Plot

Plot

Plot is the knowing of destination.

—Elizabeth Bowen[1]

Humans love telling and hearing stories. People who can turn buying milk into an interesting adventure are rewarded with our attention. Plot is a story’s road map, guiding you through twists, turns, challenges, and discoveries. A good plot keeps you hooked; a bad one feels like a drag.

Organizing events into a plot helps us make sense of them, but we need to watch out for two red flags: first, being swayed by the better of two plots; and second, letting the stories we tell ourselves blind us to new information.

Plot is the chain of connected events that make up a narrative. According to the playwright and novelist Gustav Freytag, causality in the chain of plot events is what lends a story believability and interests the audience in getting to the end. Most relevant to fiction, plots, scholar Marie-Laure Ryan notes, “are heavily dependent on the circulation of information.”[2] Characters learn new things, which prompts them to take certain actions, which move the story through the narrative arc.

Freytag identified five typical elements of a plot:[3]

• “Exposition” (beginning/introduction) brings us into the world of the story, providing a sense of the starting point. It gives the reader context for subsequent events.
• “Rising action” (including conflict, which may be internal, external, or both) begins at the point at which the initial sense of normalcy in the story is disrupted.
• “Climax” tends to be a point of high emotions and lots of action, when you don’t want to put a book down or turn off a film.
• “Falling action” is the stage in a story when the pieces begin to fit together, dilemmas begin to resolve, and questions begin to receive answers.
• “Resolution” (end/conclusion) will typically tie up all the loose ends of a story and leave the reader with a satisfying sense of completion.

The novelist E. M. Forster, who also thought of plot as a chain of events linked by causality, says in his 1927 work Aspects of the Novel, “ ‘The king died and then the queen died’ may be a story, but it is not a plot. However, ‘the king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. The same two events occur, the difference is that one is the result of the other.” The creation of conflict is a key role of a plot, as conflict is the “primary source of narrative interest.”[4]

Plots are used most frequently in novels, movies, and plays, but they can also be found in visual art and dance. We can think of a plot like a skeleton: it provides the base for a structure, but on its own it’s not enough for a story. Characters, setting, emotions, desires, and details are combined with the skeleton of plot to produce a story. Aristotle, writing in Poetics, viewed plot as the core component of drama, more crucial than anything else—even than the characters.

Writers also organize true events into plots, as in a newspaper article or book-length work of nonfiction. While reality might not map onto the same five-part sequence described above, we can still see the narrative structure in “introduction, background, new information, putting it all together, and conclusion.” Even in nonfiction, there is a tendency for writers to create an aha moment, similar to the climax, where the point of their writing becomes clear to the reader. A story can have more than one plot at once, with multiple threads occurring in tandem or intermingling. There may also be subplots, such as a separate sequence of events happening to a supporting character.

Storytellers need to balance placing realistic characters in logical situations in the world they’ve created alongside the extraordinary events of the story. Thus, plots in literature are not meant to mirror reality exactly. There has to be something special, even in nonfiction, that makes this particular plot worth telling.

Although the resolution of all plotlines by a story’s end is not required, some kind of resolution is necessary for the plot to be finished. It may take a couple of novels, or a series of movies, but at some point, the audience likes to get to an ending. Some endings are more satisfying than others. Readers generally like resolutions to be the logical outcome of decisions made throughout the story, versus what is called a “deus ex machina” (something brand-new that is dumped into the story strictly to bring about a resolution because the characters, on account of the parameters that have been set up, cannot bring about the resolution themselves).

Not all plots are perfectly constructed. A flaw or inconsistency in a plot is known as a “plot hole” and can ruin an otherwise sound story. Even if we can’t quite articulate how exactly a plot has let us down, plot holes impact our enjoyment of a work of fiction. An unresolved ending, however, is not necessarily a plot hole. An author may deliberately leave questions open or subvert a traditional plot structure, even if readers find the result unsettling.

Another way to look at plot is to see that works of literature have two plots. There is the storyline created by the author, in which things happen, but there are also the plots of many of the characters, “who,” as Marie-Laure Ryan explains, “set goals, devise plans, schemes and conspiracies, and try to arrange events to their advantage.”[5] Thus, authors have to be careful when creating characters, so as to not end up with characters who are ill-suited to advancing their plot as it progresses. Each choice made in story writing closes many doors, and a plot will often develop based on the constraints dictated by earlier choices.

A good plot makes causal links intelligible to its audience. In life, those links can be much harder to establish. When a story persuades you, ask what evidence connects its events and what it leaves out. That check can expose narrative bias. When telling a story yourself, make the causal links clear without supplying connections the evidence does not support.