Writing a Novel, Part Six: Plotting, Overplotting, and Laughing at James Bond Right Before the Laser Slices Him in Half

Plot, so goes the joke, is the difference between literary and genre fiction.  The condensation goes both ways—literary writers with poetic language but less-than-logical narratives can say that commercial writers don’t choose individual words with as much care, and so don’t produce work of lasting value.  Sometimes the argument surfaces that all old fiction read today is literary.  While both sides of the genre argument have interesting points, the more specific notion that only ‘literary’ works stand the test of time is bunk.  Shakespeare and Mark Twain, among others, most assuredly wrote for the popular audiences of their day, and their works most assuredly contained plot.

To imagine plot, imagine a flowchart of the events that happen in a novel.  With Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, an abridged version would be something like:

Harry is invited to Hogwarts -> Harry goes to Hogwarts, meets friends and teachers -> Harry discovers a conspiracy -> Harry and his friends solve some puzzles, and save the day

This sort of thing can be much more or even much less detailed, but the point is that pure plot is essentially the description of a path.  Rowling's writing style—her tone, characterization, humor, wit—these are all different things entirely.  Plot is a blueprint for fiction, just as dialogue is a key tool.

What might your plot be?  Genre fiction, at least, has a sort of standard narrative (in common with many movies) that is very hard to break away from.  Step One: Hero(ine) leads boring, or at least repetitive life.  Step Two: Heroine experiences some irresistible call to adventure.  Step Three: Heroine vanquishes physical evil, metaphorical evil, or both.  Step Four: Heroine returns to a level of normalcy.

In series, sometimes this process is dragged out over many books.  Sometimes there are twists—the heroine’s retirement is death, the bad guy or true love is someone other than expected, etc…  But this narrative arc, explained in great detail in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, is startlingly consistent across a wide variety of stories.  Indeed, tales that don’t have clear endings are sometimes accused of being done ‘wrong.’

If you want to write gene fiction, like urban fantasy, it is probably better to ponder how your first novel will explore the four stages I outline above, rather than how it can break away from the constraints.  Don’t fret too much.  Understanding the paradigm probably the first step towards figuring out how to rearrange it.

Next week—Tone, so fickle.