How do I know if my plot is satisfying?
The most effective way to check if your plot is satisfying to get feedback from readers, but here are some things to look for in your planning phase:
1. Genre awareness - What’s satisfying to your audience is very different in a romance novel vs. a thriller vs. an epic fantasy vs. a litfic novel. Know your genre well and have an awareness of what your audience finds satisfying.
2. Change and growth - Stories are made of change, so your story should be ever changing, ever moving, and most importantly, this should cause visible character change. Without character change, your plot doesn’t show itself to be important since it’s not causing a lasting effect on the character. But you should also consider plot movement, where things are visibly changing on the plot level.
3. Set-up and payoff - This essentially means that elements introduced into your story (probably at the beginning), are important later on (probably at the end), and ideally in a logical but unexpected way.
4. Unpredictability - This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to throw in a bunch of plot twists, but the plot should be one that is not easily anticipated. A strong plot is both logical, but unpredictable based on the opening and premise.
5. Causality - The strongest possible structure is one where you cannot remove or move a single scene without disrupting the entire story irreparably. Scenes should have a domino effect so that each causes the next.
6. Mystery and revelation - At the beginning, you probably have a set of questions that need to be answered. In a genre like mystery this is most obvious, you have a whodunnit. But in other genres you still have crucial questions the reader wants answered (that’s essentially what a plot is, a question), then there is revelation throughout and at the end. However, revelation needs to be paced properly so the story makes sense but suspense is maintained.
7. Suspense and snap - Suspense is related to mystery, but I would say is a more visceral stress related to the unknown outcome rather than a lack of wanted information. Snap, which is not a common literary term and one I just invented because it seems right, would be the culmination of suspense in a key, energetic moment.
8. Emotional balance and cohesion - This relates to what I talked about in this post about hope and despair having a push and pull effect. The key is finding a balance between emotional variety (so, not too much hope or there’s no tension, not too much despair or there’s no possibility for change), while still having a cohesive plot where all the threads feed into each other.
9. Unrest and resolution - You can think of your entire plot as being a period of unrest for the characters, and the resolution being a period of rest. Whether this is positive or negative for the character, the arrival of rest means that the story is over and the character’s life will probably de-energize from the plot from here on out, and the question of the plot has been answered to a point where the character can’t really change it anymore by any significant margin. This could be a good or bad thing, but things have settled. Without that rest (or promise that rest is very near and inevitable) at the end, whether it’s positive or negative, the story doesn’t feel over.
