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Giving Your Plot Depth

So far on my blog, I’ve covered the first two steps of writing a novel: developing realistic characters and coming up with a plot. Congratulations! You now have an A plot. 

An A plot is the surface level plot. It’s what your character is doing and what’s happening to them. This plot deals with questions like:

What is wrong with my character’s life at the beginning of the novel?

What do they think will fix their lives when—spoiler alert—it won’t?

Why haven’t they achieved this goal yet?

What catalyst (or inciting incident) will cause them to get off their butts and start chasing this goal for real? 

Now it’s time to move on to the B plot. The B plot is about your character’s development and changing who they are as a person. This is about working out not what your character wants but what they need.

Remember all those flaws we gave our characters? This is where we need to ask the questions:

How does this flaw affect the rest of my hero’s life?

Do my characters flaws get in the way of them achieving their goal? 

How is the plot going to help them realise this flaw and overcome it by the end of the novel after their breaking point?

How is overcoming this flaw really going to make their lives better?

This character development is what gives novels their sparkle. The A plot is what makes your plot interesting, but the B plot is what makes your characters interesting. 

[Please Credit @isabellestonebooks if reposting to instagram] 

The Twin Paradox According to the special theory of relativity, relative motion causes observers in relative (non-accelerated) motion to perceive each other’s clocks to run slower by a certain factor called the Lorentz factor, which is a function of their relative speed. This phenomenon is known as time dilation.

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