How Not To Get Published - How To Win the WWOTYA - 3, The Plan and the Plot

By: Gabrielle Guichard
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:43:27
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To target the wrong audience and to choose the wrong publishing house were children's games. To be known as the Worst Writer Of The Year requires more than that. We are now reaching the heart of the problem: not to get published depends also, maybe mostly, on the manuscript itself. That means: you are going to fight against your own talent.

If you are a born schemer, you will have more trouble than another writer to spoil your plan. Each event leads logically to the next and you even do not know that it could be otherwise. It is almost impossible to easily turn a good plot into a bad one. Sorry, but on this one, you will have to work.

Unfold your plan step by step, closely following the plot. The A event leads to the B event, which leads... and so on. If an arrow means "leads to" each arrow comes from an event and points towards another one. (In literature, an event is not always an action; words and thoughts are events.) You cannot merely mix the pages. Any experienced reader will put the pages back to their natural order. He will also sigh and curse you, but if the plot is interesting, and the third lesson assumes that you are a born plotter, he will keep on reading anyway.

The key to failure: choose any event, add some arrows, that is to say make the event leads to as many other events as you want. Follow each one. Do not forget to force some of them to go back in time. Add events upon events so that the whole thing ends up looking like a fly paper. There may be all kinds of flies, dead flies, living flies, buzzing flies, but when the paper --the book-- is thrown into the bin, they all go with it.

If you cannot bring yourself to destroy the well-oiled mechanism you had so much pleasure to create, the next lesson will discuss another option : the length.

Gabrielle Guichard
writes bilingual textbooks and is in charge of the English-French department at Multilingual Bookstore, the publishing house that translates and publishes bilingual and multilingual short novels.

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