Editor's note: I'm on a self-styled writing retreat in the hills of San Diego for a week, and although I've somewhat barred myself from contacting the outside world, I couldn't resist begging novelist Janis Hallowell for help attacking one of my many albatrosses (albatrossi?)---plot. She's teaching a two-weekend intensive at Lit Fest called Thickening the Plot, which I recommend for all writers of any genre who share this particular challenge.
[caption id="attachment_2518" align="alignleft" width="158" caption="Janis Hallowell's latest plot-rich novel, She Was."]
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A Few Words on Plot
from novelist Janis Hallowell
I love plot. I love it. It’s a wonderful game I do in my head (or on paper, note cards, or computer) when I ask of myself, my characters, my universe, “Okay, and then what happens?”
But I gather from talking to other novelists that the plot game isn’t the only way to do it. And that’s fine. I’m sure there are as
many ways as there are novelists, but for every one writer who has finished a novel there are a dozen who haven’t. Lots of writers I talk to who want to write fiction say that they get about fifty pages into a project and then it stalls. Or, they have an idea but they can’t figure out how to tell it. Or, they have written four hundred thousand words on something but if there was ever a story it got lost along the way. All of these are (among other things) plot problems.
Usually these people are playing another popular game called: Avoid The Plot Altogether. Here are some variations on this game:
- Just focus on the characters and writing beautiful sentences and the plot will take care of itself.
- Find a narrative voice, and start telling something, anything, and the book will happen.
- Literary fiction is character driven, not plot driven, so focus on the characters not on the plot.
- Write a memoir. Then you don’t have to deal with plot at all, you just write what really happened. (People who write memoir for this reason quickly find out that the choices you make about what to tell and what to leave out add up to---you guessed it---plot.)
[caption id="attachment_2523" align="alignright" width="180" caption="Don't settle for the "canned soup" of narrative. Go gourmet with Hallowell."]
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Here’s the way I see it: Plot is to fiction writing what verbs are to sentences and vegetables are to good food---necessary, hardworking, and underappreciated. You can’t have a sentence without a verb, you can’t eat well without vegetables, and you can’t have a novel without a plot. And since we’re into the food metaphors, I say, cook it slowly, add spice, and thicken. A good plot is a fine sauce. A bad plot is just canned soup.
Maybe this is a good time to catch that darned bird for good! Thanks, Janis!
--aed
