National Graphic Novel Writing Month, Day 17: Fools! I shall tell you my evil plot!

The month’s half over and amazingly, I have yet to reference former Valiant Comics editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden‘s lecture on “The Evil Overlord Devises a Plot“. This must be remedied immediately because, even though you are probably deep in your story, you may have hit a few snags along the way. Her own plot advice says “steal from the best” and so I’m going to steal from her. Take it away, Teresa:

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p class=”large”>Start with some principles:

• A plot doesn’t have to be new. It just has to be new to the reader.
• In fact, it doesn’t even have to be new to the reader. It just
  has to get past him. (It helps if the story’s moving fast and there’s
  lots of other interesting stuff going on.)
• A plot device that’s been used a thousand times may be a
  cliche, but it’s also a trick that works. That’s why it keeps getting
  used.
• Several half-baked ideas can often be combined into one fully-cooked one.
• If you have one plot presented three ways, you have three
  plots. If you have three plots presented one way, you have one plot. (I
  stole this principle from Jim Macdonald’s lecture on how to really
  generate plots, which is much better than my lecture on stupid plot
  tricks.)
• Steal from the best.

Looked at from this angle, the Internet’s various lovingly-compiled
cliche lists are a treasury of useful plot devices. The instructions that
follow are one way to use them.

1. Below, you’ll find a comprehensive collection of the various Evil
   Overlord lists. Don’t go there yet. First, using whatever method pleases
   you, generate five random numbers that fall within the following ranges:

1. 1-230
2. 1-150
3. 1-130
4. 1-123
5. 1-94

1. Now go to the Evil Overlord lists, which I’ve divided into five
   categories. Take your five random numbers and match them up to the
   appropriate entries in the lists:

1. Lead Characters (Bad)
2. Lead Characters (Good)
3. Auxiliary Characters (Bad)
4. Auxiliary Characters (Good)
5. Further Evil

You now have five juicy cliches.

You’re going to make a plot
out of them. You’ll find it’s fairly easy to make a silly one, but
it’s not all that much harder to turn them into a decent one. You’ve got a
lot of potential story to work with.

1. You’re not done yet. Before you start writing, roll one die. Take
   whatever number comes up, and generate that many random numbers which fall
   between 1 and 141. Now go to Murphy’s Laws of Combat, which follow the
   Evil Overlord lists, and find the laws that match your numbers. These are
   plot twists. Use them as needed. If your story absolutely requires that
   Gareth go from point A to point B and drop off a package at the Post
   Office along the way, but you’re finding that part dreary, tossing in
   modifiers like “Every man has a scheme that will not work” or “If your
   attack is going really well, it’s an ambush” will suggest ways to liven it
   up.

Alternately, you can go here and have them
all generated for you.

1. You’re allowed to throw out one cliche, but only if you’re
   convinced you know another comparably lurid thing that should be
   happening there instead. You’re also allowed to use the cliches
   straight or reversed. Say you’ve drawn A-34, “I will not turn into a
   snake. It never helps.” You can have a character turn into a snake and
   find it doesn’t help, or do it and find it very useful indeed, or decline
   to do something so obviously useless and do something else instead. That’s
   fine. Just get in there and make the story start happening.

2. You may be tempted to throw out awkward-seeming list picks and go for
   more obviously writer-friendly cliches. That’s your choice; but try the
   awkward set first. It’s figuring out how to make them work together that
   produces interesting and unexpected story lines.

3. If you’re trying to write science fiction, it may be useful at
   this point to pull the same stunt using the mighty and compendious SF
   cliches list at http://users4.50megs.com/enphilistor/cliche.htm. For a
   perfectly shameless mixture, you can also toss in a few cliches from the
   “Things We Learned at the Movies” list—but only if you use them in
   reverse.

Me again. And since this is comics, we would be remiss if we didn’t include these comic cliche lists:

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2009/11/03/roasting-old-chestnuts-our-favorite-comic-book-cliches/

http://www.jonathancrossfield.com/blog/2008/03/comic-scriptwriting-superhero.html

http://forums.comicbookresources.com/archive/index.php/t-50446.html

And if you have a few hours to burn, you can go through the lists at TV Tropes. But be very careful– you only have two weeks left to finish writing your graphic novel, and if you go there, you can easily spend two months. You’ve been warned.

Remember: you can follow all the NaGraNoWriMo posts here!