I was plotting out my novel “Vampires Vs. Maturity” in preparation for NanoWriMo, and I thought about character-oriented plotting, a model for which I had learned back in Clarion. (Follow the link for more detail, but the basic premise is, you draw an arrow between every character in the story, and the arrows become scenes.)
This was a novel, though. I wanted more than a few scenes. Still, I knew the characters, and started by listing them.
I wanted at least four characters: Myrtle the Vampire, Dan her werewolf best friend, Raiden her evil ex boyfriend/vampire killer of teen girls, and Emma, the girl Raiden is currently plotting to date/kill.
I also knew I wanted the theme of the novel to be maturity. What does it mean to be mature? I drew this grid to separate how my characters interact with maturity and immortality:
| Mature | Immature | |
|---|---|---|
| Mortal | Dan | Emma |
| Vampire | Myrtle | Raiden |
Well, ok, that gives me things to contrast and emphasize in the characters… Dan’s maturity includes awareness of his limited life. Myrtle’s maturity is despite knowing she’ll look sixteen forever.
So what does maturity mean? I made a list of things that come to mind when I think of Maturity:
- putting other’s needs first
- letting go of emotional “wants” / stoicism
- patience
- acceptance
So now I made a table to grid my characters so I could assign a maturity topic to each pair of characters:
| Myrtle | Dan | Emma | Raiden | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Myrtle | Putting others first | Acceptance | Letting Go | |
| Dan | Mentoring | Patience | Stoicism | |
| Emma | Mentoring | Acceptance | Need vs. Want | |
| Raiden | Letting Go | Walking Away | Lust vs. Love |
It’s… not the most useful chart, is it? But I can see how I would have the two characters interact in a way that addresses the theme. Ideally, I could just plan a scene for every box in the grid — 12 scenes. BAM. Novel. Or at least Novella.
I know there will be:
- A scene where Mrytle has to choose to put Dan’s needs before her quest to defeat Raiden
- A scene where Myrtle has to accept Emma’s right to her teenage point of view, even though she “knows better.”
- A scene where Myrtle lets go of her need to “beat” Raiden
Those could all be the same scene, or three aspects of the character’s arc. Simultaneously, Dan, Emma and Raiden have their own arcs, even if Raiden’s is a villainous one, I hope he’ll at least accept that picking his pseudonym from Mortal Kombat was kind of silly.
I digress… what’s important to take away here is that I took a theme and a list of characters and turned it into a list of scenes to address those themes, and that is what we in the biz like to call “an outline.” BOoYaH!
(And a friend saw my page of diagrams and asked me to make a blog post about it.)
If you are interested in reading the result, I’ve been serializing “Vampires Vs. Maturity” on Curious Fictions, posting a snippet every Monday for my subscribers.
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