Have We Lost the Plot?

Thoughts on the elusive principle from a writer + reader's POV

What is a plot? I don’t know and I don’t think anyone does, but 2023 was the year I went looking for it. I felt I had lost it, lost any basic understanding of it, plus I was starting to hatch an idea for a new novel (what I’m thinking will be my fourth book) that might actually have a plot in a more conventional way than the other books I’ve written. I panicked. Generally I do not begin writing from what most people consider a plot, I begin writing from an idea of who a character might be, a question, a relationship, an image, or a mood.

I combed lists of best suspense and mystery books and got them from the library and read and listened to them to see how they worked. Many of these were interesting to read but ultimately not super useful or long-lasting for me, except Gone Girl which, I think, is so successful because of its point of view work and reversals. It’s really the story of two people who are trying to stay married to each other but failing at that, and cannot agree on how to tell the story of what the fuck went wrong.

I also read some books on plot. The usual suspects, plus this little one called Plot: The Art of Story by Amy Jones.

I gravitated to this book because of its drawings and diagrams. When it comes to plot, I’m a visual learner. Jones’ book is more descriptive than prescriptive which I appreciate, mostly devoted to drawing and naming common shapes of stories — “rags to riches,” “quest,” “comedy” — and analyzing how they work. I did particularly appreciate her section on “twists & reveals”: “A well-executed twist can be the making of a plot,” Jones writes. “A sudden turn of events or an extraordinary revelation can jerk a narrative into a completely new direction or throw everything into an entirely new light—past, present, and future.”

But Jones also steps into the hole of saying that plot is fundamentally about conflict. “All character, all structure, all drama, is built on the law of opposites,” she writes. “Thus, conflict and opposition are found between characters (e.g. criminal vs detective, or hunter vs. prey) and also within them.” But what does conflict even mean? A disagreement, an incompatibility, a variance, a clash.

Jones also makes the tired division between “character-driven” stories "(“focused on character development) and “plot driven stories” (the protagonist is carried along by events”). As if somehow the thing that is called the “plot” is wholly separate from the things that are the “people.” This would make “plot” things that just happen, are happening from the outside in the realm of “incident”; things like births and deaths and weddings. This just never made sense to me.

I also watched TikTok videos about plot and in a nice twist of fortune, someone shared an excerpt of this author conversation between Ocean Vuong and Jacqueline Woodson at The Strand to celebrate On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

“That’s how a lot of western literature is given to us from the western canon and greco-roman tradition,” Vuong says to Woodson starting at around the 26:20 mark in this video. “I wanted to write about American violence but I did not want to enact American violence because then it’s just a replication. I would only be another cog in the wheel. So I had to turn to other methods. And one of the methods I found, a narrative structure, was a Japanese form called Kishotenketsu. And it’s actually a chinese form that helped organize lineation in Chinese poetry. So Ki is the introduction of a character or a scene. Sho is deepening, deepening those things. Ten is a turn; not a plot twist but a turn, a different element, sometimes a whole other character will be introduced. And ketsu is the accumulation of all of those things; it’s not a summary, not a conclusion but an accumulation. And so what happens is it’s a plot system that moves without conflict. And I always felt that proximity, life lived in proximity has plenty of drama and tension, enough to build a narrative structure worthy of literature. And that’s how we live. We’re not here because of a linear plot, we’re here because of proximity. We decided to put our bodies amongst each other, alongside each other, and from that proximity, meaning is amplified and created.”

I love this idea of proximity which is really what animates Housemates, the idea that different people in close proximity is an inherently interesting situation. And also the idea of a turn that is not a twist and a final act that is not a conclusion but rather just an accumulation, like snow that has accumulated on the ground over time.

Perhaps, that got me thinking, plot isn’t so much what happens and then what happens next but rather a sense of accumulated unity—a logic, a question, or an unsolvable mystery—which is where incident mixes with character perhaps. I think on some fundamental level plot is just what keeps the reader inside the book rather than say, texting, or watching Selling Sunset, or taking a nap. It’s the thing that says stay here, something is happening, don’t you want to know what it is?

I don’t really know how to articulate how to achieve that from the writer’s stance yet — again, probably no one does, but

Alice Elliott Dark

just wrote a lovely piece this morning about how it feels to lose and find her plot when writing — but I sure do know which books feel like they really have a plot that kept me inside the book ready and waiting to see what was happening. Here are 30 books I read recently that had plots that WORKED grouped into categories based on how and why they worked for me.

Plot as linear incidents that illuminate a character(s) as stand in for big idea(s)
Once upon a time there was an interesting person trying to live and work and love today. None of these books are really about a “problem” or a “conflict” in a traditional way, yet they employ tried and true linear storytelling in which something happens to a character or characters which leads to something else happening. Along the way big ideas get raised — In The Very Nice Box by Eve Gleichman and Laura Blackett the ideas are about labor and capitalism and tech and male entitlement and grief; in Dykette by Jenny Fran Davis they’re about queerness and queer community and class and social media — and the characters test and explore and illuminate themselves as a way of illuminating those ideas.

Examples:
The Very Nice Box by Eve Gleichman & Laura Blackett
Dykette by Jenny Fran Davis
The Catch by Alison Fairbrother
Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou
All This Could be Different by

Sarah Thankam Mathews

Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress
The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood

Plot as the character in tension with herself
Sometimes called the “Women Versus the Void” genre, these books work and have successful plots for me because there is a core sense of suffering and discomfort coming from within the character, and we are reading to see why they are this way and if they can possibly ever feel better (maybe this is conflict?). Many of these books lack the kind of surface level incidents that the previous category uses for reader engagement, or the incidents are taking place within their mind or in some magical zone. Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson was really immersive and successful for me because we are watching a character wrestle and figure out how much of life to want and there is development and turns (to use Vuong’s words) on that journey. Like everyone else, I read The Guest by Emma Cline this summer in a day or two on the beach and that book operates the same way. What the fuck is going on with this woman? you keep asking as you turn the pages (though it has an added plot device of a time clock and a “where will she sleep each night?” problem).

Examples:
Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson
The Guest by Emma Cline
Chemistry by Weike Wang
I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins
Assembly by Natasha Brown
Hurricane Girl by Marcy Dermansky
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
The Pisces by Melissa Broder

Plot as denied feeling rising to the surface
Perhaps a stylistic subset of the “women versus the void” plot logic are books in which a character is hopelessly knotted up (often from grief, loss, estrangement or some other catastrophic event) to the point where they begin the book almost unable to speak, or able to speak only in poems, riddles, jokes, or obfuscations. These books don’t use linear time or conventional incidents but jump between time in a fragmentary style and are mostly about revelation, an inching towards truth, articulation, vulnerability, and real feeling. In Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung, we are given fragment after fragment of a person struggling to know what life is in the wake of her father’s death. By the end of the novel, the reader can clearly grasp her real heart and her grief and what made these things so ungraspable to her at the beginning.

Examples:
Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung
What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons
Bough Down by Karen Green
Nox by Anne Carson

Plot as two-hander
This category is for books that move and generate reader engagement based on the powerful forcefield created between two people. What is special about this relationship? What does it do for each character? Why was it lost? Can it be found again? The romance genre (will they/won’t they) works this way, and so does my favorite micro genre of “the friend breakup book.” I read Mari Naomi’s graphic memoir I Thought You Loved Me in a single night because I was reading to find out — why did her best friend really end their friendship?

Examples:
I Thought You Loved Me by Mari Naomi
Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeannette McCurdy
The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith

Plot as POV trouble
In Trust Exercise by Susan Choi, you think you’re reading a book about a teenage romantic relationship and then you get two narrative shifts that make the book now more about how does this narrator relate to the other one? The reader is now reading to understand where we are and who is telling the story more so than we are reading to see the resolution of the surface incidents.

Examples:
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
Counterfeit by Kirstin Chen
Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Plot as aftermath
The passage of time and the consequences of a single act are powerful plot engines. In Rachel Lyon’s Self-Portrait With Boy, a single moment of chance and then an ambitious decision are the basis for the rest of the book, with the main character returning over and over and reckoning with something she has already done. Usually these books explore cruel, unethical, or bizarre decisions, asking the unsolvable question of why people do things that hurt others or themselves or defy conventional logic.

Examples:
Self-Portrait With Boy by

Rachel Lyon

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson

What are books you loved that had successful plots? Maybe they fit into more than one category here or a category I haven’t yet thought of. Do you have a craft book or essay I should read? Let me know in the comments below.

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Book Scoop

Thrilled that Housemates has been featured on a delicious bevy of “most anticipated book of 2024” lists including at Electric Literature, Lit Hub, The Millions, The Rumpus, LGBTQReads, Them.us, Lilith, Debutiful, Hey Alma, and more.

Beautiful print galleys of Housemates have also arrived! If you are a reviewer, podcaster, bookseller, event series organizer, or just general loudmouth and you want one, please reach out to my team here. You can also request an e-galley of the book from NetGalley.

If you want to keep track of my book on your reading app of choice, you can do that on Goodreads or StoryGraph.

yours,
Emma