Plotline

Plot is the stuff that happens in your story and the order in which that stuff appears on the page.



Three questions to ask yourself about each scene

Is this scene relevant to the ultimate goal of the book?

Is this scene forced/contrived?
Characters must be propelled by their Motivation

Am I basing my story off any assumptions?
Make sure that anything that you consider is "a given" is something that all your readers do, in fact, already know. Don't take anything for granted.



How to organize

Organizing your plot depends on what kind of book you're writing and what kind of writer you are. Here, I'm talking about revision, so you should have some kind of plot already in place from your earlier draft(s). If you're married to it, file for divorce because there's a good chance you'll be playing with the order of your scenes, probably even deleting and adding scenes that weren't there before.

yWriter is a good tool for organization.

Personally, I like to use colored index cards (one color per point-of-view character) on a display board. The cards are easily moved around and replaced.

Connecting plotlines

One thing I struggled with early on was how to give confidence to my readers that these five plotlines would eventually come together. At first, these five stories are unrelated. The reader does not have the patience to read half a book to find out how they come together. You must hint at their cohesiveness early on. In the first chapter, I wound up using the element of the new bird flu mutation to connect each one. It's a red herring because the bird flu is not why they all come together, but the bird flu mutation does hint at an apocalypse, which is what the book is about. By having each of the point-of-view characters have some kind of reaction to the news of the bird flu spreading, the reader is a little less wary about how these plotlines will converge. My story is a little difficult for this sort of thing because half of the storylines take place in London, the other half in Baltimore. If you have all your action taking place in the same city, you'll have a wider inventory of things to connect your stories. Maybe they all heard the same radio program, all see the same billboard, etc.