Are you missing some of your best plot ideas? Some writers tell me they find it easy to create characters and story worlds, but struggle to create enough plot. What they often don’t realize is they already have significant and rather good plot material–if only they knew where to look.

Here are four places where your best plot ideas might be hiding.

1. Your Characters’ Background

If the main focus of your plot is family or personal questions, look for the drama that might be lurking in your characters’ jobs or obligations.

Detectives might have murders to solve, adulterers to spy on, missing people to find, thieves to thwart, or stolen treasures to recover. Doctors have moral dilemmas, medical conundrums that highlight the human condition or require them to be brave and brutal. Airline pilots, ambulance drivers, and even car mechanics bear the responsibility for people’s lives. In historical fiction or fantasy, servants might have conflicts between duty, family, and personal standards. Kings might be similarly troubled. We’re all human (or goblin or zomboid).

By the same token, if the thrust of your story comes from your characters’ roles in the big wide world, don’t forget to mine their personal backgrounds. Each stage of life provides challenges that can feed stories: leaving college, becoming a parent, watching the children move away, changing career, and getting old. A character of any age might face the death of a partner or be cut adrift from home and safety.

2. Backstory–Including Secret Burdens

Many writers give their characters an exciting secret burden–which they then don’t use in the story. They might give their protagonist a long-lost brother, or a mother whose identity was never known, or a hidden romantic obsession, or a puzzling birthmark–and nothing comes of it.

Such exciting character tidbits are like Chekhov’s gun. If you load a firearm in the first act, the reader will be looking for it to appear later on. If it doesn’t, you might have teased them on false pretenses–and they will notice.

But if you give your characters these colorful issues, do they have to be resolved? Not necessarily. Chekhov’s gun doesn’t have to be fired. Stories don’t have to mete out rewards and answers in a simplistic way. The characters don’t have to conquer every fear or heal every injury. But each secret wound adds a marker the readers watch for. So consider how far you can take it and whether it could generate interesting story events.

3. Conflict at Home

Conflict is not just good guys versus bad guys. It doesn’t come only from your antagonists. In any situation that’s dangerous or troublesome, there will be people on the same side who clash and make it far more messy.

In Lord of the Flies, the group of schoolchildren have to deal with the practical problems of survival, but these soon become much worse because of the children’s personalities. Each phase of the plot produces new challenges to each character’s sense of right and wrong and personal coping thresholds. It’s conflict all the way, and yet they started off “on the same side.”

Lord of the Flies (1963), British Lion Film Corporation.

If you put characters in a situation that causes trouble, each of them will react differently. They don’t always have to turn traitor or become deadly enemies, but they won’t all comply with full obedience to the story’s mission. Detectives, scientists, astronauts, or friends on holiday will all have their personal ways to tackle a problem. As their plight becomes more desperate, rifts and disagreements will grow. It’s human nature to form loyalties and rivalries–especially in an unfamiliar or challenging situation. The interpersonal conflict could create far more complications than the original problem.

If you have a bunch of characters on the same side, how could they tear each other apart?

4. Unexplored Mysteries

Sometimes writers set up potential mysteries then reveal the answers immediately. But these could be teased out into tantalising story threads.

An example: you might reveal the village veterinary surgeon is a drug dealer. You could give this more mileage by, first, having a character wonder why he has a mysterious second mobile phone. You might then make the other character wonder if the vet has a secret lover. That’s two stages of mystery from one simple idea. Before you reveal an answer, ask yourself: Did you make the most of the intrigue? How far could you spin it out?

Plots With Drama, Depth, and Heart by Roz Morris (affiliate link)

These tips are taken from Roz Morris’s new book Writing Plots With Drama, Depth & Heart: Nail Your Novel 3, available now in print and on all e-book platforms.

Tell me your opinion: Where have you found some of your best plot ideas lurking?