Plot Archetypes: Rebirth

It’s all about the arc, baby

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

Welcome to our sixth and final post in our plot archetype series! Today we’re going to be talking about the feel-good plot archetype: rebirth. So what exactly is involved in this plot archetype?

What is it?

Well, rebirth can literally be a resurrection, but in general, it’s a transformation of your main character from villain to hero. The whole cast of characters wins when you have a rebirth plot because the protagonist changes themselves and their surroundings for the better. After sinking further into their vice or villainy, these characters will meet a character that reminds them of the goodness of the world and inspire them to change for the better. 

How to write a rebirth plot

So how do you go about writing a rebirth plot? Well, like the other plot archetypes we’ve been talking about, there are certain steps that need to be taken in order to make it successful. So what are they?

The fall of the protagonist: Your protagonist can’t have a redemption arc without first needing to be redeemed, right? This is where it’s established that your protagonist has fallen off the righteous path and the reason why they fell.

Bad is a good color: Your character’s bad deeds have to work for them, or else why would they stay bad? This could be something like insider trading and your character getting super rich, or they killed someone to take over a kingdom and they have the world at their fingertips. 

Frustration: This is where your protagonist sees that they might have done the wrong thing, but they don’t yet see how they can get out of their situation.

Nightmare: This is where your character will feel there’s absolutely no way out—there’s no changing for them; they’ve gone too far down the hole and they should just stay there. 

Redemption: Remember the aforementioned character that shows them they can be better? This is where they’re really going to shine. Your protagonist is going to realize that they can change with the help of or inspiration from the helper. And they do the hard work to make amends and improve themselves to no longer be the villain.

Examples

So, where can you find plots that involve rebirth? Well, there are several different examples that we can give, so we’ll break them down into books and movies for this blog post.

Books

A Christmas Carol is a book we’re all familiar with—especially since we’ve gotten so many movie versions of it. This is all about Ebenezer Scrooge and his journey to redemption. After a not so bright childhood with a lost love, Scrooge becomes the miser that we see from the start of the book. After he’s visited by the ghosts of the past, present, and future and sees how miserable his life is and how miserable he makes everyone else, a fire to change lights under him. He doesn’t want to die alone and unloved. So when he wakes up from his nightmare of visions, he vows to change his ways—and does. And everyone around him benefits from his new generosity, but especially the families of his workers. 

Movies

How The Grinch Stole Christmas is a family classic that, at least in my family, is played nearly every year around or on Christmas. To be fair to the Grinch, he doesn’t really hate Christmas—he hates the people that treated him poorly. This is where the book and the movie differ slightly: Cindy Lou Who, instead of catching the Grinch in the act of stealing their Christmas feast and presents, decides to befriend the Grinch and warm his heart to the Christmas spirit by trying to get him elected as the Cheer Meister. And she almost succeeds until the town mayor proposes to the Grinch’s childhood love and  the Grinch wreaks havoc on the town destroying the things around him. After being hated and derided by the villages in Whoville, the Grinch decides to take his revenge and ruin the one thing they love most: Christmas.  And so he takes the villagers’ gifts and feasts and plans to get rid of them so no one can have a happy day. But come the morning, despite him stealing everything, he hears the Whos singing and realizes that Christmas isn’t just about the gifts and the feasts, but the people. And as the story goes, his heart grows three sizes and returns the gifts to the villages and they all live happily ever after. 

Join us next week for an author interview with A4A author Melion Traverse about her debut novel, Exile.

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Plot Archetypes: Tragedy

The books you cry over

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

Welcome to our fifth post in our plot archetype series! Today we’re going to be talking about a story that’s familiar to everyone who’s ever taken a high school English class: tragedy. So what exactly is involved in this plot archetype?  

What is it?

Unlike a comedy, a tragedy is a series of bad decisions that don’t end up having a funny, happy ending. It ends, well, in tragedy. There are no happy endings for this type of plot, especially for the protagonist. This might sound a little sad, and it is, but our protagonists in tragedy stories usually aren’t truly heroes like we would see in our other plot archetypes. They’re tragic heroes who do not have to be entirely good or evil, but they tend to fall further into the evil side than they do good. We can also see heroes turned into villains based on discontentment of how they’re treated who now do everything that they can to ruin things for their former allies or heroes. (Think Benedict Arnold after being passed over for promotion several times turning his coat to the British.) 

How to write a tragedy plot

Much like the other plot archetypes that we’ve been looking at, there are five stages an author must hit in order to write a successful tragedy plot. So what goes into it? 

Anticipation Stage: This is where our tragic hero discovers something that they want and set their sights on getting it. This could range anywhere from money to power to the girl they want to marry. No matter what they set their sights on, by trying to attain it they start their own downfall.

Dream Stage: This is where the protagonist starts their journey toward their goal, and by ignoring any warning signs that what they’re doing is wrong, they will do something that means they can’t change their mind and turn back to their old life. Things are going to go right for them, at least for now, and they’re going to see this as a sign that they’re doing what’s right. 

Frustration Stage: Some things are going to start going wrong for the protagonist, but they are able to overcome them and continue on toward their goal, and what they do will truly alert the reader that there won’t be redemption for the tragic hero by the end of the book. 

Nightmare Stage: Now nothing is going right and the protagonist’s plans start failing. They keep making bad decision after bad decision that has them living in fear of the eventual failure.

Destruction Stage: This is where everything comes to a head and the protagonist ultimately fails in their goal, or at the very least loses everything that they’ve gained. Sadly, or not so sadly, this is where the protagonist will perish and the other cast of characters will be rid of the evil put forward by the tragic hero.

Examples

So, where can you find plots that involve tragedy? Well, there are several different examples that we can give, so we’ll break them down into their own sections, but this time we’re going to focus on books and plays. 

Plays

King Lear is just a cluster of bad decisions. First, Lear splits his kingdom into three between his daughters equally and he asks his daughters how much they love him. When the youngest doesn’t give him the kind of answer he wants, he disowns her and she goes to France to the French king. After that, Lear realizes the mistake he’s made but there’s no getting out of it now. He flees to the heather after his remaining (remaining as in still in the same country) daughters undermine him out of what little power he still has. After that is a series of bad decisions on the daughter’s part that result in their deaths and King Lear dies from grief. In this play, not every bad decision is made by our tragic hero, but the decision he made put everything into motion to have the result that it does.  

Books

Madame Bovary is perhaps even more tragic than King Lear. In this, Charles Bovary first loses his wife, and then marries another who is discontented with life as a village wife. She wants the finery that she sees wealthier people have and falls in and out of love with wealthier men, making her husband a cuckold, and also falls into extreme debt with a money lender. Eventually she ends her affairs and when the moneylender repossesses the items that she can’t pay for. Afraid that her husband will find out, she tries to pay back her debts by asking local businessmen and even trying to prostitute herself to one of her ex-lovers. When that doesn’t work, she kills herself by eating arsenic to avoid the shame of her own greed. To make the story even more tragic, her husband was so loyal he never suspected she had been unfaithful until he found her letters to her ex-lovers after her death, and he dies from his own grief. 

Join us next week for an author interview with A4A author and co-founder Renee Frey for her debut novel, One Thousand and One Days, a retelling of One Thousand and One Nights, and in four weeks we’ll see the conclusion of this series when we talk about the rebirth plot archetype. 

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Plot Archetypes: Comedy

Wait, what?

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

Welcome to our fourth post in our plot archetype series. Today, we’re going to talk about the plot archetype of comedy. So what goes into that?

What is it?

Well, comedy is the simplest to explain and the hardest to get right. The comedy archetype is, in essence, a series of unfortunate events in which there’s miscommunication, secret-keeping, and confusion for your protagonist, which prevents the protagonist from reaching their goal with ease. These plot types are laced with humor, which is why it’s so difficult to get right, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that these stories can’t have some sort of drama or depth to them. Often the best comedies do, as frivolity for the sake of frivolity can become boring and keep your reader from continuing on. 

How to write a comedy plot

We’ve seen in all of our previous posts that there are five stages to make the plot successful, but for comedy, you only need three.  So what does it take to write this plot?

The confusion commences: This is where we’re introduced to our protagonist and their world. Once we’ve established what’s what in the world, then things can go wrong. The misunderstanding happens, and people start to pull away from the protagonist or turn against each other as a result. 

Further confusion: (Or in my family, “But wait, there’s more!” And I genuinely hope you read that in Billy Mays’s voice.) In this stage, things get even worse for your protagonist. Things progressively get worse and more confusing, and it seems like nothing will be settled. 

The confusion is resolved: Finally, the light dawns on our protagonist, either by them figuring out what went wrong on their own or by another member of your book’s cast explaining it to them. Things start to right, and the protagonist can go back to being in their happy bubble or move on to their happily ever after—hopefully with more insight than they started with. 

Examples

So, where can you find plots that involve comedy? Well, there are several different examples that we can give, so we’ll break them down into their own sections. For comedy, there are even more examples of movies and television shows that are just plain funny that don’t quite follow the plot archetype, so we’ve done our best to find examples that do.

Books

Well…play, as it were in this case. The Importance of Being Earnest is a great example and one of my favorite Oscar Wilde plays out there. It fits the comedy ploy archetype to a T. This involved Jack being Ernest, Ernest being Algernon, and a whole host of other deceptions in order to live the lives the two men want to have and get the girls they want. A spectacular series of errors happen as they try not to be outed, but that doesn’t stop it from happening. In the end, everyone gets their happy ending, though.

Television 

Schitt’s Creek is probably the best comedy I’ve watched in that it’s written with such nuance that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the characters become better people. This show starts with the Rose family losing everything that they can’t carry with them because Johnny Rose’s business manager stole all their money and now they have only one option: live in the town they bought as a joke for their son, David, and rebuild. They continually jump to conclusions and get themselves into some interesting situations as they try to right their lives, but eventually, they find out that the route that life has taken them has made them much closer and happier than they could have been had they not lost their money. 

Movies

Ah, the nostalgic movie of my childhood: Mrs. Doubtfire. It starts when Daniel Hillard keeps making more and more mistakes, including being fired from his job. This leads his wife to ask for a divorce, which she’s granted, along with custody of their three children, while Daniel is only given supervised visitation. He devises a plan to become the nanny for his kids with the help of his makeup-artist brother making him an old lady mask. Things are great, and he’s getting closer to the children when he’s discovered. The children are immediately taken away from him, and he’s alone doing his own work as Mrs. Doubtfire on a Mr. Rogers-eqsue TV show. When finally the children and their mother watch an episode of the show, Miranda, the ex-wife, realizes that it was wrong to take away the kids, and Daniel is able to have his family back. 

Join us next week for our next installment of our Misused Advice series, where we’ll talk about avoiding cliches, and in two weeks, we’ll resume this series, where we’ll talk about the tragedy plot archetype. 

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Plot Archetypes: Rags to Riches

The stuff of dreams

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

Welcome to our third post in our plot archetype series! Today we’re going to be talking about a story that’s familiar to everyone across the board, but most especially young women because of media conglomerates producing this en masse: rags to riches. So what exactly is involved in this plot archetype?  

What is it?

So what is the rags to riches plot archetype? It says what it is right in the name—the protagonist in the story starts out down on their luck or in some position that requires them to turn their eyes toward something better and achieve their goal by the end of it. They’ll be so close to their goal, either through good fortune or other coincidence, by the midpoint only to lose it because they hadn’t earned it (bear in mind this has variations). They then spend the rest of the plot truly earning the fortune that they strive for. 

“Why do they need to lose what they want before the end?” They don’t necessarily have to lose what they achieved through the aforementioned means—they can lose something they already have that sets them back, like what minor income that they have or their house, for example. Plus, how boring would a story be if the protagonist got whatever they wanted without issue? 

This plot also isn’t just sweet princesses finding their prince charming and living happily ever after. This type of plot is also synonymous with the American Dream, where you can rise from nothing and achieve great things through hard work and determination. 

How to write a rags to riches plot

So what all goes into writing a plot of rags to riches? There are five stages that you must hit in order to make it successful.

Initial wretchedness and the call to action: We can’t have a rags to riches story without seeing the rags first. To start your book, you must first show your protagonist in whatever their undesirable state of being is, whether it’s being poor, down on their luck after losing a job, or whatever situation you’re putting your protagonist in. Once the writer establishes this, we then have to see the protagonist want to lift themselves out of their situation.

Getting out with initial success: The protagonist now goes out into the world in the direction of their goal and they have some sort of success, but the success will only last for so long. 

The central crisis: Here comes the part that keeps your story from having a Mary Sue or Marty Stu protagonist who gets whatever they want without struggle. Now it’s time for things to go wrong—the protagonist stalls on any progress that they’ve made and starts to slip backward.

Independence and ordeal: Now our protagonist must truly do things on their own; in their downward slide they’ve lost their resources, and potentially any allies they’ve made in the process, especially if their previous successes were based in trickery. Whatever goal they’ve made in the beginning of the story is just within reach now and only they can grab it.

Completion and fulfillment: As the title for this stage suggests, the protagonist achieves their goal. They could even exceed what they thought they could while searching for their happily ever after. And now, no one can ever take away their success. (Cue the singing rats and birds that will make your clothing with on-point draping as the end credits roll.)

Examples

So, where can you find plots that involve rags to riches? Well, there are several different examples that we can give, so we’ll break them down into their own sections. Unlike the other examples, we’re going to skip TV shows and focus on the book and movie examples. 

Books

Pride and Prejudice is one of my favorites—even the newest iteration with Kiera Knightly. (Can we talk about that hand flex by Matthew Macfayden? It’s sublime.) In this, the Bennet family isn’t the absolute bottom of the totem pole, but they need someone in the family to marry rich enough to support them once the estate goes to Mr. Bennet’s cousin, Mr. Collins. Elizabeth Bennet is sort of on board for this—given the times, she’s not really in the position to not be on board, though her father is much more lenient with his daughter’s autonomy than the vast majority of the men of the era—but she wants to find someone she can also love as her parent’s marriage has been...not the most loving. Better the chances if she can also find someone with money. Enter Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy, two incredibly rich gentlemen, and the Bennet family set their sights on marrying one of their daughters to one of them (this is their call to action). The initial reactions are different between each man, but as this story is mainly about Elizabeth, we’ll focus on her. 

Mr. Darcy thinks she’s quite plain, while she thinks he’s handsome, and she finds out that he isn’t all that impressed by her. But, each time they see each other after that, Mr. Darcy finds other values in her and realizes his first assessment of her is incorrect. Elizabeth is also finding that she enjoys the company of Mr. Darcy and eventually it comes to the point where Mr. Darcy proposed to her. This is her seeming victory, and then she causes the start of her central crises by refusing his hand. A series of other things go wrong, and eventually, it comes to light that, despite being rejected by Elizabeth, Mr. Darcy lessens the burden on the Bennet family because he still loves her. Now we come to her independence and ordeal in which she must overcome her pride and prejudice and convince her father that she does indeed want to marry Mr. Darcy. After she accomplishes this, she gets her happily ever after. She gets her marriage based on love and respect, a ton of money, and as much autonomy as she can within the bounds of her era. 

Movies

These two are examples everyone is probably familiar with in one form or another. They’ve certainly been put into plenty of mediums (books, movies, plays, ice shows, sing-alongs, and broadways just to name a few). Aladdin is about a street urchin who is tricked into obtaining a magic lamp and becomes the genie’s master. He sees and falls in love with Princess Jasmine and uses the genie to trick everyone into thinking that he is Prince Ali so that he can marry her. Everything is going great, right? It is until Jafar exposes him for being Aladdin and not Ali. All of his success is taken away from him and after he loses everything, including Genie, he must find a way to save himself and the rest of the kingdom from Jafar on his own. And he does, getting to live happily ever after. 

Cinderella is another familiar fairy tale that Disney has beaten us over the head with since our parent’s childhood (and even for some of you, your parent’s parent’s childhood). Cinderella is one of the OG rags to riches that Disney has put in front of our eyes, though it’s had many, many different versions over centuries of storytelling. In our familiar story, Cinderella has become a servant to her stepmother and stepsisters after her father passes and when the opportunity comes to go to a ball for the prince to find a bride, she wants to go. Her stepmother denies Cinderella the chance to attend,  but her fairy godmother gets her there by impossible means. She enjoys herself at the ball, but wait—she’s stayed too long and now she’s losing the things that she’s gained and must escape before she’s found out as just a peasant. The prince is already in love with her, so once she leaves behind her shoe he already knows how he can find her. Here is where it comes in that only the protagonist can achieve the goal. The only person who can fit in the shoe is Cinderella herself. She overcomes her stepmother’s deception and puts on the shoe, and she and her prince live happily ever after. 

Join us next week for another Misused Advice post where we talk about writing what you know.

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Plot Archetypes: Quests and Voyage and Return

The only difference is the ending

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

Welcome to the second post in our plot archetypes series. For this post, we’ll talk about two of the archetypes you’ll find out there. Why two? Well, the only real difference between Quest and Voyage and Return is that in the latter, the hero returns, and they don’t necessarily have to succeed in their goal. So what all goes into these?

What are they?

The Quest plot archetype is a fairly familiar one—our hero is on a mission and must complete this either for the good of themselves or the good of those around them; this can be finding a person or a place. The biggest point of the Quest plot archetype is that the hero must leave home to go on the quest. We’ll often see this plot with a group of people that aid the ultimate hero, with the rest being heroes in their own way—for example, the hero could not succeed without the help or sacrifice of a group member. In these plots, your hero must succeed by the end of the story—with some difficulty, of course, because no one likes a Mary Sue and Marty Stu—but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll get a happy ending. (Lord of the Rings, anyone?)

In the Voyage and Return plot, the goals might be a little bit different, but the general premise is the same as the Quest. There is a goal the hero wants to achieve, and they must leave home to do it. These can be plots that involve simply wanting an adventure, finding a cure for a disease plaguing the hero’s village, city, family, or something else that can pull the hero from their home in seeking something new. Unlike the Quest, the hero doesn’t always have to succeed with their goal (though they usually do), but they must always return home and with more knowledge than they left with. 

How to write a Quest plot

Much like with Overcoming the Monster, there are five stages an author must hit in order to write a successful Quest plot and Voyage and Return plot. You can break them down into whatever structure style you’d like, but these cannot be left out.

The Call: This will be your inciting incident for either the Quest or the Voyage and Return. Your hero will have a goal to achieve presented to them either by circumstances that they fall into or by someone else needing help (likely a companion that will be going along on the journey). 

The Journey: This is the more arduous part of your hero’s story. The journey to achieving the hero’s goals is an intricate dance of success and failure. The hero can’t have an easy journey—otherwise, what’s the point? Your hero will often feel like they’ve made some headway toward their goal, only to be sent back near the beginning in terms of progress. 

Arrival and Frustration: Now the hero is where they want to be, their goal just within their grasp. But, before they can achieve that goal, they still have a few more things to overcome.

The Final Ordeal: Ah, finally. The last obstacle before they achieve their goal. This is something only the hero can do, even if they have a group of people with them, like Frodo throwing the One Ring into the lava even though Sam is also there to support him.

The Goal: Now all the fighting’s done, the hero gets what they want out of the whole deal. They’ve found the place, they’ve found the person, or they’ve found the item or items they want. Now, just because they have achieved their goal doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to be happy with their ending. 

For a Voyage and Return plot, your final two stages instead will be:

Nightmare: Unlike the Quest, the hero has the possibility of not succeeding. In this stage, our hero will lose hope that they can get what they want and might even lose their life if they can’t push through and succeed. 

Escape and Return: Your hero has escaped certain death, and can now return home with the new knowledge that they’ve attained and spread it for the good of the people. 

Examples

So, where can you find plots that involve the Quest and Voyage and Return? Well, there are several different examples that we can give, so we’ll break them down into their own sections. 

Books

The best and the most familiar example I can think of in literature is The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In this, Frodo falls into getting rid of the One Ring to save all of Middle Earth because his uncle, Bilbo, decides it’s time for him to leave and puts the ring in Frodo’s care. Frodo must complete a series of tasks with his companions until he ultimately has to destroy the ring on his own. Most notably, he doesn’t truly return home. He returns for a bit and it turns out that his home is not really a place he fits in anymore, and makes the journey with the elves into the West.

To keep with our Middle Earth theme in books, The Hobbit, is a great example of the Voyage and Return. Bilbo is thrust accidentally—or rather by Gandalf’s design—into the company of the remaining dwarves of Erebor as a burglar because of his hobbit-ness. They are on a quest, while Bilbo is on the journey because he wants to go on an adventure and just happens to have the skill set that they need (sort of). On this journey, he faces many challenges, but ultimately he comes away with far more knowledge of the world than what he set out with.    

Television

Sadly, the only example of a true quest show I can think of, Terra Nova, was canceled almost a decade ago. In this, the future people of earth are faced with overpopulation and dangerous pollution threatening the future of the human race. In order to try to save the human race, scientists find a way, by sciencey means, to send people back into earth’s past to repopulate the world and avoid the mistakes that were made before. There will be no going back, and if they succeed, they will save all of humanity. 

One of my favorites is a constant story of the Voyage and Return plot. Not every episode of the Stargate series (SG-1, Atlantis, or Universe) is a true Voyage and Return, but easily 70% of them are. In these series, teams comprising of soldiers and intellectuals, whether scientists or archeologists, travel through the Stargate to other worlds in order to learn more about how the other people on these planets live and how to get technology to save them from outside threats. In the episodes, something new is either learned about the people or the enemy, and the main characters generally return home safe and sound by the end of each episode. 

Movies

One of my childhood favorites, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, teeters on the edge of Voyage and Return and the Quest plot, but ultimately it falls under the Qest because Milo doesn’t return home. In this, Milo is in search of the lost city of Atlantis to prove to the world and gain knowledge of the people and their stories if he can find it. His search for knowledge is what starts to push it into Voyage and Return, but with his decision to stay there is what truly makes it a quest. 

Our last example is a cult classic. Back to the Future signifies even by its name that it will be a Voyage and Return in that they’re going to the past, and then back to the future. Marty McFly goes to the past with his weird adult friend that no one questions throughout the whole movie, and he must ensure his existence by making sure that his parents end up together in the past before he can return. You might be asking where the knowledge aspect of this comes in, and it’s him learning about both his parents and the mechanics of time travel before he goes back to the future. 

Join us next week when we talk about the Rags to Riches plot!

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Plot Archetypes: Overcoming the Monster

It doesn’t have to be a literal monster, but it helps

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

Welcome to the first post in our plot archetypes series! Today we’ll talk about the archetype Overcoming the Monster. This can be a physical monster, like your classic epics such as Beowulf, or it can be more metaphysical like taking on your own health, government, or a corrupt corporation.

What is it?

Overcoming the monster is the archetype of, well, overcoming the monster. Super helpful, right? There are many ways to define the monster for this plot. It can be a physical monster that needs to be killed or captured for the safety of the people, or it could be overthrowing a tyrannical government for the good of the people, or it could be the hero versus self to overcome struggles they have with themselves, such as a serious health problem or addiction. 

What’s different about this plot style is how black and white it is. This is purely a plot that is about good versus evil. Let’s take the self-journey, for example: the addiction that the hero needs to overcome is the evil, and the hero themselves is the good by trying to break this addiction. Even though it’s self-contained within one person, it’s still good and evil. 

How do you write an overcoming the monster plot?

So what all goes into writing a plot of overcoming the monster? There are five stages that you must hit in order to make it successful. 

Inciting incident: This is when the hero and the reader are introduced to the issue of the monster—there’s been some sort of attack on a village and the hero either decides on their own or is tasked by a ruler (either a village elder or royalty/president) to get rid of the monster.

Dream: This is where your hero is preparing to fight the monster, the dream of victory, and the riches and adulation they’ll receive spurring them on. Your hero might even have a victorious brush with the monster and think that this will be an easier task than they initially thought.

Frustration: The real battle begins in this stage. The hero and the monster go head to head and the hero will find this harder than anticipated, especially if they’ve already had a victorious brush in the dream stage. The hero will also start to doubt that they can defeat the monster.

Nightmare/Hope is lost: This is the bleakest stage for our hero. This is where they now believe that there’s no hope and they’ll fail in their mission to defeat the monster. 

Escape/Victory: Wait, the tides of war have turned! Your hero will escape certain death they thought they’d encountered in the previous stage when all hope was lost and they overcome the monster by killing it. As the resolution comes into play, our hero will get their promised riches or, as some of the older stories go, the girl.

Examples

So where can you find plots that involve overcoming the monster? Well, there are several different examples that we can give, so we’ll break them down into book and movie sections and give an example for each. 

Books

Beowulf is one of the most classic examples of overcoming the monster—or, at the very least, one we were all made to read in our freshman English class. It also incorporates other plot archetypes like voyage and return (surprise, you can sometimes have more than one!), so you’ll likely see this example pop up again in another one of our posts for this series. In Beowulf, Beowulf sets out to defeat Grendel after hearing of Hrothgar’s plight and does so by ripping off his arm. After that, he’s rewarded richly by Hrothgar and then defeats Grendel’s mother, where he is also rewarded again before he returns home (this is where the voyage and return comes into play). 

Movies

The MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) is littered with overcoming the monster and other hero’s journey affiliated plotlines. You could write an entire year’s worth of blog posts going over the ways that the MCU covers overcoming the monster, (Spoilers ahead, but come on, it’s been out for over a year, so if you haven’t seen it, that’s on you) but I’ll only talk about the most recent iteration of it: the Avengers defeating Thanos. This fight takes place over the course of two movies Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. In these, the Avengers must defeat Thanos and save the world from losing half of its population. We’ve heard of Thanos a couple of times before, but he doesn’t become a true issue to Earth until Infinity War. By the end of the first movie, we’ve seen our heroes succeed against parts of the monster (the dream stage) and then we get a touch of the nightmare stage at the end of the movie when Thanos snaps his fingers. In the next movie, we sit in the nightmare stage for the majority of the movie as the Avengers take one more last-ditch effort by collecting infinity stones from the past. Then, only with the fall of one of the heroes do the rest of them succeed. Unlike other overcoming the monster stories, the reward for defeating the monster isn’t riches untold, it’s the resumption of normal life and getting their loved ones back. 

Join us next week for an author interview with A4A author and founder B. C. Marine to talk about her upcoming book, The Allurist’s Son, book two in her Meriverian Trilogy, and in two weeks the latest installment of our Misused Advice series where we talk about writing what you know, and in three weeks we’ll resume this series to talk about quests and voyage and return archetypes. 

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What is plot structure?

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief, and Brandi Spencer (formerly B. C. Marine), Secretary Authors 4 Authors Publishing

First, what is a plot? The basic definition is: (n) the main events of a play, novel, movie, or similar work, devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence. Whether you pants or plot down to the very last detail, your manuscript must follow a plot structure, so what does that entail? 

Basic elements of plot structure 

Please first bear in mind that this is a single blog post—we’ll cover all that we can without getting bogged down for pages upon pages. So what elements go into plotting a novel? Here are the basic elements of what will occur within Act I, Act II, and Act III of your story.

Hook: This will be obvious—the hook is where you draw your reader into the story, usually within the first line, but at the very least within the first few paragraphs.

Plot Turn I: In other words, this is your inciting incident. This is going to be the conflict introduced into the story that sets the whole plot into motion. For example, a war could break out, or someone could find out there’s a question of their parentage.

Pinch Point I: Your first pinch point should lead into Act II of your book; this will be a conflict that starts making the character’s goals hard for them to achieve.

Midpoint: This is when your protagonist or main character (they’re not always the same as we explain in our blog series on characters) turns from simply reacting to the conflict around them to proactively working to solve the conflict.

Pinch Point II: This is going to be another obstacle for your character encounters to make their goals harder to reach. 

Plot Turn II:  This is the point in the story where the conflict turns in your character’s favor—or against them, depending on how you’ve planned your series—and they should have the tools need to go into the climax.

Climax and Resolution: This should be where the conflict that’s building throughout the book and through the midpoint will come to a head and you can start working toward the resolution. As things resolve, you should be tying up and loose ends that won’t be following through to your next book to become the main conflict. 

Four types of plot structure

There are more than four different types of plot structure, but we’re going for the basics here. Heck, tomorrow you could develop your own type of plot structure that becomes popular in ten years that we’ll all be writing blog posts about. 

Dramatic or Progressive Plot

A progressive plot structure is one of the most common ones. This plot is told chronologically and establishes the conflict within the first chapter and continues to build the conflict until the climax occurs (much in the same way I laid out the basic elements of plot structure above). After the climax, it will resolve any remaining threads created throughout the story that won’t carry into the next book as the main conflict.

Episodic Plot

This type of plot is told, well, episodically. This means that it has several different stories that build up to the climax of the book, much in the same way that a TV series that actively character builds for on or several characters in each episode while working eventually toward to climax of the season. Think of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and how Jake consistently becomes a better person and better police officer in each episode as he learns something new about himself or a life lesson.

Flashback Plot

Flashback plots will start in with the climax as its hook and then flashback to tell the story. Think of those TV episodes that start at the end of the episode and we get flashes of things that happened “earlier that day” or “twenty minutes ago.” and we understand how the climax came to be.

Parallel Plot

This is a plot structure that has two interweaving plots that are linked by similar goals, events, or characters. For example, you could be writing a historical fiction about the French Revolution where one character is a commoner trying to throw off the yoke of the nobility and the other character is a noble who wants things to change but doesn’t want to meet Madame Guillotine.  

Genre-Specific

Many genres have specialized plot structures with their own spin on the basic elements. These structures go hand-in-hand with the four types, rather than replacing them. For example, you can write a parallel romance or a flashback mystery. How strict the structures are varies from genre to genre and even from element to element with genres. Let’s look at some of the genres we frequently see at A4A. Any one of them could take a whole post itself, so this will be a brief run-down of the essentials.

Romance

The most immutable element in a romance plot is the HEA or happily-ever-after; the story must end with a positive resolution to whatever relationship stage the couple is in. The other elements help to support the relationship toward that HEA. That’s why the second-most important thing is to have the main characters meet (your inciting incident) as soon as possible in the story—the story can’t focus on their relationship if they don’t know each other. If there are events that need to happen before their meeting, you may have to tell the story out of chronological order. All the points in between that are normally attributed to the protagonist are applied to the couple instead.  

Mystery

Much like romance revolves around a relationship, mystery revolves around a question. You want to raise the main question that will run through the story (your inciting incident) as soon as you can, ideally in the first chapter. Though “who?” is the most common question thanks to subgenres like murder mysteries, “what?” “where?” “why?” and “how?” can also work. And of course, whatever question is raised needs to be answered in the end. For all the plot points in between, you generally match up high points with epiphanies or solid clues, and setbacks with red herrings.

Paranormal and Horror

Paranormal and horror both work on a similar concept: things are not what they seem. At first, they function similarly to a mystery, with questions and doubt raised in the inciting incident. However, answering the question is not the end of the story. That’s because answering the question involves a follow-up: what is the protagonist going to do about it? If the initial mystery is the harder question, it will typically be answered at Pinch Point II, with Act III revolving around the protagonist’s solution. If the initial mystery is fairly simple but requires more work to find a solution to, it will be answered at Pinch Point I.   

Hero’s Journey (Sci-Fi, Fantasy, & Adventure)

The Hero’s Journey is a cycle that was first attributed to Joseph Campbell. It’s usually seen in series and classic mythos, which is why it’s a popular structure for speculative fiction and adventure. It breaks the Three Act structure into twelve parts, but the key feature is in the turning points between acts. The first one takes the protagonist away from their normal world, and the second one returns them to it. Unlike the other genres mentioned, this is not a strict structure, as speculative fiction is defined more by its setting and inhabitants than the plot. It just so happens to be a common structure.

Mix and Match

Remember how I said that the genres are layered onto the four plot types? They can also be combined with each other. If, say, you’re writing a mystery romance, you have to incorporate the plot structure of both mystery and romance. Since both genres require involvement from the inciting incident, it must do double duty: the question of the story must be raised in the same scene where the characters meet. 

Join us next week for our latest installment in our Misused Advice series, where we’ll talk about filtering. 

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New Authors: Plot Makes the World Go Round

Where your story is going

Rebecca Mikkelson, Editor-in-Chief Authors 4 Authors Publishing

One of the most important in your work is going to be the plot. This feels a little bit like the chicken and the egg conundrum where you might be asking yourself, “What really does come first: plot, world, or characters?” For the purposes of this series, we’re going to start with the plot. 

Where is your story going?

First thing’s first, you need to have an idea. 

That seems self-explanatory, but there’s more: you need to have a complete idea. This doesn’t mean that you need to have your whole trilogy planned out before you even start writing; it means that you need to know where the story is going to end. It could be a happily ever after (the guy finally gets the girl and they’ll love each other until their dying days), the chosen one saving the world against an invasion, or the detective catches his or her man, just to name a few. 

It’s a lot easier to get to your destination—even if it takes unexpected turns along the way—if you know where it is. 

Plotter vs Pantser

Ahh, the age-old debate: do you actively plot your story until you already have it written, or do you wing it? There’s no wrong answer in what kind of writer you are, but depending on the type, you’ll need a different set of skills.

For those of you who have never heard the terms “plotter” and “pantser,” a plotter is someone who will have their whole novel summarized, including having each chapter planned from start to finish to make sure they get to the end of their book—they basically have the whole book written before they really start writing. Don’t worry, this still doesn’t mean that you have to have every chapter of every book in your entire series before you can even start writing book one. You can take it a book at a time. 

A pantser is the total opposite: they wing it. The name comes from the saying, “Flying by the seat of his pants.”  These writers start with an idea and write until they’ve finished. If you’re a pantser, you’re going to need to be a very good editor. With no direction, things can get weird quick: plot holes come up, character development gets changed mid-book, and the ending of your story can wind up somewhere entirely different than where you thought it would. 

Is there another option? Yes. Yes, there is. I’m one of those writers—you can be a hybrid. These writers know where the story is going to end, and the basics of what’s going to happen in each chapter, but they don’t exactly know how to get there. For me, when I make my chapter outlines, it looks a little like this:

Chapter 22: Margaret

Synopsis: Prince Gareth brags about his family’s power; Jerone returns home; Sorren announces the war is over 

These are the bare bones of what I want to happen in the chapter, but I have no idea how they’re going to come about. 

Structuring your plot

This might seem like we’re going over self-explanatory information, but without the building blocks of writing, any writer is doomed to fail. When it comes to structuring, there is no real breaking the mold and doing something new and fantastic. There are different ways to structure, but for the purposes of this blog, I’m going to stick with western story telling. 

Your book needs to have a beginning, middle, and end. These can also be called acts one, two, and three. This is nothing new, but it can be for writers just now starting on their journey to becoming an author. 

The beginning (Act I) is where you introduce your setting, your characters, and where your conflict is introduced. Usually, this is when your main character or protagonist (they aren’t always the same, by the way, but we’ll get into that next week), locks themselves into the story by making a goal or decision that pulls the rest of the characters toward the end goal.

The middle (Act II)  is a series of events and challenges that the main character faces to reach their goal that leads to the climax of the story. The challenge is making sure that you don’t end up with a lull working toward the climax. This should happen at the very end of Act II.

The end (Act III) is where your resolution will happen. The climax has come, everything’s gone to crap, and now your characters need to figure out how to meet their end goal. This is a little different for stories that have more than one book...sort of. Your book still needs to have three acts and still needs to have a resolution; it just won’t be the final resolution. There still needs to be at least one loose end that sets up the conflict for the next book.

How does your plot affect your characters?

What I mean to ask is, is your plot event-driven or character-driven?

A character-driven plot relies on the characters’ actions and emotions to move the plot along. This type of plot typically falls upon the villains of the story to work. They actively break rules, while the heroes of the story follow the rules and try to fix what the villain ruins/breaks.

An event-driven plot relies on external factors to create the plot. These type of plots work particularly well in historical fictions: for example, you could write a story about a Jewish family surviving the holocaust. These plots are initiated by something that is not a central character to the story. 

Does your plot make sense within your world?

This is where we get into the chicken and the egg conundrum. What really comes first? There are a lot of things that happen simultaneously, honestly. These steps don’t happen in isolation.  

While you’re figuring out your plot, you need to make sure that it fits within the world that you’re creating. You can’t very well have a story of the downtrodden rising up in a utopian world. Though, I suppose, you could if that utopia is made by slaves and only the rich get to enjoy the fruits of the oppressed, but I think you get my point. If there are no oppressed, there is no story within that world. 

Join me next week when I talk about characters

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