I'm enjoying this series! Plot has always felt like the most challenging thing for me to get right on a story. As a result, I've read a LOT of books about plotting.
I agree with you strongly that I prefer principles/vibes than concrete "And then this must happen on page 13, and this happens at the 38% mark, and then this at..." I can't do that. It's not how my brain works, but more power to the people whose brains do work that way.
I debated commenting this on the last post, and decided against this, but I will do so now: My favorite ever resource on plotting is Brandon Sanderson's lectures about plot. They changed the way I thought about story, and changed the way I approached writing and revising my own work.
I've gotten the vibe that you are maybe not the biggest Sanderson fan (that's fine!), but I do think you are saying some similar things about plot here. I don't agree with all of what he says, but some of his ideas of promises, progress, and payoffs seem like they're aligning with what you are saying. So I would recommend them to you (which I'm sure has been done a million times, people online love recommending those lectures) and to anyone who wants to deepen their own understanding of plot, and how it works.
The thing I love about writing advice is that I generally speaking learn something about my process by taking it in. If I agree with something, it furthers my understanding. If I disagree, it makes me think about why, and what I'm doing in my own practice that is counter to whatever is being said. That being said, it's also nice to read your craft posts in particular, where I find myself nodding along and agreeing and thinking deeply, and just having a good time. I'm practicing saying when I'm enjoying something online, since it is so easy to only speak up when we disagree with something. Wanted to start here! Thanks for all your work that you put into Counter Craft!
Thank you! Sanderson's mode of fantasy, with "magic as science" worldbuilding is not my personal cup of tea normally but I totally understand the point of it from having read some of his essays. Using magic to set the stakes of the plot, etc. Makes sense. I just like the idea of magic as being magical and surreal. But, I've never read a Sanderson novel so have no real opinion there! And I might find myself loving his magic systems when I get to him.
One-upping Wendy's comment here. For Sanderson, I would focus less on his magic systems, and more on his "Promise > Progress > Payoff" principle (link below), which explains almost every successful story, no matter the plot type. It sits at a level above Vonnegut's shape of stories.
If you are allergic to prescriptive advice or notice how many great stories defy basic formula, it's one of the most useful frameworks for plotting.
Shockingly, I agree with you aha. I prefer a soft magic system, and Sanderson's rules are extensive. But I think that, while ofc you can't ignore the magic system entirely, as it's part of the story, his lessons on plotting in particular are super enjoyable.
As I encounter this I keep thinking that with the advent of the screen, the viewer ( vs. reader) has become more calibrated into the mix to affect plot, as sculpted to media, pasteurizing it in relation to story. definitely makes me wonder how news is being forced into this mix and churned as well.
Plot is change! But this change can be remarkably subtle. You might bring your characters back to the place they started, but something about them is not the same. And the person who travels most in your story is the reader - the change may not be for the characters, it may be for them. Loved this discussion by @Lincoln Michel
Great post. Love that scene from Adaptation. I did a whole post on it, that movie is a nice example about how a story can get readers to care about anything, even subtle questions about what stories even are and what makes for good art.
Thanks for this! Many of those up and down moments especially in the beginning are where all those secondary characters can come into play and where the land mines for later are set. McKee and his faithful are one of the biggest reasons I walked away from screenwriting. I believe his pedantic rules which became gospel are the reason all American films began to look and and sound exactly the same.
yeah his book gets far too prescriptive for me. Though I like the story value idea and the idea that each scene should be giving us SOME movement. The Brian Cox scene in Adaptation is perfect.
Some folks in my book club described John Crowley's Little, Big, as plotless. I think this is wrong - it has more to do with their expectations of what a fantasy novel is. Plenty happens in the book, it just isn't what fantasy readers are used to.
Michael Chabon has mentioned being a huge Crowley fan, and that makes sense. Crowley's work is in a lot of ways a precursor to Chabon, Lethem, and their ilk.
Great informative piece and really helpful. I always saw the distinction between plot and story as terms of how to organize and explain the basics of it. Plot always seems like is can translate into an outline breaking down chapters and segments while story is more about a summary of a story that can fit into three paragraphs or less (what gets used for the synopsis). But it always seems to vary on what kind of novel is a person writing and what tools work best to articulate their tale.
Thank you! And yeah I think we can separate them. We perhaps could use a third term here since people also use “story” to mean the totality or the execution of the work, including e.g. the style it is written in.
A fascinating look into the concept! The bit about cause-&-effect made me think of Samuel R. Delany's seminal essay "About 5,750 Words," and the distinction he draws between what he calls "adventure fiction" and "psychological fiction" (roughly analogous to how the terms "genre fiction" and "literary/plotless fiction" are used today). It seems to me that the distinction between the litfic/plotless novel and the action-adventure yarn is not a lack of cause-&-effect in the former, so much as a difference in what is motivating it.
After all, our disconsolate Brooklynite will still have their beautifully sad, byzantine thoughts in response to specific things said in one particular bar over another, or in reaction to one listless, unsatisfying lover as opposed to another, so there still is cause-&-effect in the logical, literal sense. But while events proceed in time as a reaction to past events, we can conceive of a way they could have happened regardless----past events "cause" future ones, but without being their impetus, meaning they don't signify in the way cause-&-effect does in a "plot-first" story.
To try and rephrase in a more clear way: we could say that in "plotless" fiction, events occur in logical sequence with causality, but nothing happens SO THAT a new thing can happen, the events serve as their own justification. Whereas in a plot-heavy story, certain events do in fact happen SO THAT other specific events can then proceed, the events subordinated to what they signify in the context of the overarching plot.
Of course this is just me cribbing from Delany, whose work always has new things to teach you upon returning to it! :)
As always, I appreciate that you use many disclaimers and give nuances and counterexamples to advice! While I was an English major, the bulk of my reading outside of school was commercial /genre fiction, so there are some things I took for granted (well, I'm vaguely aware of some plotless stories, such as Samuel Beckett's. But I'm far from a connoisseur of these nontraditional story structures!) It was helpful to read the examples you described, where you enjoyed the story even if there wasn't a "plot" (at least not in the traditional sense of the term).
For me, I always worry about boring the reader. So I might be moving too fast, doing too much oscillation. I'm still trying to strike a better balance, of giving the story enough forward movement (and oscillations) to captivate readers, while not going overboard that readers get tired out because I don't give them any breaks...Maybe it's a lack of confidence that I can write a relatively calm, low tension scene without losing the reader's attention.
Every writer should do what works for them, and I have a larger theory that most writers tend to be motivated by different elements of story that sort of "drive" the rest of the story. Some by character, others by setting or voice, etc. Letting different elements drive the story produces different types of stories.
That said, I don't think the idea of story value movement has to be about prescribing a pattern on a character or not letting the character lead.
We get to decide the external events that happen to a character and it's often interesting to throw external events at a character that challenge them to act differently or react to unusual events. If character A is, e.g., hyper competent at their job, seeing how they react to failure beyond their control (or a rival upstart character B who is just as talented). And then there is simply the structure of the book. If a character succeeds at their job 364 days of the year but has one big failure, you can choose to center that failure in the narrative.
Sort of that "why this day?" question about where to start a story and why you often want to start on the day where things are different. Similar principle can apply to each unit (like book chapters or movie scenes) of the story.
As you said, every writer has their own methodology. It's just that all these "formulas" for writing seem to work best if a writer doesn't have a story in them at all -- much less characters who are communicating that story to them. Formulas and technique works best for someone who has decided they "want to be a writer" and is trying to figure out how that's done but fundamentally doesn't have anything to say. People who have stories inside them and characters screaming to be heard, really can't stop to see if the story fits a certain pattern or if it fulfils "desired" criteria.
I write historical fiction and history provides the plot, while many of the characters are historical figures with biographies that I can't warp to match the "ideal" pattern of a novel. On the other hand, we know about them precisely because they were interesting or important or did something unusual or impressive in one field or another. Even my fictional characters, as I noted in my original comment, are strong personalities who know exactly how they respond to the events they are "living" through.
Yeah I think writers are very different in these ways. Many of my favorite novelists don’t think about characters in the way you descrbie, though I totally respect authors who do think of characters as voices who demand their stories be told. But many great writers imo think about other aspects, like ideas and themes, primarily and the characters are generated out of that rather than the characters generating the plot and themes. I don't think one mindset is more legitimate or more having something to say. Having ideas and themes bouncing around your brain is just as valid as having characters doing so (or plots or "voice" or whatever might inspire you).
Cent 1. Story, as I define it, are the chronological events of a work. Narrative is how they are related. For example, in a mystery, the story is generally a person has a reason for killing someone, kills them, then tried to escape. The narrative is generally that of the detective trying to determine what the elements of that story are.
Cent 2. I think a good example of oscillation, if I understand you, is Clancy's THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER. A lame book has chapters that starts at rest, or zero, makes the action rise to ten, then resolves things back to zero. There's no reason to keep reading on. Early Clancy is so thrilling to read because he starts each chapter at 10, resolves it back to zero, then ramps again and leaves the reader cliffhanging at another 10. You have to keep reading to see what happens. Sidney Sheldon did the same thing, alternating between three different plotlines. Later Clancy is just heavy and impenetrable.
That said, plotting was best described by Peter Jackson in the commentary on Lord of the Rings. He was able to adapt the books by applying a simple rule: If it doesn't get the ring to Mordor, then it doesn't go in the movies. Which of course makes the movies all about the ring, whereas the books are all about the fellowship.
> 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.
I think it's arguable that even sequences of thoughts can be understood as plot elements.
> Why have five scenes in a row where nothing is changing?
Do all events have to have immediate consequences? It might be the events depicted in those scenes are building up to set of events where the relationship collapses? What do scenes have to do with a discussion of plot, anyway, given that plot events don't necessarily correspond with scenes? Although I guess you could call this just a terminological dispute...
I think it can, sure. But I think overly expansive definitions loose coherency. I've had arguments with people who said you can't say any work lacks characters because anything can be called a character. At that point, what are we even saying though?
You're right about scenes. McKee uses scenes as the primary unit because they tend to be in film, so I was referencing him. In fiction, the unit you are looking at will really depend on the work. Maybe it's chapters. Or if it's a book of super short chapters, maybe it is series of chapters.
I also think you're right to say someone could use five repetitive scenes intentionally to create specific effects. Anything can be done. But, when an emerging or student writer is looking at their work and thinking "why does this part feel flat? How do I make it feel more dynamic?" then answer might be adding this kind of movement. In general, I find most writing questions come down to whether someone is doing something with intention or simply not thinking about that element of the work. Are you writing several chapters that don't move because you want to or because you just were just focused on other questions (style, clever ideas, whatever) and not thinking about the overall structure?
I think it depends on what purpose we're talking about character or plot for—for the purpose of statements of saying "works lack characters" or suchlike, it may make sense to use more limited definitions of plot or character. But when considering how to create plot or characters, adopting a more grand unified definition might be more useful?
> In fiction, the unit you are looking at will really depend on the work.
I was making a distinction between the plot and the way the plot is translated into scenes, chapters, etc. What I meant was that plot events A, B, C, D, E could all not rock the boat too much individually but result in the marriage starting to collapse in event F. You could dedicate a chapter to each event and that would produce the five scenes/chapters where the relationship doesn't change structure, or you could have A, B, C, D, and E in one chapter which wouldn't produce such a structure. Sorry if I'm stating the obvious, I'm just trying to make clear that my objection isn't just to the unit chosen.
> Are you writing several chapters that don't move because you want to or because you just were just focused on other questions (style, clever ideas, whatever) and not thinking about the overall structure?
I mean, in the latter case, would it not feel more natural to treat the flatness as a serendipitous discovery and think about the structure from there?
I'm enjoying this series! Plot has always felt like the most challenging thing for me to get right on a story. As a result, I've read a LOT of books about plotting.
I agree with you strongly that I prefer principles/vibes than concrete "And then this must happen on page 13, and this happens at the 38% mark, and then this at..." I can't do that. It's not how my brain works, but more power to the people whose brains do work that way.
I debated commenting this on the last post, and decided against this, but I will do so now: My favorite ever resource on plotting is Brandon Sanderson's lectures about plot. They changed the way I thought about story, and changed the way I approached writing and revising my own work.
I've gotten the vibe that you are maybe not the biggest Sanderson fan (that's fine!), but I do think you are saying some similar things about plot here. I don't agree with all of what he says, but some of his ideas of promises, progress, and payoffs seem like they're aligning with what you are saying. So I would recommend them to you (which I'm sure has been done a million times, people online love recommending those lectures) and to anyone who wants to deepen their own understanding of plot, and how it works.
The thing I love about writing advice is that I generally speaking learn something about my process by taking it in. If I agree with something, it furthers my understanding. If I disagree, it makes me think about why, and what I'm doing in my own practice that is counter to whatever is being said. That being said, it's also nice to read your craft posts in particular, where I find myself nodding along and agreeing and thinking deeply, and just having a good time. I'm practicing saying when I'm enjoying something online, since it is so easy to only speak up when we disagree with something. Wanted to start here! Thanks for all your work that you put into Counter Craft!
Thank you! Sanderson's mode of fantasy, with "magic as science" worldbuilding is not my personal cup of tea normally but I totally understand the point of it from having read some of his essays. Using magic to set the stakes of the plot, etc. Makes sense. I just like the idea of magic as being magical and surreal. But, I've never read a Sanderson novel so have no real opinion there! And I might find myself loving his magic systems when I get to him.
One-upping Wendy's comment here. For Sanderson, I would focus less on his magic systems, and more on his "Promise > Progress > Payoff" principle (link below), which explains almost every successful story, no matter the plot type. It sits at a level above Vonnegut's shape of stories.
If you are allergic to prescriptive advice or notice how many great stories defy basic formula, it's one of the most useful frameworks for plotting.
(very helpful article btw, Lincoln - thank you)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihd76ijy9LU&t=235s
Shockingly, I agree with you aha. I prefer a soft magic system, and Sanderson's rules are extensive. But I think that, while ofc you can't ignore the magic system entirely, as it's part of the story, his lessons on plotting in particular are super enjoyable.
Gosh. Thank you. So helpful.
As I encounter this I keep thinking that with the advent of the screen, the viewer ( vs. reader) has become more calibrated into the mix to affect plot, as sculpted to media, pasteurizing it in relation to story. definitely makes me wonder how news is being forced into this mix and churned as well.
Plot is change! But this change can be remarkably subtle. You might bring your characters back to the place they started, but something about them is not the same. And the person who travels most in your story is the reader - the change may not be for the characters, it may be for them. Loved this discussion by @Lincoln Michel
Great post. Love that scene from Adaptation. I did a whole post on it, that movie is a nice example about how a story can get readers to care about anything, even subtle questions about what stories even are and what makes for good art.
https://craftywriting.substack.com/p/the-best-scene-from-charlie-kaufmans
The spoiler redacted part cracked me up!
Thanks for this! Many of those up and down moments especially in the beginning are where all those secondary characters can come into play and where the land mines for later are set. McKee and his faithful are one of the biggest reasons I walked away from screenwriting. I believe his pedantic rules which became gospel are the reason all American films began to look and and sound exactly the same.
yeah his book gets far too prescriptive for me. Though I like the story value idea and the idea that each scene should be giving us SOME movement. The Brian Cox scene in Adaptation is perfect.
Some folks in my book club described John Crowley's Little, Big, as plotless. I think this is wrong - it has more to do with their expectations of what a fantasy novel is. Plenty happens in the book, it just isn't what fantasy readers are used to.
Michael Chabon has mentioned being a huge Crowley fan, and that makes sense. Crowley's work is in a lot of ways a precursor to Chabon, Lethem, and their ilk.
Great informative piece and really helpful. I always saw the distinction between plot and story as terms of how to organize and explain the basics of it. Plot always seems like is can translate into an outline breaking down chapters and segments while story is more about a summary of a story that can fit into three paragraphs or less (what gets used for the synopsis). But it always seems to vary on what kind of novel is a person writing and what tools work best to articulate their tale.
Thank you! And yeah I think we can separate them. We perhaps could use a third term here since people also use “story” to mean the totality or the execution of the work, including e.g. the style it is written in.
Definitely speaking my language. Prescriptive writing advice is the worst, but that doesn't mean there aren't signposts.
A fascinating look into the concept! The bit about cause-&-effect made me think of Samuel R. Delany's seminal essay "About 5,750 Words," and the distinction he draws between what he calls "adventure fiction" and "psychological fiction" (roughly analogous to how the terms "genre fiction" and "literary/plotless fiction" are used today). It seems to me that the distinction between the litfic/plotless novel and the action-adventure yarn is not a lack of cause-&-effect in the former, so much as a difference in what is motivating it.
After all, our disconsolate Brooklynite will still have their beautifully sad, byzantine thoughts in response to specific things said in one particular bar over another, or in reaction to one listless, unsatisfying lover as opposed to another, so there still is cause-&-effect in the logical, literal sense. But while events proceed in time as a reaction to past events, we can conceive of a way they could have happened regardless----past events "cause" future ones, but without being their impetus, meaning they don't signify in the way cause-&-effect does in a "plot-first" story.
To try and rephrase in a more clear way: we could say that in "plotless" fiction, events occur in logical sequence with causality, but nothing happens SO THAT a new thing can happen, the events serve as their own justification. Whereas in a plot-heavy story, certain events do in fact happen SO THAT other specific events can then proceed, the events subordinated to what they signify in the context of the overarching plot.
Of course this is just me cribbing from Delany, whose work always has new things to teach you upon returning to it! :)
As always, I appreciate that you use many disclaimers and give nuances and counterexamples to advice! While I was an English major, the bulk of my reading outside of school was commercial /genre fiction, so there are some things I took for granted (well, I'm vaguely aware of some plotless stories, such as Samuel Beckett's. But I'm far from a connoisseur of these nontraditional story structures!) It was helpful to read the examples you described, where you enjoyed the story even if there wasn't a "plot" (at least not in the traditional sense of the term).
For me, I always worry about boring the reader. So I might be moving too fast, doing too much oscillation. I'm still trying to strike a better balance, of giving the story enough forward movement (and oscillations) to captivate readers, while not going overboard that readers get tired out because I don't give them any breaks...Maybe it's a lack of confidence that I can write a relatively calm, low tension scene without losing the reader's attention.
Any character who lets me tell them to move up or down to follow a prescribed pattern isn't strong enough to deserve a book.
Every writer should do what works for them, and I have a larger theory that most writers tend to be motivated by different elements of story that sort of "drive" the rest of the story. Some by character, others by setting or voice, etc. Letting different elements drive the story produces different types of stories.
That said, I don't think the idea of story value movement has to be about prescribing a pattern on a character or not letting the character lead.
We get to decide the external events that happen to a character and it's often interesting to throw external events at a character that challenge them to act differently or react to unusual events. If character A is, e.g., hyper competent at their job, seeing how they react to failure beyond their control (or a rival upstart character B who is just as talented). And then there is simply the structure of the book. If a character succeeds at their job 364 days of the year but has one big failure, you can choose to center that failure in the narrative.
Sort of that "why this day?" question about where to start a story and why you often want to start on the day where things are different. Similar principle can apply to each unit (like book chapters or movie scenes) of the story.
As you said, every writer has their own methodology. It's just that all these "formulas" for writing seem to work best if a writer doesn't have a story in them at all -- much less characters who are communicating that story to them. Formulas and technique works best for someone who has decided they "want to be a writer" and is trying to figure out how that's done but fundamentally doesn't have anything to say. People who have stories inside them and characters screaming to be heard, really can't stop to see if the story fits a certain pattern or if it fulfils "desired" criteria.
I write historical fiction and history provides the plot, while many of the characters are historical figures with biographies that I can't warp to match the "ideal" pattern of a novel. On the other hand, we know about them precisely because they were interesting or important or did something unusual or impressive in one field or another. Even my fictional characters, as I noted in my original comment, are strong personalities who know exactly how they respond to the events they are "living" through.
But that's just me.
Yeah I think writers are very different in these ways. Many of my favorite novelists don’t think about characters in the way you descrbie, though I totally respect authors who do think of characters as voices who demand their stories be told. But many great writers imo think about other aspects, like ideas and themes, primarily and the characters are generated out of that rather than the characters generating the plot and themes. I don't think one mindset is more legitimate or more having something to say. Having ideas and themes bouncing around your brain is just as valid as having characters doing so (or plots or "voice" or whatever might inspire you).
To each their own, basically.
My two cents.
Cent 1. Story, as I define it, are the chronological events of a work. Narrative is how they are related. For example, in a mystery, the story is generally a person has a reason for killing someone, kills them, then tried to escape. The narrative is generally that of the detective trying to determine what the elements of that story are.
Cent 2. I think a good example of oscillation, if I understand you, is Clancy's THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER. A lame book has chapters that starts at rest, or zero, makes the action rise to ten, then resolves things back to zero. There's no reason to keep reading on. Early Clancy is so thrilling to read because he starts each chapter at 10, resolves it back to zero, then ramps again and leaves the reader cliffhanging at another 10. You have to keep reading to see what happens. Sidney Sheldon did the same thing, alternating between three different plotlines. Later Clancy is just heavy and impenetrable.
That said, plotting was best described by Peter Jackson in the commentary on Lord of the Rings. He was able to adapt the books by applying a simple rule: If it doesn't get the ring to Mordor, then it doesn't go in the movies. Which of course makes the movies all about the ring, whereas the books are all about the fellowship.
> 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.
I think it's arguable that even sequences of thoughts can be understood as plot elements.
> Why have five scenes in a row where nothing is changing?
Do all events have to have immediate consequences? It might be the events depicted in those scenes are building up to set of events where the relationship collapses? What do scenes have to do with a discussion of plot, anyway, given that plot events don't necessarily correspond with scenes? Although I guess you could call this just a terminological dispute...
I think it can, sure. But I think overly expansive definitions loose coherency. I've had arguments with people who said you can't say any work lacks characters because anything can be called a character. At that point, what are we even saying though?
You're right about scenes. McKee uses scenes as the primary unit because they tend to be in film, so I was referencing him. In fiction, the unit you are looking at will really depend on the work. Maybe it's chapters. Or if it's a book of super short chapters, maybe it is series of chapters.
I also think you're right to say someone could use five repetitive scenes intentionally to create specific effects. Anything can be done. But, when an emerging or student writer is looking at their work and thinking "why does this part feel flat? How do I make it feel more dynamic?" then answer might be adding this kind of movement. In general, I find most writing questions come down to whether someone is doing something with intention or simply not thinking about that element of the work. Are you writing several chapters that don't move because you want to or because you just were just focused on other questions (style, clever ideas, whatever) and not thinking about the overall structure?
> At that point, what are we even saying though?
I think it depends on what purpose we're talking about character or plot for—for the purpose of statements of saying "works lack characters" or suchlike, it may make sense to use more limited definitions of plot or character. But when considering how to create plot or characters, adopting a more grand unified definition might be more useful?
> In fiction, the unit you are looking at will really depend on the work.
I was making a distinction between the plot and the way the plot is translated into scenes, chapters, etc. What I meant was that plot events A, B, C, D, E could all not rock the boat too much individually but result in the marriage starting to collapse in event F. You could dedicate a chapter to each event and that would produce the five scenes/chapters where the relationship doesn't change structure, or you could have A, B, C, D, and E in one chapter which wouldn't produce such a structure. Sorry if I'm stating the obvious, I'm just trying to make clear that my objection isn't just to the unit chosen.
> Are you writing several chapters that don't move because you want to or because you just were just focused on other questions (style, clever ideas, whatever) and not thinking about the overall structure?
I mean, in the latter case, would it not feel more natural to treat the flatness as a serendipitous discovery and think about the structure from there?