Another excerpt

[moonwise]

Again, taken from Stephen King's On Writing, totally without permission.

On Plot



In my view, stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from Point A to Point B and finally to Point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.

You may wonder where plot is in all this. The answer - my answer, anyway - is nowhere. I won't try to convince you that I've never plotted more than I'd try to convince you that I've never told a lie, but I do both as infrequently as possible. I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontanaeity of real creation aren't compatible. It's best that I be as clear about this as I can - I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is giving them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course.)

Comments

[fireceremony.livejournal.com]

I agree that too much plot only makes a story seem trite and artificial, because of the reasons King list. I also think that a story pretty much writes itself, aided by the writer to get it down on paper.

But I still think that plot has a great part in movie scripts and other media where the visual is of much greater importance than in writing and where you don't have the possibility or relating emotions the same way you do in text. A superbly plotted story, where the artificiality of plot is part of the form of the movie and which without, the movie wouldn't be half as genius, is "Miller's Crossing" and "The Usual Suspects". They're stories whose plot is so dense and double edged, you need to go thru the stories more than once to get the full experience. I haven't seen "Memento" but I suspect the same is true for that movie. It's also no coincidence these stories are movies and not books / short stories.

[arafel.livejournal.com]

Certainly - but as you pointed out yourself, King is discussing books, not visual media. Plot is absolutely essential there, as you said, because you do not have the author describing the events from all perspectives; rather, you have to rely on visual, emotional, and auditory cues. This may be why so many books have been poorly adapted for screen, and why books that are adapted for screen are often heavily altered.

What I think King is saying is that if you force your story into the rigid confines of the Ultimate Story that you dream of writing (i.e. trying to predetermine every thought and nuance) then you may be bound for frustration. The characters do talk to you and you find that they want to do things you might not have expected. I have found this myself in my limited experience and I can only imagine how it is for someone who knows what s/he is doing.

I see that once again, I forgot to put in a HTML tag. :/