Young Writers Society

Hey, so I'm looking for ideas I can use to strengthen my plot. I have the main idea for all the big important stuff, but I need to figure out how to get from the beginning to the climax. Anyone have any suggestions for exciting, somewhat mystery-oriented secondary plot ideas? Basically the story centers around a group of teens that has a lot of differences and don't get along well, and they end up having to figure out under life-threatening circumstances how to work together.

Your feedback is appreciated!

Well, something for teenagers especially can be a simple case of mistaken identities/misinformation, i.e. possibly that Character A assumes that Character B had done something wrong to Character C, as thus that is part of a slight conflict of course.

Past that, a more demonstrated idea would be that Character D feels like the rest of the characters don't like them and so they feel separated from them regardless if that was the intention of the other characters.

If there's an inherent link between some characters, perhaps similar personalities or backgrounds, that can be an immediate, initial sense of conflict as some people don't like meeting people that are similar to them.

However, a good mystery should tie to some part of the overreaching plot or an overall idea that ultimately affects the characters. For a more teenager-ish novel, the idea doesn't need to be super drenched in mystery, but even something forgotten about some characters' backgrounds could provide a good turning plot device!

If some of them had known each other, or if some of them had even known who the "bad guy" is or whoever could be causing these "life-threatening" events, that could also make for some interesting scenes!

I hope that helped. ^^

can you please give a few more details on the plot?
Like how many characters are there?
What are the basic character traits?
Are they quickly thrust into the situation or do is it more of a slow burn?

@JohnKlue - So there is quite a handful of characters. It's kind of a slow build-up to the main issue, but I need ideas of specific kinds of events that could showcase their differences and disagreements to exemplify just how severe their odds are.

Hi there! So here's a couple of ideas off the top of my head about 'events' that could develop disagreement or rivalry/ foil-type relationships between characters (with mystery vibes):

- Character A and B are in conflict with each other, when character A suddenly goes missing for a bit. Character B suspects them of doing something fishy, even though there's actually a reasonable explanation behind it. Nonetheless, it stirs up tension.
- Character A reacts in an extreme way to something character B says (maybe because of a personal issue they have or something in their backstory) and character B takes it poorly, resulting in simmering conflict as the story goes on, but perhaps another character tries to get B to find out why A was reacting in that way?
- There's a character C who has been acting strangely, and all the other characters are trying to figure out what's up with them.

> Basically secrets and hiding them, for reasons that will have to be specific to your characters and their stories, might work for this kind of thing.

Hope this helps!