Is Your Plot Connected to Your Characters?
A handful of techniques and tips for making sure your characters are moving along with your story
What’s new in my writing room: if you haven’t read my latest novel, Last Bets, check it out—two women artists try to escape their lives by fleeing to a Caribbean island, but paradise isn’t what they find. About female friendships and morality, and how we rescue each other’s hearts in unexpected ways. Last Bets was selected for Kirkus Reviews' Top 100 Best Indie Books of the Year!
How connected is your story’s plot with the characters that journey through it? Surprisingly, many writers, especially in early drafts, keep the two remarkably separate. And that’s not going to engage the reader, so what do you do about it?
First step is to find out exactly where your character and plot take separate roads. This isn’t always evident, so I’ve devised a couple of techniques to figure it out.
Then you have to mend the gap, fix the disconnect between storyline and character arc.
I’d like to share my process with my recent novel, Last Bets, and how this might help your story structure.
Structure keeps readers engaged
Not every writer believes in structure. I believe good stories, those that keep the reader engaged, structurally connect the plot and the character’s journey through it. In other words, what you choose for your plot is always, always related to some effect on the character.
No plot point exists without some effect—right? Otherwise, why is it there? Maybe you write a very cool scene, you want to include it, but are you asking the question: How does this relate to or affect my character?
Until you have an answer, that plot point is literally unanchored in your story’s structure. If it doesn’t serve the story, via the character, it may not belong.
Charting the plot points
Plot points are the dramatic moments that create your story structure. There are dozens of ways to chart them. I have used so many—and I keep coming back to the W storyboard because it’s versatile and nonlinear.
The storyboard is a tool favored by screenwriters but quite popular with writers of all genres. Below is a video where I explain the basic W storyboard and there’s a lot more about it in my book, Your Book Starts Here.
This video describes a simple one-narrator storyboard, but what if you are working with multiple points of view? More than one character narrating scenes or chapters? That’s the complication I chose with my last novel, Last Bets, and here’s how I used the storyboard to solve the plot-character connection.
Multiple characters equal multiple W’s
Two characters narrate Last Bets. They alternate chapters, each telling part of the story, in separate tracks, which converge by the end.
Trust me, it’s not the easiest road to follow. But it was the road I chose for this novel.
Plotting these two stories started on a huge storyboard with two separate W’s. I chose Post-It notes in two different colors, one for each character’s scenes. I started with one character and noted the main plot points, writing each on a Post-It note. Sometimes there was just one per planned chapter; sometimes a chapter would have several scenes that were all important plot points.
Once I had the first character’s main plot points, I placed them on the storyboard W. Then I did the same for the second character, on her W.
This showed me the individual storylines. I could see where they intersected or echoed each other. This was just the plot analysis, though. Next I had to see if the characters actually changed, or were forced to react, because of these scenes.
The effect of plot on character
I happen to have a lot of colored Post-It’s on hand, so I was able to choose a third color for the character arc. I used the same color for both W’s.
For each plot point, I asked myself how it affected the character. When it did, I wrote a new Post-It in the new color and placed it under that plot point on the character’s W. I did this all the way through for the first character, then continued with the second.
I tried to be very honest with myself as I did this, only adding the character change Post-It when it really was evident in the manuscript already.
A sad and dramatic lesson: Many plot points that I’d drafted—that I loved—had zero effect on the character involved. In fact, only about one-third of my plot actually worked, in terms of the character. That was sobering.
Reading aloud and asking questions
I’ve been down this discouraging road before. I have a handful of favorite “get unstuck” techniques when my plot and character are living in separate rooms.
Telling the plot points aloud. I went through each character's main plot points, talking them out loud as if telling the story to a listener. Hearing my own words often summoned up ideas that hadn’t yet appeared on the page. I used yet another color Post-It (to represent ideas that weren’t yet in the manuscript) and jotted notes then posted them next to the plot point I’d rework.
Asking a question. Questions trigger my creative mind, my imagination. I asked, What does she really want right here? and often, I could answer that question. It just wasn’t written yet, but the scene provoked it.
By the end of my plot-character analysis, I had many new ideas posted on the storyboard.
Longing starts a story
One of my two characters. Ellie, always felt a bit distant to me, even though her plot points seemed to track. So I asked a different question of her: What longing starts your story?
Longing is a magical key in story structure. Something the character desires will often drive their journey and make them face challenges that grow into crises.
When I asked Ellie about her longing, I had to travel way back in time. Diving into her backstory showed me the wounds she’d gained from an experience as a young girl, trying unsuccessfully to protect her sister who eventually died. This was the loss that drove all of Ellie’s choices, including those in this story.
So I was finally able to understand her elusive character and rework the plot points, to knit her journey with how she’d grow as a result.
When to try this
I recommend trying this kind of structure analysis when you’ve already got a lot of pages drafted, when your story feels fairly solid in terms of what’s happening (the plot), but you feel stuck or uncertain about how your characters intersect with it.
Again, I find the W storyboard an excellent tool for testing out your plot-character relationship. It’ll take you away from the actual writing, but when you return, it’ll be to a much stronger story structure.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Try the plot-character chart described above for one of your story’s narrators. See what you learn about how the plot intersects with the character’s growth—and where it doesn’t seem to have any relevance and needs rethinking.
You can try a storyboard for this exercise, using the video above or my book.
Or you can simply list your plot points then write the effect on your character next to each point.
Where do you have plot points that orbit nobody? What can you do to connect them to your character’s journey?
Share your thoughts and questions!
Shout Out!
I love to give a shout out to writing friends and former students who are publishing their books and encourage my newsletter community to pre-order or order a copy to show your support of fellow writers. Be sure to let me know if you are a former student and will publish soon (pre-orders of your book are available now), or have in the past two months! Just email me at mary[at]marycarrollmoore[dot]com to be included in a future Shout Out! (I’ll keep your listing here for two months.)
Mary Walerak, Finding Alineade (Kirk House Publishers), August
Karen Lueck, The Green Thread: Reclaiming Our Spiritual Authority (Goodness Press), September
James Francisco Bonilla, An Eye for an I: Growing Up with Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness (University of Minnesota Press), November
I’m a lifelong artist, and I love to inspire and support other creative folk, which is why I write this weekly newsletter. My goal with these posts is to help you strengthen your writing practice and creative life so it becomes more satisfying to you.
I’m also the author of 15 books in 3 genres. My third novel, Last Bets (Riverbed Press), was published in April, after becoming an Amazon bestseller during pre-orders. My second novel, A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, was published in October 2023 and also became an Amazon bestseller and Hot New Release from pre-orders. For twelve years, I worked as a full-time food journalist, most notably through my weekly column for the Los Angeles Times syndicate. My writing-craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “People’s Choice” in 2011 and my first novel, Qualities of Light, was nominated for PEN/Faulkner and Lambda Literary awards in 2009. I’ve written Your Weekly Writing Exercise every Friday since 2008.