Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell Page A

you can too. Steal your plots. Yes, the Bard of Avon rarely came up with an original story. He took old plots and weaved his own particular magic with them.
    Admittedly, that’s harder to do today. You can’t lift plot and characters wholesale and pretend it’s an original story. But you can take the germ of another plot and weave
your
particular magic with it. You can switch key characters and conventions (see “Flipping a Genre” listed next). You can follow the same story movements even as you add your own original developments.
    â€œOriginality,” says William Noble in
Steal This Plot!
, “is the key to plagiarism.” What he means is you cannot lift the exact plot, with the same characters intact. But you may take a pattern (and plot is nothing more than a story’s pattern) and use it.
9. Flipping a Genre
    All genres have long-standing conventions. We expect certain beats and movements in genre stories. Why not take those expectations and turn them upside down?
    It’s very easy to take a Western tale, for example, and set it in outer space.
Star Wars
had many Western themes (remember the bar scene?). Likewise, the Sean Connery movie
Outland
is like
High Noon
set on a Jupiter moon. The feel of Dashiell Hammett’s
The Thin Man
characters transferred well into the future in Robert A. Heinlein’s
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
.
    Even the classic television series
The Wild, Wild West
was simply James Bond in the Old West. A brilliant flipping of a genre that has become part of popular culture.
    So play with genres, conventions, expectations. Mix them up. There is an idea there somewhere.
10. Predict a Trend
    Novels can be “hot” because of the subject matter alone. If you are able to catch a topical wave before it breaks, you may have a winner.
    The trick, of course, is in predicting what will occupy the popular mind. How can you do it?
    The best source is specialty magazines. Often you’ll get a window into the immediate and long-term future areas of interest to people.
    This doesn’t need to take a lot of time, either. Go to a newsstand and irritate the manager by scanning magazines like
Scientific American, Popular Mechanics, Wired
,
Time
,
Newsweek
, and
U.S. News & World Report
. In addition,
USA Today
often has stories about cutting-edge technologies and issues. Jump on something interesting and ask:
Who would care about this?
What would that person do about it next year? In ten years?
What would happen if all of society embraced this?
What would happen if all of society rejected this?
Who would it hurt the most?
11. Noodling the Newspaper
    Read newspapers. Scan all the sections. Have your homing device set for sparks that get your mind zooming in original directions.
    Read
USA Today
. The paper is written in “arrested attention span” style — lots of little snippets you can scan quickly. One edition will yield at least a dozen possible ideas. Take an item and ask a series of what-if questions to expand on what you find. If an item itself has information you might want later, snip it and toss it in a box.
12. Research
    James A. Michener began “writing” a book four or five years in advance. When he “felt something coming on,” he would start reading, as many as 150 to 200 books on a subject. He browsed, read, and checked things. He kept it all in his head and then, finally, he began to write. All that material gave him plenty of ideas to draw upon.
    Today, the Internet makes research easier than ever. But don’t ignore the classic routes. Books are still here, and you can always find people with specialized knowledge to interview. And if the pocketbook permits, travel to a location and drink it in. Rich veins of material abound.
    Don’t forget experts, either. Find and interview people who lead in their fields. Go to ordinary folks who lived through certain periods or in certain places to get rich detail and