Plotting the Supreme Ordeal
I'm a great fan of Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey outline for plotting my stories, and I was reminded of how useful it was when I did a workshop on plotting for Havant Writers' Circle this week.
Vogler's book is based on the work of Joseph Campbell, in particular The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Vogler's book translates Campbell's work on the universality of myth into a structure useful to writers.
Basically, the strucuture is that the character leaves their ordinary world behind, crosses the threshold into the special world of the story, and is then presented with a series of tests while he or she tries to solve their problem, or overcome the challenge they've been presented with.
The best visual description of this I've come across is that a story should look like a rising sine wave, a wiggly snake rearing up its head. The top of each 'wiggle' is a moment of tension, the bottom a moment of calm or relaxation before the main character goes off to solve the next problem.
The highest moment of tension should be just before the end of the story. This is the classic set-piece huge shoot-out, or the confrontation between the characters, the moment the murderer is arrested, the place where the bad guy is killed.
Using this framework to look at my older novels, I can see that the Supreme Ordeal is either missing, or it occurs way too early in the book, leaving the story tailing off. I've just finished re-writing my twenty year old novel Snowbird, and I've used this framework to put the murder attempt on my main character in the right place, in the penultimate chapter. Now the book rises properly to its climax, and thanks to The Writers' Journey, I know it's going to work this time round.
Vogler's book is based on the work of Joseph Campbell, in particular The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Vogler's book translates Campbell's work on the universality of myth into a structure useful to writers.
Basically, the strucuture is that the character leaves their ordinary world behind, crosses the threshold into the special world of the story, and is then presented with a series of tests while he or she tries to solve their problem, or overcome the challenge they've been presented with.
The best visual description of this I've come across is that a story should look like a rising sine wave, a wiggly snake rearing up its head. The top of each 'wiggle' is a moment of tension, the bottom a moment of calm or relaxation before the main character goes off to solve the next problem.
The highest moment of tension should be just before the end of the story. This is the classic set-piece huge shoot-out, or the confrontation between the characters, the moment the murderer is arrested, the place where the bad guy is killed.
Using this framework to look at my older novels, I can see that the Supreme Ordeal is either missing, or it occurs way too early in the book, leaving the story tailing off. I've just finished re-writing my twenty year old novel Snowbird, and I've used this framework to put the murder attempt on my main character in the right place, in the penultimate chapter. Now the book rises properly to its climax, and thanks to The Writers' Journey, I know it's going to work this time round.
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