PLOT IS NOT STORY
A mistake I made for many years was to confuse plot with story. At the end of the day, the story is about the characters. What lessons do they learn over the course of the book? What changes do they make? How do their lives change, and how do they change each other? The plot is merely the stuff that happens that acts as a catalyst/cause/provocation for these changes.
Plot is the skeleton of events that the actual story hangs on. Example: I cooked up a dastardly plan to destroy Las Vegas in a terrorist attack that a Homeland Security Officer actually asked me not to write into a book because it would a) work, b) give bad guys ideas, and c) Homeland Security didn’t want to pay to fix the problems I had discovered and exploited. Pretty cool plot, huh?
So, I told Homeland Security I was going to write the book anyway because hey, I’m a housewife in Texas. If I can think of this stuff, a bad guy surely can, too. They should go ahead and find a way to fix the security problems. Then I sat down to write the book. And that’s when it hit me…the horrible realization that, as cool as this plot might be, it was NOT what the book was about. The book is about the hero and heroine and how dealing with this crisis and stopping this attack affects them.
Ta daa. Epiphany moment. The book was not about my brilliant plot. It was about the people affected by my brilliant plot. It wasn’t even about how those people were affected by my brilliant plot. It was about how those people grow and change in the context created by my brilliant plot. The looming terrorist attack is merely the background within which my characters face their inner demons, learn about themselves and each other, and ultimately, fall in love.
I wish I had known this earlier, and I admit that the hardcore plotter within me grieves a little at this realization.
It’s possible to be a plotter and still write a terrific story. It’s just that now I turn much of my plotting energy toward cooking up interesting, compelling, emotional character arcs, internal crises, and fascinating, triumphant changes in my characters’ souls. I have embraced the mantra that plot is external and story is internal.
My new mantra for writing: IT’S THE STORY, STUPID.
(And by the way, the book is called FEVER ZONE and comes out in March 2015)
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You have outlined one approach to disentangling story and plot, and it will no doubt work for many authors. Having said that, surely this is just one approach. You are writing of plot as though it is an entirely external skeleton upon which our flesh grows. Surely many authors write about how the unfolding of this skeleton depends in significant part of the protagonist. Maybe the characters undergo their arcs in response to choices they have to make between those they love and other responsibilities: like Virgil in the Aeneid. Reducing plot to just part of the scenery strikes me as a mistake. Great novels can be written by those who lie at the extremes of the approach to plot. But the greatest successes in the long term are probably those that attempt to unite plot and story. Anyway, that's what I think.
