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Today’s guest post is excerpted from Hurling Words Into Darkness: A Book Doctor’s Dose of Brain Science for Writers, Second Edition by Peter Gelfan.
Most basically, a plot consists of a character’s book-spanning struggle toward an objective. The Trojan War is over, and Odysseus must get back to Ithaca to save his marriage and estate. Prince Hamlet learns his uncle murdered Hamlet’s father to usurp the throne and marry his mother, and he now has to set things right. A scientist who discovers a runaway asteroid headed straight for Earth must figure out how to deflect it.
Not all stories need an epic plot set on a world stage, but at their core, most effective stories have this sort of structure—a character struggles for something. In a murder mystery, a detective must solve a crime before the killer strikes again; in a coming-of-age story, the hero must face a challenge, grow, and find a place for herself in the adult world.
Plot presents an experience of someone having to struggle to survive and how their choices turned out for them—it provides an opportunity to learn. We enjoy it because it entertains, and we learn something from it even if without noticing.
Some stories don’t have a true plot
They may charm, amuse, or mesmerize us in other ways. In the 1950s, although they were not the first to do so, the French Nouveau Roman (new novel) movement and its cinematic counterpart the New Wave eschewed traditional plots in favor of other elements and for a while became prominent and successful. The history of world cinema, stage, and
literature abounds with such experiments.
As an artist, you should create what you want. Nor can one condemn a writer for breaking the rules, because art evolves by breaking rules—the novel itself was once a renegade art form, as were movies almost within living memory. But a storyteller, no matter how she plans to experiment, can still remain aware of a plotted story’s deep-seated influence on the human mind and heart. Over the millennia and across just about every culture, a plot-like structure is how stories seem to work. If you have a good reason to depart from it, you better also have something else to take up the slack in reader engagement.
Comedy provides a good example. Some comedies are well plotted, but in others the plot is thin, nonexistent, or absurd, and the characters are caricatures, yet the laughs keep us reading, listening, or watching. I’m not talking about just a dash of wry humor here and there or a few good one-liners but out-loud laughs on every page. Likewise, erotica taps a source of engagement outside plot.
One might ask, can’t the beauty of the writing alone be sufficient to engage and transport readers? For some, sure, and literary fiction often emphasizes creative use of language over other aspects of storytelling. But if you’re going to write beautifully about something, why not also make that something as worthwhile as possible?
From premise to plot
A story’s premise is the what-if seed that spawns the whole project. What if scientists were able to culture DNA from fossils and bring dinosaurs back to life? That’s the premise of Jurassic Park. What if a gang member fell in love with a rival gang leader’s sister, and she reciprocated? West Side Story, inspired by the same sort of what-if at the heart of Romeo and Juliet.
Sometimes an author gets so excited by his premise that instead of turning it into a plot, he simply takes the reader on a guided tour as the premise plays out. He might bring in a character, or a series of them, whose dialogue explains what’s going on. Other writers conduct their tours through promiscuously multiple points of view, zipping readers as if on a magic carpet from one site to the next.
The magic-carpet strategy tends to lower suspense and excitement. Giving readers an intimate knowledge of the unfolding scenario lessens the amount of mystery in the novel—the very mystery that compels readers to keep reading. We may know who the villain is, and what he’s up to, far too early in the book, and we don’t learn it through the hero’s thrilling detective work but simply because the author lets us listen in on the villain’s plans. We ride high above the action, seeing the big picture and all sides of the conflict instead of getting personally involved in one side of the struggle. It’s not much of an experience because we float above it all rather than immerse ourselves—we are rubberneckers rather than participants.
Underlying that mistake lurks a common misconception: that the premise is the plot. It isn’t the plot—it’s the seed of a plot. One turns a premise into a plot with this question: who will deal with the premise and how? For the plot isn’t just the premise, it’s the hero’s struggle with the premise. Your premise may shimmer with brilliance, but all the more reason to give it the plot it deserves.
Starting the plot
Some writers devise a plot but run into trouble getting it started. A common problem is excessive setup. Before shifting the plot into gear, the writer tries to set up the story in great detail. This might include exposition, backstory, settings, character sketches, and so on. Plots rarely need much setup—just as life crises rarely provide the courtesy of forewarning and preparation. Beware of unnecessary and/or excessive preliminary information in stories, as echoed in Elmore Leonard’s succinct piece of writing advice: “I just try to leave all the boring parts out.”
I well understand a writer’s impulse to map his territory before starting the journey, but one also has to consider the effect this has on readers. For the most part, they want the journey to start quickly because without a stake in what will happen—without taking steps down the road and seeing enough to want to continue—they have no reason to be interested in your map. The author may need to know the map in advance, but readers want to learn the territory by exploring it firsthand, through the story’s events. Your job isn’t to write the guidebook but to lead the expedition. Readers won’t care who built the subterranean temple until they’re standing in the middle of it, cave lamps strapped to their heads, gazing in awe at the stalactites, wall art, pottery, and skeletons.
Because premise and plot tend to be the most engaging elements of a story, usually you want to get them underway as soon as possible. You can fill in small dollops of exposition as necessary while you move forward with the plot. If the plot’s inception really does need to be delayed, you can at least hint at the underlying conflict and infuse it into the preliminaries to initiate mystery and suspense.
A clichéd workaround that often backfires is to open the story with an exciting scene from the middle of the plot or even the climax, during which the protagonist, in a brief lull, may wonder, How the hell did I get myself into this mess? End of Prologue. Chapter 1 heading: “Three Weeks Earlier…” and now comes all the setup. This strategy is meant to hook readers so they’ll stick with the story through the setup information rather than lose interest and give up, which is what the author worried would happen if the setup were at the beginning. But why put anything boring anywhere into your story? As well, such an opening can spoil suspense by letting readers know where things are going, and it’s often one of the most exciting scenes of the novel, which can make much of the rest of the story disappointing.
My point here is to suggest you get your plot moving as soon as you can and emotionally involve readers with your story rather than delaying it with a long setup.
Plot strength
For a thirdhand experience to hit readers as worthy and memorable, two elements are of key importance. The first is stakes. What do the protagonist and his people stand to gain or lose? What would be the consequences of failure? The stakes can be personal, familial, social, spiritual, and/or involve our entire planet’s future. The character connection here is that readers need to care about the outcome as well. Small stakes may be enough to set your hero in motion, but your story needs stakes high enough to put readers’ brains on high alert. Here you’re seeking ground between the commonplace and the melodramatic.
The second vital element is difficulty. To garner full reader cognitive participation, the protagonist’s task must seem close to or even beyond impossible. If things are too easy for the protagonist, readers can shrug off the weak ordeal. I am not talking about genre or scale here. Even on a small stage with few characters, an excruciating struggle will have much deeper impact on readers or an audience than merely an inconvenient or uncomfortable situation.
First-time novelists tend to make mistakes along these lines—perfectly natural, humanitarian ones. Because they love their protagonists, they want to give them a helping hand. At the outset, even if the stakes are high, an author may make the predicament too easy to deal with. As the plot proceeds, the writer may create lucky breaks and fortuitous happenstance to ease things along—a random encounter solves a problem, a coincidence drops crucial information into the protagonist’s hands.
In the same vein, another common error is to make the villains inept, weak, or stupid. A villain needs to be scary and daunting rather than contemptible or laughable. It’s fine, perhaps even necessary, to love your characters, but your first duty is to your readers. They need your characters to go through a dire ordeal. Your job is not to ease your hero’s path and pain and solve his problems for him but to push him right up to his limits and then beyond, to challenge him beyond what he thinks himself capable of. This is what will transform him.
