Happy Monday, Reader,

Welcome back to Maria’s Corner. Oh boy, you have no idea what I have planned for you!

But first, let’s get some things out of the way before we get into today’s newsletter.

July was supposed to be a recharge month for me, a way to quietly recharge my creative stores. Spoiler alert, it wasn’t.

I had a big job come in mid June, and the manuscript took a lot out of me. I worked on it for a month, and it was honestly draining.

Having said that, I still loved every second of it. Helping writers make their stories the best version of themselves is honestly amazing. I have another client scheduled for August, and one for mid to late October, which means September is open. If you want me to take a look at your manuscript, the time is ticking. Visit my website at https://marliteraryservices.com to learn what we can do together.

Now, I started by saying I have something planned for you this month, and I do. Welcome to my version of plot school. I hope you enjoy it.

Two Books, One That Works And One That Doesn’t

I’ve been fascinated lately with dark romance, both the MM and MF side of it. That’s not usually my genre. I’ve read a few, I beta read a handful last year, but it’s not somewhere I live. That changed in early July.

I found a book on Audible with a premise odd enough to stop me mid scroll, a mercenary and a mortician. I loved it so much I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. The plot was tight, the characters made me laugh out loud, and even the darkest moments felt earned instead of gratuitous. I don’t have any triggers of my own when it comes to reading, so anything an author wants to throw at me is fair game. And this story has some moments that will definitely trigger someone who has a traumatic history. That’s not really what pulled me in though, what pulled me in was that the story simply worked, in a way I could feel but not immediately name.

Around the same time, I was beta reading a client’s manuscript. Near future AI science fiction, he told me. Except that’s not a plot, that’s a category. And once I got into the ninety one thousand words behind it, eighty thousand of them before a plot actually inserted itself, I understood why he’d reached for a category instead of a plot in the first place. There wasn’t one to describe yet.

Two books, roughly the same month, sitting at opposite ends of the same question. What actually makes a plot hold?

Most writers only think about one of the two kinds of plot

Here’s the thing I want to get into this month. There isn’t just one plot running through a story. There are two, stacked on top of each other, and most writers only ever learn to see the top layer.

The first is scene level plot, the engine. This is the moment to moment machinery, problem, solution, problem. My college professor called it exactly that, the problem/solution/problem dilemma. You start with a conflict the character has to face. Something moves them to act on it. That action resolves the conflict, and immediately generates the next one. Rinse, repeat, chapter after chapter. He liked to put it this way. “The king dies and then the queen dies” is not a story. “The king dies, and the queen dies of a broken heart” is.

The second is big picture plot, the thing all those scene level engines are actually building toward. This one’s harder to name, harder to teach, and it’s the layer most manuscripts I read are missing even when the scene level engine is technically running. Big picture plot isn’t “what happens.” It’s what all the happening was for.

Most writers can talk about plot in the big picture sense, theme, arc, the shape of the whole book. Fewer writers have actually sat down and drilled the scene level engine until it’s automatic. And almost nobody talks about how the two layers are supposed to talk to each other. That’s the gap I want to spend this month in.

What it looks like when the engine is missing entirely

Back to the client’s manuscript. Eighteen chapters, eighteen, of a group of eight people living in a military fortress in the middle of Sweden, interacting with each other, with a vague sense that some solution to their situation was coming. It never came. What came instead was a countdown, and not the kind you’re imagining. Each secondary character died, one by one, until the protagonist was alone in that fortress in the dead of winter.

Then nine more chapters of watching him unravel. Losing his grip, losing his will to live, mostly alone in his own head. The antagonist finally showed up for a long philosophical debate, then killed him. And that’s when we learned the protagonist wasn’t human at all. He was the incarnation of a god. The antagonist was his son.

Mind bending. Not in a good way.

Not once in the thirty chapters before that death do we get a hint, not a flicker, that this man is anything other than human. There’s no foreshadowing, no clue, nothing to retroactively make the twist feel inevitable instead of arbitrary. And because the protagonist spends most of the book passive, alone in his own thoughts, even the moment to moment scene engine barely runs. There’s no problem/solution/problem chain to speak of. There’s just time passing, and then an ending arriving.

That’s a book with no scene level plot and a big picture “reveal” that isn’t earned by anything underneath it. Both layers, missing.

What it looks like when the engine runs, and what it’s running toward

Now the mercenary and the mortician.

This mercenary was groomed from age ten. Before that, his mother kept him and his two sisters in cages in her basement. The man who got him out of that gave him purpose, trained him, gave him the tools to protect the people who needed it most.

Watch the chain. Problem, he sees a child walking hunched over in pain, heading into a funeral home. Solution, investigate who hurt the child. Problem, he realizes he’s interested in the mortician who runs that funeral home, and suspects him. Solution, go to the mortician’s house to kill him. Problem, the child turns out to be asleep in that same house, and the mortician fights back, insisting he’s not the one hurting the kid. Solution, the mercenary talks to the child directly and learns it’s actually the child’s own father doing the hurting. Solution, he kills the father. Problem, the father turns out to have been part of his boss’s organization, and killing him rips open something the mercenary was never supposed to see.

That sequence alone runs about fifteen chapters. Fair, in a book with over a hundred. You could map the entire novel this way, link by link, and it would never feel padded, because every solution creates the next problem instead of just closing the loop.

But here’s the part that took me longer to see, and it’s the part I actually want to come back to later this month. That chain isn’t the plot. It’s the engine that carries the plot. What killing that man actually uncovers is that the boss, the same man who pulled the mercenary out of the basement and gave him purpose, has spent years running a trafficking ring that deals in children. The mercenary told him early on that hurting children was the one line he wouldn’t cross. The boss didn’t argue. He just made sure the mercenary was never assigned anywhere near it. And now the boss is furious, not because a man died, but because that man’s death just handed the mercenary the one thing he’d been kept from seeing for years.

That’s the wound. The mortician is the other half. He’s the one who actually sees the mercenary as something other than a weapon someone else pointed, who helps him understand that being raised to fight doesn’t mean fighting is what he is. The real plot isn’t just the mercenary realizing the boss controlled him as completely as his mother once did, only with better manners about it. It’s him figuring out, through the mortician, who he actually was underneath all that training the whole time.

The problem/solution/problem chain is what kept me turning pages. The realization underneath it is what I haven’t stopped thinking about since July.

Why this matters for whatever you’re working on

If your manuscript feels like it’s dragging, it’s usually one of two things, and they require completely different fixes. Either your scene level engine has stalled, nothing is generating the next problem, so nothing is generating momentum, or your engine is running just fine, chapter after competent chapter, but it isn’t in service of anything. It’s a very smooth machine going nowhere in particular.

Most craft advice only addresses the first problem. That’s useful, but it’s half the map.

This week’s exercise

Set a timer for two minutes. Take a section you’re working on, one that isn’t quite working right now. In those two minutes, write three problems and three solutions in a chain, problem, solution, problem, solution, problem, solution. Don’t overthink it. Crude is fine. The goal isn’t a polished sequence, it’s proof that something can move.

When the timer goes off, look at what you’ve got. Does each solution actually create the next problem, or does it just quietly resolve things? That’ll tell you fast whether your section level engine is doing its job.

Because scene/section level plot is only half of what we’re talking about this month. The other half, what the engine is for, is where we’re headed next.

See you next week,

Maria Acosta Ramirez Alpha & Beta Reader, MAR Literary Services Florida, USA gravatar.com/unabashedd4deba3b56 ​

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