Progress

Previous chapter taught you how to make great promises at the start of your story. Now you need to progress those promises. This is the meat of your story. It’s 90% of the book. It’s also the secret sauce that makes good books tick: progress, progress progress.

If a scene does not clearly progress a story … why does it exist at all?

Whenever you’re stuck, simply think “what’s the next piece of progress I can show?” Pick one of your promises, and progress it further. As long as every scene in your story shows progress, your story will keep a good pace and stay interesting. Even if that progress, on its own, isn’t that amazing or unique.

The worst thing you can do, is add scenes that grind the plot to a halt. Yes, it might be fun to add a scene with banter between characters, simply making some funny jokes. But this does not progress the story. It might be okay once, but do it multiple times, and readers become frustrated. The story isn’t going anywhere. They were promised X, and they are making no progress towards X!

That same banter scene can still work, but you need to add progress. For example,

• Show a new side of a character.
• Show a character development: our hero felt like an outsider before, but slowly realizes they belong to the group and are more accepted.
• Through the banter, new information is revealed.
• While bantering, they walk around their new hideout (describing more of it to the reader), or prepare for the next mission

As long as you make some progress, the story keeps its momentum going forward.

Mapped Route

Some writers call this idea “placing road signs” or “points on a map”. I’ve called it a mapped route for a while.

It’s a plotting method that delivers the three P’s (Promise, Progress, Payoff) quite naturally, but does not restrict you that much.

You simply …

• Pick a starting point
• Pick a possible end
• And figure out the major steps of progression needed to get from start to end

In other words, your story is like a route on a map. You pick your current location, you pick your destination, and you map the route between them.

Here’s the crucial part.

Each scene you simply take the next (major) step on this route.

If your steps are too small, your story will both lack momentum and be way too long. Really focus on maybe 5 or 10 major events (at most) that would logically lead to your destination. Every scene, you write the next one.

You might be afraid that this is too predictable or too “straightforward”. Keep in mind that the reader does not know the route. You promised them a vague destination and route, but the details are unknown to them. You, as the writer, can see the route very clearly—but for the reader, it’s an adventure they merely follow.

Additionally, this method has a second advantage: you can always change. I regularly realize I want the character to go somewhere else, halfway through a novel. Through my improvisation, I’ve written an event that sends them on another path.

No problem! I map a new route. From now on, they walk the highlights of that path. As long as your characters are making logical steps forward, your story always has a nice sense of progress.

In a way, this is my definition of a good plot. If left to their own, each character would take logical steps and reach their goal. But when you combine the characters, they clash. There’s conflict. They become obstacles for each other. They interrupt each other’s route, forcing them to adapt.

As much as writers say your characters should change (for a fulfilling a story), I think their mapped route should change as well.

The only danger is that they might end up in an entirely different place than you promised. And that’s why most writers go back, after writing their full story, to rewrite the first few chapters.

Example

Let’s meet Sarah.

• Start: She was wrongly convicted and serves a lifetime sentence in jail.
• Destination: She aims to escape.

To create a plot, invent the steps needed to get from start to destination. If you were to escape from prison, what would yo try first? Which key events need to take place?

• She surveys the building, learning about possible escape routes or weaknesses
• She makes friends with other inmates, trying to get more information or build a crew
• She tries to bribe the guards
• Etcetera

If you want, each of these can be broken into even smaller steps. Take bribing guards.

• She bribes a guard, but realizes she obviously has nothing to offer.
• She searches something to offer. (Maybe she had serious money or power when she was still free.)
• She tries again, with the new offer. But her approach is wrong, too obvious, and she is punished for it.
• She searches a solution again.
• The next time she tries, she actually succeeds. With a guard on her side, escape becomes a real possibility, and more plans are set in motion.

When I write, I usually know three or four major steps for someone’s journey. I figure out the smaller ones when it comes time to write them. If I have multiple storylines, this approach allows me to find surprising overlap while writing. (Connections or fun scenes that I would never discover if I sat down and tried to outline the story beforehand.) If possible, I try to progress multiple stories with the same scene, or try combine them as often as possible.

While writing, you really only have to know the next few chapters, and what progress you will make in those.

Progress focused on Promises

So far, this chapter might’ve given you the idea that any progress works. But that’s obviously not the case. You can show a character learning some new skill, but if that character only appears in that single chapter and nowhere else in the story, it’s a bit pointless.

Progress should be laser focused on the promises.

This is a natural consequence of the Promise->Progress->Payoff structure. If your progress is not focused on the promises … then how are you ever going to get to the payoff? You promised something, did nothing with it, and then you suddenly have to resolve the issue?

I mentioned that the Promise is usually not the part where you get creative and break rules. (The Payoff, similarly, isn’t that part. Because once you promised something, the payoff is mostly set in stone.) Progress is where you get to be creative! This is the meat of the story, and it’s up to you how you do it. This is where you let your unique characters, world, twists on themes, and more shine.