Writing a Children's Book

Lesson 6: Writing the Middle.

What if You've Lost the Plot?

Sometimes you lose the plot while writing the middle of a story. This usually happens for one of three main reasons:

(1) Your characters have developed in an unexpected direction.

(2) You find you’re writing “long” or “short”.

(3) Logistics have caught you out.

(1) When plotting your book, you usually move your characters like chess pieces. You might write something like this;

“Jamie watches in dismay as the oarless boat is swept down the river.”

This seems fine in the synopsis, but by the time you come to write up that scene Jamie has developed from chess piece to personality. And you know, now, that Jamie would never stand and wring her hands as her little sister is carried downstream. She would undoubtedly plunge in after the boat, and, what’s more, she’d catch it. If you know Jamie would act like that, then forcing her to fit the plot line you have decreed would be foolish. Characters have to remain true to themselves.

If you have a “Jamie” situation, then take up the synopsis, and see if you can amend it to take in the new situation.

Suppose the original storyline called for Jamie to watch helplessly, and then run and alert a picnic party to sound the alarm, while her sister Cassie spends a terrifying day alone in the boat.

You could change this so that Jamie catches the boat but can’t stop it because of the current. She manages to scramble in, and then she and Cassie are swept downstream. A picnic party sees them, but can’t help (it’s an elderly great-gran and three five year-olds), so Jamie flings her cap (with her name and address inside) to the bank. Finally, she manages to get the boat to the bank, but it’s the wrong bank and seems nowhere near civilisation.

Now you have an equally exciting situation, but Jamie is acting according to her personality.

(2) Sometimes, you will find that the sequence of events you have planned will take either far more or far fewer words than you expected. You were planning to write a 50,000 word SCB, but you’re only half way through the plot line and the word count is already 37,000 words and rising. Or maybe you have almost finished the plot, and you just know the book is going to pull up at 35,000 words, which is 15,000 words too soon.

If either of these problems besets you, try reading the existing text from the beginning. Are any important scenes missing or glossed-over? Is there too much exposition? Do you have longwinded dialogue? If any of these problems exist, correct them and reassess the word count. If the existing text seems problem-free, then you may need to look at that synopsis and either shorten it by cutting out a sub plot or plot wrinkle, or else lengthen it by adding a complication your characters won’t expect.

Using Jamie and Cassie and the boat scene as an example, you can see where you might add a new complication. Instead of having Jamie and Cassie wait for rescue, you could have a severe storm come in. Not only will they have to find shelter as the river starts to flood, but other characters will be very frightened for them. Get a tree down over the road Dad will need to drive along to find them. Go back and make the cap Jamie flings as a clue be, unknown to Jamie, a cap belonging to her friend who has just gone to Greece for several weeks. Now the “clue” will be compromised.

(3) Plots can also go wrong because of logistics. It is easy to write something like;

“Sero picks up her cousins from the airport” and then discover that although Sero is old enough to drive where you live, she isn’t old enough in the state/country where you’ve set your book. You could make her older, but that would mean she wouldn’t be still at school, and will spoil the whole kids-alone scenario.

You might write;

“Gareth goes to the pharmacy and picks up Tom’s medicine”, and then you find out that photo i.d. is needed to pick up prescriptions.

Or you might write;

“The kidnappers send Gina and Mac to a phone box, where they wait for instructions”, and then you find out that it is no longer possible to call public phone boxes. Or that parking meters don’t whirr any more. Or that schools don’t allow dogs on the premises. Or that German isn’t taught in high schools any more.

Generally, it isn’t faulty research that trips writers. It’s more likely to be the things they thought they knew and so never bothered to check. When I was writing a YA novel in the 1980s, I thought I knew it was possible to do “Matric” in one year. (It was when I went to school.) I discovered, almost too late, that it wasn’t possible any more. So, why didn’t I make my protagonist a year older? Because that would have made her old enough to get a driver’s licence which, for plot reasons, she couldn’t be.

Another problem is galloping technology. A useful plot complication goes down because mobile telephones no longer have to be charged every twenty-four hours, because telephone bills can be paid on the internet, or because a certain medicine is suddenly available without prescription. SMS means you don’t need to speak on mobile phones any more. Broadband means you don’t have to wait for a website to load.

If you need a wake-up call about what technology can do to plotting, read the Kate Brannigan series by Val McDermid. Time and again, Kate solves a problem by using an esoteric point about computers – which any computer literate twelve year old would know these days. They’re great stories, but already they read like period pieces.

If you get caught in a logistics problem, you must think of an alternative. Don’t try to brush past it, think/hoping the readers won’t notice. Maybe nine-year-olds wouldn’t notice the credibility gap, but an editor probably will.

Consider "The Orange Outlaw", "Alien Dawn" and "Trinity Street". Has advancing technology made any of these feel like period pieces?

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