The Shape of a Story: On Losing (and Finding) the Plot of Your Novel

As literary terms go, plot is a funny one to be afraid of. Sure, it has a whiff of the cemetery about it, and the suggestion of nefarious scheming does not help, but the most dangerous thing about plot from my younger self’s point of view was that I didn’t think I could write one.

That, and its dual belonging in the “table stakes” and “cheap tricks” camps. I knew that I was supposed to be able to craft one in my sleep, and I also knew that if ever I was going to try my hand at devising one, it would be best not to mention it or let it show. Like the correct undergarments, I understood that it was a good idea to have one in place, but that a visible line or exposed strap would be worse than vulgar.

The disdain that otherwise open-minded readers reserve for works in which the plot is showing, and especially for so-called genre fiction, certainly contributed to my dread. Oh, a thriller. Aha, a romance, I see. I prefer a character driven novel, myself. As if all civilized people must agree that a story with a certain structure, with a certain type of plot, cannot also be driven by its characters.

Can it? And how does a person learn to do something that’s meant to be invisible?

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That I wanted nothing more than to write was clear to me from the age of reading onward. Buried deep in my soul, along with an abiding passion for breakfast cereals hot and cold, was the knowledge that it was novels I wanted to write, because I wanted to get at the kinds of truths that one can only tell through relatively long-winded packs of lies.

But somewhere between middle school and university entrance, I managed to convince myself that I did not have it in me to write a plot. My evidence? That a fully formed novel had not, thus far, spontaneously poured from a single one of my (many) pens. Immaculate conception or nothing was my view on the subject. Where I got this from, I have no idea.

Imagining I might become a journalist or a diplomat, or some kind of fascinating, life-of-the-cocktail-party journalist-cum-diplomat, I studied Modern Languages at a U.K. university. I learned about The Rise of the Novel in Golden Age Spain and Proust and the Art of Being Modern; I read Cervantes and Márquez and Borges, Balzac and Flaubert and Sartre, all of whom strengthened both my itch to write fiction and my certainty I’d never do it well enough to show to anyone. Later, I went to journalism school, where the plot is meant to come to you.

What a painful shock. The plot doesn’t come to you in journalism, any more than it does in fiction. You still have to find the story. You have to decide what the point of your story is and order it accordingly. I was forever not doing this, trying instead to lead with characters, with settings. To capture all of the nuance, all of the grey, all of the complexity of whatever situation I was supposed to be reporting on. And my student articles were returned with exasperated notes in the margins. “Too many angles. Pick one.” “Where is your nut graf?? The para that explains why I’m still reading this??!!”

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How does a person learn to do something that’s meant to be invisible? You probably figured this one out well before I did. She reads.

The difference between story and plot, according to E. M. Forster, is causality. A story is a series of events ordered by time sequence; a plot is one in which the events are causally linked, so event A brings about event B, and so on. This makes it sound incredibly straightforward, like knitting a scarf. And yet if you’ve tried it (I have never successfully knitted anything at all), you’ll know that it’s anything but. Taking an intelligent reader on an unexpected journey that will engage his interest and possibly even move him (let’s not get greedy), with nothing but a causally linked sequence of events? Cold necks guaranteed.

Even if it were agreed upon (it is not) that plot is the egg that holds the cake together and gives it its shape, to try a different domestic analogy, still, many discerning readers will, if they perceive plot’s presence, dismiss the whole confection as Not Cake.

How is an amateur scarf-knitter, cake-baker, or journalism student trying to stuff her increasingly urgent need to write fiction into long articles about French youths who want to restore the monarchy to win? Well, it was going about as well for me as it was for the jeunes monarchistes.

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“‘Character is destiny,’” says Novalis in what George Eliot’s narrator calls “one of his questionable aphorisms” in The Mill on the Floss. “But not the whole of our destiny.” Addressing the reader, Eliot’s narrator precedes that statement with this one about the novel’s protagonist, Maggie Tulliver: “You have known Maggie a long while, and need to be told, not her characteristics, but her history…For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within.”

Of course it isn’t. The more I read about plot, the more sympathy I have for my younger self. It’s one thing to attempt to render a person convincingly on the page. It’s another class of hubris to build a world for that person and take on the role of god in that world, subjecting him to circumstances of your design, and seeing if and how he changes.

In life, I have tried many times to write my own plot. A few years after I graduated from journalism school, my then-boyfriend and I took a slow walk through Brooklyn. We’d just been to his younger sister’s baby shower. It had awakened us to the fact that we, too, had reached adulthood proper. We decided on our walk that we would get married the following year, mostly as an excuse to take a long-anticipated trip to Japan, and we would start thinking about a baby a year or so after that. We returned from our walk rosy from the cold and pleased with ourselves for having thought everything through so well. About a month later, I was pregnant.

As George Eliot (who published her first novel at age 40) knew, we only have so much control over our own narratives. A crossroads will appear, and we will have to make a call with the information available to us. With hindsight we can tell ourselves stories about our choices, about our experiences, and those stories will always be limited by the version of us that is telling them.

What if it were the same with characters? What if you began with an idea of where they might go, a version of their story to tell, but then over the course of countless drafts, got to know them in all their range of selves, and allowed them to, as humanly as possible, make decisions?

The word that unlocked this possibility for me was “scaffolding.”

Zadie Smith used it in a 2006 interview about On Beauty with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s “Bookworm.” I didn’t hear the episode until the winter of 2020. By then we lived in Toronto. I can remember that I was listening one evening while tidying up the toy explosion in our living room.

Silverblatt asked whether Howard’s End had provided “an efficient shape” for On Beauty’s “confrontations and meanings to emerge in,” and Smith answered: “I think that every single one of my books has needed scaffolding. I don’t know whether that’s because I’m young and still uncertain or because fiction needs scaffolding. Then the question is afterwards how well you hide it.”

By that time in my own plot we had a second daughter who was a few months old. Her birth was followed by postpartum complications that jolted me, and from my current perspective this event was causally linked with my renewed commitment to a vocation that I had not quite given up on. During and after my recovery, I wrote like a person possessed.

This word, scaffolding, became the antidote to my fear of plot. Think of a shape that will allow you to contain and animate your characters, to turn them around and around in your mind until you know them. Then see if it stands. That’s all.

Naturally, it took years. First the structural work, I’d tell myself, then the paint. It isn’t going to be beautiful at every stage. Some days you will finish in a pit of self-loathing. Plaster dust will fill your eyes, there will be leaks and bad choices, but eventually, if you keep at it, you might have a house. Or a cake. Or a scarf. I can’t tell you which, if any, I’ve made, or whether it holds, whether the lines show. That’s up to you.

But as the character in this story, I’ve evolved at least to this extent: it’s no longer plot I’m afraid of.

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The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight is available from Pamela Dorman Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.