Hi there c: You know who I am and that I'm a (very) amateur/hobbyist writer. I know how my story will begin and end, though I'm very unsure about what I can do in the middle. All I have is a romantic subplot, and 3 smaller plot points that develop characters and help worldbuild. How many plot points would you recommend in a novel, minus the beginning and end points?
How Many Plot Points Are Enough?
This is a tricky question, because every single book is different, and ever plot point takes a different amount of words to cover. But if you already have your beginning and end, then you’re off to a great start.
My advice would be to turn those smaller, character developing plot points into something larger. Every plot point (and scene) needs to have a direct effect on what comes after it, and on the book’s ending. Which is to say that if you take out anything in your outline, the ending should be changed drastically.
I’m assuming that if you have an ending, you have an antagonist, and if you have an antagonist, you have a Big Bad Thing your protagonist wants to prevent. Every plot point should be a step your protagonist takes in the processes of preventing that Big Bad Thing, in which the antagonist subsequentially makes that Big Bad Thing more Big or more Bad and harder to prevent.
Sometimes the protagonist knows all the steps ahead of time (like in a heist or a quest), though most of the time they only know the next step they’re going to take, which they may believe will be the final step. But you as the writer should know the entire process already.
If you’re struggling with not having enough meat in your book, try taking a couple of these steps, and throwing a wrench into them. How does your protagonist deal with having their plan utterly fail? What happens when you take away all the resources they were counting on? If they sacrifice everything to try to accomplish what they think will prevent the Big Bad Thing, but still fail, what do they do next? How do they recover, to come back harder and stronger the next time?
You don’t want to push your protagonist to their breaking point until the end of the story, just before the climax, but you still want to fracture a few bones along the way. Every time you hit them with something that throws them off their path, they have to find a new and better method of getting to the next step.
That’s all a plot is; your protagonist moves towards a goal, at times a constantly shifting goal, and as they do, they alternate between making progress, and being forced to side track around an ever larger obstacle.
