Setting Your Plot Trajectory: Being Clear About Your Goals in Plotting

Understanding what it is you're writing is important to your plotting trajectories.

A friend of mine, Tina Glasneck, and I write a just for fun series to take us out of the dark criminal/supernatural worlds we normally write. It's a series mostly about friendship (and dead bodies) All of the books in the series start with "If You See Kay" and then a verb. Our newest book's verb is "lie."

Did you know that the title stands for a swear word? It's in the great literary tradition of Shakespeare where in Twelfth Night he spells out the "C" word: "By my life, this is my lady’s hand. These be her very c’s, her u’s, and her t’s, and thus makes she her great P’s."

Or in James Joyce's Ulysses when the prison gate girls sing "If you see Kay, Tell him he may, See you in tea, Tell him from me." They were setting up a sexual tryst for Tuesday.

Not that I'm saying you should put my writing on par with Shakespeare or Joyce - just saying sometimes ribald can be fun.

And fun is a MAJOR goal in both writing  our books and hopefully in reading them. These books are geared toward having a glass of wine and a giggle-snort after a long day.

We set that goal out there from the very beginning - light, fluffy, stupid (in a smart way).

Tina and I were just talking about the content of our books this morning when we were working on categories - just what is it that we write when we work on this series together?

Badge Bunny Booze Humorous Mystery Collection. That's the series name:

Badge Bunny - a girl who gets sexually turned on by (in this case) a cop with a badge.
Humorous - and in this case the humor is double entendre, tongue in cheek, and really bad puns.
Mystery - dead body, clues, crime solved/bad guy arrested

That's the outward packaging of our books - but that's not what they're "about." The "about" is the most important thing to understand when plotting a book. This is a series of books about two young women in their early twenties who have known each other since they were in pre-school together. It's "about" their relationship. Their ease of bantering. Their willingness to show each other their soft underbelly by exposing their stories from when they had the most embarrassing moments - from bad wax jobs, to glitter bombs, to sexual encounters that were substandard - knowing their tales would live a safe zone.

When we're plotting these quick (40,000 words) books. We have a couple of trajectories:

The most obvious is the mystery line. How do you get the characters from the point of discovery (dead body) to gather the clues, to confront the criminal, and bring closure?


The second and more difficult trajectory is building the friendship. Revealing these women, helping them grow as individuals as they lean on each other through their friendship. To do this, Tina and I use storytelling within the story. (So very Shakespeare's Hamlet of us, right?) The girls will tell each other stories as they move through their day. Through the stories, the young women show themselves to feel safe in their vulnerability with each other, while their capable side is shown to the world at large. Dichotomies: The soft and the hard of the character, the intellect v. the goof, the courageous and vulnerable, the calculation v. jumping off the cliff. For the most part, the soft parts are shared within the friendship and the hard parts are exposed to the public.

We also use really stupid jokes to make the point about their

relationship. If two adult women met and started telling each other the types of jokes we use, it would be kinda weird, just sayin';) Because our two leading ladies, BJ and Kay, have known each other through potty training, training bras, and first periods, they still have a shared humor that was developed along the way. We retain that humor to show their history.

Our books are emphatically about friendship - and if they solve a few murders along the way? So be it.

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