Otherwise known as the storyline, plot is the sequence or series of events that happen in a fictional story – be it in a film, television soap opera, cartoon, play, novel, short story, comic strip or picture book. Put another way, the plot is the bare bones of a story, a story stripped down to its most basic parts. Consider how the plot to the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel might begin:
Hansel and Gretel’s parents can’t afford to keep their children any longer so they try to lose them in the woods. The children come back and once again the parents . . . This is not the story as such. The story, with all the incidental details and dialogue included – the details that make the tale exciting and engaging and much longer – might begin:
Once upon a time there were a man and woman who lived in a cottage on the edge of a wood. They had two children – a boy called Hansel and a girl called Gretel. Times were hard and the man had no work. One night, after Hansel and Gretel had gone to bed, the man and the woman sat by the fire talking.
‘We have no food left,’ said the woman. ‘The children will have to go.’ Writers have their own individual ways of finding plots.
MALORIE BLACKMAN: I tend to get the storyline or plot first, then I think about the people in the story. And I play ‘what if ’ games. For example,
‘What if a girl goes into the future and meets herself as a grown up?’
(Thief! )
‘What if a boy and his sister have to prove their dad didn’t steal one
million pounds from the bank where he works?’ (Hacker)
‘What if a boy and his friend get involved in a dare game which goes
horribly wrong and one of them goes missing?’ (Deadly Dare)
So, I’m always wondering ‘What if, what if . . .’ and then I find a plot. With all of my books I try to build up my novels to a climax where each incident is the direct result of something which happened previously and inevitably leads to something else – usually worse!
Some writers seem to be more motivated by writing about their characters’ feelings and situations rather than actually working out a plot for their characters – see ‘Characters’ section on p. 86 onwards. Yet Celia Rees is interested in both:
CELIA REES: I’m as concerned with plot as I am with character. When you write for young people, you have to have a strong plot. Equally, you’ve got to have believable characters that your readers can care about – particularly if you’re writing in the genres that I do. Otherwise, you wouldn’t care if the characters were killed or whatever. You’ve got to care about them and you can only do that by developing credible characters within a strong plot. And plot, for me, has got to work and have an internal logic. There can’t be any boggy areas where nothing much is happening, or any loose ends that don’t make sense. There’s got to be a coherent sequence of events that work by cause
happened because of that. You have to be able to look forwards and backwards at any point.
A story cannot simply contain non-stop action or the reader would lose interest even- tually. Quieter moments are necessary as you do not want a book equivalent of a car chase going on all the way through your story! Some dynamics – a balance of busy and quieter moments – are important.
Most novels will have a series of plots – perhaps a main plot and a minor subplot, or a number of subplots. But in a short story, as David Almond commented in the ‘Short story’ section on p. 81, there is no room really for much more than a single main plot. However, it is only too easy to worry about the plot, and to lose sight of what you are trying to achieve. A storyline, as Philip Pullman advises, does not need to be a complex chain of events and should ideally be kept as simple and as straightforward as possible. If you are worried about writing a plot or storyline – as Celia Rees suggested earlier – why not begin by writing some short pieces that focus on one single event or character, and you may find that a plot develops out of one of these. Philip Pullman has his own unique way of describing the process of choosing the events for a story:
PHILIP PULLMAN: With a story, you have a path and a wood. The wood is the world of the story – everything that could possibly happen to all the characters. The path is the story itself that goes through the wood – and some things happen and some things don’t. But with every turn in the path something else could have happened. Cinderella could have thought, ‘Stuff it, I don’t want to go to the ball at all’. Or, the ugly sisters could have said, ‘All right, Cinderella, come to the ball’. All sorts of things could have happened. You need to know many more details about the fictional world you have created than you will actually tell in your story. So it is the role of the storyteller to decide which path to take – that is, which details to include and which to discard.
Russell Hoban says that ‘what happens next’ is ‘the essence of story’. The ‘what happens next’ – that is, whatever the chain of events in the story will be – is for the writer to work out and the reader to follow, experience and enjoy. As a writer, you want your reader to be interested in your story and to anticipate what the next event will be. Now imagine you have a character, and that character is called Tom, and your story begins ‘Tom awoke one morning to find . . .’. Well – what will happen next? You are in control of your story and it is up to you what you do with Tom. Is Tom going to find out that it’s only 4 a.m. – so he goes back to sleep? Or, is he going to find two pairs of eyes peering at him? Or, is he going to find himself in a strange place that he doesn’t recognise? It is your decision – you have invented your characters, and you must decide what you want to do with them, and how you will entertain your reader. One way is to inject
suspense in your story, which is dealt with later in this chapter.
Here, Philip Pullman explains how he works out the plot for a novel:
PHILIP PULLMAN: I use those Post-it notes – the smallest yellow ones. I use them for planning the shape of a story. I’ll write a brief sentence summarising a scene on one of them, and then I’ll get a very big piece of paper and fill it up with sixty or more different scenes, and move them around to get them in the best order . . . I have pictures in my mind like daydreams. Like dreams, they can stay with me. If they’re good, they will
keep coming back. Such ideas can come unexpectedly and stay with me for a long time. For the Northern Lights trilogy, I had a whole series of images. My task was to discover how I could connect each of these images together and to find the narrative thread that joins all the images together – a story to connect the pictures. The only way I can do this is by sitting down and working the whole thing out.
Jan Dean has some useful advice on checking if the plot of a story is working well. Like Philip Pullman, she describes plot as a ‘path’:
JAN DEAN: Once you’ve written a story it is often a good idea to look at the plot by dividing your story up into its key scenes. A plot is like a path. You don’t want it to meander too much. You want it to be reasonably straight, though you might want a few surprises along the way – something that jumps out at you. Do a storyboard, a series of simple pictures, and break the story up into its scenes. If you’ve got lost with your story, this can help you to see where you have gone wrong. If you want to, you can even do a storyboard as a plan for your story before you write it out. Whenever I write a book, I think: which are the bits that people will really want to read? So I look at my key scenes and work out how I can tell the story so that I can get as quickly and as neatly as possible from one scene to another. Try and imagine your plot as a series of beads on a string.
Most stories – whether deliberately or not – follow a set pattern. This pattern or formula can be divided into four basic parts:
• Opening
• Complication • Climax • Conclusion
Every fairy tale follows this pattern. Consider ‘Cinderella’: • Opening: Cinderella lives with her two bullying sisters.
• Complication: All three sisters receive an invitation to the ball. The two sisters insist that Cinderella cannot attend as she does not have a suitable ball gown.
• Climax: Cinderella goes to the ball thanks to her fairy godmother. She has a fine time dancing with the prince, but so much so that she forgets that the magic wears off by midnight. As the clock strikes twelve, she flees the ball, dropping her glass slipper on the steps outside.
• Conclusion: Luckily, the prince finds Cinderella’s slipper. After scouring the region many times, the prince finds that Cinderella is the true owner of the slipper and they consequently marry.
Think of books or short stories that you have read recently. Do they follow this pattern? Write out the basic plot of some of the stories in terms of Opening – Complication – Climax – Conclusion. Then invent a few of your own plots with this model, using the worksheet ‘Plot overviews’ on p. 120.
WORKSHOP
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119 Creating Writers, Routledge © James Carter 2009
Invisibility
Many writers say that ‘happiness writes white.’ What they mean is that it is impossible to write a story in which all the characters are happy all the time. It would be a non-story! But what if . . . your central character had a special pen that wrote with invisible ink? What messages could they send to friends? Who is your central character and why would s/he need to write secret
messages? Perhaps your character is in trouble or a difficult situation. How would the pen help? Think how this could work in a story. Work out a storyline first before you begin writing.