Lecture 9: Turning Story Into Plot
(The very last lecture I will ever load from Professor James' Hynes' Writing Guidebook for students for good on my account here. —Lumna10.)

As noted earlier in the course, literature is the creation of order out of chaos— the creation of meaning and structure out of reality, which is otherwise meaningless and without structure. We've already seen several ways in which fiction imposes order on chaos: When we evoke a person, a scene, or a situation, we select the details that best get across what we want the reader to see and understand. When we write dialogue, we suggest real speech without actually reproducing it, thus imposing purpose on speech. But perhaps the most obvious way that fiction imposes order on chaos is through the creation of stories and plots, which will be the subject of this and the next five lectures.

Introduction To Plot

Given the prevalence of stories in all human cultures and in our own personal lives, it's easy to think that stories occur naturally in the world, like fruit hanging from a tree, and that all a writer has to do is pluck them. But the reality is more complicated than that.

If literature is the creation of order out of chaos, it follows that all fiction has a structure. Even for narrative works that don't have plots, all fiction can be broken down into a few fundamental components: a situation or context, at least one character, a conflict of some sort, and a resolution to that conflict. All these elements are inextricably linked in every work of fiction, and if you're missing one of them, your narrative won't work.

The initial situation needs to be dramatically productive, that is, it needs to be a situation that will produce a conflict, and the character or characters need to have some sort of relationship to that situation. The conflict can be external to the character, or it can be an internal conflict within the character, and the resolution must resolve that conflict in some believable and dramatically satisfying way, though not necessarily happily or pleasantly.

All fiction must also possess a quality that the writer and teacher John Gardner called "profuence," which he defined as the feeling you have when you're reading a novel or short story that you're getting someplace. Another way to think of this quality is as forward momentum.

Whether it's a highly plotted, complicated story, such as Game of Thrones, or a modernist, plotless masterpiece, such as Mrs. Dalloway, a book or story needs to give the reader a reason to keep turning pages.

Profluence doesn't necessarily mean that a story has a plot per se; there are other reasons besides plot to keep reading. Sometimes, you read to gain a deeper understanding of the central character, as is the case in Anton Chekhov's plotless story "The Kiss." Or you might read simply to inhabit a strange and richly detailed world or to enjoy an author's writing style.

Defining Plot
Although our culture is dominated by the traditional narrative structure, some writers remain uneasy with the idea of plot. John Gardner, in his book The Art of Fiction, called plotting "the hardest job a writer has." E.

M. Forster wrote that a story "can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next. And conversely, it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next." As we'll see, however, creating an engrossing plot is one of the most satisfying things a writer can do and no more arbitrary an act than creating characters.

Think back to the story we concocted in our lecture about the couple at the baseball game whose marriage was on the rocks. We could take that same situation and tell it from any number of different points of view-Sarah's, Brad's, a mutual friend's, even from a godlike, omniscient point of view. We could also play with the order of events, telling the story in a strictly chronological fashion or starting from the moment when Sarah tells Brad she's unhappy, then showing their previous relationship in flashbacks.

Done well, each version of Sarah and Brad's story could be satisfying and meaningful, yet each would be completely different from all the others. Plotting is an incredibly powerful tool, but like any powerful tool, it's difficult to handle. If you don't take enough control over it, your plot will seem loose and formless, with no forward momentum a series of events that has no particular importance or obvious meaning. But if you use narrative too forcefully, you could end up with something melodramatic, mechanical, contrived, and unbelievable.

How do we create stories out of formless events and create an order that seems both satisfying and lifelike? Let's return to Forster again, who clarified this problem by making a distinction between stories and plots.
In a famous passage in Aspects of the Novel, he defines a story as simply a series of events linked by their chronology, but he defines a plot as a series of events linked by cause and effect.

The Story-Plot Continuum
We might think of the same distinction between stories and plots as opposite ends of a continuum, with the most basic, chronological story at one end of the continuum and the most subtle plot at the other.

The simplest and often the most addictive stories are the ones that simply answer the question "And then?" These are the stories we like best as children, the ones that we beg our parents to finish for us because we can't stand not knowing how they turn out. As we get older, the desire to learn the answer to "And then?" never really leaves us. Much of the pleasure we derive from even a mediocre Hollywood blockbuster comes from watching the story unfold one plot point at a time even if the story to predictable.

The fact that children insist on hearing the same story told in exactly the same way reinforces the idea that with a good story, it's not just how it turns out that counts it's how you get there.

Closer to the middle of the continuum between story and plot are such blockbuster series as the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling or the epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, better known in its HBO version as Game of Thrones. The overarching story of each of these series of novels moves relentlessly forward chronologically, yet each is more complicated than a simple chronology.

Much of the narrative momentum of Harry Potter involves Harry figuring out what happened between his parents and the villain Voldemort before he was born. We get this information in flashbacks, stories from other characters, mysterious documents, and magic visions, all of which Rowling uses to mix up the chronology of the backstory. Each of these nonchronological additions moves the Harry Potter books away from Forster's simple chronological "tapeworm" —what will happen to Harry next?—and toward his idea of a plot-why is Harry so important?

The construction of A Song of Ice and Fire is even more complicated. The fictional world of Westeros has a long, convoluted history that precedes the events of the first book, and the story is told from the point of view of many characters, sometimes returning to earlier events told from a different point of view. The books have tremendous forward momentum, but still, much of the pleasure in reading them comes from elements other than the plot. We want to know the answer to "And then?" but there is much to savor that doesn't relate to that question.

The Literary End of The Continuum

At the literary end of the story-plot continuum is Joseph Conrad's novel Lord Jim. This book has one of the most complex plots in modern literature, yet the basic events of the story are fairly simple.

Jim, a romantic young Englishman, seeks his fortune as a sailor in the seas of South and Southeast Asia in the late 19'" century. Even before his career at sea has properly gotten started, he becomes the first mate of a rusting old freighter carrying Muslim pilgrims across the Indian Ocean to Mecca. When the freighter, called the Patna, collides with some unseen object in the water and threatens to sink, the rest of the crew prepares to abandon ship, leaving the pilgrims to die. At the last minute, Jim betrays his own sense of honor by jumping into the lifeboat along with the other crew members.

After Jim and the rest of the crew are rescued and arrive in port, they learn that the Patna didn't sink. The rest of the crew disappears, but Jim turns himself in to accept responsibility for what happened. At a tribunal of sea captains, he is stripped of his seaman's license, and his career and reputation are ruined.

After the trial, Jim drifts from job to job across Southeast Asia until he decides to accept a dangerous job far upriver on a remote island, where he helps a village defeat an oppressive warlord and win its freedom. By the end of the story, it looks as though Jim has found peace and redemption at last when, in a final series of incidents, his past returns to destroy him.

Told chronologically, Lord Jim sounds like an action-packed adventure story, but the complexity of its plotting makes it into something richer and more melancholy. In telling the story, Conrad not only jumbles the chronology, but he also tells the story through several layers of point of view.

If Lord Jim is told chronologically, it's a simple tale about a young man who makes a bad mistake and tries to redeem himself. But told by Conrad, through various narrators, with the story starting in the middle and looping backward and forward, Lord Jim becomes an intimate and intense psychological study of a character who is destroyed by his idealistic conception of honor rather than redeemed by it.

Despite the complexity of Conrad's plot, Lord Jim may be the most realistic of all the narratives discussed in this lecture. Chronological narratives seem lifelike because we experience our own lives in chronological order. Conrad's method doesn't mimic the way Jim's life happens, but it does mimic, in a very lifelike way, the manner in which most of us learn about other people in our lives. The result is a much more intense and intimate experience of the character because it forces readers to assemble the chronology of Jim's life, leading to greater understanding and compassion.

It isn't true that simple storytelling is inferior, and complex, nonchronological, modernist plotting is superior. But it is true that the two approaches reach different regions of a reader's heart and brain and serve different functions for the writer.

Writing Exercise Prompt
List all the major plot points of a story you admire or a story of your own, but write them out on index cards, one plot point to a card, in the order they actually appear in the story. If the story is a narrative that is told out of chronological order, try putting the cards in chronological order and see how that sequence changes the effect of the narrative. If the story is a narrative that already moves chronologically, lay the cards out and see what happens if you start rearranging them. If you want to be especially bold, shuffle the cards and try retelling the story in whatever order they end up in. Deciding how to arrange or shuffle the events of a narrative is a large part of deciding what you want the reader to take away from it.

1. Lecture left to go to finish publishing from Professor James Hynes, Skylights do please enjoy this. —Lumna10.