Oh!  For a Muse of Fire!

So what are you trying to say?  That is a difficult and central question of any piece of art, and one that often has no answer, hence bad art.  How many artists today are nothing more than performers?  Rehashing old clichés or performing works they do not create, but only interpret, they say nothing except "remember that cool thing?"  It is an insidious disease of any decadent culture, and has wormed its way well into our artistic life, deluging us with entertainments that jump and shout and blink and beep but never really say anything.

It is, perhaps, the signature artistic flaw of the age, what John Gardener called "frigidity" - the lack of ability to really connect with a work of art, to delve into real feelings, giving us technique over honest drama, homages rather than original thought, and trailer moments rather than character depth.  It is what brings us irony as the cardinal feature of popularity rather than real (potentially embarrassing) love.  It keeps us at a distance from fiction, whether written or filmed or sung - and really, in all forms of fiction, a writer is there first.

So you have to decide what you want to say, knowing that as you write you may change what that is, because fiction is above all a mode of thought - a way for us to think about things too big and complex to think about all at once any other way.  That rush you get at the end of a good story - the culminating cascade of feeling as conflicting currents of meaning and emotion all crash together at once - is the only way we can comprehend really deep and difficult topics.

So you figure out what you want to say by the process of saying it, which is why we revise, and why the good writer leaves some room for flexibility in his plot outline.  Of course, the best way to do this is to know your characters well enough when you start that you don't have to guess what they are going to do - you know.  But then this can breed the sin of manipulation.  All of us have had it happen when reading or watching a story: a character behaving in some way we do not believe.  We know the character, and we don't buy them doing it, but they do it anyway because the writer had it worked out ahead of time and either couldn't figure a way out of the corner he got in or couldn't be bothered.  Our faith in the writer is diminished, and our faith in all their works.

It has been said that ever story a writer creates is about everything that writer knows, and this is the mark of a good story, when we feel like we are putting everything into it, not holding back.  Because that is the meat of fiction.  Fiction cannot do its work of helping us figure out what we mean unless we allow it to, it cannot work if it is hobbled, or limited.  This is why we distrust polemic fiction - stories written about a political viewpoint or a religious dogma have inherent limits.  They decided the end before they started, and thus the gloves are not off.  The story and its characters cannot reach real, human, emotional conclusions and make real decisions because they are not allowed to.

I wrote a novel once that ended up being titled The Howling King.  It was originally intended as a NaNoWriMo project, just to keep me busy.  I had a plot, and characters, and I was just intending it to be a fun, violent Sword & Sorcery kind of story.  But as I got more involved it became something much darker and more serious, and I ended up saying a lot of things in it about what I believe about war, and nationhood, war and sacrifice.  I poured myself into that book, and it came out more powerful than I ever expected, because I didn't limit where it could go.

So when you have an idea, you have to get down to the root of what the idea is really about.  What human truth, or conflict, or struggle will be illuminated by what your characters go through?  What do their obstacles represent?  What do their failures and triumphs mean?  I'm not talking about straight allegory, I'm talking about the subtextual considerations that are there no matter what you do.  Is your story about law versus freedom?  Faith versus doubt?  The nation against the individual?  Man against nature?  Man against himself?  You have to know, and you have to bring that out.  It will make your story more powerful, and it will say something to people besides "look at me".  Fiction can do all these things and more, if you let it.

I'M HERE TO DEVELOP YOUR CHARACTER!

So in any plot you have a main character, or maybe several, and then you have the things they want and will go after, which start out dictated by what kinds of people they are and later on may evolve to meet changing conditions.  You have a villain, whether character or force, who opposes them in these things, and Boom : Plot!

Right?  Well, no, because now you come to the big job of plotting, otherwise known as the dreaded "Specifics".  Because now you have to ask yourself how exactly your villain is going to oppose your heroes.  This is what we call "obstacles" - the things you put in your characters' way to prevent them from getting what they want.  What kinds of things you choose, and what causes them within the narrative, will have a great deal to do with what kind of story you are telling.

Obstacles can be of three basic types: they can be things put there by the villain to stop the hero, like an army of skeletons or a moat full of lava.  They can be features of the environment that may have nothing to do with the hero or the villain - i.e. an impossible to climb mountain or a long sea voyage.  Or lastly they can be things that arise from within the hero and are entirely psychological.  All of these say different things about your hero and will take your narrative in different directions.

I HAVE A PENIS!

Really?  Really?