Plot considerations

[resonant]

I've been reading a book about plotting. I'm finding it very inspiring, though I'm not sure whether that means it's an outstanding book or not; it's possible that it's just wildly exciting for me to have even the most incomplete and flimsy sort of conceptual framework for thinking about story structure.

(For what it's worth, the book is Plot, the author is Ansen Dibell, and it's part of the Elements of Fiction Writing series from Writer's Digest.)

Ever since I started writing fanfic, I've been wondering: How did I manage to read so much fiction without getting an intuitive grasp of what's necessary to make a good plot? I mean, I picked up other aspects of fiction writing -- sentence structure and characterization and dialog and how to write explicit sex and so on -- just from reading; why didn't I do the same with plot?



And then I hit this quote:

"Play with Murphy's Law. Try to think of what, within that fundamental situation, could go surprisingly wrong."

And suddenly I realized: It's a personality trait.

See, I've got a puzzle brain. I solve problems. Present a knotty hypothetical situation to me, and I will automatically go through a process like this:

1. Clarify where we are.
2. Clarify where we want to be.
3. Find the shortest path between those two points.

(This is assuming that I've got enough distance on the situation to see it clearly, and that doing item 3 doesn't conflict with my fundamental laziness.)

Seriously: I'm good at doing that. It's fun for me to do that. But it's exactly the opposite of the kind of thinking that gives you a story, which apparently goes more like:

1. Clarify where we are.
2. Confuse the characters, so that they think they're someplace else. Two different someplace elses.
3. Clarify where each character wants to be, and make sure the two destinations are as far apart as possible.
4. Tie their ankles together, then send them off in the opposite direction of where they want to go, and at right angles to each other.
5. Every time they appear to be on the verge of getting somewhere, fling an angry wombat into their path.

Comments

[norah.livejournal.com]

WOMBAT!!!!!

SQUEEEE!!!!

And yes, plot is hard for those of us who are linear thinkers. :)

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Huh -- I hadn't connected it to my linearity, actually. But that is another part of the problem, because not only do there have to be conflicts, but they have to add up to something, which is a birds-eye-view problem and not a down-here-on-the-path problem.

[panisdead.livejournal.com]

Wow.

Very interesting; I think similarly, and am well nigh unable to plot.

[electricandroid.livejournal.com]

happened across this on my fof List.

The wombat made me cough up soda all over my screen. Hillarious! Thanks so much for posting this, I'm certain it will stick in my brain!

[celandineb.livejournal.com]

*little twinkly bulbs start flashing*

THAT'S IT! That's the problem I have too - the urge to fix, to solve, to make it all better as quickly as possible. Good for RL - arguably - not good for plotting.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Yeah -- it's really hard to stop thinking of how it might work and instead think of how it might go wrong. (I should get the spouse in on it. He's a professional pessimist.)

[raveninthewind.livejournal.com]

I'm linear, too, and as a reader I get impatient with plotless novels, even if the writing is good. There are some pro novels out there that make me toss them aside impatiently if the author is being too subtle for my get-to-the point brain, and there are plenty of meandering, never-ending WIPs in fandom that I bail on.

Style is good, but there has to be some substance or action.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

My biggest problem with WIPs isn't so much the ones that meander as the ones in which there's incident after incident and they don't add up to anything. This happens, and then that happens, and then they fall through a trapdoor, and then they get caught having sex and have to make up excuses, and blah blah blah, and there's no development.

It's like being trapped in a room, and you fix the window, and then you fix the door, and then you paint the walls, and then you refinish the floor, and all this time I'm screaming, "Get me out of the fucking room already!"

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Hee! And, yeah. Pretty much. Conflict = plot. Otherwise the story's very short. Though I do prefer if the conflict can be achieved without making the characters appear to be very stupid or the angry wombats of coincidence implausibly common.

The thing about plot is that while it may be the most important thing to the characters, to the author most of the time it's just the mechanism of character development. The real "where we want to be" is in having the characters grow/learn/change/bond/whatever. Viewed that way it you can keep your "shortest possible line" approach, because it will avoid bloating the story with unnecessary scenes. You'll include only as much plot is strictly necessary to provoke the learning experiences and attitude changes you want.

It is, however, necessary not to create a too-easily solveable problem in the first place. If you have two characters who already are in the place they want to be, emotionally speaking, then the shortest possible line is a point and you're done.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

the angry wombats of coincidence

My god, that's beautiful. It's even iambic pentameter, did you notice? I've been murmuring it to myself all day long.

And, yeah, I know what you mean -- sometimes there's not enough conflict; sometimes it's not difficult enough; there are so many ways to go wrong! I flung Lynn Flewelling's The Bone Doll's Twin down about halfway through because the whole issue could have been resolved in five minutes' conversation, and I just couldn't buy that nobody would have told.

[beledibabe.livejournal.com]

Ah! What a good book! Nan Dibble (aka Anson Dibell) has the knack of explaining things clearly, which is surprisingly rare, even in books on writing. (And she's a damn nice person to boot.) ::g:: I like your precis -- I think I'll print it out and post it above my desk.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

You know her? How cool!

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

Your five rules are my new favorite guidelines. *loves and appropriates them*

I was talking to cmshaw the other day about how the plot for the orignial novel I'm trying to outline is coming to me in the form of Character Billiards: "Okay, so A. goes spinning away from the fight with T. and careens into I., and somehow imparts a spin onto him that sends him spiralling down into this vortex of activity with K1, and they both get flung out of it at high velocities in different directions, and one or both of them crash into K2 and send *him* whirling off down the path that gets him killed..."

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that's a really interesting way of thinking about it. I may have to try that.

[kupukello.livejournal.com]

Hee! :D You'd make an excellent bit nerd, or a housewife, or both :D That's the reason I've never even tried to write anything, my brain works too much like "slice-dice-and-pile" to create an interesting plot. In your case your current system works wonders, there is absolutely no need to change it! *loves your stories*

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

[beaming at you] Thanks.

To the extent that my stories have plots, I sweat blood over them. (Or else julad does them for me.)

[vampiresetsuna.livejournal.com]

oooh, yeah~~! Those are good plot tips! I think the reason that i sturggle with plots, is that i see everything in images, which makes pretty scenes, but a bunch of pretty scense strung together and tied with a bow do not make a plot. : /

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Hee! I'm not visual at all -- I hear most of mine. Which I guess explains why there's so much dialog. Left to myself, my plots would go, "And then they have a conversation. And then they have a really intense conversation."

[crysothemis.livejournal.com]

LOL! That's beautiful. Particularly the wombat.

Seriously, though, your puzzle brain *is* useful for plotting. You just have to engage the wombat-flinging part of your brain at the same time. Fling the wombats, *then* solve the puzzle. And maybe the wombats will have spawn-of-wombat and there will be further complications down the road. But without the puzzle-solving side, you can fling all the wombats you want and still never have a plot.

Okay, I think I've stretched this wombat metaphor so thin it's a see-through marsupial.

Or something like that.

Anyway, thanks for the book rec. Might check it out.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

See, I think the wombats themselves need to be a puzzle, somehow. I mean, all the characters' problems need to relate to each other; they can't just be random problems. ("Fraser can't confess his love to Ray because he's repressed, and also he's attacked by ninjas and develops lung cancer and has jury duty ...")

[kestrelsan.livejournal.com]

I obsess about plot a lot, because I'm not very good at it (and I think for the same reasons you list--I like *peace*, man *g*).

But I also some reservations about the conflict-model of plotting (born solely of my idle thinking about it in terms of my own writing patterns, so I don't know how applicable or useful it would be to other people).

Reservation 1: It fosters a kind of backward-looking thinking process. In other words, you (me) come up with point A and decide on an ending point B, and then backtrack to create roadblocks and confusion along the way. The problem with this for me is that I think readers *want* that shortest path from A to B. And if they're able to see the short path, but yet are taken along the long path by the author, then it can either:

A. Create this Three's Company-like narrative confusion (which honestly, a lot of readers must like, just as a lot of viewers liked the show. Me, it drives batshit.)

B. Lose the trust of the reader. As a reader, I want the author to know more than I do. If I see they're taking the long route when there's a short route available, then what does the author really have to offer me?

(a good answer to this is: insightful character development. And I'm okay with a plot that merely serves to advance character development (which is why cliched plots can be fun). But if that's what you're going for, why worry too much about plot at all? Anything will work in that instance--and while it's true that conflict exposes more of a character, the focus there is on what kind of conflict will expose more of that character, not what kind of conflict fits in best with the plot).

Reservation 2: I don't always *like* the concept of conflict. And I think conflict tends to be seen very narrowly (not saying you or the book are doing this--and in fact, I'm very keen now to check it out, in light of my plot obsessiveness and insecurity *g*) as high-tension situations, when in fact it could be something broad and undefined, yet still present.

I guess generally I'm saying that I like reading books that take long rambling roads to get where they're going, with little to no "conflict," as I do books that are high-intensity and fast-paced and present multiple challenges.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I can see what you mean about the problems here -- I've certainly abandoned stories because they either milked a single conflict for five hundred pages, or had everyone ignoring some ridiculously obvious solution to the problem.

My difficulty in my stories isn't not enough conflict, per se -- it's not enough happening at all. (And of course my other difficulty is that I'm trying to write novels, which need a little more skeleton than a short story, or they all fall to pieces in a hopeless muddle. Which is what they all do.)

[julad.livejournal.com]

I like your icon. *g*

And I've heard very good things about that book and haven't been able to find a copy. (That series is pretty good, the OSC one on character I got a lot out of, although the dialogue one was a piece of shit.)

I'd also recommend Robert McKee's Story, if I haven't already. It's on screenwriting and I haven't even finished yet, but I read the first few chapters with a funny sense of deja vu, going yes, yes, okay, learned *that* the hard way, right, yes.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I've promised to lend the book to one of my fellow coffee shop regulars, but do you want it when she gives it back?

[sine-que-non767.livejournal.com]

How did I manage to read so much fiction without getting an intuitive grasp of what's necessary to make a good plot?

I'm in the exact same position. And your post is really helpful, b/c I'm one of those types of people too! It's the willingness to *create* problems instead of solving them, and that makes me feel...itchy. Uncomfortable. I think I have to work out a way of doing plot that doesn't piss me off, too, since plot for the sake of plot just annoys me immensely. You can totally see through that type of plot - the author wanted to stretch out the book and thus included this pointless situation which doesn't contribute much at all, and could have been left out. There must be a balance, somewhere...

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Yeah! And you have to create meaningful problems, too -- problems that spring from other problems, problems that solving them will develop your characters, problems that are all connected to each other by little bits of string ... which I think is what you're talking about with "plot for the sake of plot."

[iibnf.livejournal.com]

Please put more angry wombats into your fics!?

After an angry wombat caused serious and long term suffering to the boss at work that gives me a lot of grief, I have an enormous fondness for angry wombats. They deserve to be immortalised in porn.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Well, I now have a wombat icon.

I was about to object that I couldn't put wombats in my stories because I've never seen one, but then I've had just as much contact with wombats as with male/male sex, so I ought to be able to fake it, right?

[shayheyred.livejournal.com]

This is exactly what a writing teacher one told my class - hell, beat into our heads. Don't solve the problem. Create one.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

That's another thing I never managed to do: take a writing class. (Well, journalism classes, but it's not the same.)

I suppose my fanfic career could be considered one long writing class.

[ellid.livejournal.com]

The problem with that sort of plotting is that too much tends to alienate the readers. Some complications are necessary, yes, but too much (especially too much happening to the same person/couple) will make the reader fling the book across the road, and that is not easy. The trick is to write an interesting plot with enough complications to entertain without alienating.

Case in point: Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy's last novel. Now, Hardy was a gloomy sort, and his novels rarely have conventionally happy endings. But there's usually some glimmer of hope that makes them tolerable.

Not this one! By the end of the book every single sympathetic character, bar none, is either dead or insane. The protagonist has lost his children to suicide, his reputation to scandal, his love to madness, and he has never achieved his dream of obtaining an education. He himself dies while listening to the bells of Oxford, where he never went, tolling. It's not a fun read, and the tone is so relentlessly pessimistic that it's not even a *rewarding* read. And contemporary critics agreed; the reaction was so negative that Hardy gave up writing novels permanently.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah -- I mean, the challenge is to create meaningful conflict, just the right amount of it, in just the right places... gah. The more I answer the comments here, the more difficult the task sounds, and the more I despair of ever being able to do it.

From Snitch

[scarah2.livejournal.com]

OMG. You're me, only a better problem solver, because you found out why I suck at plots!

[julia-fractal.livejournal.com]

I love your succinct, 5 step guide to creating plot! I liked Ansen Dibell's Plot as well. Out of the 6 or so "how to write" books I've read, it's definitely the most helpful and interesting one.

For me, the problem isn't a reluctance to create conflict so much as difficulties in creating anything, whether it's the central dramatic conflict or what the protagonist had for lunch. Which is probably why I'm most comfortable writing drabbles and take eons to finish anything longer :)

Thanks for posting this!

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, I can create lunches and wardrobes and home interiors and old college friends and etc. until the cows come home. It's making something happen that's a challenge for me.

[delurker.livejournal.com]

5. Every time they appear to be on the verge of getting somewhere, fling an angry wombat into their path.
*dies*

Although I think this only works if the characters go, 'Aaagh! Angry wombats! Quick, let's climb the trees and work our way through the canopy instead. No wombats there.' If they go, 'Oh look, angry wombats. Woe.' and then do nothing, it gets annoying. I want to hit them until they actually try to do something to fix the problem.
(And then, of course, when they take to the trees, they find the angry koalas... *g*)

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

If they go, 'Oh look, angry wombats. Woe.' and then do nothing, it gets annoying.

My characters, I'm afraid, tend to go, "Angry wombats!" "Shoot them." "OK, done." "Did I ever tell you about the time when I was a kid when I saw a picture of a wombat in the encyclopedia, and I was so traumatized I couldn't sleep for a week?" "Who cares about your stupid problems? I kept a pet wombat, but my evil father took it away and had it killed and told me it went to live on a farm." "Weren't we supposed to be having sex somewhere along here?" "Well, to do that we'll have to budge from this path somehow ..."

And then, of course, when they take to the trees, they find the angry koalas...

[snerk]

via the Snitch

[queenofzan.livejournal.com]

So what I write actually does have plot? Amazing.

Unless, of course, Oompa Loompas aren't equivalent to wombats. In which case I'm SOL. :D

Re: via the Snitch

[queenofzan.livejournal.com]

okay, actually, this is really quite good; I printed them out in large print and tacked them on my wall to remind me that it needs plot, even if it is implausible. It can always be reworked later. Or I can explain it away with the wombats of coincidence as a scapegoat. Either way.

(also: these are a good guide for NaNoWriMo. keep the word count up, even if it is with wombats!)

[starkittyn.livejournal.com]

This made a great deal of sense to me. Plotting always frustrates me because I don't WANT to have them have all those problems. I want to solve their problems. LOL

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Yes! Canon gives them problems, and I want to make them act sensibly so that they won't have those problems any more.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I love this. Saving it onto a Word doc, I discovered that I already had some musings of yours saved away under 'resonant on roads'. Who needs a creative workshop, eh? I find plotting fiendishly difficult. After I started to write fanfic, I really started to appreciate some published writer's plots. A really good plot is a very impressive thing. Two of my favourite alive writers, David Mitchell and Ann Marie McDonald, construct plots like scaffoldings or pieces of carefully balanced architecture. You get one pylon at a time and by the end of the book, the whole edifice suddenly appears before you in complete perfection. I find this extraordinarily impressive, extraordinarily difficult to do and an absolute delight to read. It's not the only thing they do well but it's one of the things that I may just have to admit not being very good at and simply bowing down to the masters to. I have to say that I have not read a really fantastically plotted fanfic, not as well-plotted as published stories I've read. I don't know why this is. Perhaps because it's an amateur world mostly out there and plotting requires... well, I don't know what, a lot of elbow grease for one and I think fanfic writers are, on the whole, impatient people and love the feedback too much to wait a year after finishing a story to polish and construct. Also, a lot of the long fics are sort of wippish, and wips are more like Charles Dickens type of serial plots, with cliffhangers, and a 'and then' element.

But I love your thing about problem-solution and then throwing in a whole lot of complications. And thinking in terms of different trajectories, not just one plot, but each character's own plot.

Thanks for this.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Fandom has been better than any writing class I've ever taken.

I don't actually think I've got the conceptual tools to recognize a really well-plotted pro story. (Or, well, maybe I do now! I didn't last week!)

I have noticed that it's very common in fanfic for a story to be four-fifths fabulous and then fall apart at the climax. I think one reason for that is just the rush to post -- you've got it, you like it, you're eager to get some strokes for it. But another reason (and I've done this myself (http://trickster.org/res/american.html)) is that you set all sorts of forces in motion so that you can get to the sex/relationship development, but the sex/relationship development is the only part of the story that really interests you, so once you've brought that to fruition, you don't bother to bring the plot forces to climax at all.

[princessofg.livejournal.com]

Wombat!!!! alert!

oh thank you for this. i needed it. all of it. esp. the wombat. *ponders*

[auctasinistra.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think you have the right kind of brain for it: Consider this: If you have characters at point A and you want to get them to point B, you at least need to know the shortest route and have some of your characters know it, unless you want your characters to look like idiots (or horror movie characters) where the readers are always going "Why the hell don't they just XYZ????" So you do want to reduce that beginning-to-goal route to the most sensible and reasonable (to demonstrate your characters are sensible and reasonable, or at least mostly that way -- who wants to read about complete idiots?). Only then do you start adding sensible and reasonable (and maddening) obstacles.
For me, the hardest part in novel writing (not so hard in fanfic, since even my long ones aren't novels) is the escalation of threat that keeps the middle from being one long grey mass. That climactic build is hard to sustain over hundreds of pages.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Well, I have the right kind of brain for avoiding stupid conflicts, which is something. I have some idfficulty with the non-stupid kinds, too, unfortunately.

And yes yes yes on the gray-mass middle problem. I'm struggling with that, too.