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The monthly meeting for Central Ohio SCBWI yesterday featured romance writer (and accountant!) Donna MacMeans, author of The Trouble with Moonlight and The Education of Mrs. Brimley. Ms. MacMeans spoke about the W-Plot, the basic shape of which you can see below.

 

The notes on the W-plot are mine, and the only thing you’ll learn from them is that I take a lot of notes legible only to myself! The W-plot makes a lot of sense compared to some other plot representations that I’ve seen. Perhaps I’ll blog more about it after I’ve tried analyzing some novels against it, or tried planning my latest WIP using it.

Since I’m working on the opening pages of a new WIP (yes, I’ve set aside my medieval novel AGAIN!), I found myself most interested in Section A on the W-plot, which Ms. MacMeans refers to as Ordinary World. It is the opening chapter or section of your story, in which you introduce the reader to the day-to-day world of your MC and get your reader emotionally invested in the MC. And how do you do this? With something called rooting interests.

 Rooting interests work for the following reasons:

• We care about characters we feel sorry for (empathy).
• We like characters with humanistic traits.
• We like to admire the character.

So to get your reader to root for your MC, you have to apply the techniques of rooting interests in your opening pages. Here are some specific examples of each type:

Empathy

• Undeserved mistreatment
• Undeserved misfortune (bad luck)
• Physical or mental handicap
• Frustration or humiliation (embarrassment)
• A moment of weakness
• Abandonment
• Betrayal
• Loneliness

Humanistic Traits

• Lets down her defenses in a private moment
• Helps less fortunate
• Relates to children
• Children like MC
• Animals like MC
• Risks life for another
• Ethical or moral and responsible

Admiration Traits

• Power and charisma
• Self-confident
• Courageous
• Passionate
• Attractive
• Skilled or competent
• Witty and clever
• Underdog who tries hard
• Active, not passive

Ms. MacMeans pointed out that once you know about rooting interests, you’ll notice them in the opening of novels and movies. She writes romance, but she said all successful books are loaded with rooting interests.

Just to see how this works, here are rooting interests from the opening of Diary of Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney, a middle grade bestseller that intertwines text and cartoons to tell the story of Greg Heffley. I opened it to look for rooting interests, and pretty much that’s all I saw on the first two pages.

“This is a JOURNAL, not a diary. I know what it says on the cover, but when Mom went out to buy this thing I SPECIFICALLY told her to get one that didn’t say ‘diary’ on it.” (undeserved mistreatment)

“Great. All I need is for some jerk to catch me carrying this book around and get the wrong idea. [Cartoon of Greg getting beat up].” (a moment of weakness, humiliation)

“The other thing I want to clear up right away is that this was MOM’s idea, not mine.” (undeserved mistreatment)

“I figure later on when I’m rich and famous, I’ll have better things to do than answer people’s stupid questions all day long. So this book is gonna come in handy. [Cartoon of Greg giving journal to reporters so he doesn’t have to answer their questions]” (sense of humor, self-confident)

“Like I said, I’ll be famous one day, but for now I’m stuck in middle school with a bunch of morons.” (undeserved mistreatment, witty)

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is actually an interesting case study, because the overall result of MC Greg Heffley’s wimpiness is that he’s kind of a jerk. So it’s not surprising that Kinney loads on those empathy techniques in the opening or Greg would be an easy character to dislike. The fact that the book is hilarious helps, too.

One last point about this that is very important for new writers is what Donna MacMeans had to say about the number of rooting interests. She has found that in contest entries, writers will use maybe only five rooting interests. In published debut novels, they will use many. But in bestselling novels, the opening chapters are packed with rooting interests. To prepare to speak to our group of children’s book writers, she read the YA novel Along for the Ride by Sarah Dessen, in which she found at least 20 rooting interests for the MC in the first chapter. The point is, the more you use this technique to make your readers care about your MC, the better your chances of getting published and getting read.

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