I love Stephen King’s On Writing, and I’ll cheerfully endorse about 80% of the advice in it (which is high, for a writing book!), but it does bother me when he says he doesn’t plot, that plot is too artificial, that he just puts his characters in a tough situation and lets them sort it out.

Truth is, I have yet to read a Stephen King novel with a really good ending, so I’m inclined to be skeptical.

The trouble is, as a writer you have control over every aspect of the situation. You have control over the situation itself. You have control over the flow of information. You get to decide where the iceberg is, who knows about the iceberg, and what they do with that information. And without the iceberg, you have only half a plot. The difficulty in plotting is making sure the iceberg is exactly where you need it to be.

Without making your readers feel railroaded.

Because when you have a spectacular coincidence, suddenly people remember that none of this is real. It’s just words that a person thought up and wrote down, and it’s all completely arbitrary. There’s nothing wrong with being postmodern and going for that effect on purpose, but I’m not going to care about this love triangle or that person trying to survive the North Dakota wilderness if I keep thinking that they’re fake people.

So you plant the trap, but you kick leaves over it and make it look real. You build the house that looks, from a distance, like it belongs there in the forest.

Time is the universe’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. So too with plot. What does it change if that discussion happens when your main character is angry and frustrated enough to hear the worst in things? What does it change if that discussion happens after she finds out one crucial piece of information? You can’t abdicate responsibility for these decisions. You try things out one way, and then another, cutting out what doesn’t push your characters far enough and also what pushes them in ways that aren’t subtle enough. You try until you’re sick of trying, sick of considering how one decision ripples out onto another.

And this, I think, is one of the things that beginners have to learn. It’s why books sometimes get harder, instead of easier, to write. It’s easy to glom onto the way it really happened, or the way that you know from TV and movies, or the way that seems most dramatic or surprising, and get wedded to that even if it contradicts common sense, linear causality, and your characters’ personalities. It takes experience to slow down, look around, and back off the first thing that leaps into your head. It’s why I can’t do NaNoWriMo anymore.

It’s not an easy thing. But if it were easy, it wouldn’t be so much fun.