On Not Just Stringing ‘Em Along: Does Your Novel Have a Plot?

You (hotly): You’re kidding, right? Of course my novel has a plot!

Me: It probably does, because that’s the kind of tightly-put-together story we prefer nowadays. But some novels really/almost/actually don’t. They’re episodic, quest-like. And that’s OK, if you intend them to be that way. Just don’t let it happen by accident, as I once almost did. Perhaps a little reflection up front can stave off some panicked rewrites later.

The Classic Quest

The great English classic Pilgrim’s Progress is a good example of a quest novel. The Pilgrim is on a journey, and en route, he passes through many trials, confronts many adversaries. They pop up once, he swats them down, and then he moves on and never sees them again. Other great works of literature like Dante’s Inferno (which of course, isn’t a novel) use the same episodic structure. So do modern books modeled after these—books like the delightful Hind’s Feet for High Places. In fact, all three are metaphors for life, which most of us only get to pass through once, and we either learn our lessons or we don’t. This is an ancient pattern of literature, and the sagas and hero tales of almost every culture (for example, the Odyssey) employ it. How could you go wrong?

… And the Rest

Well, I did early in my career. The first draft of a (nameless) manuscript came back with the editorial comment, “This reads like ‘Jane Doe’s Really Awful Year.’” What she meant was that the plot points were just a series of beads strung together with no real connection. I was keenly conscious of the need to pack it full of action, but I had somehow neglected to weave those actions back into an overarching whole. I hadn’t set out to write an epic, but it was a kind of mini-quest. As I saw it, the protagonist’s arriving at new self-knowledge as a result of these experiences was the string that held the beads together. She surmounted each of these trials and moved on. And I was right.

But something that might have justified that sort of single-line structure was missing. My story was a modern one, although set in the past. It was psychological. It had some humor. And it did NOT have the sense of timeless majesty of the great quests of literature. The stakes were not enormous. The theater of action wasn’t vast. It just wasn’t the right story to attempt that sort of unconventional linearity.

String v. Braid

Rather than following a straight line with plot points that serve once and fall away, most modern books have a sinuous plot, and everything that happens, everyone the protagonist encounters, typically exercises some influence over other parts of the book. It resembles beads braided into a plait of hair rather than beads in a line on a single string. Every strand gets woven back in. This is certainly a more difficult structure to organize, but in the end it isn’t so demanding of the grandeur factor.

Now, some readers might have liked that novel the way it was originally written. Maybe the editor just happened to be one of the people who didn’t. But her feedback—although it meant a lot of hard work to re-plot the story—made me think harder about how to “reuse” characters or actions or even settings that had made a brief appearance and then dropped from sight. I’m sure the second draft was much tighter and more complex—with a lot more “Aha!” moments for the reader. In short, a better novel.