Use the LOCK, Luke
PLOTTING MADE EASY!! HOW TO WRITE COMPELLING PLOTS!! PLOTS FOR DUMMIES!!
You can’t prowl the advice-to-writer section of your bookstore/ online community / RSS feed without coming across some of the old favorites about plotting.
Put your main character up a tree; throw rocks at him; get him down.
Have some guys burst into the room, guns drawn.
Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl.
Have your MC go somewhere, do something, come back different.
Yes, yes, that’s all fine, and I’m sure there are writers who can take such utterly generic advice and spin compelling plots from them. The Hero’s Journey is in there, too. It’s nicely suited to describe all kinds of plots, but how do you actually go about plotting?
I’ve written stories seemingly without much plot. These appear to be little more than a character study. In one of these stories, a guy who’s almost late for work hears a strange noise under his hood. On opening it, he sees a heavily pregnant cat curled up near the brake master cylinder. She’d come in from the cold to give birth, then when the truck started, couldn’t get out in time because she was too far in labor. The guy stands there staring for a moment, then gets a blanket from his trunk and covers up the cat. He closes the hood and hustles in to work, trying to beat the timeclock. The end.
Where is the plot? Mostly, the events are simple. As you can see, there are no huge stakes here. No aliens getting ready to wipe humanity from the face of the earth. No ill-conceived weddings to be disrupted in the nick of time. No ancient curses that must be lifted with the blood of an innocent, left-handed sailmaker’s daughter. It’s just a guy, a truck and a pregnant cat.
But look closely: what this story has is a LOCK. That makes all the difference between a story that meanders in nothingville and a story that can potentially evoke a response in the reader by taking them on an emotional journey.
There are lots of ways to construct plots, but I fell in love with James Scott Bell’s LOCK method, which he describes in his book, “Plot and Structure” (a book I heartily recommend). LOCK stands for Lead, Objective, Confrontation, Knockout.
Use the LOCK, Luke
Lead: the main character. This can be the real MC of the book or story, or an otherwise minor character who is the focus of this scene.
Objective: what your MC wants. By the way, your MC should always want something, even if it is just to enjoy the peace and quiet between people throwing rocks or bursting into the room, guns drawn.
Confrontation: the MC interacting with whatever stands between her and what she wants. Maybe she wins this confrontation, maybe she doesn’t, but it has to be an actual battle of conflicting desires. Note that this can be conflicting desires within the MC herself: drink that third martini or not?
Knockout: the resolution of the confrontation, delivered with some drama. Re-read the last part there: “delivered with some drama”. You can’t just have the MC slurp down the martini and call it The End. When the confrontation is resolved, it has to have some punch, some consequence. It has to have impact, some distinctly non-zero amount of significance to the MC. Most of all, it should be satisfying to the reader. It should be a knockout.
This LOCK format works fine for individual scenes, often several times within a scene. For the purposes of longer works, you can nest multiple LOCKs, such that the Knockout resolution of one scene has given the Lead a new Objective. The new Objective can lead directly from the original one, or it can be the start of a new subplot:
Great – I escaped from Darth Vader!
Damn – now I’m missing a hand, I’m upside-down and I need to be rescued.
Great – I got rescued by Princess Lea!
Damn – now I need to a) confront Darth Vader, b) rescue Han Solo and c) get a new hand (not necessarily in that order).
etc.
etc.
Mr. Bell also suggests that for writing novels, the L can change to Location, as you go from scene to scene – Luke’s farm –> Obi-Wan’s canyon –> Obi-Wan’s house –> wreckage of the Jawa crawler –> etc., etc. At each point, there is a new Objective, a new Confrontation and a new Knockout.
In my little man-meets-cat drama up above, the Lead has a simple Objective: get to work on time. He is Confronted with a noise under his hood, which reveals Mrs. Cat in distress. Now, his new Objective is to figure out what to do about Mrs. Cat, with the Confrontation being within himself: be selfless and kind or be self-serving and cruel? The Knockout is an act of unexpectedly sensitive kindness, which leads to another new Objective, an aspect of the original, overarching Objective: in order to get to work on time, he now has to sprint and avoid his supervisor, a tense enough Knockout that could easily lead to another Confrontation. Did he make it? I left the story open-ended, which is (you guessed it) another kind of Knockout.
That story was only 600 words long, but it had at least three LOCK sequences. I didn’t sit down with a tablet and mark off these LOCKs deliberately, but they’ve become intrinsic to my storytelling. If you try to use this approach, I’m confident you’ll find it to be a valuable tool in your writer’s toolbox.
Great article Tony. I’ve heard of the LOCK method but never bothered to investigate it. After all, there are only so many tips and tricks I can cram into my tiny little mind.
I appreciate how well this lends itself to story telling of all lengths and genres. I’ll be giving LOCK a try and have purchased Mr. Bell’s book based on your hearty recommendation.
Strangely enough, I was reading about this yesterday afternoon. I, too, found it interesting. Thanks for sharing this. Now all I have to do is to go off and write this plot about an author who’s lost his inspiration, reads a book which fills him with ideas and sets him off on the road to confronting his self-doubt in order to pull out that best seller.
I LOVE Plot & Structure, and this is by far the easiest method to decide whether or not a plot idea actually has enough merit to develop into a plot. It also gives you a map to keep you on track during the writing process. Excellent way to describe it!
Nice post Tony. LOCK is a very handy mnemonic indeed. Once you’ve got a handle on LOCK, you’ll be much better able to understand all the concepts covered in Robert McKee’s STORY (for me, the all-time best writer’s companion! But I must confess I had such a hard time understanding it before I got a grip on plotting!).
And by ‘you’, I didn’t mean you personally, I meant you in the generic plural
Plot is one of those things that scares the crap outta me … literally freezes me in the act of writing. Your description of LOCK takes the mystery out of it – thanks!
Chris: Bell gives more examples of LOCK and all his other advice in the book. Well worth the price of admission.
Paul: Idea: give him a spouse who fights him every step of the way, just to up the stakes.
Icy: I used to write stuff and think, “What the heck is wrong with this piece?” After I learned the LOCK method, I was able to sort things out much more quickly. I’m looking forward to your more complete review of “Plot and Structure” on the 16th.
Lily: I’ll have to check that one out, too. Plotting is so basic, and unless you have a handle on analyzing what works and what doesn’t, you end up just throwing things at the wall and hoping something sticks.
Cathy: It used to bug me, too. “Where the heck am I going with this?” Once you lay it out with the LOCK, you have some basic structure: My hero wants A, but B stands in his/her way, forcing him/her to do… what? Answering that “what” with something dramatic makes for compelling plot. Simple.
Doing that would change my story from fiction to biography.
Tony, great summary. Thanks for posting this. I came up with LOCK after years of trial and error and learning, then finally teaching what I’d learned. I wrote an article for Writer’s Digest on LOCK and it caught on. I wanted it to be simple but essential.
I appreciate the nice comments. Write on.
Great recommendation and wonderful explanation. Enjoyed your article and will pass it on.
James: Thank you for the LOCK! Write on!
Vikk: It’s my pleasure. I think you’ll find this a valuable tool for your writing.
I wasn’t familiar with this technique, but it’s interesting. Thanks for sharing it!
So this begs the question — how do non-outline people feel about the LOCK method? I’m an OP myself, so this fits naturally into the way I approach a writing project. I’m curious if NOPs have success using the method?
[...] be well on your way to a page-turning plot. For a fuller discussion, check out Tony Noland’s Write Anything post on using the LOCK [...]