Character and Plot Nodes: Writing Fiction With Concept Maps

Using literary analysis as a starting point, my creative writing students begin by “reverse engineering,” or “disassembling,” stories to analyze how their “parts,” i.e. plot, character, setting and language, fit together structurally. Reading and constructing concept maps of these structures gradually deepen student understanding of both the form and the content of fiction. Midway through this process, we play constructivist “freeze-frame” games with the film As Good As It Gets, for example, to demonstrate to the students how much they already know about story and its character and plot structure. Finally, creative writing students are invited to complete scaffold maps for their own and their peers’ nascent stories to complicate their characterization and plot structures. While this work establishes that literature and writing also have their domain, content and structure, despite the misapprehensions of many, it also enhances our students’ ability to weave a convincing tale from the “characters” and incidents of their own lives.