Plot arc: get complicated!

Once you’ve pinned down the message – the essential nature of the post– draft a one-sentence summary. This needn’t be flashy, as it’s for your eyes alone. Many writers pin this declaration to the wall or paste it into the top of their computer file. A few examples:

1. The ostrich jockeys: running the big birds in the Valley of the Sun
2. Is it fair to take children on a gambling holiday?
3. Tea time: faded colonial splendor in Candacraig, Burma

This "capsule sentence" introduces your theme, the thread that leads you through the post. Your first paragraph (the "lead" or "lede") and conclusion will most likely reflect this key information. And all the bits between should be in harmony. Cut the retired showgirl anecdote, if the entry’s about children in casinos. Don’t get sidetracked by hang-gliding, if the subject at hand is mountaineering. Be ruthless – but don’t despair. All that excised material can be spun into other stories, so nothing’s ever wasted.

Professor Jon Franklin takes this a step further in Writing for Story. He encourages students to plot pieces by crafting two sentences in a noun-active verb-noun format. The first is the problem, the second its resolution. Then note three steps that advance the tale. For example:

Complication: Company fires Joe

Development:

1. Depression paralyses Joe
2. Joe regains confidence
3. Joe sues company

Resolution: Joe regains job

The telegraphed style focuses the writer's thoughts on the relationships in the story, he claims. Plus, "if there's anything wrong with 'Company fires Joe,' we need to discover it now, before we've written several thousand unusable words."

Avoid statements that are weak or static (includes the verbs be, am, was, were, have, has, being, been, do, does, did, could, would, should). "Stories consist of actions! Stories consist of actions! Stories consist of actions!" Franklin writes (he gets a free pass on the exclamation marks for helping to invent narrative nonfiction).

Not all journalism is plot-fueled, obviously; this approach doesn't suit every wearable-blanket brief and hotel review. Yet even a service piece benefits from a theme and an outline. Not the hideous textbook sort with nested subsets in Roman numerals like "I.E.iii.a". Rather a simple list of topics that need coverage, roughly in order. The "five boxes" stratagem – a sort of slapdash structure – remains popular with many journalists and bloggers.