plot v. story: the things you can do
This is a reworking of a post from more than two years ago. I pulled that post up to read because I was thinking about a television pilot I saw last week and rewatched today in my bed-bound misery (thank you, iTunes).
The pilot was for The Nine, which you can watch for free if you've got a fast internet connection. Here's the link to the ABC webpage if you want to have a look. And of course, that link won't stay around forever. By the way, I think it's a brilliant move on ABCs part to make all the season's pilots available to watch for free on the internet after they've aired.
I'm going to write about The Nine in the next post, because first I want to revisit the difference between plot and story.
There is a simple way to think about the relationship of story to plot. Here it is:
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:
- Marge Lawson is born to a middle class family in Toledo in the spring of 1954.
By the time she is ten, she's the oldest of seven kids. Her mother depends on her help.
She doesn't do well in school but she's highly praised by the parish priest and all the other mothers in the neighborhood for her dedication to her family, her housekeeping and childrearing skills.
She lives at home taking care of the family after graduation, and is still there when all the other kids are in homes of their own, many in the neighborhood. Her mother dies and she takes care of her invalid father until she's thirty-five, when he dies.
Her priest introduces her to the new principal of the high school, and after a courtship Gordon Johnson proposes. Marge accepts because it seems like the thing to do.
For the next twenty five years she raises two kids and takes care of the house. She is widely admired for her housekeeping skills and the care she gives her husband, kids and garden. She cooks every meal from scratch, launders and irons every piece of clothing. She has little time for activities outside the house, and doesn't mind. Her family is everything.
Her kids grow up more than a little spoiled, and once they go off to college they are gone for good. She doesn't hear from them very often.
One day she goes shopping and learns that the brand of spray starch she has always used to iron her husband's shirts is no longer being produced. She spends the next week trying out every other brand she can find, and settles finally but unhappily on an alternative.
Her husband, in a bad mood because his beloved baseball team has lost two games in a row, snaps at her when she bemoans the state of the shirts she's just ironed. He tells her he doesn't give a damn about the shirts, and would she just shut up finally about spray starch? Get a life, he tells her.
Late that night, Marge gets up because she can't sleep. She gets the iron, plugs it in, turns it on the highest setting, and then buries it under the blankets at the foot of the bed. Then she goes downstairs and makes coffee while she waits.
When she is taken in to be questioned in the matter of her husband's suspcious death, all she can talk about is spray starch, and how things will never be the same since they took away the only kind she could depend on.
So this is a chronological accounting of Marge's life. It could go on, of course. How she adjusts to prison or a facility for the criminally insane, for example. The letters she writes to her kids would be pretty interesting, I think. But to tell this story in order like this would be a mistake.
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.
Maybe I'd start when Marge's story when she is twelve and angry that she can't go out with her friends, so she's careless and burns herself with the iron as her mother is praising her for her dedication. Maybe I would start on the day her father dies, the conversation she has with him. I imagine he tells her some truths she doesn't want to hear. She would spend the first years of her marriage convincing herself that he was wrong, that she was happy taking care of her family. Then I might jump forward to her in prison, age seventy, writing a letter to her granddaughter. She could tell stories about her life, either in complete denial (in which case you've got an unreliable narrator to work with, where you tell two stories at once) or with some insight that comes with distance. Maybe she's perfectly happy, working in the prison laundry, and she needs to explain why that's reasonable. The scene where she gets up and gets the iron to put it in the bed -- you could start with that, but then you've got to handle the pacing very carefully.
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.