How do you solve a plot problem?

Jeffrey's answer

I had a problem once. I will tell you about it because it is the best example I know.

I was writing As The Crow Flies. Charlie Trumper, my protagonist, was in trouble. The one person on earth who could get him out of the trouble was an elderly matron in a nursing home in Australia. So Charlie flies, twelve thousand miles, from London to Sydney. He finds the home. He knocks on the door. The matron opens the door — and Charlie tells her that he has come to see Mrs X. The matron says: “I’m so sorry. Mrs X died three weeks ago.”

Now: I had doubled the problem. Charlie had flown twelve thousand miles to find out something that the only person who knew it had taken to the grave three weeks earlier. I sat in front of my pad, and I had no idea how to get out of it.

What did I do? I went out on the golf course at home. I walked around it for three days. Around and around. The other golfers must have thought I was unwell.

The only amusing thing — which I tell you because it might fascinate you — is that on the next fairway, also walking around, was Sean Connery. He was practising long irons. He was trying to hit a golf ball over three hundred yards. All his balls were landing around me, and we did not speak to each other. I did not want to speak to him because I knew he wanted the peace of being able to hit a golf ball without being interrupted. He did not want to speak to me because I was clearly trying to solve a problem. Two men, on adjoining fairways, in identical states of furious concentration, ignoring each other for three days.

And on the third day, I solved it.

When the matron told Charlie that Mrs X had died three weeks ago, she added: “I wonder, are you going back to England? She left a letter. She wanted it posted in England — the British post is quicker, and the stamp cheaper. Could you take it for me?” Charlie says yes. He gets on the plane home. He opens the letter — and the letter contains the one thing that solves his problem.

That is not writer’s block. That is a plot problem. They are entirely different things, and I want every writer reading this to be clear about which one they have.

Writer’s block — the inability to write at all — I have, as I have said elsewhere on this page, never had. But plot problems? I have plenty. They are a normal and indeed welcome part of writing a novel. They mean the book is alive. They mean you have constructed a situation that does not have an obvious way out — which is, by the way, exactly what your reader wants. The book that solves itself in chapter three was not a book worth writing.

The rule my old editor Cork Smith gave me, and which has become the most useful piece of advice I have ever received about plot, is this: when you have a problem, make it more difficult. Then the reader will wonder even more — how on earth do you get out of that? That sounds like terrible advice. It is the best advice. The harder the problem, the better the solution. The better the solution, the more the reader will press the book on a friend.

What do you actually do when you are stuck on a plot problem? Walk. Walk until the legs are tired. The unconscious is a better problem-solver than the conscious mind. The solution arrives, more often than not, between corner three and corner four.

What do you not do? You do not abandon the chapter. You do not delete the difficult scene. The problem is the engine of the book. Solve it.

Three days on a golf course, with Sean Connery in identical concentration on the next fairway. A letter posted in England. Problem solved. Trust the walk.

A few practical notes

• Not metaphorically — actually walk. The unconscious mind solves plot problems the conscious mind cannot. Most writers report breakthroughs between minute fifteen and minute forty-five of a walk.
• Cork Smith’s rule: when you have a problem, make it more difficult. Counter-intuitive but right. The harder problem usually has a more elegant solution, and a better one for the reader.
• Skip ahead in the book. Write the scene three chapters later. Often the solution arrives backwards — the next scene’s logic forces the current scene’s solution.
• Re-read the first fifty pages of your manuscript. The solution is often a clue you planted yourself in chapter two and forgot. Plot problems are frequently solved by a writer’s earlier-self.
• Tell another writer about the problem. Articulating the difficulty out loud, to someone who is not the book, often unsticks it. (Friends and spouses do not count — they are too kind to push.)
• Don’t conflate plot problems with writer’s block. They are different conditions and have different cures. Writer’s block is rare. Plot problems are constant — a sign the book is alive.
• Keep a plot-problem notebook. Note the problem, then list every conceivable solution, however unlikely. The right solution is almost always on the list — usually about three down.
• Resource for structured plot tools. Save the Cat and the Snowflake Method both offer frameworks for working through plot problems systematically. Most novelists outgrow them, but they’re useful early scaffolding.