Lessons in Effortless Plotting from Death at a Funeral

Our manuscripts are either character driven or plot driven. But a single event can be the center of a plot, a world, and your novel. Death at a Funeral is a great example of how this can be done.

The loosely connected story lines of a British family are gathered together in the English countryside for the family patriarchs funeral. Each story line begins to weave tighter and tighter as they converge on the old country estate.

The key is that these individual story lines are only supplementary. The real story is centered around the secret that almost went with him to the grave.

The down fall in many of our manuscripts is a nasty case of over-complication. We often have a main plot and then as we add more characters, their lives start to become a force of nature.
When this happens, the main plot disappears in the confusion and no one will care to wade through the slush to find it for you. So clean it up and let the real plot shine through.

The real magic of Death at a Funeral is the laugh-so-hard-you-can't-breathe brand of dry British humor that doesn't let up from start to finish. So I beg you, go rent this movie and keep an oxygen tank handy in case you can't catch your breath.

So why not take a second look at our own manuscripts and ask; Is there a single event that my entire story is centered on? Can pear down my other story lines? Or is there an event that I could build a new story around?