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Lecture 9: Turning Story Into Plot

Lecture 9: Turning Story Into Plot
(The very last lecture I will ever load from Professor James' Hynes' Writing Guidebook for students for good on my account here. —Lumna10.)

As noted earlier in the course, literature is the creation of order out of chaos— the creation of meaning and structure out of reality, which is otherwise meaningless and without structure. We've already seen several ways in which fiction imposes order on chaos: When we evoke a person, a scene, or a situation, we select the details that best get across what we want the reader to see and understand. When we write dialogue, we suggest real speech without actually reproducing it, thus imposing purpose on speech. But perhaps the most obvious way that fiction imposes order on chaos is through the creation of stories and plots, which will be the subject of this and the next five lectures.

Introduction To Plot

Given the prevalence of stories in all human cultures and in our own personal lives, it's easy to think that stories occur naturally in the world, like fruit hanging from a tree, and that all a writer has to do is pluck them. But the reality is more complicated than that.

If literature is the creation of order out of chaos, it follows that all fiction has a structure. Even for narrative works that don't have plots, all fiction can be broken down into a few fundamental components: a situation or context, at least one character, a conflict of some sort, and a resolution to that conflict. All these elements are inextricably linked in every work of fiction, and if you're missing one of them, your narrative won't work.

The initial situation needs to be dramatically productive, that is, it needs to be a situation that will produce a conflict, and the character or characters need to have some sort of relationship to that situation. The conflict can be external to the character, or it can be an internal conflict within the character, and the resolution must resolve that conflict in some believable and dramatically satisfying way, though not necessarily happily or pleasantly.

All fiction must also possess a quality that the writer and teacher John Gardner called "profuence," which he defined as the feeling you have when you're reading a novel or short story that you're getting someplace. Another way to think of this quality is as forward momentum.

Whether it's a highly plotted, complicated story, such as Game of Thrones, or a modernist, plotless masterpiece, such as Mrs. Dalloway, a book or story needs to give the reader a reason to keep turning pages.

Profluence doesn't necessarily mean that a story has a plot per se; there are other reasons besides plot to keep reading. Sometimes, you read to gain a deeper understanding of the central character, as is the case in Anton Chekhov's plotless story "The Kiss." Or you might read simply to inhabit a strange and richly detailed world or to enjoy an author's writing style.

Defining Plot
Although our culture is dominated by the traditional narrative structure, some writers remain uneasy with the idea of plot. John Gardner, in his book The Art of Fiction, called plotting "the hardest job a writer has." E.
M. Forster wrote that a story "can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next. And conversely, it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next." As we'll see, however, creating an engrossing plot is one of the most satisfying things a writer can do and no more arbitrary an act than creating characters.

Think back to the story we concocted in our lecture about the couple at the baseball game whose marriage was on the rocks. We could take that same situation and tell it from any number of different points of view-Sarah's, Brad's, a mutual friend's, even from a godlike, omniscient point of view. We could also play with the order of events, telling the story in a strictly chronological fashion or starting from the moment when Sarah tells Brad she's unhappy, then showing their previous relationship in flashbacks.