I’m writing my third book live on the Internet, and you can follow along! Today: Strengthening the plot.
If you missed the previous parts of this story, the first post describes how to collect ideas. The second post is about outlining. In the third part, we expand the outline using the hero’s journey.
Improving the outline
Let’s look at the outline that we created in the previous post in this series again.
While it does provide us with a basic story, it still needs some refinement. Particularly, it is too much based on plot, and gives too little consideration to characters and emotional pay-offs. We will fix this now.
Mentors and villains
We have already identified the Yanomami boy and his father as “mentors” in the sense of the Hero’s Journey. They represent the allies of the three kids: Rose, Mary and Scooter. But we can also see from the outline that the other party lacks a face. They are just “other tribe members” who leave to work for the loggers. In the end, when the tribe unites again, we miss an emotional payoff, because we don’t know who these “other” tribe members are, so we don’t care about them, and whether they will unite with “our” tribe or not.
It is particularly important in a book for children to give a face to abstract concepts. “Being bad” or doing something “immoral” is harder for them to relate to than “a naughty boy,” “an honest shopkeeper,” and so on.
So we will assume that the Yanomami boy’s uncle, the brother of the tribe leader, is heading the group of people who want to leave the village and accept the loggers’ money. The tribe leader is the boy’s father. This is another point that will strengthen the story a bit. It’s more interesting to read about the leader of the tribe than to read about a random member of it.
The uncle will need some visual identity, some characteristics that are memorable and single him out of the mass of other people. I will have to keep that in mind when I write him.
The other tribes
In the end, the story should not only be about the loggers and their defeat. Stories of defeat are not as interesting and morally uplifting as stories of victory. And a victory should not only consist in the defeat of the enemy, but have a moral quality of its own.
So one good idea would be to have the tribes unite at the end. This is their victory. Although the loggers provide much of the conflict in the story, the story, on a deeper level, is not about them. It is about the tribes, about the forest, and about how friendship can overcome adversity.
The situation at the beginning should then be the opposite of what we want to reach at the end. When the story starts, the other tribes around have already made peace with the loggers and get money from them, or are too afraid to do anything. So it looks like the bad guys have won.
The father of the boy is the tribe leader, a person of authority. His tribe is always at war with the other tribes (the Yanomami are known to be fierce fighters, who always find some reason to fight against other tribes!). He is at war with the other tribes, because they have some disputes over land ownership. The boy, and Rose and Mary, realise that if the tribes cannot unite, they will lose everything to the loggers. So the only way to win against the loggers would be to unite the tribes.
The kids realise this, and, together with the boy, they go and talk to the other tribes. Their solution: Mary’s father buys the disputed lands from both tribes that claim ownership, effectively paying twice for them. In this way, he gives them the money the loggers would give them (which is almost nothing). But this solves the problem with the disputed lands, because now they are not disputed any more. Now the tribes can work together again and fight the loggers.
In the end, the “self-exiled” tribe members are ordered to shoot at their tribe members — but they refuse, giving the victory to the tribes. Here it must be the ‘bad’ uncle who finally realises that he must be loyal to his tribe, rather than to the loggers. When it comes to shooting his own people, he cannot do it. And so he is the one who turns his bow towards the loggers and brings about the final victory. Which really is not the victory over the loggers, but the unification of the tribes that gives them power and the ability to survive in the future.
Money
What solves the problem in a practical way is that Mary’s father, the missionary, uses his own private money to buy the land from the tribes. In the end, after the loggers have been sent away from the forest, the tribes will give him his money back, and they will take back the land, this time in peace and unity. So nobody loses anything really. We don’t want the priest to end up owning a piece of the rainforest, just like the loggers did.
Fairies
In this series of books, the fairies are an additional attraction for kids, and they represent nature and its concerns. But they are never crucial to the plot itself. The main point of the books is that it’s always the girls who solve the problems. Sometimes they will accept practical help from grownups (like car rides, or using dad’s money to buy the tribal lands), but the ideas will always be theirs. The series is about children being empowered to solve problems on their own, rather than fairies or grownups solving the problems.
In fact, the fairies are so little involved in the plot that we have not yet mentioned them at all. The plot works completely without fairies. But we want to put them in now (mainly because my daughter really likes them, and I do too!).
From the first book in the series, we know that the children have magic rings with which they can summon the fairies. The fairies are specific to particular places and trees, and each fairy is associated with a species of tree. So there are Ash fairies (all called “Ash”), olive tree fairies (all called “Olive”) and so on. In the rainforest we’ll have fairies named after the trees that exist here. (Do some research!)
The fairies will not actually do much. They will occasionally comment on things, or warn the children of dangers, or discuss plans with them. They are similar in function to the chorus in an ancient Greek tragedy. The action is always the hero’s.
Conclusion
Now we have a rich, emotionally satisfying plot that ends with the tribes reuniting and celebrating their lives in the forest.
Next comes another round of research. The whole plotting exercise has highlighted some areas about which I don’t yet know enough:
- How does the social structure of the Yanomami work? Do they have leaders, kings, wise men?
- Are their leaders young and strong, or old and wise?
- How do they live their everyday lives? They hunt, I guess, but what? What do they eat?
- How are the relations between the tribes? Between men and women?
- And, finally, are there any stories of real fights between tribes and loggers?
Read on to find out in the next installment, where we go for a final round of research before writing the first draft!