What is a Plot?

What makes a good novel? Many might say a good plot. But what is a plot? How do you know if you have a plot that can sustain a whole novel? Are there rules for plotting?

The answers to the above questions, as with so many issues involving fiction, depend largely on you and your own writing process, as well as the nature of your project. When I speak of "plot" here, I'm not talking about the outline of a story so much as of the elements that are necessary to make that outline an actual story.

In "Writing the Novel," a course I've taught off and on for seven years, I've discovered that many students, including several who have written professionally, don't have a clue about what a novel is. What they plan as a novel is actually a long short story, or a memoir, a fictionalized article or even a long series of disconnected scenes. This confusion is so widespread that I long ago broke the class into two segments: structure and narrative. In the semester devoted to structure, we focus on the main plot elements, which can generally be found through the answers to the following five questions:

The premise of the novel is the starting point through which the other elements interact to make a coherent plot. For example, what if a spider could write words in her web (Charlotte's Web)? What if a rapacious old man was murdered by one of his four sons, each of whom had good reasons for wanting him dead (The Brothers Karamazov)? Although each of these books incorporates far more themes than those suggested by the original what if, the nucleus of nearly every novel, great and not-so-great, can be traced to a provocative, well-answered "what if."

Science fiction and mystery writer Hayford Peirce describes the genesis of his novel The Gauguin Murders as the sudden appearance of an idea: "Suppose there's a lost Gauguin in Tahiti? Then what?" Although it took him ten years to work out the actual mechanics of the plot, this basic what if question provided the framework within which he developed a successful mystery adventure.

The "what if" needn't, of course, be expressed in the form of a question. ASJA member Claire Tristram, whose first novel, After, was recently published by the prestigious house Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, uses her premise to keep her on track as she writes. The premise for After was "A woman whose husband was murdered by Muslim extremists decides to become the lover of a married Muslim man." The following two sentences tell what happens next: "In spite of their good intentions their love-making escalates into unexpected violence. It ends badly."

This method of plotting, according to Tristram, "left a lot of room for spontaneous creative urges. But having the 3-sentence synopsis kept me from turning it into a soppy love story or some other book that I didn't want to write."

No matter how good your premise, it is only the starting point for a plot. In fact, any given premise can generate a multitude of different stories or novels. Think of Claire's novel and how very different it might have been with two different sentences following the premise.

I'm sure you recognize this premise: "What if a girl entered a topsy-turvy fantasy world through a mirror?" It is the starting point for Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. It is also the starting point for my own young-adult novel (written under the name Lynn Beach) Stranger in the Mirror. In my much less sublime novel, the main characters are identical twins, one of whom steps through a magical antique mirror into a perilous world of the past. Instead of focusing on the adventures in Wonderland, as Carroll's novel did, mine focused largely on the efforts of the present-day twin to rescue her sister from the mirror world.

In building a plot, all of the elements are essential, but some are more so than others. Next time we'll take a look at what many if not most writers would agree is the most important of the elements: character.

In the meantime, I leave you with my favorite quote from E.M. Forster on the difference between premise (which he calls story) and plot: "The king died and the queen died is a story. The king died and then the queen died of grief is a plot."