The Principles of Plotting Part II: Oscillation

The second entry in a series on figuring out plot and applying it to your fiction

From The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard circa 1767–68

What Are the Principles of Plotting?

In January, I started a series on what I’m calling “the principles of plotting” and then got a little sidetracked. Sorry for the delay, but I’m back with Part Two today. I’d encourage you to read Part One first. But I’ll summarize Part One briefly. There is a tendency in some corners of the literary world to mock the idea of plot or even to call it “fascist.” And even when plot isn’t looked down upon, it is often simply overlooked. Lessons in plot are rare in an undergraduate creative writing class or an MFA workshop. I ended up having to teach myself plot before I could publish my first novel, The Body Scout, which was a somewhat surreal science fiction novel with a noirish plot at the core.

I think plotting is a narrative element like any other. It isn’t necessary to have a good plot in a story. Some great works resist plot and even would be ruined by plot. I think the same is true of any other element. Invisible Cities would not be improved by round characters with defined arcs. Fairy tales would fall apart with detailed worldbuilding. The Mezzanine does not need more present action scenes. Etc. At the same time, great plotting is as difficult to pull off as memorable characters, unique worldbuilding, strong voice, or anything else. It is a skill worth learning.

When I taught myself plot, I read more than a few essays and craft books with extremely prescriptive advice. The screenwriting craft books are especially prescriptive, often mapping plot beats down to the specific page numbers. I’m always allergic to that. I’m excited by the infinite possibilities of fiction and far more interested in different ways to think about structure, character, style, or any other element than I am in learning what one person claims is the “right way” to do them. Thus, my series here is an attempt to come up with principles not rules. Or as I said in Part One:

I try to synthesize all of the above. To balance the extreme prescriptivism of Hollywood guides or Hero’s Journey-type maps with the freeing yet vague advice of the literary world. For me, this takes the shape of what I’ll call story principles. Principles are not rules. They are not saying X must happen between beats Y and Z. And principles are flexible, applying to a wide variety of stories across styles and genres (though never, of course, covering everything). But principles also give you something more tangible to think about than “find your voice,” which may leave most writers shrugging their shoulders instead.

My “Principles of Plotting” don’t apply 100% to all texts, nor would I want them to. I said the possibilities of fiction were infinite, didn’t I? But I think they apply to most kinds of stories regardless of genre or style.

Part One focused on Escalation, and the idea that plots are powered by escalation. Stakes get bigger, things get worse or better, and we hurtle upwards towards some conclusion. The escalation can take many forms. A superhero may fight ever stronger enemies while a Kafkaesque character may sink ever more into hopelessness. In a haunted house novel the poltergeist might become ever more threatening while a domestic realist story may show the marriage increasingly fracturing until it falls apart. The point is the principle can apply to many types of fiction from experimental to highly formulaic works. Anyway, go read Part One if you want to read more about Escalation.

Why "Plot" Isn't a Four-Letter Word

Part Two is going to focus on a complicating principle that I’m calling Oscillation. Briefly, this is that while you typically want a sense of overall escalation you simultaneously need a sense of up and down or back and forth movement. These two seemingly contradictory principles are the most essential parts of plot from my point of view. The trick is combining them.

However, I realize there is something I should explain before I get to Oscillation….

What Even Is Plot?

In my first entry, I took a jab at writers who mock plot while celebrating similar concepts like “story” without defining the difference. Embarrassingly, I didn’t really define plot myself. I edited the article to add a definition, but I’ll repeat it here now.

For the purposes of this series, I’m defining plot in more or less the usual way. Plot is “what happens?” or more specifically the cause-and-effect sequence of events that explain what happened as well as how and why.¹ Story, in the sources I read, is defined in two opposing ways. Either people say story is the simpler version of plot (essentially the gist of the story as summarized in a sentence or two) or else as the entirety of the work factoring in all elements like style and themes. I’ll use story to mean the latter.

I will take a somewhat more expansive view of plot than others in that I’d include the character’s interiority as it relates to the cause-and-effect events. Plot arcs and character arcs are typically entwined. This is true of a formulaic action film (the hero learns to believe in herself before she can defeat the big supervillain²) as well as a canonical literary work (Captain Ahab gets increasingly monomaniacal before leading the Pequod to [spoiler redacted]). If the plot involves the how and why, then I think we can group internal character events with the external world events when describing the plot.

To take a classic example, Kate Chopin’s short short “The Story of an Hour” has basically three external events. A woman with a heart condition hears her husband has died in a train wreck. She locks herself in a room. Then her husband returns—he hadn’t in fact been on the crashed train—and she dies of a heart attack upon seeing him. Much of the story, and I would say the plot, occurs internally when she goes through an entire character arc from sadness to joy realizing that as a widow she will be finally free in a patriarchal society where married women are controlled by their husbands. This internal world arc is connected to the external world arc. She dies not because she’s happy, as Chopin ironically states is the doctor’s diagnosis, but because her new freedom has been snuffed out.

What Even Is “Plotless Fiction”?

So, what is “plotless fiction” then? I think most people call a work plotless if it either has very little events (“nothing happens!”) or else the events are not connected in a cause-and-effect way to create a single story. The cliché of a boring literary fiction novel about a young man/woman wandering around Brooklyn having sad thoughts is plotless not because no events happen. The character probably enters a few bars, maybe has some depressing sex, etc. But the events don’t connect in a cause-and-effect way to create an overall story arc.

Again, though, from my perspective plotless is not a bad thing. Many of my favorite books have minimal to no plots. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which I mentioned above, is composed mostly of descriptions of imagined settings with no real characters or events.³ Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine takes place in the mind of a character riding an escalator from the ground floor to the mezzanine, and the vast majority of the text describes his musings, memories, and digressions about topics like shoelaces and hotdogs. Thomas Bernhard’s novels typically feature a character doing very little in “real time”—perhaps merely sitting in a wing chair at a party—while internally ranting about things they hate. Rachel Cusk’s Outline is a series of conversations that a largely undefined narrator has while attending a writing conference. In all of these works, there is “not much happening” and also minimal to no cause-and-effect relationship built between what does happen. You could reorder the descriptions of cities, the musings about everyday objects, the rants, or the conversations without most readers even noticing much less dramatically altering the books. The same could not be said of, say, a tightly plotted murder mystery.

Plot is at minimum a spectrum. There are books with strong plots and minimal ones. And there are other complications we could throw in. For example, the “episodic plot,” which is often a series of mostly disconnected stories with minimal cause-and-effect relationship between them. Are these plotless? Well, it depends. Episodic plots are a sort of series of mini-plots strung loosely together that may have an overarching plot (e.g., Odysseus returning home to reclaim his throne) or not (e.g., most network TV shows in the pre-prestige TV era) or else be a bit of both (e.g., The X Files mythology storyline interspersed between monster of the week episodes).

Lastly, and obviously—or at least I hope it is obvious—the various elements of any story are entwined. Plot cannot be wholly separated from character, voice, worldbuilding, structure, or anything else. Still, I think we can separate it enough to talk about.

Since I love different models and complicating ideas, I’ll plan to include a series of links to other models and concepts as the series goes on. (For example, Emma Copley Eisenberg is also currently writing an interesting series on plot here on Substack that I recommend reading.)

Principles of Plotting #2: Oscillation

Just as you walk stepping left to right and a bird flies flapping their wings up and down, stories need back and forth movement. You want an overall shape of escalation, yes, but a straight line of escalation is simply boring. We do not want to see the superhero punch a series of stronger bad guys without ever struggling nor do we want to read a detective find all the clues in order without any setbacks. Even if the ultimate ending of a story is inevitable, the trick of fiction is surprising and delighting the reader with the route to get there. Yes, that stoner you knew in college was correct. The journey is the destination, maaan.

One of the simplest versions of a story is this: a character wants something but obstacles get in the way that they have to overcome. In such a story, the protagonist progresses to the climax in a sort of two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back fashion. (In another type of story, it may be a one-step-forward-and-two-steps-back motion into failure.) What these obstacles are varies story by story and they may be internal or external. But this back and forth movement propels the story on its overall escalating course. This is what I’m calling oscillation.

This principle can apply to both formulaic stories and experimental ones. In any superhero movie (or rom-com), the hero is going to face setbacks and struggles on the way to saving the world (or uniting with their true love). But even in a work like Kafka’s The Castle, the protagonist’s futile quest to reach the castle is filled with moments that at least seem to progress him on his goal.

Kurt Vonnegut has a famous “shapes of stories” theory that showcases a version of this up and down movement by using a Y axis of a character’s fortune and an X axis of story time:

(The Kafka joke is funny, but as I argued above his stories do include movement or at least the appearance of movement that shapes the emotional arc of the work.)

Vonnegut’s idea was later mapped out by the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab, which tried to quantify the movement of stories on a happiness to unhappiness scale by counting the ratio of “happy words” (e.g., joy, peace, and love) to “unhappy words” (e.g., terror, death, misery). I have to admit I normally find this kind of data-driven art analysis silly. Indeed this specific study helped produce a lot of silly headlines like “Every Story in the World Has One of These Six Basic Plots” and “There Are Only Six Basic Book Plots, According to Computers.” These claims were both silly and uninteresting. The researchers use this analysis to say stories are composed of “rising” or “falling” and then map stories up to three steps… which only leaves six possible combinations.⁴ But since this is obvious nonsense—many stories have more movement than that—they declare all other stories are “combinations of these six.” Rather than proving anything, this could be summarized as “if we think of stories as having rising and/or falling, then all stories will have some combination of rising and/or falling.” Wow. Brilliant insight, computers.

Okay, rant aside, I did find the analysis a useful visualization of story movement.

Here’s a few famous epics charted together via Lapham’s Quarterly from the same data:

Those graphs are a good demonstration of the up and down movements that propel a story. But they probably aren’t helpful for generating your own plots. A story can be mapped like a stock price. It fluctuates up and down. Okay. How do you achieve that on the page in a productive way?

How Do You Achieve Oscillation on the Page?

First, you may simply want to think about the general shape of your main character’s journey. What is the shape you want? Perhaps thinking of the general shapes Vonnegut drew will give you a sense of overall structure. Maybe you want the character to rise in the first act, then fall low in the second. Is that happening on the page? Read your draft and ask yourself if reordering events and chapters would improve the shape? Are there too many “rising” (or “falling”) events in a row, lending to an undynamic segment of the novel? Or even worse, too many flat chapters where nothing is changing for the character internally or externally?

For more concrete advice, there is an idea in Robert McKee’s famous screenwriting guide Story that I frequently reference in class. If you aren’t familiar with McKee, his book Story is often called things like “the Hollywood screenwriting Bible.” His lectures and advice are famous enough that he was parodied by Brian Cox in Adaptation:

Much of McKee’s advice is a bit too prescriptive for my taste, but there’s one idea related to oscillation I have found very useful and that is his conception of a “story value.” He says all stories should have a story value on which the story moves up and down. McKee says, “story values are the universal qualities of human experience that may shift from positive to negative, or negative to positive, from one moment to the next.” These values are expressed as binaries such as Freedom vs. Oppression, Love vs Loneliness (or Hate), Courage vs. Cowardice, and so on. McKee’s advice is that every scene in a movie (and perhaps every chapter in a novel) should move the character somewhat up or somewhat down this binary.

Take your average rom-com plot. You have a lonely character who wants to find love, so they start low on the axis of “Love vs. Loneliness.” Then they have a meet cute (up the axis), but oh no the cute person is in a relationship (down the axis), yet that other relationship is on the rocks (up the axis)—so on and so forth—until finally the two lovers unite and live happily ever after (way up!). This is the general gist.

As a principle, this can apply to anything you want. A character-driven story may function on an interior value axis (like “courage vs cowardice”) while a superhero action flick might have an external world value axis (“freedom vs oppression”). I think you can easily have multiple values at work. Perhaps most works need both an internal value axis and an external one—the superhero must oscillate up to finally embrace courage in order to win freedom by defeating the invading alien hordes. And you can make your values as strange or experimental as needed. The point, for me if not McKee, isn’t the values but the structure that movement imposes.

From a practical drafting and revision perspective, it is useful to think about your story value(s) and then going scene by scene and asking yourself “is the story value changing?” Map it out. The change could be small or big, but there should be some change. If there isn’t, then your story is stagnant and likely boring. Consider the story of a couple’s marriage disintegrating. If a couple starts a scene in love with no problems and they end in love with no problems, that’s not as interesting as if they start in love and then an issue arises that moves them down the axis. Worst of all is you have several scenes in a row that keep the characters in the same dynamic. It’s flat. Why have five scenes in a row where nothing is changing?⁵ If you need to have many events in a row where little changes—or they are on a steady upwards slope or steady downwards slope—you probably want to introduce some movement. Or else you need to summarize these flat scenes (e.g., with a montage in a film) to get us back to the movement.

This is the gist of oscillation. A plot is propelled by up and down movement. At the same time, my first post argued for an overall trajectory of escalation. These principles are combinable. If you want a metaphor, think of a bird flapping its wings up and down to rise up to the treetop. Or a mountain climber zigzagging up the mountain.

In my first entry, I quibbled with the old Freytag Pyramid model⁶ and suggested that at least for most modern stories an upside down checkmark is a better model than a triangle. This diagram from Janet Burrow that I included illustrates the dual principles of escalation and oscillation.

I’ll end with that and be back—in the not too distant future—with some other plot principles.

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My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

1. For the pedantic, yes, when and where also factor in.

2. A specific example: Luke must embrace the force and thus his destiny in Star Wars, and doing so is what allows him to destroy the Death Star. The character arc and plot arc work together.

3. Between those sections, Kublai Khan and Marco Polo have poetic and philosophical conversations, but they are also essentially plotless and the characters are mere avatars for Calvino’s musings rather than traditional characters with internal arcs.

4. 1) Just up, 2) just down, 3) up then down, 4) down then up, 5) up then down then up, 6) down then up then down. And then 7-∞ are combinations of 1-6.

5. As always, there are exceptions. Some experimental works may want to be flat. These principles apply generally but not universally.

6. Itself a disservice to the actual scholarship of poor Freytag.