Last night at my Loft class, I had to admit the ugly truth. I know jack about plotting. This is always my worst lecture because I’m forced to rely on what other people have to say about plot and how to do it.
I know basically what plot is. It’s the stuff that happens in your short story or novel. Plot is a “verb;” it’s action, forward movement. One of the things that the Writer’s Digest PLOT book reminds me is that it is anything that a character experiences which makes a difference to what comes afterwards.
But how is it done? What makes good plot? Why do some plots snap and others fizzle? We read a short story by Maureen McHugh for class called “Homesick” which defies a simple explanation of plot because it is a deeply compelling story, and all of the students who read it thought that it “worked,” i.e., they felt satisfied by the conclusion. Yet nothing much happens, and there are events, such as a car crash, in which there are no immediate consequences for the main character, which is to say, she walks away from it and talks about how the driver was forever changed, but she wasn’t (though it can be argued that by the ending she was.) Still, it’s very non-traditional in its approach to plot, so why does it work?
Other than the answer: because Maureen McHugh is a genius, I didn’t really have a good reply because, frankly, plot is something I constantly struggle with. I think that when it works for me, it works by chance, by magic. Also, I think I’ve honed my “ear” to the point when I can tell when a scene isn’t going anywhere and I revise it so it does. If I screw that up, I have Wyrdsmiths tell me that things are dragging and that I need to get back to the plot.
None of this, however, is good advice to students. How would you teach someone about plot? Does anyone know of any good articles about plot out on the internet?
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12 comments:
LOL...I almost signed up for one of your spec. fic. classes, you know. But I spared you the pain of having someone with an MFA and the critical snarkiness that comes along with that degree in your class.
I'll buy you a cup of coffee sometime, in an environment where writer-to-writer snarkiness is more appropriate. ;-)
HOWEVER, if you come up with a way to teach plot and make plotting easy, organized, and painless: I am SO in your classroom. Worshipping at your feet, even.
There are two things that have helped me plot a little bit better. One is studying screenplay writing. That can be dangerous for a novelist, but if you can see screenplay structure as a tool rather than a set of rules, it can help a person think about plot more clearly. I like Syd Field's books on screenplay writing.
The other thing is a book called "The Writer's Journey." It's a book that basically posits that all stories are based on Joseph Campbell's take on the heroic journey, and of course that is simplistic and limiting. But again I found it gave me some kind of framework to use in thinking about plot.
But still, for me, it is always a challenge to deal with plot and the pacing therein. Mostly these books just gave me words to more apty describe my plotting agony, lol.
Sounds to me as if you are confusing "plot" with "story."
A "story" is events recounted in chronological order. First this happens, then that happens, etc. A "plot" is the explanation for WHY the things being recounted are happening. In other words, plots are causal accounts since why questions are answered with causes: "Why?" "Because...."
The classic example is:
"The king died and then the queen died" is a story. "The king died and then the queen died of grief" is a plot because it answers the "why" question by explaining the cause.
So, the story of THE LORD OF THE RINGS is very complicated and detailed; lotsa stuff happens and it goes over three fat books. The PLOT of LOTR is really very simple: The Ring of Power must be destroyed or Sauron destroys Middle Earth. Everything that happens in the long story is explained by pointing to the cause that motivates everything to happen.
I think Norman Spinrad talks about this in his book, SCIENCE FICTION IN THE REAL WORLD in a great review of the DUNE movie. They attempted to do the story and missed the plot, which is why DUNE sucked as a movie. Whereas BLADERUNNER worked because they got the plot right, even if they let the story change.
Oh, and I know it isn't magic that gets your plots to work. It is the genius with the long legs I'm always seeing you with!
jpj-nice take. The way I put it for my students is that plot=conflict+cost. The conflict is why things happen, the cost is what has to be given up to make them happen. I add the cost dimension because that's such a key part of the transformation that a plot needs to become a good story.
Thanks for the distinction between plot and story, John. I hadn't ever seen that before. I'll be sure to tell my students about that on Monday.
Just a quick note: "Story" and "Plot" are rather inextricably linked. Dictionary.com defines plot as follows:
Also called storyline. The plan, scheme, or main story of a literary or dramatic work, as a play, novel, or short story.
...and WordNet thusly:
the story that is told in a novel or play or movie
(Don't have my OED at work, sorry.)
It's not that Lyda is confusing plot and story, but that the difference between them is rather nebulous. I tend to think of plot as the skeleton upon which a story is framed, consisting of the important moments, actions, realizations, etc., that drive the story forward and impact its outcome. But without a plot, there is no story, so technically, there can be no differentiation between "plot" and "story", per se. Plot is the essence of the story, sifted out, boiled down, distilled and extracted.
While I agree that reasons behind the story certainly are primary drivers in moving the story forward, they are not the only essential elements of a story. LOTR could as easily have as its plot "A Hobbit must make the choice between good and evil when he is given a powerful object and told to destroy it." By froming it this way, the plot is not defined by an object, but by a character's quest and development; both are essential to the story, both are plot elements of LOTR, but neither is the whole story, and neither is the whole plot, though arguably, both could be called the main plot.
Sean-I have to take issue with this bit of your argument:
"But without a plot, there is no story, so technically, there can be no differentiation between "plot" and "story", per se."
I've seen lots of stories with no plot. There are whole schools of literary fiction that argue that plot is superflous and then set out to prove it. Mind you, I have trouble reading them, but there are people that enjoy watching words ramble across a page sans discernable meaning.
I have heard the highest point of plot, the climax, referred to as the point where something happens that prevents you from going back to the way things were at the beginning of the story.
Even in a story/novel about nothing (meaning not having a plot), something changes somewhere between page one and the last.
This has helped me when revising--if something hasn't happened, no matter how seemingly insignificant, my work isn't done.
If something happens, if something changes, that is inherently a plot. It doesn't have to be a bomb going off or a cup of coffee spiling on your lap. It can be a mental meandering through a day that yeilds some observation about the world, some realization driven by a wandering set of thoughts--though I would argue in that case that it is less a story than it is a narrative essay.
I'm not saying that there aren't Deconstructionist arguments whose entire point is to unmask the assumptions we have about language. That doesn't mean that they are correct, though. A solid argument can be--and many have been--posited based on a false premise. Xeno's Paradox, famously, begins with the given that time does not exist, and goes on to prove, quite eqivocally, that motion does not exist. However, if one begins with the given that time does exist, the exact same set of logic steps yeilds that motion does occur. My point in all of this is that independent of the arguments that Deconstructionism makes concerning plot and its viability or lack thereof when it comes to defining story, I think A) for the vast majority of stories--and readers--plot is the driving force (the "why" of the story, as JPJ so aptly put it) when it comes to story, and B) "words rambling across a page sans discernable meaning" may be lovely poetry, but it is not a story.
Except when I'm wrong, of course.
Sean-I'm right there with you that plot is the driving force for many readers, though I won't concede most—since there are too many people who read purely for character.
At the same time, I don't agree that plot and story are identical, and that's despite the fact that I often use them interchangeably when I'm teaching or doing panel discussions. The two inform each other, and neither stands very well on its own, but they are not the same thing. A plot outline can contain and encapsulate all the things that are important to a story without itself being a story. And a story can be told without plot.
As for poetry, don't get me started. There are poems that have plots as strong as any fiction. There are also poems utterly without meaning beyond lyricism. And that's all without getting into the differences between rhymed and metered poetry and prose poetry.
Kelly--Agreed, poetry is its own mess, and entirely a seperate conversation. And yes, stories can be told without plot--jellyfish are animals with no recognizable skeletal structure, too, but in the natural world, the overwhelming majority of animals have either an exoskeleton or an endoskeleton, of one sort or another, be it chitin, cartilage, bone, etc. In much the same way, I think that there are some stories that have little or no definable plot, but that the overwhelming majority of stories do, of one variety or another--be it external or internal to the character.
The issue of readers who read for character, independent of the presence of plot, is quite accurate, so I retract my "--and readers--" sub-clause of the previous argument. Like the poetry reference, it is not essential to drive this conversation forward, so it must be cut from the story.
I'm too lazy to read all the postings here, but I really like John's distinction of Plot/Story. The neat thing, for me, is how you can then extrapolate Subplot. Every chapter of a Story has its own Subplot, as does every scene, as does every paragraph... etc. It stops at some point, of course, but if I think of Plot as the meaning invested into a section of writing, this clarifies a once sticky point for me. I'd personally bundled up "Plot" with words like "Postmodern"—too ambiguous to be worth much unless you want to bamboozle some sorry bastard at a cocktail party. Thanks John.
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