Plot From March 6ths Meeting

March 6th – Plot

“Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen.
Characters should not, conversely serve as pawns for some plot you’ve dreamed up. Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT. I say don’t worry about plot. Worry about the characters. Let what they say or do reveal who they are, and be involved in their lives, and keep asking yourself, Now what happens? The development of relationship create plot.” pp. 54-55 (1)

“Lastly: I heard Alice Adams give a lecture on the short story once, one aspect of which made the writing students in her audience so excited that I have to passed it along to my students ever since. (Most of the time I give her credit.) She said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABCDE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw us in, make us want to know more. Background is where you let us see and know who these people are, how they’ve come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot – the drama, the actions, the tension – will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?”p.62 (1)

“Plot is the plan – the design – of your story. Or, to put it less architecturally and more organically: Plot is the nervous system of your story. In the same what that nerves connect your brain and muscles so you can move and live, plot interconnects and moves the elements of your story.” P.71 (2)

“Plot clearly depends on basic values. What do your characters treasure most? Put it at stake. Let them fight for it. Let them fight for life, love, money, jobs. If your characters care about nothing, the actions around them might become random. Without passion, forget about plot. Even Albert Camus’ The Stranger – in which a man is sentenced to death not so much because he committed murder as because he did not cry at this mother’s funeral – would not work if it did not rely on a framework of expected passion, against which the character’s indifference draws meaning.” P. 72 (2)

“You don’t need much to make up a plot. Work from a conflict. The conflict suggests escalation of struggle into a climax – so follow the potential for a story that the conflict suggests. Once you know what happens in your story, you can organize the rest. If you have a clear conflict between two or preferably three or more characters, everything else with follow – even the beginning! You introduce the fight – and to make it intelligible, you introduce the fighters and the ring…. If you can manage to clearly define the contested territory in a story, you will have a powerful focus, out of which the story may flow with surprising ease.” P.75 (2)
“What gives significance to actions is taking them toward the resolution of some king of predicament the character is facing. The predicaments fictional characters might face are infinite in their variety, form trying to light a lifesaving fire with just a few matches, to finding who killed Roger Axelrod, to coming to terms with some inner devil such as self-hatred, loneliness, or the silence of the gods.
All plotted works of fiction are not born equal. Some are intended to be more entertainments, and others are intended to be serious works of art that attempt to shed some light on the insanity of the human condition – or to point out that there is no light to shed and we might as well stop whining about it. But, in all of these stories, the plot is what the characters do in overcoming obstacles in a progression toward a resolution.” P. 5 (3)

“At one time of another, all writers – beginners and seasoned professionals, big talents and bad hacks - seem to have problems plotting. The most common problem is that the characters refuse to do what the author has planned for them. Whatever the author does to straighten this out, whatever action she pushes the characters to take, just doesn’t seem right. The old sheriff won’t strap on his gun as he’s supposed to. The heroine won’t go up to the hero’s loft to see his etchings. The knight in shining armor won’t enter the cave and do battle with the dragon.
This problem occurs because the author often identifies too strongly with the protagonist. The author is thinking of how the author would handle this problem, not how the character would handle the problem. The author is plotting her own story, not the character’s story.
Frequently, however, characters lie dead on the page not because the author is pushing them to do what is not in them, but because they aren’t well orchestrated. Plot arises out of opposing forces – forces that come out of the characters.”p.9-10 (3)


Six Tips for Plotting
-Chart each major character’s development through the actions
-In a work of entertainment, chart each major character’s actions and indicate his or her motivations
-Spend some time brainstorming.
-Conduct interviews with your characters of write diaries in their voices.
-Follow the “Would he really?” test for believability.
-Make sure your characters are well orchestrated.
p. 10-11 (3)

(1) Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Anchor Book. 1995.
(2) Novakovich, Josip. Fiction Writer’s Workshop. Story Press. 1995.
(3) “The Philosophy of Plot”. James N Frey. The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing. Writer’s Digest Book. 2002