A Few Thoughts about Plot

I'm getting together lesson plans for two courses on fiction writing I'm teaching this fall, and right now I'm thinking hard about "plot." Various writers have grappled with this term and tried to pin it down. I've always liked E. M. Forster's summation, which goes roughly: The king died and then the queen died--that's a story. The king died and then the queen died of grief--that's a plot.

One important distinction I think is important to make between plot and action is that action is a more rambling list of events that happen in a story, while plot is a succinct summation of what's important. Here's a quick mini-test to see how comfortable you are with the notion of plot. How do you typically answer the question, "What did you do yesterday?" If you're like me, you start from the second the alarm goes off, describe the way the window shade snaps up, linger over the bowl of cereal in the kitchen, until the person you're talking to screams, "Get to the point!" To which I always say, "But I want you to get the feeling of what my day was like!"

The trouble with plot for writers is that the activity of writing a story is all about these little details. You're spending most of your time mired in bits and details that you're trying to make vivid for the reader. But there's nothing more boring than listening to a writer trying to answer the question, "What's your book about?" if he or she hasn't prepared a twenty-five word or less standard description of it.

When people first asked me about the novel I'm writing now, I used to say, "Well, it's about this young woman who moves to Berlin with her new husband to get away from her old life, but then she finds the new one isn't all that she'd hoped for either, and the marriage isn't going that well, and she wants to have a baby, but she and her husband are having bedroom trouble, and then one day she meets this Russian immigrant by chance and forms a bond with him, and then she's..." By which point, my conversational partner's eyes have thoroughly glazed over.

These days I've learned to say, "It's about a love triangle set in contemporary Berlin." If I'm feeling frisky, I might add," involving a married couple from America and a Russian immigrant."

Now that's plot.