What is Plot

So many writers imagine that plot is a straight line from point A to point B. And their writing, unfortunately, suffers because of this. I find myself telling writers that they have too much plot in the book, but what I mean is, they have too much movement directly from point A to point B. It feels unrealistic to me, because in my experience, that is not how life works.
Plot is actually all the things that happen along the way from point A to point B (or at least in the beginning, when that’s where the protagonist still thinks she is headed). It’s more like the story of what happened when someone was headed from point A to point B and then ended up veering off toward point C, then point D, E, and F, and then headed back to point A. Or something like that.

I don’t mean to suggest that there is only one plot, of course. There isn’t. That’s part of the problem. If you as a writer love one particular book or movie so much that you are trying to duplicate it too closely, everyone will see that and your version won’t feel original. There’s nothing wrong with being inspired by someone else’s art, but you have to make it your own, and that means taking it off in other directions than from where it went. It means inventing a new plot for it.

Another way of thinking of plot is thinking of it as the mistakes the characters make as they are trying to go from point A to point B. It might turn out that point B is where the story ends, after all. That’s fine. But what makes your story unique and interesting is how the characters get there. And where the detours are along the way.

Sure, there are plenty of stories where it feels like the author didn’t care about putting in any plot at all, and maybe you want to avoid that. The best strategy for that is to make sure that your characters always think that they know where they are headed, and are doing their best to get there. But they are flawed and so end up failing over and over again (classic try-fail cycle here).

In a novel, your readers are less interested in going on a successful journey with your characters where at the end they feel like they have achieved something notable, and more interested in experiencing something like a real journey themselves. Readers want it to feel like it takes time to make a journey. They want to feel like it was hard to get to the destination. They want to feel like they learned something along the way that they didn’t know before. And that’s why your character is going to spend plenty of time learning things and making mistakes along the way. Because readers don’t actually want to read about a character who already knows everything necessary to make the trip from point A to point B without any interruptions.

And besides, that won’t be a novel anyway. It won’t even be a short story. Just a boring, one paragraph summary.