Planting “Seeds” in Your Plot

One way you can do it is by continuing themes. For instance, you may show a number of situations in which one of your characters hotwires a car in order to steal it – without over-stressing them; he’s a bad character, and that’s the main impression your readers will get. But if in the climactic scene he is stranded with a couple of other characters in a deserted mining operation in the middle of nowhere, with apparently no way to get out, it’s going to be entirely believable when he manages to hotwire the massive bulldozer – because you’ve planted the seeds of this long before.

Equally, you might seed your climactic event in sub-plots. For instance, two of your secondary characters are looking for their fathers; one of them is adopted, looking for her birth father, while another perhaps might have a very distant, much-remarried father who is chief executive of a multinational, and she is desperately trying to get enough time in his diary to get to know him. When, at the end of the novel, we find out that the man the main character has called ‘Dad’ all his life is in fact his uncle, and that his real father is someone he learned blues guitar from who died two years ago, that fits into the pattern that you established with the sub-plots.

You might have little hints early on in the book. For instance with your blacksmith hero, you might show him thinking about swordplay, running fights through in his mind, even practising moves in the back yard – but perhaps in quite a joky way, without ever showing him in a serious fight. So when you come to the climactic fight, the reader knows that he has some acquaintance with the art – but also has real doubts as to whether he’s going to be able to overcome a real expert. (If you want to make the scene really interesting, have him losing to the French fencing master, and then winning by using his own special skills as a blacksmith – perhaps being able to pick up a huge table and actually flatten his opponent with it.)

Or you might set up phrases that link to each other. The most overt way to do this is to give your character a catchphrase that is also the last line – but that’s a pretty cheesy thing to do. More interesting is a link where, say, you have a number of times referred to a particular quote – ‘if music be the food of love’ for instance – or where characters ask similar questions throughout the work.

Suppose you have a character who keeps asking, ‘Where do I fit?’ and ‘Where is home, really?’ Then when at the end of the work he arrives somewhere and says ‘I don’t know how, I just felt at home’, it has real resonance.

This may sound tricky. You might be asking, ‘How am I going to put all these clues in as I write?’

Well the easy answer is that you’re not. If you realise, towards the end of your draft, that you need to seed some clues, the easiest thing is to go back and rewrite the relevant scenes, or even drop new ones in. No one said you have to write a book the way readers read it – in order.

But ’seeding’ the plot is not part of editing. It’s something you should start doing as soon as you know you want to do it – whether it’s as you write your first draft (for instance if you’re concerned with a major theme like absent fathers), or after you’ve finished your climactic scene.

‘Seeding’ your plot is one of the easiest ways to improve the quality of your writing, and your reader’s enjoyment of the work. And if you do it right, you’ll never get readers throwing the book at the wall when they read your final scene!