Diana Kimpton - Plots and Plotting: How to create stories that work

When I first became an author, I wasnt much good at creating stories. First of all, I tried that technique where you invent some characters and see where they take you. But it failed so badly that my characters wandered off in chapter three, muttering, Dont think much of this book. Its not going anywhere.

Then I tried writing a list of everything that would happen in each chapter. This was a slight improvement because it helped me complete my first attempt at a childrens novel. But thats where the success ended. The story came back from a publisher with a note saying it had a weak plot and a flat ending.

In retrospect, that was probably a good thing for generations of children because that novel was about an 11-year-old boy who goes to a boarding school for young wizards. This was years before Harry Potter came on the scene so, if my weak plot and flat ending had actually been published, JK Rowling might have been faced with publishers saying, Tried that, didnt sell.

However, at the time, I could see no advantage in the rejection at all. It shattered my confidence so badly that I went back to producing non-fiction while I tried to learn how to write novels properly. I devoured every book and article I could find about story structure and used my new-found information to analyse the books I read and the movies I watched.

Gradually I started to understand what makes stories work. But I still couldnt write them. Thats because story analysis is a different skill from story creation. Analysing a novel or film doesnt reveal anything about how the plot developed in the authors head from the original idea it only tells you about the finished product.

My personal breakthrough came when I picked up a copy of How to Write for Animation by Jeffrey Scott. As I read his step-by-step description of how he used a step outline to develop the story for an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, something clicked inside my head. For the first time, I realized that I didnt have to work out a story from beginning to end. I could start at the end and work backwards or start in the middle and work in both directions. Armed with the power of the step outline and the freedom it gave me to work in any way I wanted, I discovered that I could finally create stories that worked.

Since then, Ive written twenty-three novels for young people, including my Pony-Mad Princess series which has sold a million copies worldwide. Ive come a long way since that devastating rejection, and I hope this book will help you make similar progress whether you write for adults or for children.

Of course, there are probably as many ways of writing stories as there are authors in the world. We all think differently and work differently. So this book isnt about getting you to create stories my way. Its about giving you the understanding and the tools you need to discover how to create stories your way.

To help make my ideas clearer, Ill be using some of my own books as examples as well as developing a plot especially for this book. The reason for concentrating on my own work isnt to show off. Its because these are the only stories where I know for sure how they were created. However much we analyse other peoples stories, we can never be sure of how they grew in their authors minds.