How I Write, Writing,

One of the most difficult elements of plotting any work of creative storytelling is to create a believable sequence of events that tells your story. High budget Hollywood movies and big name video game studies aren’t immune to it. I’m not going to name any names, but I’m sure you have a few examples in mind after reading that sentence.

It’s an easy trap to fall into. You’re writing the plot, and your characters will do whatever you want. You already know all the outcomes, and it’s easy to get lost along the way until — hopefully! — you step back, take a look, and realize that nobody would actually make those choices needed to drive your plot.

Fortunately, there is already one form of storytelling that by its very nature requires character choices to be organic. This form of interactive storytelling is pen-and-paper RPGs, and it is where I cut my teeth as a storyteller well before serious writing was even a glimmer in my mind. I’ve found the lessons I learned planning and running RPGs to be highly applicable to plotting and even writing a novel.

(A bit of necessary background for those who aren’t versed in RPGs: what is a Dungeon Master?)

Planning Like A Dungeon Master

The first and most important rule of planning like a Dungeon Master is this: You don’t make the choices. The characters make the choices. If you don’t follow that rule as a DM, you risk alienating your players and creating a railroad plot. If you don’t follow it as a writer, you risk creating a story that doesn’t feel natural or plausible.

Obviously, your characters in a novel aren’t actually played by real people. They will do whatever you want. But if you treat them like they won’t, and plan every stage of your plot as though you had to convince a group of real people to make the choices you want, you’ll find that a lot of plotting issues take care of themselves.

The First Elements

Before you can connect the dots of your story into an organic journey for your characters, the first step is to create those dots. The plotting road map can get you from point A to point C by way of point B, but it’s useless without waypoints. This isn’t an open world game, after all, no matter how much you want it to feel that way.

How much do you need before you can start creating the basic skeleton of your plot? Ultimately, it comes down to personal preference and comfort. When I started plotting my first manuscript I had:

  • A concept for the prologue and how I wanted it to tie into the story
  • Two viewpoint characters
  • Two scenes I wanted to incorporate later
  • A very high level idea of the story I wanted to tell

Ideally, you want a little more than that. Most stories have a beginning and an ending, so it’s ideal to have at least a rough idea of the end when you start planning how to reach it. At the bare minimum, I’d say you want a viewpoint character, a beginning and an ending.

These are also the same elements you need when planning an RPG adventure: You need to know your party, you need to know how to start the adventure, and you need to know what end you’re guiding the party to.

Creating And Filling Out The Road Map

You’ve got your viewpoint character. You’ve got your ending and beginning. Now, it’s time to start filling in the blank space. Stories are about journeys, and while the beginning and ending provides the framework to assemble that journey, it’s the journey that lets your characters grow and entertains your readers (or players).

Here’s an example of how the plotting road map might look at this early stage, with just a beginning, an ending and a few waypoints scattered into the mix. You can do this on paper, but I like to use an outdated word processor and a bunch of nested bullet points.

For this example, the hero is a cliched stable boy who discovers a magic sword, and his journey takes him to confront the evil wizard who is putting his entire kingdom under a spell. For added cliche points, the hero falls in love with a princess of similarly nebulous age along his journey.

  • (beginning) The hero discovers the sword
    • The hero meets the princess
    • The hero and the princess fall in love
  • (ending) The hero confronts and defeats the wizard

It’s a start, but it’s not much. The characters – poorly defined though they are – need room to breathe, and the plot development is nonexistant. We need to drop in some key moments along the way.

For this still quite high-level stage, I favor just reaching into your creative subconscious and pulling forth whatever elements you’d like to work into the story. Some of them might not work out once you start hammering out the details, but it’s surprising how many of them will if you’ve been looking at them together from the beginning.

  • The hero is established a little before he becomes a hero
  • The hero discovers the sword
    • He meets the wizard around this time, although neither knows the significance yet
  • The hero takes the sword and uses it in a tournament
  • The wizard’s awful spell is put into place
  • The hero must gather help to stop the wizard
    • The hero comes to a magical castle where he finds help
    • An ancient dragon provides unlooked-for help
    • The princess’ already foreshadowed ability to talk to plants provides the last crucial piece
  • The hero confronts and defeats the wizard
    • The wizard has taken over the castle where the hero used to serve, and made the king and queen into his puppets
    • The heroes need to sneak in by some back way the hero knows

Now the skeleton is starting to show some flesh, so to speak. It’s a pretty unimaginative story – but it’s an example, so what can you expect?

Connecting The Dots

It’s at this level – getting from point A to C by way of B – that the Dungeon Master’s Method truly comes into its own. Let’s focus on one particular step:

  • The hero discovers the sword
  • The hero takes the sword and uses it in a tournament

It’s easy enough to make a connection between these two events. You want your hero to fight in a tournament, and he’s just picked up a cool magic sword. You have him find out that a tournament is being held, and he promptly enters it. Job done!

Not so much. The question you need to ask isn’t what do you want your character to do next (enter a tournament with his new sword), but what does he want to do next now that he has a magic sword? Then, you need to assemble the right elements to make sure that his answer and yours match.

That, at its core, is the art of planning an adventure: putting elements in place so that what you want the characters to do, and what the characters want to do, align and become one.

Maybe the hero has always dreamed of being a knight and fighting in tournaments. That’s the easy way out, since it makes the tournament an obvious step, but it requires you to change the character to fit the story, not change the story to fit the character. It’s better to do the latter if possible.

Alternatively, provide the hero with a reason to enter the tournament. Maybe he’s already met the princess (never hesitate to move elements up or down the plot tree as long as it doesn’t break the continuity) and he wants to impress her. Or maybe he has an old rival who’s already going to be fighting, and the hero finally sees an opportunity to get one back. Maybe he’s plunged into the tournament by pure circumstance; he’s near it, and people assume he’s an entrant.

The possibilities are endless. At each step, any number of paths can connect you to the next step. What’s important is that when making the connection, you always ask yourself:

Would a group of real people ever make this decision, based simply on the framework I’ve provided and with no prodding from me?

That, in a nutshell, is the Dungeon Master’s Method of Plotting. Follow it where it leads, and sometimes the possibilities can surprise you as much as the characters.