Mapping out your story, by Saviour Pirotta

I've been conducting writing workshops in schools and libraries since the mid-eighties. Over time, I developed a foolproof template that children could use to quickly sketch out a plot with a beginning, a middle and an end. Inspired by Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand, it was a quest in five easy steps, leading from the main character coming across a problem to solving it and reaping the rewards of his success.

It has stood me well over the years. Reluctant writers with not much confidence especially, found it easy to follow and they all had a plot to work with by the end of the session. Some kids have even used what I term my '5 step story ladder' with great success in the BBC 500 word story competition, dedicating just 100 words to every one of the five steps.

These last couple of years, though, I have been hankering after a more organic and non-linear approach to working out storylines. Looking through my old notebooks, I found some notes I made at Charney Manor a few years ago. I can't remember the exact year but I do recall that Mary Hoffman showed advance copies of Stravaganza: City of Masks, so I'm guessing it would have been 2000 or 2001. With my notes was a map I drew in one of the workshops (Again, I can't remember but I have vague recollection that it might have been a guest speaker rather than a member of the SAS.) It's a map of my childhood, showing my home, the houses on our street where my relatives lived and I used to visit, the road to my school and church and the places where I used to play. I was very good at hiding and eavesdropping on conversations when I was a kid. My favourite hiding place was a secret tunnel behind an ancient honeysuckle that had grown away from the wall. I spent so much time in it I often staggered home dizzy from the perfume. Sometimes I fantasised about finding a secret door under the layers of dead honeysuckle, a portal to a magic world.

Looking at it, it occurred to me that you could start a story by drawing a map for your main character. You could put in all the locations where the main events happen and draw little banners announcing what happens there. You could people it with the characters he interacts with. Using Snow White as an example, you could show the king's castle, (I would have a cutaway with a cross-section of the castle), the nearby forest with the dwarves' cottage, the mountains and the mines, the location of the glass coffin etc. I also draw arrow-paths to show the character's journey. In this case, it would be Snow White's flight through the forest, the dwarves' way to the mines and back, the witch's journey as she follows Snow White and the prince's arrival in the forest.

I found it's a great way to make the story come alive by visualising the location of every stop along the way. In the future I plan to make little cut-outs of the characters so I can move them along the map and imagine how they would interact. Perhaps it's a daft way of working out a story but I find it helps me a lot. What's your favourite way of plotting?

Saviour Pirotta's next book is set in the Stone Age. The second in a series of four, it is called The Whispering Stones and will be published by Maverick in April. His second play for children is an adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood and runs at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough during the Easter holidays.