Why “There’s no Plot” Sometimes

Could you try an entry or two on punching up a sense of ‘there really is a plot here”? I’ve read several that I’ve thought were good but my husband grumbles had no plot. *I* thought there was one, but it’s not getting across to him. And he sees the same in our teen’s fiction.

I think your description nails the fundamental problem dead on: this reader is not getting “a sense that there really is a plot here.” The question then becomes, why does he have trouble seeing the plot, when you don’t? There are a couple of possibilities; some of them are susceptible to a writing solution, and some aren’t.

For starters, readers vary a lot in taste, preference, and reading conventions. For instance, some readers only recognize a plot if it is an action plot; they parse emotional or intellectual problems as subplots, if they recognize them as plots at all. At the other end of the scale are readers who like to work at the books they read, teasing out meaning and connections from obscure hints. For them, the typical action plot is too easy and too obvious (it is hard to miss or misinterpret explosions, fist-fights, battles, or chase scenes). Any book written with one end of this spectrum of readers in mind is unlikely to please the people at the other end, and there’s not much that can be done about it.

More commonly, though, when one reader sees a plot and another reader doesn’t, the reason is that seeing the plot depends on stuff that the writer has not actually put into the book. Sometimes, the missing thing is some background knowledge or other that the writer assumes is common knowledge but that isn’t (like a knowledge of Greek mythology or a familiarity with particular cultural norms). This is, obviously, extremely common with great books written by someone from a culture different from the reader – it’s why a lot of foreign-language books “lose a lot in translation,” and why stories from a hundred years ago or more frequently need lots of footnotes to explain things ranging from the significance of different styles of horse-drawn carriages to the meaning of a rude gesture that nobody has used in a couple of centuries.

The missing link isn’t always outside cultural or background knowledge, though. Sometimes it is more of an angle of attack, a point of view that is so clear and obvious to the writer that he/she doesn’t get it onto the page, except perhaps by implication. Readers who have a similar approach will instantly make the right assumptions about what is going on; everyone else has to dig for it or end up floundering.

And sometimes, the problem is the problem. That is, the thing that is supposed to be the central story problem is so obvious and important to the writer that it simply doesn’t occur to them that not everyone will instantly recognize it as of crucial importance to the main character. Saving The World is probably going to be important to any main character (though if the author forgets to mention that the reason the hero needs some odd item is to Save The World, it can be hard to understand why the main character is in such a hurry to locate a pair of scissors or a lost roller skate). A central problem that involves the main character deciding between taking a job at K-Mart and working at Taco Bell seldom seems as urgent or important, especially if the character him/herself has no reason to recognize this as a potentially life-changing decision.

When the story problem has a lot of emotional connection for the author, the author sometimes assumes that it will have an equal intensity for readers, and may even deliberately play it down a little to avoid being too obvious…or to avoid raking up the author’s own emotions around the subject. If the central problem is the sort of thing that most people recognize as emotionally intense, like abuse or dealing with the death of a friend or family member, damping the intensity a bit can work very well. If, however, the problem is something like losing a library card, which was highly traumatic for the author at age 8 but which most people aren’t likely to see as a big deal, downplaying how important this is to the main character is likely to result in an impression of non-plot, except among readers who already consider losing their library card to be a tragedy.

The other difficulty in this sort of situation – when the author is using something in the story that has a lot of personal emotional resonance for them – is that it can be a lot more difficult than usual for an author to judge what has gotten into the story. Years ago, I read a scene in which the author described an incident that anyone would recognize as emotionally intense – think watching a drunk driver in an SUV come straight at you, and then waking up in the hospital. The scene was brief, factual, and a bit clumsy…and what the author wanted was advice on how to “tone it down, because it is so intense.” It was intense for the author, because the scene was based on a real incident and just writing a minimalist version still gave that author the shakes…but for the reader, it was more of a “Yeah, that would have been bad, I guess” moment. It wasn’t involving or emotional, because the author’s emotions got in the way of putting the incident vividly on the page – it was already way too vivid in the author’s mind.

Notice that in all of the above cases, the “missing plot” problem has to do with something getting left out of the story. Usually, this is accidental, but occasionally an author has a deep and abiding horror of being too obvious (the way many authors have a horror of writing purple prose), and they’re leaning over too far backward. In any case, the solution to the “there is no plot here” feeling is to make the central story problem clearer, harder to achieve, or more obviously vital to the main character. If the author objects that the problem is already hard to achieve and/or vital to the main character’s health and happiness…well, if a significant percentage of one’s beta readers can’t find the plot, then the difficulty and/or importance of the central problem hasn’t gotten onto the page. (I can talk more about this in the next post, if people are interested.)

Also notice that there will always be differences in taste and preference. Back in high school, I had a friend whose taste in fiction ran very strongly toward things I considered over-the-top melodrama, verging on the hysterical. She considered my favorite books unemotional, cold, and full of almost robotic characters. With forty years of hindsight, I can see that it was a difference in taste, not necessarily in the quality of the prose, plotting, or characterization. There will always be readers who want every detail of the plot laid out clearly (whether it’s action-adventure, romance, or man-learns-lesson), and others who find it annoying to have stuff spelled out that they consider obvious. There will always be writers who have a horror of being obscure, and others who cannot stand the thought of being too obvious. Sometimes, all you can do is say, “I guess this isn’t your sort of story, then.”