thing 

[00:13:20] is to be focusing on your main character, that's the very first step ofeliminating the superfluous, Is by really nailing down who your character is, what makes them specifically tick, what is their wound, what is their want, even before the inciting incident.

[00:13:43] And this is something I've really tried to stress in some of the video modules, is that your character already has something before you ever have your inciting incident. And a lot of people tend to have difficulty with that like if your character is already after something, but your character already has something that they want and they need, even before the inciting incident gives them a clear goal. 

[00:14:07] So part of what I like about the video lessons is right now, I'm hoping that it's, as you listen to them, you're, it is exploding ideas, too many ideas. You know, as you're going through the stuff, you're like, Oh man, I could do this.

[00:14:20] I could do this. That's part of the fun, right? It should be part of the creative excitement and, um, spontaneity and, you know, um, inspiration. Like you can, all these ideas. I think that that's, what's exciting about taking a course like this is that it's, it's, it's triggering all sorts of potential ideas, but again, Once you get into then the specifics of the plot map and the specifics of the character, it will necessarily start curbing the things that don't fit.

[00:14:55] You'll find the things that, oh, that just doesn't fit into this. And you might save that idea for something else. You might come up with ten other ideas while you're trying to work on this one. You can jot that down and then just shelve it for now. For, you know, um, And, and as you then get into the primary narrative that you're trying to tell, um, and the specifics of that 

[00:15:19] it will become more natural and more clear what parts you leave out and what parts you keep in.

[00:15:27] Now, having said that, that leads me to something I wanted to saywhich is you said, You have a tendency to write tangents that aren't useful. I do too. Um, But here's the other thing that i've discovered and this is where it gets a little tricky So yes, we don't want to go off on these tangents that are just ultimately useless.

[00:15:53] However, we also don't want to 

[00:15:56] squelch the muse Because there is a mystical element in writing and sometimes you might You You might not know how something fits yet, but it's something you feel compelled to write. Here's my advice on how you know. I mean, sometimes you don't, but here's my advice to know. So, cause I don't want you to waste your time either. It's, it's just too painful. And we have so, so limited amount of time. It's the one thing we can never get back is time. We can always make more money. We can, you know, all those things, but we can never get our time back.

[00:16:37] And so we don't want to waste it, but we also don't want to squelch or stifle the muse. So my encouragement to you would be. As you are fleshing out the plot map, the plot map is meant to be a guide, not a rigid construct. So, if you do the work of fleshing out the plot map, here is inevitably what's going to happen.

[00:17:07] You simply can't plan everything in advance that you're going to need to address in your story. As detailed as you get in the plot map, you're going to miss things. Because it doesn't account for all of it and there's a difference between seeing the map here And then getting into the muck and the mire.

[00:17:29] I liken it to like you're in the mud pit with your characters when you're writing a scene. And that's where the magic happens. It's when you're in the muck and the mire with the character. So my encouragement would be To do the work absolutely do the work of fleshing out as much as you can on your story But then when you're in it when you're in the muck Don't let if you're in the muck and it feels right You gotta just feel that scene and if it feels right to explore something that you hadn't planned Then let go of the plot map for a minute.

[00:18:09] It may not work, but you might be tapping into something really magical that if you try, if you were like, Oh, that's, that's irrelevant, you might miss something. So just know that sometimes it's when we're in the muck and the mire, that is where the magic happens. And if you've done the work in advance of fleshing out as much as you can, I think you'll limit the unnecessary tangents.

[00:18:35] But you'll still find some that that it'll just be special. You'll be like, Oh my gosh, I didn't even figure it. I didn't even know that this was going to happen. And this is so great. 

[00:18:42] Okay, good.