The Importance of Plots
I’ve noticed a trend in my reading lately that has undoubtedly always been there, and I’m only now realizing the ultimate relevance. Namely: the importance of plots.
I’m not talking about plots in the dry sense of the word. “One man travels to a secluded island to find a missing girl and uncovers a pagan conspiracy.” I mean a literal plot. A scheme. A planned action by a (group of) individual(s) to steal, spy, overthrow, or otherwise infiltrate an overbearing *insert antagonist here.*
In science fiction and fantasy, it’s par for the course that you find a lot of heavy-stakes plotting. Hobbits carrying rings, Jedi overthrowing Sith, con men lying their way into buildings while someone snags a grappling hook on the far wall. That isn’t to say that a plot is in any way secluded or unique to one way of reading. However, speculative fiction as a whole has a way of taking the arguments on good craft that apply to most other fiction, and blowing them up to the size of parade floats.
Hence the fun of it all.
A plot can teach you everything you need to know about compelling fiction:
1) The Incentive. Someone stole a diamond, and the protagonist has to steal it back. They undoubtedly have a stake in the plot, else they wouldn’t have any part of it. So you craft a sense of motivation, a starting point for the character in question, and have a goal that moves the story forward.
2) The Scheme. This is a character’s first draft of how to steal back the diamond. It is undoubtedly flawed in ways that they cannot predict, or depends on other factors that they have yet to secure (i.e. “If we’re going to get through that wall, we need an expert in explosives. I know just the man…”).
3) The Anti-Scheme. As a writer, you’ve demonstrated the breadth of the character’s knowledge. Now swivel the narrative lens to someone who errs on the Mordor side of Middle-Earth. Someone who can disrupt the plot, or god forbid, knows about it in advance. This gives the reader a privileged sense of urgency, the nightmarish feeling of powerlessness, yet they have to look anyway to see how it pans out.
4) The First Try. This is where it gets really fun. A good plot should never work on the first try. Something goes wrong in a big way. Maybe it was a trap all along, someone changed their flight, or Lando Calrissian sold your characters to the Empire just when things were looking good. Either way, there’s a completely unanticipated setback. The reader’s confidence builds in the characters as they see them improvising to save their lives.
5) Regroup at the Rally Point! “Okay, that didn’t work. We didn’t exactly get what we were looking for, and one of us was taken captive, but now we know something we didn’t know before.” Enough said.
6) The Revised Scheme, And So Forth.
I’d bet my shoes that you’ve read at least a dozen books that worked this way in the last year, less than half of them involved ray guns, and some of them went no farther than the old family manor. Barring some experimental fiction, it is a truth universally aknowledged that your characters will declare their intentions and will be proven at least partially wrong. Fiction is the way in which their wrongness holds them back, and how the consequences move them forward.
While I won’t wholeheartedly argue that writing with this formula in your back pocket is the way to go, it can serve as an extremely helpful prophylactic to some of the most basic writing pitfalls: “I don’t understand why he would do that.” A plot makes your character’s intentions crystal clear, their every shortcoming a devastation, their sympathy palpable. These are abstractions to be used responsibility. Good advice, not a way of life.
I’m glad you told me to be responsible about the use of plots at the end. I mean, halfway through the post, I’d already begun scheming how to foil my first plan to eat dinner. Phew, not a way of life!
On a more serious note, enjoyed your insights, as always =).