Plot

1. The Big Picture

Every fiction tells a story. This is your plot, and if you don't have one... well, why are you posting on SFF?

Most fan fiction authors start their story off with a premise, like "What if Brom hadn't died?" or "How would Murtagh and Birgit get together?" This is what we call a plot-bunny: it's an idea, but at this point you don't really have much. It's time to flesh it out.

Start by asking yourself some basic questions: When will this story take place? Where? Who is going to be my protagonist, and who will be my antagonist? What are the basic conflicts and challenges my characters will face? If you're writing an AU story, how will my premise change the canon story? If it's a romance, how to my characters meet and how do they fall in love? If it's an action story, is there a war going on, and how did it start? Keep brainstorming ideas and jot them down.

Next, make an outline. You do NOT have to stick to this outline when you write, but you should have some sort of road-map of your story before you start. See which of your ideas work together, and get rid of the ones that don't make sense to include. Just because you had a really cool idea (omg, Eragon goes back in time!) doesn't mean you have to include it in this story—save it for another fic.

Keep in mind that most stories aren't a simple progression from point A to point B. If you're writing a novel-length fiction, you may have a lot of mini-plots going on—Eragon and Arya's budding romance, the battle between the Varden and the Empire, Murtagh's attempts at escape from Galby, Roran's rescue of Katrina, etc. This is good, but you need to make sure all these plots also tie back together somehow.

You may also want to foreshadow future chapters at the beginning of the story, or start laying out clues for your character to follow throughout the book. These are definitely things you want to include in your outline so you don't forget about them.

2. The Little Pictures

Each chapter tells a little piece of the main story—Eragon and Arya go on their first date, Roran discovers where Katrina is being held, etc. At the end of each chapter, your story should have progressed just a little bit further from where it was at the beginning of the chapter: a new clue has been discovered, a revelation has been made, or a person has been slain in battle.

Chapters in which nothing really happens to the plot are called "filler chapters." If you can't explain to a reader how a chapter contributes to the overall plot, it's a filler. Authors use them for many reasons—maybe to show the passage of time, or as a break between two really important chapters, or just to go off on a tangent that they want to play with. Filler chapters are okay so long as a) there is a reason for writing one and b) you use them sparingly. Keep the Big Picture in mind as you're writing each chapter, and if you start to stray from your outline or are stuck in a rut, you need to revive your plot.

Dividing your story into chapters is a personal choice, and it has to do with your writing style and how you want to organize your story. Some people like to put one scene per chapter and have a lot of chapters, others like to put a bunch of scenes together, and others may like to have a theme—like "failure"—for the entire chapter and will include scenes from different subplots that fit that theme. Once you pick a style, stick with it—if you have one chapter that is just a 500-word scene, and the next is a 3000-word behemoth that switches from Roran to Murtagh to Arya, the flow of your story is going to be odd.

3. Comedy and Parody

Just because you're writing a funny story does not mean you shouldn't have a plot. While there are people who like to read a bunch of lame jokes and stupid antics strung together into something that may kind of resemble a story, you need to know that that kind of story has absolutely no value what-so-ever—literary, intellectual, or humorous.

Comedy isn't about making a bunch of knock-knock jokes. Its about telling a story from a humorous point of view. This especially goes for parody—it's not just about making fun of something, but of making fun of it from a particular perspective.

So the first thing you need to do is to outline your plot (see part 1 of this workshop), just like you would any other story. Don't just write down your premise and a list of jokes and start writing! Your plot may be simpler than an average story, or it may be more complex (if your protagonist continues to make bad decisions that have hilariously disastrous results), but you still need that outline.

Next, figure out what your point of view will be. This generally is tied into the kind of character your protagonist is: is he an airhead? a cynic? a prankster? If you're doing a parody, what exactly are you making fun of and why? Is there a message you want to send, and how will you convey it? Your point of view is an overlay that goes on TOP of your plot-- you take a normal story, and now you're going to make it funnier.

Remember: things are only funny in comparison to what is normal. If you try to make everything in your story funny without anything normal or serious thrown it, its not going to be funny any more. If you're going to focus on a character who is really off-the-walls, you will also want to have a strong, prominent, "normal" character to serve as a comparison; if your narrator uses a lot of dark humor, you may want a more goofy/optimistic character to act as comic relief. If your dialogue is going to be mostly light-hearted, you'll want a more serious narrator. You can intersperse comedy scenes with normal bits of plot.