Plot? What Plot?

Two things amazed me about my writing progress last year: 1) that I was actually doing it; and 2) that I managed to write over four hundred pages without even the slightest hint of a plot. This is okay for forty pages or so, you know, just introducing the characters, setting, and what not. Maybe eighty if you’re particularly gifted with adjectives. Maybe even two hundred pages, if you have the luxury of forcing all your readers to enjoy your work at gunpoint. But never, ever four hundred pages.

Yes, yes, I realized I touched on all this in the last book update. Today I just want to dig into the whole concept a bit more.

Not every book actually needs a plot. Travel books, memoirs, dictionaries, — all of these have the ability to fill hundreds of pages without even the merest threat of a twist ending. However, unlike the other books I’ve written, this one is fiction. As I got to the point where I realized the book might never end, it dawned on me that I might not be the only one to notice the problem.

For one, books that never end are very expensive to print. But worse, books that never end are never read. And, like most writers, I’m definitely writing to be read. So what’s a struggling wannabe to do? Come up with a plot, of course.

Disclaimer: I’m not a complete idiot. I did know about this strange literary device called a plot before I started. And to be honest, I had one when I started. I wrote up an outline which looked okay when it was only seventeen lines. It wasn’t until I actually started writing, however, that I realized it was about as thin as butter scraped across too much bread. There was no way my piddly little idea could support the weight of an entire novel.

As I mentioned in the last post, I began work on a second book (or booklet). I worked on it for two days. It’s about ten thousand words long and told in the first person point of view. It fully fleshed out the backstory I needed to give the main story a sense of purpose. Once I had that, I officially abandoned the first draft and went back to the literary drawing board: the synopsis. (If you can’t tell a story in 500 words, you sure won’t do it in 500,000 words. Trust me.) This second pass of the synopsis is getting a lot closer to where I want to be. Still a ways to go, but closer (and in the right direction).

Even better — for you, that is — I may be ready to actually unveil some of this mystery when Update Three rolls around. Which means I’d better stop typing here and get back to the word processor.