There are many books out there about plot. I won’t tell you which ones to read because it all depends on what you want to write. They will talk about protagonist and antagonist. They will talk about character development and emotions and….
The truth, sorry, my truth is that in the majority of books I read things don’t divide up neatly in this way. It might work great for the movies where you can almost predict what is going to happen because you are so many minutes in. It might work well for TV where any critical moment is inevitably the herald of an ad break.
You can make the theory fit the book. Stretching a point you can make Wuthering Heights, Oliver Twist and Sherlock Holmes stories seem as if they were conceived around a rigid structure – Oh, it’s chapter 13 I need an emotional twist. Did Orwell plot every element of Animal Farm?
Most of the books I read don’t fit a plot structure, thank goodness.
Some will follow a pattern. There are series of detective fiction that run into a dozen books and they are all fundamentally the same and if the hero is showing signs of change or development, it’s happening horrendously slowly.
It’s not difficult to read a good book and retrospectively see a structure that appears familiar. But then if we do see a structure, how do we know that is what the author meant. We read Dickens as a writer of novels, but all of his famous novels were published in weekly or monthly installments. Fit them into a plot theory.
What I’m saying in a very long winded way is that the most important thing to remember is that you are telling a story. You need a beginning and an end. What goes on in the middle is up to you.
So here’s a suggestion. Take your bright idea, start writing and see where it takes you. After a while you will know where it comes in a larger piece and what other characters, scenarios, actions and locations you will need. Get a feeling for it, develop a love for what has inspired you. Don’t take an idea, construct a plot and characters around it before you start writing because it will always be an uphill struggle.
