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What Is a Plot?At first glance, answering the question What Is a Plot? hardly seems worth bothering with. A plot is everything that happens in a novel, right? You start with Event A and finish a few hundred pages later with Event Z - right? Kind of, yes. But that's a bit like saying that a house is a dwelling with four walls and a roof - it doesn't tell you much about how to build one. Let me begin by giving you my own definition of plot, (then afterwards I'll dissect it word by word in considerable detail)... What is a plot? A plot is a series of linked events concerning a character who urgently wants something important that won't be easy to get. The events should reach a satisfactory conclusion. A plot is a series of linked events...Linked how? Linked by an unbroken chain of cause and effect. Event B must be caused by Event A and in turn must cause Event C. Or to put it another way, Event B must be the effect of Event A, Event C the effect of Event B, and so on. If Event B could have occurred without Event A happening first, you are not plotting a novel so much as cobbling together a series of vaguely related events. Indeed, when a story in a novel lacks this important cause-and-effect chain, or when the chain is a weak one, the novel is said to be episodic. "Let us define plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. 'The king died and then the queen died,' is a story. 'The king died, and then the queen died of grief,' is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Or again: 'The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.' This is a plot with a mystery in it..." Another way of explaining it is like this: each event in a novel, whether dramatic or apparently trivial, must have consequences. In other words, it must make a difference to what comes next. If the tale being told is unaffected by a particular event, or if the tale would have been precisely the same without it, that event has no place in the plot and should probably be removed. The only other thing to say about this chain of events that makes up a plot is that each event within the chain, broadly speaking, should be a little "bigger" than the one before...
Of course, you won't want every single event in your novel to be uniformly "bigger" than the one that went before it...
You can read this article in full, and loads more besides, in my 500-page eBook. Follow this link to discover more about the Ultimate Guide to Novel Writing.
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