The Best Plot Advice I've Ever Seen

From the creators of Giant Douche and Turd Sandwich

As I get closer and closer to the end of my manuscript, I can start to feel everything coming together, like a puzzle that had been missing pieces and I just found all of them under the couch. The loose ends are getting tied up (at least the ones I believe should be tied… always leave a string or two for the reader to figure out on their own.) Everything just FITS.

But then, there comes the matter of entirely rewriting the first half, which is just a 50-thousand-word rambling adventure that isn’t going anywhere. But that’s another few months of work down the line.

So what was the difference between writing the second half and the first? Well, I want to save the entire breakdown for another post, once the first (first and a half?) draft is actually finished, but the big problem with the first half is that there’s no direction. I was just figuring out the characters, their motivations, what they actually need vs. what they think they need. But that resulted in a long string of events that don’t do much to fascinate the reader. I left it alone for years (!! yes years!), reread it, and was bored out of my mind. It’s not badly written at all, but I can already edit entire chapters out in my head, thousands of words at a time, and it wouldn’t change the plot much.

“What was I thinking?” I thought.

I was thinking, “And then what if this happened? Oh, and this, that’s a cool idea! And then this would happen…”

And while that might sound fun as you’re actually writing (and it was fun! That’s why there’s 50k words of it!) it brings about an absolutely boring, dogshit plot.

This is where South Park comes in.

Now, Trey Parker and Matt Stone aren’t exactly the Shakespeares of our time, but they did make something massively popular, memorable, long-lasting, and creative. They didn’t just do it with dumb memes (even though those dumb memes have survived for years.)

My friends and I still quote this to each other

They did it with plots in which one point organically leads into the next. Does that mean every episode is a banger? No, of course not. They were making an episode a week, sometimes basing their plots on current events. You can’t hit a homerun every week for years and years under that kind of pressure, but they were able to string together the incredibly dumbass jokes into ones that serve the plot as a whole.

How did they do that? Instead of going, “And then, and then, and then,” they approached with the mindset of, “Because this, then this, but because this, then this.”

Below is the full clip from MTVU, allllllll the way back in 2011. (That was only like 7 years ago, right?)

RIGHT…?

It’s incredibly simple. You don’t want to watch or read anything in which the plot meanders along with no direction. Not even the best prose or the coolest visual effects can save a story with no plot.

There are exceptions, like the 2016 movie Paterson, directed by Jim Jarmusch and starring Adam Driver, but you kind of have to be in a certain mood to watch and appreciate it. It uses the fact that there is no plot as a plot… that is kind of the point, that his life meanders like a poem, because the main character, Paterson, writes poetry in an utterly mundane life. Everyone else around him has a plot, but he doesn’t, and yet he’s got the richest life out of all of the other characters.

But I’m getting off of my own point.

In order for your plot to move forward, you need a reason that doesn’t just drop out of the sky (well, you can get away with that as the inciting incident, but not more than once or twice in a story.)

Make sure every character has a motivation for what they’re doing, even the side characters. Motivations create obstacles for that motivation. Conflict. Even if we’re never told explicitly what the motivations of the less important characters are, you have to know, as an author, in order to move the story in the right direction.

Cause and effect are crucial. Tension is created by characters either having an obstacle shoved in their way (because this) or overcoming that obstacle (then this). And most importantly, overcoming the obstacle leads to the next obstacle in some way, until the climax occurs. If you have an antagonist, they are the obstacle that moves the plot, and the protagonist overcomes the obstacle and creates a new one for the antagonist, which the antagonist defeats… rinse and repeat. Stuff just happening to the character will not keep the audience interested. Those dumb jokes that Stone and Parker are known for wouldn’t have made any sense at all if they’d smushed them into the episode with no context. We might not even remember what the context of the joke was, but it sticks for decades because it had to make sense to be there in the first place.

So many kids had this phrase on a tee shirt growing up. I don’t think they understood the irony.

It’s such a simple concept, almost totally obvious, but that’s why it’s so important and somehow easy to forget. Nobody’s going to love your rambling, nonsensical adventure (not even future you) unless you move the plot along with obstacles, triumphs, setbacks, and revelations.

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