Easy Ways to Think About Plot: The Driving Question of Your Novel

Lesson 4 of "How to Finally Get Started on that Novel"

Mariam Chagelishvili

Lesson 4 of 8 from “How to Finally Get Started on that Novel”

Oh god, the novel needs a plot, too? Look, the horrors persist, but so do you. 

Once on a date (that part isn’t really relevant I suppose except that I did honestly think it was a very good first date question) someone asked me if I had been drawn to writing because of story or because of language. (Maybe it’s more relevant to note that he was French? It just feels like such a French question, n’est pas?) No one had ever asked me that in quite such a clear way before. And I had an answer immediately: because of language. Duh, I’m a Dalloway-disciple. 

I wrote so much deeply plotless fiction before I finally came around to the idea that, even if what mostly interests you about writing is the beauty of language, it’s nice to offer the reader some clear reasons to turn pages. As E.M. Forster imagines it in Aspects of the Novel:

The primitive audience was an audience of shock-heads, gaping round the campfire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or the wooly rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next? The novelist droned on, and as soon as the audience guessed what happened next, they either fell asleep or killed him. 

One hopes that most of our contemporary audiences are more likely to turn to their phones than to kill us, but for the novelist the stakes remain high. How to capture a total stranger’s attention in a world where they have so many choices of how to entertain themselves?

Forster defines story as “a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence–dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death, and so on. Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next.” 

Who am I to quibble with E.M. Forster! But I would humbly add to this that in addition to the progression of time, we need to have a feeling of causality. As readers, we want to feel like one event in the story leads to the next in a non-random way. The way the story unfolds, all the way up to the ending, should feel both inevitable and surprising. If it’s only surprising (i.e. feels random), sophisticated readers will feel duped and while we can assume they won’t rise up against us in violence per Forster, they might leave a nasty review on Goodreads which is even worse. 

It’s not just me saying this. I was recently in the audience of a panel of literary agents, and someone asked them the biggest mistake they see new novelists making. One agent said, immediately, “Plots not feeling causal,” and the rest all nodded furiously. 

A novel where a bunch of things simply happen is like a pinch pot before it’s been smoothed out, or the pattern for a garment with all the chalk lines and seams still showing. We want the reader to be seduced by the story; we want them to forget they are reading a novel and simply be drawn into the fictional world. And this happens when the plot feels causal: one thing irrevocably leading to the next.

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