Writing a Children's Book

Lesson 4: Shaping and Pacing.

W.I.P. Section. Troubleshooting Your Plan.

You now have your plot worked out and also a list of your characters. You know what kinds of people (or animals) your protagonist(s) and other major characters will be. You have cut out unnecessary characters.

Now you need to look at the cast of your story alongside the plot and make sure the two can interact successfully.

In real life, people don’t always act consistently, but in a book there needs to be an obvious reason for characters to do what they do.

Graphing Events

One way of troubleshooting your plan before you start writing is to make a graph of story events. You do this by looking at the way in which each event affects the main character on an emotional level. The baseline of the graph (which is actually drawn halfway up a page, and not at the bottom as you might expect), is what you might call “Situation Normal”.

Most people live at “Situation Normal” most of the time. Exactly where SitNor is on the emotional scale depends on a great many things. Imagine a scale of emotion where abject misery/fear is at Point 1 and where absolute delight and bliss is at Point 10. Someone who is starved/abused/very ill/bereaved might spend most of the time at Point 1 or Point 2. This is SitNor for them.

Lucky people (and we all know them) for whom life throws roses instead of rocks, will usually spend a lot of time at Point 7 or 8. This is SitNor for them.

The majority of people seem to spend time at Point 4,5 and 6. They get through their days being neither very happy nor very unhappy. They’re OK and OK is SitNor for them. If something very nice happens, they will rise above SitNor to Point 8 or 9. If they suffer a disappointment, loss, grief or guilt, then they may sink to Point 2 or 3.

Now, consider your major character and the story events. Supposing you character has a SitNor of 5, then what is his/her emotional state at the beginning of your story? When the first event comes along, does that raise or lower your character’s emotional level?

If you plot a line graph by placing one point above or below the SitNor line for each event, then you will end up with a “picture” of your plot. You can use this picture for troubleshooting. Look at this example. The "key" is at the bottom of this section.

If too many events occur on or close to the SitNor line, then your story might be pedestrian and bland. If a lot of events happen on the same level, no matter what the level might be, you have the same problem. If the line zigzags wildly up/down, up/down, up/down, (say going from 2 to 9 to 2 to 8 to 3 to 9) then the plot might be predictable and choppy.

If your graph shows a small rise, a dip, a higher rise, a lower dip another rise, a major dip and a major rise at the end, you have a traditional “Cinderella” plot shape. This one works as well now as it did in the 16th Century.

If you see too much evenness in your plot graph, now is the time to fix it. Rethink some of your plot events and get the variation happening.

Key to Graph Provided

On this graph, SitNor is at point 6. Above SitNor is Joy. Below is Misery.

Arrows show the direction of Nice Events and Sad Events. The red graph points marked A, B, C, D, E, and F show story events.

The story starts at SitNor (A). Something bad happens to the protagonist (B). The protagonist makes a move that improves the situation to (C). Things get worse again at (D), and then the problem is solves spectacularly at (E), catapulting the protagonist to joy and satisfaction. (F) marks the end of the story, as reality sets in again. This would be a fairly dramatic story.

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