A Good Story Needs A Good Plot
A good plot makes for a good story. One of the surest ways to strengthen the plot of your story is to tie your scenes together through cause and effect. The English novelist, E. M. Foster, for one, defined plot as a series of events linked by causality.
Aristotle referred to this important aspect of a story as unity. He believed that if a scene makes no difference to the characters of a story then it has no business being in the story. Unity, or causality, is fundamental to the well-written tale.
In her book, The Novelist’s Guide, Margaret Geraghty, provides this example: ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is not a plot. Although the two events follow upon each other they are not causally linked. ‘The king died and then the queen died because of grief’, however, is a plot because the first event causes the second.
Causality is at its strongest when it stems from a character’s goals, needs, wishes and desires pitted against an opposing character or force. In my award winning novel, The Land Below, for example, the hero’s desire to explore the world beyond the confines of his underground existence drives most of the plot. It explains his actions and reactions to events around him and makes his actions authentic.
Novice writers often believe that a series of action-packed scenes makes for gripping viewing or reading. I remember reading a script filled with scenes comprising mostly of ‘skop, skiet, en donner’ (an appropriate Afrikaans expression for violent and melodramatic action). The student believed that pace and action was what people wanted from a story.
That, may, in part, be true, but that is not all that people want. The student’s characters had no higher purpose other than beating each other up. The scenes provided no new information; they failed to deepen or explain character; the characters survived only to meet up again and repeat the same action in a different setting – in short, the scenes had no link to the overall plot. There was no plot to speak of precisely because the action did not have repercussions. It was action without psychological reaction. Needless to say the student returned to the word processor, where, I am happy to report, he made progress.
Linking scenes through cause and effect, showing actions having consequences, is indispensable to generating a good plot.
Summary
A plot is dependent on consequential actions undertaken by characters with conflicting goals, wants, needs and desires.
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