Plot

Nonstop Invitation:

Your character is doing what he or she normally does on a Monday afternoon, when suddenly an unappealing stranger needs help. Write what happens in a way that reveals some of your character’s personalities, fears, and/or desires, and embraces some of the opportunities that conflict offers.

About Plot

If it is a story, we say, ‘and then?’ If it is a plot, we ask, ‘Why?’”

“The kind died and then the queen died is a story. The king died and then the queen died of love is a plot.”

—E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Plots are more formal versions of the scenarios that we project all the time: if I cook a whole chicken for dinner tonight, I can use the leftovers for soup tomorrow. If I poison the dandelions, I may kill the goldfinches. If I ride my bicycle instead of walking, I can park right next to the library; but if it rains later on I’ll get soaked, and in any case I won’t be able to offer Mrs. Thomas a ride home.

We are constantly thinking through sequences of actions…. As in our everyday scenarios, stories try out choices in the lives of characters, then trace the results.

Scott Russell Sanders, “The Power of Stories”

Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. —Ray Bradbury

Because of what happened when the unappealing stranger needs help:

Your character has to go into hiding.orYour character speaks out against a great injustice.orYour character goes on an unexpected trip.orYour character makes an unexpected ally.

Structure

The Difference a Comma Makes:

Let’s eat, Grandma.

Let’s eat Grandma.

• 1. Action• 2. Background• 3. Development• 4. Climax• 5. Ending

ABDCE Story Structure

Nigel Watt’s “Eight Point Arc”1. Stasis2. Trigger3. The quest4. Surprise5. Critical choice6. Climax7. Reversal8. Resolution

from Writing a Novel and Getting Publishe

A Good Beginning

• Engages readers• Orients readers• Gives readers a sense of where

story might be headed, and “how to read it”

A Good Ending

• Wraps up questions the story has invitedreaders to ask

• Gives readers a sense that life (if not the characters’ lives…) will continue.

• Should not be entirely predictable• Should seem inevitable, given the story

that proceeds it

As time went on, and the months and years came, and went, he was never without friends. Fern did not come regularly to the barn any more. She was growing up, and was careful to avoid childish things, like sitting on a milk stool near a pigpen. But Charlotte's children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, year after year, lived in the doorway. Each spring there were new little spiders hatching out to take the place of the old. Most of them sailed away, on their balloons. But always two or three stayed and set up housekeeping in the doorway.

Mr. Zuckerman took fine care of Wilbur all the rest of his days, and the pig was often visited by friends and admirers, for nobody ever forgot the year of his triumph and the miracle of the web. Life in the barn was very good - night and day, winter and summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days. It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.

Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.

E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web

Write up a storm!

Write up a storm!

Roscommon came and laid waste to the garden an hour after dawn, about the time I usually get out of bed and he usually passes out on the shoulder of some freeway. My landlord and I have an arrangement. He charges me and my housemates little rent—by Boston standards, none at all—and in return we let him play fast and loose with our ecosystem. Every year at about this time he destroys my garden. He’s been known to send workmen into the house without warning, knock out walls in the middle of the night, shut off the water while we shower, fill the basement with unidentified fumes, cut down elms and maples for firewood, and redecorate our rooms. Then he claims he’s showing the dump to prospective tenants and we’d better clean it up. Pronto.

This morning I woke to the sound of the little green pumpkins exploding under the tires of his station wagon. Then Roscommon stumbled out and tore down our badminton net. After he left, I got up and went out to buy a Globe. Wade Boggs had just twisted his ankle and some PCB-contaminated waste was on fire in Southie.

When I got back, bacon was smouldering on the range, filling the house with gas-phase polycyclic aromatics—my favorite carcinogen by a long shot. Zodiac, by Neal Stephenson

In my right hand resting on the base of my handbag I clutch a brown leather purse. My knuckles ride to and fro, rubbing against the lining…surely cardboard…and I am surprised that the material has not revealed itself to me before. I have worn this bag for many months. I would have said with a dismissive wave of the hand, “Felt, that is what the base of this bag is lined with.”

Then, Michael had said, “It looks cheap, unsightly,” and lowering his voice to my look of surprise, “Can’t you tell?” But he was speaking of the exterior, the way it looks.

The purse fits neatly into the palm of my hand. A man’s purse. The handbag gapes. With my elbow I press it against my hip but that will not avert suspicion. The bus is moving fast, too fast, surely exceeding the speed limit, so that I bob on my seat and my grip on the purse tightens as the springs suck at my womb, slurping it down through the plush of the red upholstery. I press my buttocks into the seat to ease the discomfort.

“You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town,” by Zoe Wicomb

• In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before.– “A & P,” by John Updike

Tom’s most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain’tnothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it, and ain’t a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.

THE ENDYours truly, Huck Finn

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

1. Describe the “backstory” for your story.– What does “normal” look like for your characters when

your story begins?

2. Describe the “interesting complications” that will challenge your character(s)’s “normal.”

—How might one complication lead to or build on the next?

3. Describe how your character(s)might deal with those challenges.—How might these challenges be resolved in an

interesting, satisfying (and surprising!) way?

• CHAPTER I. AN UNEXPECTED PARTYIn a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort. It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats - the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill - The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it -and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.

This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighboursrespect, but he gained-well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.•

IT WAS A PLEASURE TO BURN. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning. Montaggrinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame. He knew that when he returned to the firehouse, he might wink at himself, a minstrel man, burntcorked, in the mirror. Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It never went away, that. smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered.

He hung up his black-beetle-coloured helmet and shined it, he hung his flameproof jacket neatly; he showered luxuriously, and then, whistling, hands in pockets, walked across the upper floor of the fire station and fell down the hole. At the last moment, when disaster seemed positive, he pulled his hands from his pockets and broke his fall by grasping the golden pole. He slid to a squeaking halt, the heels one inch from the concrete floor downstairs.

Farenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare,sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole,and that means comfort. It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke,with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats -the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill - The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it - and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.

This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginseshad lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained-well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.

– The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien