Last time, we spoke about choosing a hero for your NaNoWriMo project. You've probably already decided who your protagonist is and how his adventures are going to change him by the end of the book. Now it's time to lay down the road for these changes. No novel runs smoothly and predictably: a good work of fiction is packed with complications and twists, and it's the protagonist who complicates and even ruins everything as s/he tries to rectify the initial problem.
You can visualize a novel as a graph with several peaks that are sometimes called plot points. These peaks are the biggest events of your story, the ones that change its course. Normally, there are three or four plot points in every novel. Randy Ingermanson calls them "three disasters plus an ending". These plot points divide a novel, more or less accurately, into four parts.
The first quarter of any novel is its beginning, the next two quarters, its middle (split into two by a major powerful event – the middle point), followed by the book's climax and ending that take up its last quarter.
Let's look into each of these parts separately.
How to Plan and Write a Novel: the Beginning as Part of a Novel's Structure
Even if you don't plan your novel, you probably already know what event is going to disrupt your hero's life as the book opens. This was probably your original "book idea": what if my heroine is kidnapped by pirates? What if my hero has to go to war and leave his family behind? Usually, this opening event is forced on your protagonist and catches him or her unawares.
In a novel's beginning, the protagonist still has freedom of choice. S/he is faced with the disaster but hasn't committed yet to the drastic course of action your book is all about. In the beginning, novel heroes fight the problem the best they can, of course, but they are yet to make The Big Step that will change them and their lives forever. This will be a point of no return: after making their decision, their Big Step, the heroes won't be able to reconsider and go back to the comfort of their habitual lifestyle. This big step is the first plot point that marks the end of the novel's beginning: the first big peak on the graph.
For instance, in the beginning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, little Huck is faced with a big problem: he can't be the free person he longs to be. Everyone wants a piece of him: the Widow Douglas, his father, and Huck can't find a way out of this situation. Only when a desperate Huck stages his own murder in order to run off, he changes his life forever. It's a point of no return: Huck has burned his bridges behind him.
Plotting Your NaNoWriMo Novel: the Book's Middle Point
Now that the hero's made his choice and committed to a certain goal, his actions will eventually take him to the book's middle: the biggest disaster yet, stemming from his own mistakes that he's made while trying to fix the initial problem. According to James N. Frey, the author of How to Write a (Damn) Good Novel, this disaster may change the protagonist's luck, too: if the hero tended to fail in the first half of the book, he'll be more successful now, and vice versa.
The book's pace and tension will pick up, too, and the problems the hero faces will become graver and graver. If, for instance, all he risked in the beginning was his freedom, now it's the time to up the ante and put his very life – and later, maybe also those of his family -- in jeopardy. After the shock of the mid-book disaster, the hero's opposition grows stronger and stronger, too. The "bad guys" are not necessarily bad, they just have their values or philosophies badly screwed up (at least that's how it should look from the reader's point of view). Step by step and scene by scene, they maneuver the hero towards his undoing: the book's third peak, its third disaster.
Plotting and Writing a Convincing Ending to Your NaNoWriMo Novel
By the time of the third disaster, the ante is upped even further, so now it's not just the hero's life, but everything he holds dear that's under threat. Don't be afraid to hurt your hero emotionally or exhaust him physically. He'll survive. The third disaster is followed by what is called the dark moment: the evil has won. The hero's defeated, complete with his philosophy and the book's theme. At this point, the reader should have no idea of how the protagonist can get out of this mess.
Now it's up to you as a writer to exercise your imagination and think of various ways to make your hero win. He should always get out of trouble himself – possibly with a little help from his friends – but never as a result of some helpful outside force. It can be his or her spirit that sees them through, or a cunning trick like those used by many folk tale characters. Or both. This is the moment of your hero's glory.
This last battle between good and evil signifies the novel's climax. Ideally, the climax should be accompanied by catharsis – a powerful purifying emotion that makes us literally cry with relief and admiration.
Finally, the rest of the ending can be used to tie up all the loose ends like other characters' subplots and unanswered story questions. After that, all you need to do is come up with the novel's finishing lines, powerful and catchy enough to make the readers want to buy your next book!
Irene Woodhead - Irene Woodhead is a bilingual English/Russian freelance writer and translator. After years of working as a professional opera/jazz singer, ...
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