July 5, 2019
[This guide was copied, as is, from Wattpad. At the time, I had no intention of posting it here. Please excuse any discrepancies.]
This section goes over the plot and its scope, and the technical aspects of formulating one. It does not go over ideas. Here, I assume you are writing an outline of sorts before you ever start a draft or publish a prologue. As a Base section, it has little to no examples drawn from canon Warriors.
If you need help with the plot, you are not alone. You have seen bad movies or tedious books. Where the director added way too many elements in a 90-minute block, or when a writer just never stops writing books for a series. These are problems with the plot and its scope. These problems cross mediums and skill levels; there are some poorly written best sellers out there. That being said, there are plenty of good stories to drown out the bad ones. But this guide makes sure your fanfiction does not fall in with those, and this section is specifically to help you with the plot.
PLOT AND PLOT SCOPE
The plot is the sequence of events in a story where each event affects the next via cause and effect. Whether your plot is about adopting a stray cat or a multi-book battle between StarClan and the Dark Forest, the previous event must affect the current one and the current one must affect the next event. That is what makes the conflict a story rather than a sequence of unrelated events. For example, what you probably did on a day off was a sequence of unrelated events. That is not a story. It becomes one when a prior event affects the next one. If you are sitting at home and a friend calls you to go to the river with them, then it is a plot point in the story of your day. You left your house because your friend called you. It is a core element in writing and I am sure you get the idea.
Plot scope is the range and amount of events covered within a single story. The range of events refers to the amount of time passed. The amount refers to the number of events covered. While a basic idea in of itself, scope tends to get overlooked in the Warriors fandom. And it is easy to tell why; the canon novels tend to go pretty far off the initial parameters set in The Prophecies Begin arc. Warriors is not the best example when referencing scope. We go from 'fire alone can save our clan' to 'the ancestors of cat heaven manifest in the living world to fight the ancestors of cat purgatory'. Regardless of how far it goes, it would be difficult for us to scale a single fanfic that far out of its initial scope. Remember, the Erins are several writers with paychecks and deadlines. You are solo and without a deadline. Expanding the plot's scope should have a reason and be the result of narrative events prior.
Deciding on a consistent plotline is harder than most think. How many fanfics have you read where new characters are constantly added, or events become more and more ridiculous? The plot is the foundation of the story. The last thing you want is an ever-expanding mess of occurrences.
FORMATTING YOUR PLOT
In the section "What to Write About," I went over ideation of stories and how you could organize your thoughts into a cohesive work. I briefly glossed over the plot, stating what you wanted to write about was just as important as the characters you chose to play it out. I will focus on the plot specifically now.
There are many ways to organize a story, many looping back to theatre. While plots have no technically correct way to structure them, it is a good idea to start with one of the structures that have been laid out by history (Western history, in our case). I could go over what led to these methods of storytelling, but it mostly boils down to who said what first back before printing presses were a thing and the masses were dumb. Instead, I will go over things taken from these historically sound plot structures that no author should be without.
First is the basic five act structure: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement. This roughly translates to an expositional beginning, followed by a tension-building mid section, and topped off with a climactic ending that resolves things. This is the same plot structure you may (depending on when you were in school) have learned in English courses. It has been around for as long as civilization has existed. It is a sound method of writing out your story simply because it is recognizable and easy to understand. There are variants of it that have come around. Episodic plots are usually without a resolution since the story must continue through months or years of real time. Flashbacks tend to start close to the climax, then run through past events to show readers how and why the climax is occurring the way it is. Most fanfics do not go into the offshoots, but the basic act structure is a good place to start when you have no idea what and where to put plot elements.
Each event in your plot must have meaning; the previous event should have, in some small way, caused the current one to happen. I mentioned this above, but it is the most important part about plotting out your events. Countless Warriors fanfics out there completely miss this. Events are written and forgotten about, characters are added last minute, sequels are set up by not ending the current story. These kinds of mistakes are common in stories that are updated without an outline or a rough draft to work from. If the prior event did not cause the current event, then how did the current event begin? That is the most basic part about a plot. And that does not mean that deviating from this is completely wrong. The episodic format messes with this a little, since each episode is only loosely connected to the last. But we are not writing for TV here. Most Warriors fanfics are either a trio or more of books or a very long one-off. We are deriving from a series that has over 30 loosely connected novels, novellas, and comics. Keeping our plots consistently moving in the right direction is important to avoid ending up with a series of loosely connected stories when we do not want them.
Warriors may be an extremely long series of novels, but your fanfics are not. Keep in mind that doing something as extensive as the Erins have done with the canon will be much more difficult for you than it was for them. That leads us into our next point.
SCALING YOUR PLOT
This gets overlooked in the fandom, and it is understandable why. Warriors is a long series of books written by several writers with professional deadlines and editors. The canon stories cover many different subplots of romance and coming-of-age, branching from a main plot that spans four arcs with several books each, and with more being written beyond that. You are one singular writer (in most cases) with no editors or proof-readers (in most cases) and no deadline. Writing something of that scope is going to be very difficult at the least. And we generally do not want to strive for something that big right from the start.
That is not to say there are not long works out there; stories like Fallout: Equestria (MLP fanfic) and Worm (original web novel) come to mind. Those stories easily top out well over 400,000 words and were written solo. They also took years to finish just the first drafts and were combed over several times for consistency, taking even more time. Writing at an ideological grand scale without the literal grand scale of professional publishing deals is possible, but exhausting. And the last thing I want is for you to quit in the middle of your story because your ambition outweighed your ability. There are methods we can use to keep the scales of our plots under control if we do not want to write stories like Worm, though.
One such method is to shrink the scope of your plots by limiting your chapters; one event per one chapter. Many fanfics I read out there have a problem with how many things happen in one chapter. Sometimes characters will be learning about combat moves and talking to older cats about their prophecy. These two events are separate and, unless linked otherwise, should be in separate chapters. Having more than one relevant event per chapter can confuse the reader as to what is important. The possibility of character growth and plot advancement are important. Keep them both in your story, but keep them separate if they are not related to each other.
This next point counts only if your story is broken into major sections or you have multiple books: one major event per section/novel. It may seem odd at first. Why would you only have one event per whole book? By 'event' I mean really important event. Something that affects our characters or the universe they inhabit in a big way. In terms of a multi-novel story, our main character receiving a prophecy is not a major event. Our main character killing their littermate and losing an ear in the fight because of our prophecy is a major event. In canon, the scope of the plot in each book was condensed down to ensure they would not bog us down with too much information (they did that anyway with how many characters and super editions were introduced; do not do that). Remember your plot structures. Not absolutely everything needs to be front-loaded.
Keep in mind that limiting the scope of your plot or the events within it does not mean limiting the plot itself. If you want to write a kit-to-StarClan story complete with prophecy, love triangle, and evil littermate, go for it. Just be sure to lengthen your story appropriately to fit all the extra words, themes, and characters. No one in this fandom is afraid of lengthening their fanfics given how long the source material is. But knowing when and how to lengthen them goes a long way for your readers' attention spans.
IN CONCLUSION…
Warriors is a plot-driven series. Structuring the plot is, therefore, very important to how your characters and world will develop. Be sure that each section of your story has meaning, and that major events are broken up to minimize confusion. Also keep in mind that plots move forward (in most cases) and each event must perpetuate the story in some way. Chapters cannot just pause the story to insert a love triangle or villain reform, not unless those things help advance the story we want to tell. No matter the length of your fanfic, whether short story or novel series, it must tell a continuous story. And it must do so within a reasonable amount of words. Do not be afraid to cut characters or add chapters for the sake of cleaning up the story for your readers.
Structuring and organizing our plot may not be world building or character sheets, but it builds the core storytelling of our fanfic. Without it, we just have cool characters in a nice world with nothing to say.
- Tyto
