Sometimes, when you want to write something, everything you have to start with is just one plot event, but therein lies this problem: where do you put that plot event on the timeline of your story? Is it in the beginning, the end, or the middle? You just don’t know, and so you don’t start writing. Let’s fix that!
Because everything in your story works together, how you place your single plot event has an effect on the rest of the story as well as the significance of the event itself. In this post, I’m going to use two example plot events to show you how this works in practice.
Related reading: How to plot a novel – Writing the middle of your story – Structuring your story the easy way
Story structure matters
You might have already guessed that story structure affects on what happens when you move your plot event around. Even if you claim that story structure is pointless and made-up and only leads to formulaic stories, you probably won’t disagree that Titanic would have been a very different movie if the ship had hit the iceberg only one hour in and they would have spent two hours in the aftermath. That’s structure.
Plot events at different parts of the story have different functions. They simply do different stuff for the story. When you’ve got some understanding of story structure, it’s easier to figure out whether a cool plot event you dreamed up is someone’s rock bottom or just the beginning. It helps you plot your story like understanding facial proportions help you paint portraits.
What is your plot event like?
When you’ve got a plot event that you’re trying to build your story around, you need to know if this is a completely new thing that happens or is it something that has been expected? Like if it’s an epic fight scene, is it a surprise attack or something that you need to build up to? If you don’t yet know, this is a good time to ponder that.
Is this plot event something that happens to your protagonist or is it something that they do? That’s another thing that affects where you can put it in your story and how to make it work.
And also, how long does this event last? Is it a single thing inside a scene, does it last for the whole scene or would it require multiple scenes? If you already know it’s one of those three options, what would happen if you changed it? It could be worth it to experiment.
Our example plot events
Our first example is a character looking for her parents in their yearbook and finding two people with the same names as her parents but completely different faces. Not just younger, but entirely different people.
Our second example is a princess climbing out of her tower the night before she is supposed to be married off to a wealthy but not royal landowner.
Either of these events could be a single point of time in a bigger scene, or they could be the whole point of the scene. In this post, however, we’re assuming that these events are what the scene is about.
Plot events in the beginning of the story
When we’re talking about plot events in the beginning of the story, we’ve basically got two options: Either the event introduces the Big Problem (also known as the central or main conflict) of the story and puts the actual story in motion, or it happens before that and provides some sort of additional context to the Big Problem. It can also show what your character or your story’s world are like so that we can believe in the things that happen later on.
The important thing to remember about the beginning of the story is that you need to lay the foundation for the rest of the story there and that your readers don’t yet have a reason to care about your characters. If your plot event requires us to feel for your character, like worry for them or be excited for them, don’t place it in the story too soon.
Yearbook example in the beginning of the story
So, what about our yearbook revelation? It would make sense that learning that your parents are not who you thought they were would be the Big Problem of the story. Learning the truth could be what the whole story is about.
But could it happen even earlier? Maybe the character is having a normal day and she’s perusing the yearbook for fun, and when she tries to confront her parents about this information after their work day, she finds them missing, and THAT is the Big Problem of the story. Or maybe this isn’t new information and she’s only revisiting the yearbook, and the story gets moving when her mother contacts her suddenly after being missing for ten years.
Princess example in the beginning of the story
If you started with the princess climbing out of the tower, your readers might be curious about what’s happening, but instinctively they would feel like this has to be a common occurrence. In the very beginning of stories, we get to see what the characters’ normal life is like before things change, so if something happens there, it has to be normal.
What if it happened a little later but still before introducing the Big Problem? Maybe you’ve already introduced us to this princess and their normal life and they’ve been planning an escape from the lowly, wealthy landowner the whole time, and the real central conflict of the story happens only after her escape?
If you wanted the princess climbing out of the tower to be the thing that puts the story in motion and be the Big Problem of the story, it only really makes sense if it’s unexpected and not planned. Maybe she thought the wealthy landowner would be a perfectly fine match for her, and then she has to escape for a surprising but a very good reason. Remember that it needs to be obvious to your readers why this event matters and why they should care.
Plot events before the midpoint of the story
There’s a lot of ground to cover between introducing the Big Problem and the midpoint of the story, and a lot of it is the protagonist trying to get back on their feet, reacting to the Big Problem, and learning new things and meeting new people that will unbeknownst to your protagonist be important later on.
If someone asks what happens in your story, you usually refer to the events in this part of the story to describe it, and this is where your premise really comes to life. Typically, not many things happen here that change the trajectory of the story straight away, so that’s something to keep in mind. It’s not the right time for turning points and big revelations.
Yearbook example before the midpoint
Let’s say your protagonist learning about her parents isn’t directly about the main conflict of the story. Perhaps your protagonist is a 20-year-old orphan, and the Big Problem is that she gets kicked out of college and she needs to move in with her cranky old grandmother.
If the yearbook revelation happened after the moving in but before the halfway point of the story, it could be additional information that will somehow come in handy later on or be relevant to something that happens later. Maybe it will help your character fix her situation eventually even if there’s no hint at the moment how it’s going to happen, but in any case, it wouldn’t necessarily make sense if it was some kind of a life-changing revelation.
Princess example before the midpoint
Doing something drastic as to escape an arranged marriage doesn’t really make sense at this part of the story unless it’s a small event that doesn’t really end up changing anything. For example, maybe learning she has to be wed to this man was the Big Problem and the actual wedding is the midpoint, and then she tries to escape in vain.
It’s good to understand that some plot events are turning points in the story, and that turning points have their place. You need to build up to them for them to matter, and there need to be appropriate consequences. That’s why it’s important where you place them. Escaping your looming marriage by climbing down from a tower sounds awfully like a turning point, so it doesn’t feel natural here.
Plot events in the middle of the story
I already mentioned the halfway point, the midpoint of your story, and if you think that the middle of your story is always murky and soggy and sagging, you’re plotting your story wrong and it needs some structural integrity. Again, this is why having an understanding of story structure is important, and it’s not just referring to a plot graph.
By the way, if you’d like to truly understand plotting without having to read twenty different books first, you should check out Your Plot From A To Z. Just a friendly recommendation.
Something important needs to happen around halfway through your story, and it should be some kind of a big turning point no matter how you’re deciding to make that happen. It could be new information, some kind of a new spanner in the works that rivals the initial arrival of the Big Problem, or any kind of an event that completely alters how things go in the second half of the story. If the event is something that has been planned for, it should have surprising consequences immediately or very soon after.
Usually the midpoint also marks the change between going from reactive to proactive. First something bad happened and your character is just rolling with the punches, and then something makes them go “hey, this isn’t working out, I need to do something about this”. They shouldn’t be doing things the right way yet, but they’ll definitely be doing it their way.
In case you missed it, this post tells you everything you need to know about the middle of your story, or if you prefer, you can check out the YouTube video. There’s A LOT that I could say about it that I don’t want to cram into this post, so do check out the more comprehensive content I’ve created previously.
Yearbook example in the middle of your story
Learning that your parents are not who they claimed they were is a great choice for a midpoint revelation. However, your character’s parents, or in the very least her own origins, should have been in the centre stage of the story in some way up until that point, because the turning point can’t be about some other stuff that the story isn’t really about. It can’t change things if it doesn’t really matter.
Because the middle is a turning point, things obviously need to change. How will you do it here? Maybe your protagonist had been trying to find her parents, but now has to change tactics completely because she doesn’t actually know who they are. Maybe the Big Problem was that her previously missing parents returned to her life, but now she realises they’re complete strangers that she needs to escape from.
Because your character will now need to become proactive, this revelation needs to make her realise that how she’s been going about things up until now is clearly wrong and she has no choice but to have a completely new approach. The world is not what she thought it was, so naturally everything she thought and did earlier is also wrong.
Princess example in the middle of the story
Escaping from your tower is also a great midpoint event, because it’s certainly going to change things, and I feel like the middle would be the most natural place for this event.
Maybe up until now the princess has tried to convince her father that the landowner is actually a demon in disguise, but it hasn’t worked and she needs to take matters into her own hands by escaping the night before the wedding. She’s like “If my father, my protector, doesn’t put things right, it falls on me to make things right for myself.”
If our princess had actually been planning her escape, something surprising needs to happen after she does it, and it’s up to you whether it’s a good surprising thing or a bad surprising thing, but it does have to change things.
Your plot after the midpoint of the story
Your story has now reached a turning point, so where did it turn to? If things seemed to turn for the better, it should turn out not to be true because we’ve still got a lot of story left. If things turned bad, they should eventually get even worse in new and surprising ways. Yay! You’re going to need a rock-bottom moment before your characters can find real clarity and get the right solutions to their problems, so you shouldn’t make the middle be the lowest point.
This is the part of the story where things will get more tense and where all kinds of mistakes and flaws will be catching up. If your characters have been preparing for a heist, for example, this is where they could start executing it, and things will go wrong in surprising ways. (If things just go right, it’s not a very interesting story.)
This part of the plot is also a great place for a plot twist, but even if you don’t try to mislead your readers, you still need to do the groundwork for any events that take place here. Set them up right, or else you might end up with a plot hole.
Yearbook example after the midpoint
Could we push this plot event even further than the midpoint? In theory, but it could be difficult because new information like that should have consequences, and the time to deal with those consequences is getting shorter.
Maybe in the middle, the protagonist found her parents’ names in the list of old students at a local high school, which was a surprise to her because she had always assumed they were from somewhere far away, and after all the trouble of getting her hands on the yearbooks, she finds out the young people pictured aren’t the same people she knows as her parents after all.
There’s something a little off with that, however, and that’s because it’s so passive. Nobody made this happen. But! If the people who are pictured in that yearbook under your character’s parents’ names are actually people who have been alongside your protagonist the whole time and hiding the truth from her, this WOULD make a nice plot twist and you could make it into a rock-bottom moment as well.
Generally speaking, I don’t think a plot event like this is a very good fit for this part of your story, at least not as we’ve imagined it in this post.
Princess example after the midpoint
This plot event is a much better fit for this part of the story than our other example because it’s a very active action and not a passive revelation.
What has to have happened before for our princess to escape like this? If the whole story is about her unwanted marriage to the apparently demonic wealthy landowner, it would feel quite drawn out if the Big Problem was learning she has to get married and she doesn’t try to escape until now. If, on the other hand, the story was more about her wilful nature and resisting her oppressive circumstances, and the threat of marriage was the midpoint event, it would make more sense for the princess to escape at this part of the story.
There are two options that could work here. Either the princess has been hoping for some other outcome but she’s forced to escape instead, or she had been planning to escape and it goes wrong somehow. Again, it’s because of where we are in the story – you don’t want things to be too drawn out but also you need to deal with consequences appropriately.
The climax of your story
We’ve finally reached the climax of your story! This is where everything comes to the boiling point and questions are answered. The beginning of your story should ask a question (Will she find the truth about her parents? Will she escape the marriage she so dreads?) and then the ending will answer it. After that, the story is essentially over.
Here, the Big Problem of the story gets solved, though typically not in the way that the characters, or even the reader, thought it would. When your character faces a problem in the beginning of the story, it’s a problem precisely because they can’t solve it, and then the story turns them into a person who CAN solve it. It could require new skills, letting something go or getting a new perspective, but something should change no matter what it is.
Of course, there’s always the option that the problem doesn’t get solved at all and that your protagonist succumbs to it, but in most stories they will get to the other side of it no matter how broken and injured they end up. It doesn’t have to be a happy ending because sometimes the cost of solving the problem ends up being too big to bear.
Yearbook example at the climax of the story
I think you already know that this example isn’t going to work out here, and the only way I can think of including it is having the antagonist shove it in your protagonist’s face and be like “look how everything you’ve done was in vain, you don’t even know your parents”, perhaps as an attempt to sway the protagonist and make her give up on her parents somehow. This revelation would need to accompany an action that someone else is doing, it can’t just be a discovery from a passive source. (Surely the yearbook isn’t an actual character!)
This goes back to considering the length of the plot event. If the whole scene revolves around this revelation, it makes no sense at this part of the story, but it theoretically could be a small part of a bigger scene as long as there’s other, more climaxy stuff happening.
Princess example at the climax of the story
What if your story culminates in the princess escaping the tower? I would say it fits here better than in the previous dark hour.
Will the escape be the thing that solves the princess’s problem? If yes, she should have been trying other things first, because it’s not really a story if things just go as planned, as I’m sure you already know. If it’s not yet the right answer but just the first step in a plan that doesn’t go quite as planned, you’ll obviously need it to lead to other things that eventually will solve the problem.
The end of your story after the climax
As I said earlier, the climax ends your story, but it doesn’t have to end your novel. The part that comes after the climax should answer the question “And where did all this lead?”
So many things have happened in your story, and the world as well as your characters have changed, so there’s no going back to the old ways. There is a new normal, and that’s what you should give your readers a glimpse of.
Your story should have gradually asked smaller questions (“When will her father find out she has escaped?”) and then answered them, and you should have them all answered at this point. If something IS left unresolved and unanswered, you should have someone acknowledge that – perhaps it was their lesson to learn to let it go. It should usually be something small in relation to the plot, though, because otherwise it could very much annoy your readers unless you were planning to write a sequel.
This part of the story shouldn’t really have any plot events as such. There’s nothing to work towards, the story’s problems have already been dealt with and there’s no time to deal with any consequences. All you can do is show how things are.
Yearbook example at the end of the story
Could the story somehow end with this discovery? Maybe, but if you raise new questions at the end of a story, you have to think of your readers. Will they be frustrated by this, or were you always planning to write a sequel? It can’t leave a sense that the story is still unfinished unless it’s a bigger overarching story that continues in other books, but then, shouldn’t you have been planning THAT story, and not the one where this event is just a “hey btw”?
If you absolutely did want to include this event as a part of THIS story, perhaps it could be something that helps bring closure to your protagonist. Maybe she already knew that her parents had assumed different identities, and seeing the yearbook could stop her from ruminating over something, for example. There’s really not a lot of options here, because the actual story is essentially over.
Princess example at the end of the story
This plot event, unfortunately, would make zero sense here unless the princess had a history of escaping from things and this was just business as usual. It can’t be anything surprising or anything that raises questions, it can only show how things are now.
What to do now to plot your story
So what is your next step? Just take your plot event and place it on different places on your storyline. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Is it the thing that puts the story in motion or something that gives more context to the Big Problem of the story?
- Is it a neat detail that isn’t immediately obvious how it’s relevant?
- Is it a big turning point in the middle that changes things?
- Is it a part of the tense, downward trajectory of the second half of the story, perhaps even the rock bottom?
- Is it the solution to the big problem of the story, or is it the climax where the story culminates?
- Is it a glimpse of how things have turned out after the real story is over?
Play around with your plot event and see what you like. That’s the beauty of outlining – you get to do this experimenting with minimal effort and minimal consequences.
If you need more help with plotting your story, do check out my master post here and get the G.E.N.I.U.S. steps to outlining your novel.
Protagonist Crafts is a blog about writing fiction, written by a published author and creative writing teacher. You can find more writing tips and inspiration in the blog and you can get the best author tools at Writer Lifestyle on Etsy.
