{"id":1392,"date":"2017-06-30T16:41:07","date_gmt":"2017-06-30T20:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/?p=1392"},"modified":"2017-06-30T16:41:20","modified_gmt":"2017-06-30T20:41:20","slug":"on-plots-in-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lucysnyder.com\/index.php\/on-plots-in-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"On Plots in Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Simply put, a plot is the series of events that make up a fictional story or novel.<\/p>\n

My first really big epiphany with regard to plotting happened at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, which I attended when I was finishing up college. Before that workshop, I’d been writing short stories and had sold one, but I had no clear idea of why my other stories weren’t selling.<\/p>\n

I’d taken a couple of creative writing courses in college, and the instruction there had focused largely on the quality of micro-writing (in other words, the prettiness of the prose style) and on things like dialog and theme and metaphor. All good stuff, but the fundamental mechanics of what makes a story a story were treated as something that just sort of happens.<\/p>\n

During the week that author Joe Haldeman was teaching our Clarion<\/a> class, he started talking about the five-point plot as it relates to short fiction. As he explained it (and you’ll see different explanations around the Internet) this type of plot goes like so:<\/p>\n

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  1. You introduce your main character. He or she might not be likable<\/em>, but he or she needs to be interesting<\/em>.<\/li>\n
  2. He or she has a problem that relates somehow to his or her character traits. This problem:\n