Plot Studies: What is Plot?

Plot Studies: What is Plot?

Plot Studies is an ongoing series of investigations into different kinds of plots arising in narrative and dramatic traditions, or extrapolated from case studies of individual works. Each study will take a limited source text —some analytical, some play scripts or stories— as a means of asking about how plot works or is thought about in that text, and then as a jumping-off point to extrapolate prompts, games, or useful permissions for our own writing.

Before jumping into the series, I think it’s useful to put out a few ways of thinking about what plot is. There’s no one controlling definition, but I like this set of three approaches defined in the living handbook of narratology. (Read if academic reading is your thing—for some of us it’s illuminating and energizing, for others it’s a barrier to use and pleasure, or maybe oscillates between the two over time.) I’ve paraphrased and augmented three definitions from the plot entry in that website:

(1) Plot as a fixed structure through which the elements of a story are arranged. Plot considered in this approach always takes the total pattern of events and actions into consideration at once because these plots are normally established patterns. This framework for plot thinking belongs to highly defined narrative traditions.

(2) Plot as “progressive structuration.” That is, plot considered as the way one story event connects to the next and the reader/audience’s perception of their connection through motivation or consequence. These plot approach does not necessarily join up with traditional plot sequences. Plot here is about transitional junctures and sequential meaning-making.

(3) Plot as the author’s narrative design. If #1 and #2 are focused on the movement from event to the event in the “what happened?” mode, #3 is more rooted in the way the telling of the story moves. This could be applied as an approach to any kind of story. If we take #3 seriously as a kind of plot, then we don’t get to call anything “plotless,” even if it is not oriented toward a series of events or actions. 

In a less analytical and more practice-oriented approach, I find it useful to think about plot as movement options: a path charted through a series of possibilities, under pressure of attaining satisfaction. In the narrative traditions of fixed-plot structures or heavily codified genres, for examples, there are things that are not options in those stories. (Or aren’t options without turning them into other kinds of stories.) Achieving the course of the story, like running a race along the route, is the satisfaction. (I mean, there can be other satisfactions but if the story doesn’t finish the route it hasn’t satisfied itself.)

A reparative plot structure might rewrite what’s possible according to a different politics. In that case the satisfaction might be both the completion of the original structure (the kiss, the death), but with the desired revisions of the structure (winning of a different kiss, a different death).

So as I think of it, today at least, this means the questions that belong to plot for me are:

            What might happen next?

and      How does that feel, is it good?

So as these studies unfold, I’ll ask about those two things: what governs what might happen next? And what satisfactions does this governing logic offer?

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?