Are you a plotter or a pantser? 

A “plotter” is the kind of writer who maps out their story before writing their draft. A “pantser” is one who just starts writing and finds the plot as they go—by the seat of their pants, if you will.  

The most important rule of writing is to do it in whatever way works for you. If you find that the words flow smoothest when you start typing and see where inspiration takes you, then go forth and be a pantser!

But if you’re the kind of writer who prefers a road map, or a writer who starts their first draft as a pantser and then pins the action down to a plot structure for further drafts, then you know how hard it can be to locate those crucial beats. Do you divide your plot into Act 1, 2, and 3? How many chapters into the book does your inciting action need to take place? Is it OK if two major plot points happen fairly close together? 

Your plot is the skeleton of your book, and you want to make sure everything is in the right place. Otherwise, the story just falls over on itself. 

For every lackluster method of planning your plot, there’s probably a better answer that will get you toward a more solid story. 

Don’t: Copy Another Book 

You’re supposed to read other books to learn how to write, aren’t you? So why not simply take your favorite book, see how many chapters it has, and where those important plot points take place? Then you can structure your story the same way, chapter beat by chapter beat. 

This may not technically be plagiarizing—presumably you have your own original story and characters, and you’d just be following the chapters as a road map. But you don’t want to be doing any kind of copycat work as a writer. Even in this sort of gray area, it’s best to stay away. 

More than that, you’ll find that if you simply follow a chapter by chapter outline from another book, your plot points will feel like what they are: forced, artificial, and disconnected from your characters. 

Do: Study Overall Story Structure

You can, however, look to your favorite books for an overall story structure. If you’re a murder mystery writer, how many chapters in does the hero usually find a body? Probably toward the beginning, right? And there’s probably a point around the halfway mark when an important clue is found. 

Good storytelling has a rhythm, and if you’re doing your due diligence to read as much as you can, you’ll pick up on that rhythm. That isn’t being a copycat; that’s just learning from others. Sure, there are plenty of ways to break the mold, but if you’re reading a book where the character still hasn’t run into any sort of conflict ten chapters in? You’ll probably get bored and put it down. 

Don’t: Fill In a Worksheet

Hop on to Google, and you’ll find pages and pages of search results for paid workbooks and exercises that promise to give you a perfect plot. 

Many of these function a lot like Mad Libs: stick your character name here, invent an antagonist there, fill in the blanks. These exercises can be helpful when you’re just looking for basic ideas, but they’re just that—basic. Your characters are your own creation, so why would they fit neatly into a box made by someone else? 

A simple worksheet with blank spaces doesn’t account for your character's unique wants, needs, and obstacles. That’s why using exercises created by someone else as a plot outline often results in beats that don’t lead organically into each other. 

Do: Follow Your Character

Those exercises are really good for showing you that atmosphere and description aren’t enough for a book. You also need conflict. You need things to happen—your character needs to fight for something, learn something. 

If you’ve been so stuck with your plot that you’re reaching for these kinds of outline exercises, it’s likely that your story is missing that conflict. So go back to basics. What does your character want? Who or what is in their way? What will happen if they don’t get what they want? Or do they need to learn that they want the wrong thing? What do the characters around them think, and will any of them become an antagonist and get in your protagonist’s way? 

If you go back to your characters and look for what they’re missing at the start of your story, it’ll be easier for you to find more natural plot points. A camp counselor whose main motivation is to give kids the best summer ever—maybe because they had disappointing summers growing up—will want to investigate reports that cabin two is haunted. If they’re going to pursue that desire, they might run into the camp director, who wants them to stick to their job and ignore the ghost story. If the main mystery is the supposed haunting, your inciting incident might be a kid seeing a mysterious figure in a window or hearing strange sounds at night. 

But you can’t get to all those options if you don’t start with what you have: a camp counselor character who wants the kids to have the best summer ever but standing in their way is the ghost in cabin two, which is making them all terrified to go to sleep. 

Do: Make it Happen

Even the most devoted pantser doesn’t simply happen upon the perfect plotline with no effort. It all comes down to the fundamentals of storytelling: What is my character trying to do? Why? What’s stopping them? 

Your number one goal as a writer is to keep your readers turning the pages. Every writer has their own way of getting the job done, so there’s no use expecting what works for someone else to also work perfectly for you. But if you’re stalling out on your plot and you’re not sure what’s going wrong, your best bet is to try out a lot of different methods until you find what does work for you. 

If worst comes to worst, you can always go back to every writer’s most trusted method: do absolutely anything but write, and see if time away from your computer gets those juices flowing! 

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog. When not writing or reading, she is a fiber and textile artist who sews, knits, crochets, weaves, and spins.