Plotlessness in Lit Fic (Discussion)

Glad to see I'm not alone in the no-plot-in-sight camp!

"Writing is thinking, not thinking written down."

www.girlgriot.wordpress.com

Yeah, it's hard when a decent chunk of your novel is stream-of-consciousness meditation! ;-)

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It's sloppy and drives me nuts, but sometimes I just do that 'slice of life' thing. I start right before whatever event sparks the character development, continue through that as if nothing happened, and try to end just after the evolution has finished.

This is a very meandering, long-winded, word-eating method. It is not my favorite. But I have definitely used it.

I prefer to pick a giant event-as-a-metaphor, and that event-metaphor is my plot. Like right now, the event is a tournament, and it's the culmination of years of dreaming and hard work. With that as a backdrop, I can have that illuminate things that my characters wouldn't necessarily pick up on enough to observe, or don't want to observe. So instead of having a detailed 'this happens, and this, and this is how we tie it together and conclude it,' it's one big 'this happens' and I'm working within those specific confines.

Does that even make sense? I need more cold medicine and a snack. Blargh. I hope that was lucid enough. I like this thread. I hope it goes somewhere.

What am I doing still awake?

...Oh wait.

if i were you i would try clicking the random button on wikpiedia till you hit an place or opbject that inspires you. it is kind of your job to tie these things together. let the plot emerge slowly as a sculptor chips away all that is not a statue from a block of marble.

My only real plot points are actual historical events that happen (the 1973 military coup is of course the biggest plot point, but there are smaller things too, such as Castro's visit to Chile in 1971 and all of the rising political tensions that continually build up). But otherwise, it's basically just my characters living their lives in this kind of setting and how they're lives are influenced by the said historical event plot points.

Hmmm... I know how I want my MC to develop internally, what will spur his development as he travels through Buddhism, but I guess I'm lacking where the application/realization will occur in his daily life. And yes, "show, don't tell," but I have issues with subtlely, even in my own life, and I show by shoving a mirror in someone's phase or smashing them over the head. ;-) I guess I'm pro-Little Bunny Foo Foo.

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Novels without plots are boring.

There, I said it. (I expect the flames to begin pouring it at any moment!) Even the most long-winded and meandering of narratives (Moby-Dick, I'm looking at you) have a plot. The plots may not be the most extravagant or exciting, but they exist. Mrs. Dalloway wanted to buy flowers; Ahab wanted to spear that elusive whale; Odysseus just wanted to get home. Distilling your work into your main character's single driving force should be enough to give your novel a framework that will result in a plot, and will provide a structure that it might otherwise lack.

I really hate this notion that Literary Fiction is character-driven and therefore does not need a plot in order to function. It may not require as much of a plot of other genres, but not having one is grounds for me, at least, to put down the book and move on to another stack in my to-read pile. Plotlessness for the sake of "character exploration" is like a vehicle without a destination: you can drive on and on, but what's the point of wasting gas if you don't have a reason for it? You can say that "the journey is the point, contemporary existence does not have an endpoint" all you want, but that seems so cliche to me now, as a writer operating in 2009. If I were writing in the early 20th-century, my opinion would most assuredly be different.

I'm at work now, so I can't link to the article where I read it, unfortunately; but there seems to be a backlash against the modernist "art for art's sake!" movement among contemporary writers. At this point, we're oversaturated with media. We're used to movies, TV shows, video games that all tell a story. Contemporary readers -- even the erudite, well-read ones -- crave a good story more than anything else. (Why else would Twilight sell so many copies? Ick.) The challenge of literary fiction today, I think, is to make your work compelling from both a intellectual standpoint while remaining accessable. We've got so many other things vying for our attention nowadays; why on earth would I waste my time reading a novel without a point?

Getting off my grumpy, I-hate-my-job-and-want-to-be-writing-my-novel high horse now. XD

The Cyanotic Organization: Whining about NaNoWriMo since 2003!

I've already made my mc schizophrenic to make her more interesting, and I'm not far along at all...this is way harder than I thought it'd be

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
-Robert A. Heinlein

I suppose my story has a vague plot, in that my character does want to achieve something, if somewhat vaguely defined. But really it has just turned into a meandering waffling monologue. Not having a somewhat tight plot makes it hard to write. Not a lot to string along. And really not much to show and stuff the wordcount. I am not even sure this has 50k in it.

Fans of long drawn out narratives that go nowhere may disagree, but to have any sort of character development you need a plot or else it's all just mental masturbation. Even the most long winded and dull novels require a character to get from point A to point B, and hopefully along the way they learn something in the process.

However, this doesn't require an intricately outlined plot full of external conflict. If you follow the concept of the heroic journey your character should have a call to action that draws them out of their ordinary life and starts their journey. That journey can be physical or mental. If you follow this up by throwing a few bricks at them in the form of obstacles they must surmount and then wrap it up with a nifty epiphany you've just found your plot.

You don't need to have your character saving the world or solving crimes. Just give them a difficult problem or two to tackle and the character driven part of your novel will come into play as they make decisions on how to solve them.

I'm actually writing religious/spiritual fiction, but the topic appeals to me, so here goes.

In my NaNovel, "In Splendor Before His Face", there is the bare outline of a plot, but much of the story is (as you say) character-driven and philosophy-based.

My main character (MC) is a guardian angel named Malachi. The "plot" involves him watching a human named Robbie as he grows. There is also a "subplot" in which Malachi interrelates with Enoch, a fallen angel who was once Malachi's friend and who resents Robbie as one of the humans God seems to prefer to himself.

Most of the NaNovel, however, concerns Malachi's reflections on the differences between men and angels, the mysterious ways of God, and Jesus as the nexus among all three.

Paul aka NovelNo4
2005: Shielded in My Armor (completed ahead of schedule)
2009: In Splendor Before His Face (6,230 as Day 4 begins)

I don't see how a character can evolve without a plot; be the plot based on a meeting during one hour, or a life time. It's still a plot.

I'm not 100 % my Nanowrimo will be literary fiction (although that's the way I roll and write, so very likely) but my last project did indeed have a plot, in that manner that life threw things at the main character like life does. The interesting was how she evolved and dealt with it, but she never would've if things hadn't happened.
makes sense...?

Jesus walks on water. Iris walks on Jesus.

I feel very connected to the worries in this thread, even though I think my novel has a very tight plot. The biggest problem for me, I suppose, is that the plot will only cover four to five moments (each no more than an hour in real time, I suppose) across two days in May.

Everything around it and in between is backdrop, and the feeding of character and psychology to these characters so that when they do actually experience these moments it really means something. What I'd like is for my reader to really get to know these characters, and by showing what they are built like through stream-of-consciousness, anecdotes and opinions about the world, each other and the manuscript (see Novel Info?) my reader will form some sort of picture of what's going to happen at the defining moments.

If I keep this process entertaining, hopefully I'll be able to create tension by having things fly off course, having characters fail miserably or succeed heroically, against all odds, and all that.

Or something? I know it sounds very vague, but I don't want to spoil anything of the already minimal plot, and I'm still experimenting on how to do this.

Good luck everyone! :)

I also ramble on Twitter (though sometimes in Dutch).

2008: Junior Boys (won)
2009: Guilt (...?)

I guess I will jump onto the pro-plot bandwagon... I think the plot is a tool, as is the character developement, the setting and all other aspects of story that one may use, for exploring the concepts you are thinking about and illustrating the point that you are trying to get accross. It is also the thing that keeps the reader turning pages.

I feel that the aim of a literary work is to transfer the writer's vision and passion into the reader's mind, so it becomes like an experience for that person, so that they can grow along with the characters... It should be like life to some extent, and in life things happen, and experience causes change and growth.

I also sort of admire those that CAN actually write a novel without much of a plot, though, because I don't think I'd make it past 2K with only introspection. Of course even internal changes in a character's mind, or someone pondering something, or examining what his/her life is about is an something that happens and, therefore, arguably, a plot point.

Here's a question for discussion... How plot-oriented do you think a novel can be, and still be considered literary?

What makes a story a story, IMO, is not the protagonist but rather his/her/its interaction with the antagonist. In order for an antagonist to be an antagonist, there must be some kind of plot that puts him/her/it on the opposite side of the protagonist. Otherwise, it's a long-form journal entry.

That said, plot is everywhere. If you're writing something that interests you, chances are very good it has a plot somewhere, even if it's not very visible yet. Characters in a void are only so interesting and I think most of us wouldn't give them more than half a day unless they had an environment, a society of some sort and a form of progression be it forwards or backwards.

My story is very character-oriented with a bare plot of the much younger sister (protagonist) desiring a closer sibling-relationship with her much older brother (antagonist, but not of the evil or even intentional variety). It's a form of progress and it will have some subplot and the characters will have lives and societies. My guess is, most stories on here have at least that much plot, if not a whole lot more.

The jet pack, though, has never really taken off, Wilson says. The problem is its practical application. While a rocket belt could propel a screaming human to 60 mph in seconds, its fuel lasted for only about half a minute, "which led to more screaming,"

No kidding... it's almost more complicated to write without an underlying concrete plot, in a lot of ways, because you never really know what to say next. My novel is turning out as a sort of set-in-real-time meandering discussion/introspection piece which will probably only be worth something to someone who'll want to psychoanalyze me twenty years from now, or who wants to see what NYU was like in 2009, because although my character isn't much like me, the setting is pretty much the one that I live in. Sometimes, like a painting, a novel is made to be a work of art capturing a certain moment in time, a certain train of thought. And that's legitimate too.

____________________________________________
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To a degree, I don't think we're all on the same page regarding what exactly a plot is. (Not to get all philosophical, because I have no head for such things.) When I mention plot and the lack thereof, I generally mean that sure, things happen. My MC loses her job, she has a successful audition, she gets attacked by a pitbull. But there is no predetermined outline, either written out or just floating nebulously in my head, about how these events intersect and relate or how they'll conclude. I'm just writing her life out and how that affects her. I don't have a real "point." That's what I mean by no plot, as opposed to my MC just sitting on her couch contemplating the meaning of life or why her cousin felt compelled to wrap her car around a tree for the duration of the novel.

I mean, sure, there is a story (for better or worse) in her progress and her growing from page one to page... whatever I was on before I got intimidated and went off to Escapist NaNo Land, but if we're going by the definition of a plot being "significant chain of events with a neat conclusion," then no, I sure don't have one.

What am I doing still awake?

...Oh wait.

IMO, as soon as your character wakes up in the morning, and gets out of bed, you have something that resembles a piece of plot. What it all comes down to is how much time you spend explaining your plot. This year, my muse is so very much in charge I don't have the foggiest idea where the plot is going to go.

My characters tend to think too much this year.

Genre? Can I choose more than one? How about this year we call it what it really is: Post-Apocalypse/Fantasy/Romance/Literary Fiction.

Ever look into the Eyes of a Dragon and Find a loving Soul? Welcome to my World.

Oh, boy, I am so over my head here. Here comes a stream of consciousness vent.................... I am trying to write a story set in the 1930s so I suppose it's historical fiction, but so far it's a small story, not sweeping, and I guess I have literary fiction ambitions. This story is inspired by some true events, and I have placed a woman who is like my grandmother in and near those events & tried to imagine how she might respond. Unfortunately she died a long time ago and while I know the kind of woman she was I don't have enough knowledge of her day to day life in her younger years to really KNOW her. I have been looking at online & library resources to get more of a sense of the life then. But I still don't KNOW this character! And there's so much I don't know about the setting --e.g. one of the characters is a small-town minister--it's easy to get bogged down with researching what Bible texts, themes he might use, etc. Obviously I did not follow the adage to start by writing what I know well, but I've been sitting on this story for a long time.

Also I feel like I have a good, long short story here, not a novel. Need more story. Tempted to abandon & start over but I'm scared to do that at 10,000 plus words. Should I just keep writing and not worry so much about historical accuracy right now, see how the story might unfold?

I agree and disagree. I think that the idea of a novel without a real plot is an interesting idea but must be artfully handled. And every, EVERY novel (nay, every creative work in every genre) needs an arc. So if you can't write a novel with an arc without a plot, I think you need the plot. But if the arc is interesting (and apparent) enough, and if the characters are compelling enough, plotlessness might just be able to work.

My current nano work has a loose plot but cannot be very tight since it takes place over at least eighteen years. (I say at least because I have not decided if I want to write some of what happened in the five to eight years before the beginning that I have now.) I like to think it's Betty Smith-esque, especially in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, because it's the same kind of idea plotwise. There are lots of smaller plots, although the chapters are too long to be vignettes and the chapters each add a little bit more to the main story. I'm hoping that by the time I finish I will have been able to tie the end back to the very beginning as I have it now, and then during NaNoFiMo go back and make the middle fit the arc AND the plot better.

What I did today to help solve this problem was to mentally separate these characters from any real people. The characters are superficially inspired by them, but it's really fiction, so I should not get stuck worrying about what the real Aunt Grace might or might not have done. It helped to go through with the find/replace and change every name that might possibly resonate with family meaning and distract me from the new world of the story. Now I think the characters can reveal themselves and the story flow more easily.

I also read a post on historical accuracy in another thread, and it said, just write it! Don't get bogged down with accuracy at this stage.

Boring novels are boring. It doesn't matter whether they are character-driven or plot-driven or philosophical tomes, if the writing has no fire, the novel is a bore.

If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.

I started out like that, my first 6 chapters (very short each by the way) where just a day in a charcter's life, every character being different, as of later a plot started to appear, where the characters would meet. So i guess if you can elaborate on a character, the smallest plot will go on with it, just be careful with inconsistencies though.

Main Characters: 5
Characters: 7
Chapters: 7
Plot: starting to sprout

I've determined after much analysis of this forum that what I'm writing is, indeed lit fic. So, if you don't mind, I'll be joining this conversation.

I'm 8000 words in, and I still really have no idea where my novel is going once it gets past the, oh, I don't know, 12,000 word mark. There's pretty much no primary conflict so far, and almost all of it so far has just been random musings inside the main characters head. There are also only five named characters right now, the MC, two characters that likely won't be appearing in the story any more, a strange deity who pretty much only has a name without a face at this point, and a character that I'm probably going to kill off in about 3000 words. So, there you go. My novel has really got nothing.

But I'm enjoying writing it, so, in the end, it's all good.

07 - the paxtangbo; or the birth, death, and violent emotions of arnold nawrocki and others like him (WINNER)
09 - the adventures of panda bear, the magic talking snake

A novel will almost inevitably have some sort of plot, if we take "plot" broadly enough, but I think what's often worrying people who are thinking they have no plot - what worries me, anyway - is: what if there isn't any particular "destination", or culminating, conflict-resolving conclusion, or whatever we want to call it, at the end? What if, for example, a novel just covers a few days in someone's life? Sure, things happen; but they don't lead up to some particular conclusion, just as events in real life often don't.

I think that, unless it is done very well, it would leave most readers unsatisfied.

Thanks. I think what you're referring to is usually referred to as "slice of life" fiction, which honestly is what I like to read most of the time. I had a definite moment in middle school after returning another book the library and thinking, why is everything so dramatic? Everyone's getting kidnapped or there's a fire or losing their home. That was what left me so unsatisfied, and why I've wandered into lit fic. Less melodrama, more characters just reacting to what life threw them. (Or so I thought, and then I read stuff geared for adults and realized everyone's a drug addict or crazy. Ya win some, ya lose some.)

The problem with "slice of life," though (at least for me), is knowing where the heck to stop! That's where themes come in, I think. While externally, you may not be able to legitimately find a stopping place unless you kill everyone and don't have anyone's grief to write, after you make your thematic point, you might be able to call it a day, even if the character's life is still going and still interesting.

What am I doing still awake?

...Oh wait.

Thanks for writing this! It helped me with my current plotlessness situation.

It seems that many people are taking this line, so I guess I will argue against it. If you call a plot walking around a town, then yes Joyce's Dubliners has a plot. But I think that word means something else, a characters physical wants and desires and the actions that character takes to achieve those desires (whether they be wealth, killing the bad guy, or falling in love). Those things are plots. If the character is involved in some sort of internal struggle while dealing with day to day things, what you may be calling slice of life, I do not consider this a plot.

I will admit that most of the books I read do come from the late 19th/early 20th century. Many of the writers there tended to be more concerned with ideas than actions. Look at Hamsun's Hunger or Mysteries (both completely plotless but supremely wonderful. The latter is downright hilarious if you didn't think high literary could be combined with humor). The thing about Literary writing as I see it is to engage the reader on the empathetic level. If you are reading character driven books and don't like them, maybe that's because they just aren't very good.

As far as rebelling against the modernists' art, that is what brought about postmodernism (which I completely refute, but will not take the time or space here to do so), which is truly an abhorrent thing. Now we are saddled with so many people getting cancer or divorced and not a true idea in site.

If the author knows what he is doing, then that's a good start. But that doesn't mean the reader can just sit back like they are watching the latest Transformers movie. A well executed literary novel demands a certain amount out of the reader as well as the author. Otherwise, just pick up the latest volume of Dan Brown's Harry Twilight and enjoy yourself.

I can identify with your dilemma- I have always been interested in my great-great-great-great-great-great (or however many...) grandfather who came to America from London right in the middle of the Revolutionary War. But I have not been able to find what motivated him to come in the first place, and then to end up fighting for America (which was essentially the enemy of his homeland), but that is the truth. So a few years ago I decided to write about him and I think I handled the day-to-day details as well as I could without being able to know him, and the fact that this was so long ago that his story would have been diluted out by now even if anyone had a real knowledge of his life. So I got together all of my research on him and did what my imagination had been whispering to me for so long- I used my historical research in general of life during that time and place to try to piece together a lot of the description. But that was the icing on the cake. What the real story was, of course, was what motivated him in the first place to do the big thing. You probably have more information on your grandmother than I have about my ancestor. But you know the time in which she lived, the family she had, and some of it you just have to kind of guess at from what was going on during that time in order to rebuild what was the big picture of your grandmother. I think I really did a fairly decent job on my ancestor because I am passionate about his life. Did I get it all right? Of course not, because I am not psychic. But does that matter? I don't think so. I really think I did a decent job on his story and I want to go back and edit it. I have actually divided his life into a trilogy, based on his life in London, his trip here, and his settling down and building a family that spread out over the entire country. If you know what was going on where your grandmother lived, I think it is reasonable that you can piece together enough of the big story so the little things don't really matter. After all, you're writing a novel, not a biography. In some ways, I believe the unknown little facts might make her a lot more colorful a character than the real story. Just a few thoughts...good luck and enjoy weaving a tapestry of your family from the true cloth mixed with a bit of maybe overly colorful threads. That doesn't mean your grandmother's life was dull- on the contrary. If she is in your heart, she earned her place there, in my opinion. Just figure out why and how. I guarantee you will come to know her better than you did before, even though some of the little things might not be so true. What difference does it make?

Just wait for your ghost to whisper and you will know what to do.