It’s hard to explain—especially in light of the traditional instruction in English classes about the way stories work—especially how novels work. Dunno how often somebody’s asked me to discuss plot—and I just groan, because I’m not sure there is such a beast, at least of the color, size, coat-texture and conformation described in English class. It’s what hung me up in my course of learning how to write for about two years.
WHAT happens in a book is sort of important. WHO happens in a book and how their minds work is more so. WHEN the WHAT happens is way, way, way down the list. So the traditional book report in which Johnny gets up and recites the sequence of events in the book (besides being boring) is probably the most irrelevant thing about the book. It’s only the thing the writer decided at the last moment.
Think of it as a fireworks show. You’ve got certain triggers that are going to set off certain colored lights. How you arrange them is, yes, sort of important, but the larger nexi that group the triggers into meaningful sections are sort of mutable: you can pull the whizzbanger type A from collection 3 and put it in 5 with no trouble at all. And sometimes you discover you’ve got one trigger that really needs to be shown-but-not-touched (now we’re talking about novels) and having it set off a nice little set of actions here near the beginning could do that—until it’s REALLY pulled later; but by that time you want to link a bunch of other little fireworks to it, so that multiple things will get solved by one trigger.
That’s plot. I think of it not as anything like a sequence of events, but as a webwork of tension-lines between characters and sets of characters. You pull one—and one yank moves several characters. It’s not events. It’s tensions. Events are cheap. They can be moved all about at will. They can be put in any sort of order. That’s why Johnny’s book report made no more sense to me, who started to write at 10, than the legendary bunny with a pancake on its head. It bugged me. Bigtime. It was describing a very minor thing about the book—and I just had a lot of trouble believing that was what the book was about…to the extent that I’d go into the Dreaded Book Report assignment trying to report on the triggers, not the events, and then I’d get distracted, because there was often something that just didn’t satisfy me about the way the writer had handled the flow of it all, and I was too young at the time to understand what was driving me crazy.
It was realizing all this stuff about sequence just proved to the teacher you’d actually read the book—heck, I was such a brutally truthful kid teacher could have just asked me and saved us some agony; and finally realizing that it was just a list of trivia, so far as its importance in the plot. Map-driven books, like quests, are the simplest, because there really IS a sequence that’s nailed to a map, and it’s pretty straightforward: if you get into trouble with pacing, don’t invent an incident to fill the Great Nothingness Desert—move the mountains three days closer and don’t make the desert so important. IE, change the map, f’ gosh sakes.
Intrigue of any sort is one of the hardest—because there are twists and turns and there IS no map: the territory to be crossed is all in the mind of at least one individual—and if it’s in the minds of half a dozen individuals, you’ve got yourself a big team of horses to manage. If you’ve built them right, they’ll surprise you—but they’ll always be logical. Like the chimp in the test who was handed a pole and a set of big stackable boxes — in a bare room with desirable bananas hanging from the ceiling—said chimp went through no process at all with the boxes, just stood the tall pole on end with a quick thump, shinnied up the pole with balance unlikely in a human, grabbed the bananas and shinnied down, then sat peeling his banana in the wreckage of the scientist’s behavioral experiment on tool use. A good character will do that to you. Several good characters are a three ring circus of such behaviors. They keep writing a fun exercise.
Sequence? Naw. It’s chimpanzees. Lots of chimpanzees. And if your plot isn’t nailed to a map, you can move events all over the place. It’s why I write my ‘plots’ , ie, the anticipated events, on an old calendar—and once I’m finished, you’ll see a lot of X’s where I nixed a thing where I’d thought it would happen, and moved it earlier or later in the whole book.
That’s why writers should not drive in heavy traffic or cook with high temperatures while they’re ‘plotting.’ It’s like 3-dimensional chess, and it makes you just a little zooey.
I know it’s not the point of what you’re talking about, but I thought you’d maybe still find it interesting that an elephant just figured out how to do basically what you described chimps doing, after annoying scientists by not trying to use the stick they provided!
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/08/110819-elephant-eureka-aha-moment-zoo-intelligence-science-plos/
That’s plot. I think of it not as anything like a sequence of events, but as a webwork of tension-lines between characters and sets of characters.
WOW! It is all about the relationship structures. What an insight for a ten-year-old. I never got it, and I’m old enough to retire. Now that you make me think about it, it is obviously true. I guess that’s why you are a writer and I am a reader. It’s a new way to think about a story, for me.
In a way that reminds me of the short version of the Lord of the RIngs in which Gandalf calls up the Eagles and just flies Frodo to Mount Doom.
:=)
I totally agree re: it being about the tensions, but I hadn’t really thought about the moveability (is that a word?) of the actual events as a result. I’m going to have to take a look at my current draft in that light and see what it does for me! Thanks.
I love the way you express things, CJ. As I was reading this I was going “Yesssss”. There is always so much more going on in a book than just the bare facts like “Johnny woke up and went to school and got eaten by a giant lizard.” At the very least, I’d like to know where the lizard came from and why it elected to eat Johnnny instead of somebody else…couldn’t Johnny have run away? and why didn’t somebody… yeesh, I’m caught up in my own made up bit of fluff. 😉
Re moveability… oh heck yeah, I know just what you mean! I wrote a funny fan fic once that had this big battle scene that I came up with early on and kept writing, but as I went along something seemed off. It was the pacing, of course, but I was too close to the material and too inexperienced a writer to see it. I showed what I had to my mother and she put her finger right on that scene and told me to move it to the end. I protested that I had nothing to put there instead and she told me to use my imagination (thanks, mom! hee hee). Anyway, I moved it, gave it a ponder, added a bit more middle, and it worked.
That is probably the best and most concise writing advice I’ve ever seen. The one exception would be Ray Bradbury’s response when asked how he wrote. He said to write something every day; and if you got stuck, to sit and type whatever you were thinking about, some event or subject, whether you got a paragraph, a page, or a story or article. That was how he kept writing, stayed diverse, and avoided writer’s block. He wrote about what interested him, and he came up with ideas, or he described what caught his attention.
Your advice, that stories are basically character driven, suits me fine. To describe plot as a web of tension lines, and events as mutable, repositionable, strikes me as, “Why the blazes didn’t I think of that? It’s a web structure, not a tree or linear outline!” I have always tended to prefer character over plot anyway, and except for acts of nature, that’s how a story is always driven. Even acts of deity are character driven. Natural events are random, but not quite deus ex machina. (I’ll leave dispute over unnatural or supernatural acts to some other discussion. Those are matters of opinion. But they could make for good stories.) (I’m just kidding, the natural versus unnatural versus supernatural just struck me as funny.)
Also, that advice alone is better than several college English or French lectures, as useful as they were on construction and critiquing. I had good profs, too, except for the one who went on a personal vendetta when I was fool enough to say I wanted to be a writer.
4 dimensional chess, I’d say ….. 😀
for those of us who are here because we love your writing this really resonates. There are a fair number of writers whose blogs we do not infest for whom the plot line and not the characters seems primary.
“…infest…”
HAHAHAHA, Kokipy! You have such a wonderful way with words! Thanks to you, “infest” shall be my Word Of The Day tomorrow, and no opportunity shall go by without infesting it with “infest”!
I have recently started reading the foreigner series again – for what – maybe the fifth time, I don’t know … the torturing/testing of Bren had me awake half the night … still works its magic even after 8 years ..
I have to do the same thing…start from book 1. It’s been so long since I read the initial books that the newer ones won’t be appreciated as much as if I’d recently read the story line. Too many thousands of books have been read since my last Foreigner book read. But I recently upgraded to all hardcover and have them all arranged in the bookshelves for instant gratification when the time comes.
Did the same for the Chanur series which is still probably my favorite Cherryh read.
you know something bad is going to happen when Jago goes off saying she would never betray him
ooops, is that a spoiler?
Delurking to say I love this bit of insight. 🙂 I’ve written a few things, and I never see it as a chain of “and then, and then, and then…” Well, I sort of do, but it’s in the way you describe. X happens, which causes Character A to do Y, which in turn prompts Character B to react in Z way… It’s all a cascade of sequential *reactions*, not events, defined by each character’s relationship to the others and motivations. And if you want X to happen later or earlier… you can move it. (The problem with that, of course, is X has to be an initial event, not a reaction, or you get a whole new set of problems in shifting everything around it.) Characters of authors who fail to take this into account invariably ring false to me because of this, as if they were puppets on a string instead of people with their own wishes, goals, hopes, dreams. This is also why the “map quest” usually bores me, because it’s very event-driven rather than character-driven. I’m rambling, but I just wanted to say that I really love when writers give us these looks into their mindset of how they approach the craft, because it makes me take a step back and reinterpret how I’ve structured my own writing.
I love this! And I really hadn’t thought about how the plot comes last, but you’re right. I’m sitting here building a complex setting and interesting characters. I know there are things going on. Sometimes I see little snippets of scenes, but I don’t know how everything will fit together and I won’t until I write an outline, which comes last.
And yet I had never really seen the point that it is the last thing I ever truly consider. Maybe that’s because it’s usually the only thing I actually print out. The rest usually stays on the computer for reference.
And no, the outline isn’t set in stone even at that point. Road maps — I know where the story is going and the big points where it will make stops, but I also know there will be side trips and detours because no section of a story is truly clear until you actually get to that point, and sometimes new things just leap up and must be told.
I so love writing.
Things do happen – but the how and why and the who are as important as the action.
Bren has been under fire a number of times – and each time it is a real puzzle to figure out who is shooting at whom. And why they are shooting.
And all of the stories read so well – Does anyone else think some of Ms. Cherryh’s writing is literature?
Well, the way I get ready for a new release is I start reading from the beginning again. I used to do the same with Patrick O’Brian while he was still with us and still writing. No better way !
I love the image of the colored lights, and the web connecting the characters…yes! I’m preparing for NaNoWriMo now, getting some things straight in my head, and this post really has me looking at my story more closely. Wasn’t it Bradbury who said, “figure out what your character wants and then just follow him”? Now I’m starting to understand that!
OT but apropos “Dave’s Whizmatronic Widgulating Calibrational Scribometer” — which I notice that you have converted from pages to words, which I like. I kind of liked in the old “Progress Report” where almost every entry started with a number — the words you had done to date. There might be something in the text to talk about the writing, or to give an idea why it had gone up a lot or was stuck. Or it might be all about ice skating or driving to Dallas. But that number was there.
Now I like having the progress bar. But I liked even more having that number starting every entry. It kept its history. It was easy to see if you were whizzing along on a roll of 2K days, or sick with allergies and getting nowhere, because you just looked back at the previous entry and saw the difference.
Ohhh, I was flabbergasted one time when you wrote up a Dallas trip. You stopped for breakfast one Friday morning, after making an early start, at Whataburger in my home town of Denton, an hour north of Dallas. Right there! I could’ve been there! Had a fish sandwich with you all and the cats! But of course I didn’t know till you got back to Spokane and wrote it up.
Indeed we have stopped in Denton. Well, one of these times maybe I’ll do a convention in Dallas or OKC and we’ll be within driving distance again! If I’d known—hey, we could indeed have done lunch!
At the risk of being left-field, have you read Matthew Reilly’s Seven Ancient Wonders? Opinion?
Haven’t heard of it. Perhaps a little like Richard Halliburton’s travelogues — I loved those, back in the day. He died in a storm on a Chinese junk— He was accused of fictionalizing smoe things, but heck, I didn’t care whether he actually swam in the Taj Mahal reflecting pool. His descriptions and concepts were killer.
Unfortunately not. He does a bit of a Dan Brown on the 7 wonders of the ancient world. I recently read it as my boyfriend thought it was good and I normally quite like some of the conspiracy stuff relating to ancient buildings.
But apart from a really annoying writing style (one review says it simulates the fast paced style of films such as Indiana Jones and Die Hard) and plot holes you could fly the Halicarnassus (main character’s souped up black 747) through, I think one of the main problems I had was that it was written by from a plot outline and doesn’t deviate.
Sitting on my back burner right now, and which might get some writing done this weekend, is a story idea or first draft. I had not plotted much out. Most of my ideas are a group of characters in some scene or crisis, with an idea of their personalities and what’s going on between them. This one, I know has things I want to say, a point. But it sat, both because it’s suited to the Halloween season, and because I felt it was missing something and going off in other directions. It hadn’t jelled enough. This past week, I realized a character or type was missing, and more of the central characters and problem jelled. I still have to work out that background, but now I can make progress again. That’s all character driven. Who they are and what they are drives the choices they can make. Beyond that, it all is likely to change as I write, whether I outline or simply go and write. I am still new enough at writing fiction that I haven’t figured out whether I do best outlining first, which is tedious, but seems better for thinking through the possibilities.
Because if my strange schedule, or lack of one, I don’t know if I can finish by Halloween, or if it will grow beyond a short or novella, but when I have abetted idea, I will let people know. I know better than to start posting a story before it’s completed, though.
For some reason I thought you had something coming out next month so I was browsing Amazon checking when I noticed they had 4 of the Foreigner books available on Kindle. Did you OK that? I wasn’t sure because if so why not all of them? I would rather buy direct from you as you get more money that way.