The Write Life :: article #17

Plot is Important to STORY

By Shon Bacon

To PLOT means to navigate through the dangerous terrain of story and when confronted by a dozen branching possibilities to choose the correct path.  Plot is the writer’s choice of events and their design in time - Robert McKee, STORY

I began my pursuit of an MFA in creative writing in the fall of 2001.

In the summer of 2003, I received an e-mail from my fiction professor asking me if he ever really knew who Shon Bacon was.

“Why?” I asked.

Well, he was bored and had started the game of putting students’ names into Yahoo and seeing what came up.  When he typed in ‘Shonell Bacon’ and ‘Shon Bacon,’ he realized I was a published author, an editor, an online magazine publisher, an interviewer of successful novelists, etc.

“Why didn’t I know about this?” he asked.  “Why didn’t you tell me you were published?”

I brought him back to my first semester in the program, during a Form and Theory of Fiction class in which during a discussion on genre vs. literature, he likened genre to Hallmark…and of course, literature was more substantial than that.

I was in the process of having my second “genre” novel be released and an erotic short story be published in a highly successful anthology.  Being in a program that was solely dedicated to literary fiction and having my “field” be delegated to an aisle in an Hallmark store kept me from revealing all the wonderful things I had done.

Why am I sharing this?

Well, another thing we talked about in class was plot, and in differentiating genre from literary fiction came the notion that genre is more plot-based; whereas, literary fiction focuses more on character.

At its purest, simplest way, this is true.

In a more complex way, this is totally untrue, and McKee’s quote above illustrates that.

ANY story, genre or literature, worth its merit must have some form of plot in the story.  In a recent romance novel I read and loved - Sweet Deception by Patricia Sargeant - the main characters are placed in a series of events (designed by the writer) and for the story to complete itself successfully, these characters must make decisions to propel themselves into new events that eventually lead them to their story’s conclusion (again, all of this designed by the writer).

I can pull any work of literature off my shelf right now, and it doesn’t matter if it’s written in classical form, or if it bucks form altogether, or if it minimizes the classical form; it still will have a plot.  Even a stream-of-consciousness novel like Ulysses by James Joyce has plot because plot is not a formula in which a story is written; plot is the writer’s creation of events and design to move the events to some conclusion.

Any story can become a complete and utter mess by branching off into any and every possible scenario an event can take, but because of the writer and his or her care for that story, he/she will find the best routes to take to make the story he or she wishes to tell complete.

No matter the genre…

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