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April 22, 2004

story is to plot as apple is to

Maybe not quite banana.

There is a simple way to think about the relationship of story to plot. Here it is:

story is what happened; plot is the artful rearrangement of what happened

You can make a chronological list of the things that happened to somebody in the course of a normal life, and make it sound no more interesting than the community events page in the newpaper:

Emma Lawrence is born on a cold December morning.
When she is three, her younger brother Michael is born.
She attends West Side Elementary where she is praised for her meticulous, careful ways.
When she is seven, her brother dies of leukemia.
She attends West Side High School, and then the state university where she gets a degree in nursing.
She goes to work on a pediatric oncology unit, where she is known as a meticulous, careful, thoughtful care provider who is loved by the sick kids, but who never manages to make a connection to the parents.
She marries a pediatrician she works with, has two kids of her own.
Her infant daughter is diagnosed with leukemia.
On a cold December morning, Emma leaves home to take her daughter to the hospital for a chemotherapy treatment.
On the way there she makes a sharp turn, sails through the safety rail and over a cliff, and into the ocean.

Okay, so. Not a happy ending, but I'm making a point here.

You can tell this story just like this, moving through Emma's life from day to day, or you can sit down and think about where to start. The possibilities are almost endless. You can start at her funeral, on the morning her second child is born, the day she starts menstruation, with the spelling test she takes the week after her brother's funeral and the fact that she is the only second grader in the school and the city who can spell the word intravenous. From there you can jump anywhere. But why? Why not just tell the story in chronological order?

Sometimes you can do that, but often it doesn't work. Moving back and forth in time, across perspectives and points of view lends a certain kind of dramatic tension that keeps the reader engaged and turning the page. The reader is looking for a reason to keep reading, you know. The reader wants to be swept away, enchanted, engrossed, absolutely mezmerized, but most readers don't have the patience for long build ups. They want some hint, pretty darn quick, about what kind of story this is, what kind of conflicts are going to be moving things along, and what the payoff will be.

Plotting is the arrangement of elements of a story into a dramatically effective whole. This is not the only definition of plot, of course, but it's most generally what people mean when they are talking about the writing process.

April 22, 2004 08:48 AM

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Comments

again... an iNTeRESTiNG thought..

now, i can understand more why some works, are just more difficult to read, when they GET TOO, bogged down in DeTAiLs.. and i LOVE DeTAiLS!

You have to keep the FLOW going... once iT STOPs... you LOOSe the ReADeR's iNTeREST...

Posted by: joanna at April 23, 2004 01:46 PM

again... an iNTeRESTiNG thought..

Now, i can understand more why some works, are just more difficult to read, when they GET TOO, bogged down in DeTAiLs.. and i DO LOVE DeTAiLS!

You have to keep the FLOW going... once iT STOPs... you LOOSe the ReADeR's iNTeREST...

Posted by: joanna at April 23, 2004 01:48 PM