Random Thoughts on Plot

Some writers begin a mystery novel with a full idea in their heads—who are the main characters and what is the thrust of the story, the theme, and the climax. I wish I could do this; it would make my life so much easier. Not even in a short story do I know where I'm going. My recent story in Mystery Weekly is an example.

I’ve been struggling with my current work-in-progress because the characters keep going off in tangents. That’s supposed to be a good thing for a writer and a story, but in this case, it’s only frustrating. After several pages, sometimes chapters, the characters fall back into line and I’m left with a lot of pages I don’t need and don’t fit. Occasionally I can salvage some of those extraneous scenes and turn them into a short story, but usually I file them at the end of the draft and leave them there.

Recently I came across a mystery novel that was all plot—no excursions, no digressions, no descriptive passages to flesh out a location or person. It was all plot. There’s something to be said for this—it kept me turning the pages wondering where other parts of the story would come in. Halfway through I had a good idea who the killer was. By the time I reached the next to last chapter I knew. Was I right? Yes. Did I care? No.

A crime novel may be based on plot, reliant on a structure, or formula if you prefer, to tell a particular story, but in my view the best ones go deeper than a superficial sequence of events, as riveting and surprising as those may be. A good mystery novel leaves me nodding in admiration. A great one leaves me weeping, real tears falling for the depth of feeling the writer has created. This kind of story is not easy to write, but we all know when we’ve come across one in our reading. We finish the book wishing we could write something as good, admiring far more than the plot or turn of events.

Following tangents, letting characters meander perhaps uselessly for pages, is one way of discovering where the novel is or is not going, and if that’s what it takes to get to a deeper place, then so be it. It’s frustrating but worthwhile. The story that is slick and quick offers little compared to the ones that make us think and feel. Plenty of wonderful writers give us such stories to admire. The Long Callby Ann Cleeves is the most recent one of these I’ve read. There are others. Meanwhile I’ll struggle with my manuscript, pushing the characters to tell me more so I can reveal more to the reader.