One trilogy, three plotting techniques - by Holly Race

I'm living across three books at the moment, albeit all ones in the same series. My first novel, Midnight's Twins, has just been published in Spanish as Ciudad de Pesadillas, reminding me of all the things I loved (and all the aspects I wish I could redraft, now I'm a more experienced writer) about the story. My second book, A Gathering Midnight, is due to be published in the UK in two weeks time: advance copies are in the post, my author copies are sitting on my bookshelves, and a brilliant actress is recording the audiobook as I type. And I'm currently in the middle of drafting the third and final book in the trilogy.

Despite the fact that all three books belong to the same overarching story, I went through very different processes in plotting each of them. Midnight's Twins took me almost a decade to plan and plot - I have notebooks filled with world-building and folders of documents plotting what would happen in each scene. Of course, everything changed when my editor came on board. I may as well have started from scratch.

With A Gathering Midnight, which was largely written during the first UK lockdown, I was forced to pants my first draft entirely. When you've only got an hour to write before you have to either do other work or take over childcare, you don't have the luxury of plotting. You certainly don't have the luxury of spending more than a few months writing a first draft. It was something of a culture shock compared to the first novel.

What I did with both books, at different stages in the process, was break out some techniques I learned when I was a theatre director (an age ago!) and from my script editing toolkit. I used these more as troubleshooting methods, to test what I already had in place in my first or second drafts.

Balancing plots and subplots

With any story that has multiple subplots, it can be difficult to make sure that the focus doesn't stray too far from the central plot for long periods of time. I break my story down into 'beats', then colour-code each one to account for a different plot or subplot (investigation, romance, family etc). This makes it far easier to see where the main plot is missing from the story for long periods of time. Conversely, it is also useful to see where certain subplots bunch together and might need to be separated to create a more even sprinkle through the novel.

Peaks and troughs

In any story, we look for the main character/s to undergo a series of 'highs and lows' as they get closer or further away from their goals. If the pacing is right, these highs and lows are sequential and get bigger as the story progresses and the stakes rise. The easiest way I've found to chart this is to plot the main story out on a graph. Sometimes this will throw up the fact that I have two very big highs right at the start of the plot, for example, leaving the story nowhere to go in the final climax, where the biggest high 'should' take place. Breaking the story down in this way makes the task of structural edits feel less overwhelming: I'm not dealing with 100,000 words; I'm dealing with a simple graph.

For my third book, I'm trying to incorporate these methods into what I hope will be a more orderly an
d streamlined plotting process! I've been using Julie Cohen's brilliant Plotting with Post It Notes course to brainstorm my story before I begin writing. Using different coloured post its for each story strand helps me to balance my subplots and main plot, and I have even placed the post its on a 'graph' on my wall in order to make sure I've got the right sequence of highs and lows. So far, I haven't deviated far from my post it plan, stuck to the wall behind me. That's never happened before, although time will tell on whether my editor has other ideas!