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It’s week four of my NaNoWriMo inspired challenge. A novel in 30 days? Try a plot in five minutes. Each Friday in November, I’ve been exploring plot structure by constructing a plot using a few simple prompts and an intense time limit. In each case, there’s been something new to discuss about plotting.
As with the last two weeks, most prompts came from Julia West’s prompt generators. The goal came from a Google autocomplete for “In ten years I will…”
Prompts:
Occupations: Bank robber, ditch digger
Setting: Space
Goal: Be funny
Inciting incident: All Carrie is trying to do is hold up The Grand Bank of Mars, when she’s hit on the head by a shovel. She awakens to find herself not in jail but in an alleyway in the bad part of Phobos. A business card lays in her lap. It reads: “Will Shovel, Ditch Digger and Stand-up Comedian.” A scrawled handwritten line: “Get in touch.”
25% mark/Entry to Act 2: Carrie tracks Will to the club where he’s doing a show. Will offers to train her saying, “You have a funny look… in a good way. But you must promise to never rob another bank.”
Midpoint: During Carrie’s first show, she’s got the crowd laughing, but the tomatoes start flying out of nowhere. The crowd turns on her. After the show, as she retrieves her gun and heads for Io Bank and Trust, a shovel juts in her path. “Everybody has a bad night, sometimes,” says Will. “You can quit robbing with the power of comedy.”
75%mark/Entry to Act 3: Carrie has had a string of successful shows and hasn’t robbed once, not even a gas station, when she enters the big Milky Way Comedy Contest. Yet, right before her act, she is arrested for holding up a bank on Saturn. Though Carrie swears her innocence, when Will comes to visit her in jail, Will won’t speak to her.
Climax: Carrie thinks about robbing a guard, but then remembers a rival comedian, Mr. Tomato. Didn’t he have an unusual amount of cash on him at all times? Didn’t he carry a lot of empty burlap sacks with dollar signs on them in his car? And, hey, he was the one who threw the first tomato! She escapes and bursts into the comedy contest to accuse him. The cops are not far behind, yet with Will’s help, they demonstrate the evidence pointing to Mr. Tomato. Mr. Tomato is hauled away to space jail.
Wrap up: She doesn’t win the contest, but after it ends, Carrie finds a greater demand for her shows than she can possibly fill. She and Will decide to start a comedy school.
Note: I always think these up in about five minutes and type them out afterward. If I did both at once in only five minutes, it would look like gibberish my cat typed.
Other note: I did start out wanting both Carrie and Will to be female, but I just couldn’t resist Will Shovel as a name.
What can we learn from this?
Believe it or not, this was actually my attempt at a “quieter” story. Just one woman’s struggle to quit her addiction of interplanetary bank robbery, you know?
Anyway, it does demonstrate, although to a minimal and pathetic degree, that these plot points don’t have to be accomplished with big explosions and fights. They can be something more down-to-earth: an unsuccessful show, a temptation resisted, a temptation given into. They just have to be important to the story.
What it also demonstrates (and does so much more effectively) is that plot points are the bones of story, but it takes a whole lot more to make a story work. Did you notice how much connective material I had to put in to each beat to make it understandable? Technically the climactic scene would be the accusation and arrest of Mr. Tomato, but I had to write a ton of other stuff to get us logically from the 75% mark to the climax.
Do you plan out your plot points ahead of time, try to hit the marks as you go, or do you just write and make plot adjustments in subsequent drafts? Have you ever robbed a bank on Io? Share in the comments.
Happy final week of NaNoWrimo!
