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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The Three-Act Structure: A great place to start

You don’t have to structure your novel with three acts – you don’t have to do anything! – but it’s a useful way to shape your book without limiting things too much. In its simplest iteration: Act I sets the scene and introduces whatever conflict or questions the book will focus on; Act 2 is where there is rising action and a confrontation – often with a protagonist having to make some high stakes decision; and in Act 3 we have our climax and whatever happens after that. 

It also helps to have some key question in mind. This is often called the Main Dramatic Question, and it’s a question that will be answered by the climax of the story. Will they end up together? Will the mystery be solved? In The Sisters Brothers, which we looked at in our character lesson, it’s something like: Will Eli Sisters leave his life of crime? 

Often, in literary fiction, this question is a little more subtle. In Mrs. Dalloway, which we looked at in our scope lesson, the Main Dramatic Question is maybe more like: Is Clarissa happy about the life she’s created for herself? Or: How can Clarissa come to terms with the life she has lived, rather than those that might have been? In my novel Animal Instinct, the main dramatic question was more like: Will the protagonist open herself to the possibility of love? 

Keep in mind that as you’re writing, you don’t really have to know the answer yet, or how the answer will present itself! But having the question in mind will help you as you move your story forward. 

A Study in Plot: The Great Gatsby

Okay, I know I was teasing you about The Great Gatsby in an earlier lesson, but we’re gonna talk about it for a minute here, just as a novel I think many people are familiar with. 

Side note, it’s fascinating that this novel has become such required reading for American high school and college students, and not to be cynical but I think it’s because it’s short, fairly easy to read, and maps so cleanly to themes we love in this country, i.e. love and money. And the meta-story of the book – that it was a commercial flop, leaving F. Scott Fitzgerald to die convinced he was a failure without ever knowing the book would be considered a classic and a great American novel – is such catnip for us depraved novelists.

Okay so spoilers are forthcoming, in case you did not read it when you were assigned to which, honestly, come on. But here’s the basics:

1) As I said, you really don’t have to use a three act structure for a novel, but Fitzgerald does. 

In Act 1, the beginning of a novel teaches the reader how to read it, establishes the world of the book, and shows the current status quo – whatever is about to be shaken up by the events of the story. 

In The Great Gatsby, we get Nick, our narrator, being introduced to Long Island high society, including Jay Gatsby, his mysterious millionaire neighbor who is constantly throwing crazy parties. Shout out to Nick for the shadiest opening in literature, during which he says, basically, “I would never judge anyone… but like… well let me tell you some shit” (paraphrasing). Nick hangs around with his cousin Daisy, who has married a rich brute called Tom who by the way everyone knows is cheating on her with someone called Myrtle Wilson. There’s some history between Daisy and Gatsby, Nick’s not sure what. Note that Nick’s not knowing the background allows the reader to discover along with him, and creates tension in the narrative.

We get some backstory, which will inform the action of the book. Turns out, Gatsby was in love with Daisy when they were young, but didn’t have the resources to be a good match for her. She married Tom instead, who is from an “enormously wealthy” Chicago family and was a football player at Yale. (Eye roll from this Gen-Xer, sorry.)  Meanwhile, Gatsby became a self-made millionaire mostly to impress her which? Lightly toxic behavior all around. And what do you know… turns out he bought a mansion across the bay from her house.

2) In Act 2, we see Gatsby and Daisy reunited. Something that kind of cracks me up about this book is that Act 2 lasts for approximately 12 seconds before we launch in Act 3, where everything falls apart. But hey, it’s the Jazz Age, everyone’s drunk and traumatized, who has the time!

Also, it’s causal. Daisy learns Gatsby’s in town because of Nick (indirectly). They get together again, and this launches into motion everything else that happens in the book. Each action causes the next.

Notably, we have a cast of characters driven by desire. Gatsby wants to fit in with the old-money wealthy milieu of East Coast society, and he also wants Daisy. He has achieved the money bit, but will always be, inevitably, “new money.” (Remember how it turns out he hasn’t even opened the books in his vast library? One of my favorite details in the novel, personally.) Wherever you go, James Gatz, there you are. 

What does Daisy want? Well, we’re told she got “drunk as a monkey” the night before her wedding and wept inconsolably, saying she’d changed her mind; she tells Nick in the opening pages that she’s been through a lot and has gotten cynical. Her life looks perfect – rich husband, beautiful child, stately home, wealth and prestige etc etc – in short, everything Gatsby thinks he wants – but her husband is abusive, she doesn’t love him, and at her core, she seems pretty miserable. 

So we have these characters who have both tangible and intangible desires, and everyone has secrets that drive them. Gatsby seems shady from the start – although he’s always surrounded by people, no one seems to know him, his party guests are constantly speculating about his past in not-so-nice ways, and, adding to his shadiness, he hangs out with a — gasp —JEWISH GUY (the portrayal of Meyer Wolfsheim is not Fitzgerald’s finest moment, IMHO, but there are also some pretty racist asides in the book and… just, eek, what can you say).  Later we learn Gatsby has earned his fortune by bootlegging alcohol during prohibition. Daisy flips the switch from flirty life-of-the-party to haunted sad girl at a moment’s notice. Tom has the affair he’s not trying that hard to keep secret. I’d like to note too that our narrator Nick – though it’s touched on pretty lightly – is just back from serving in the freaking war so he can be forgiven for sometimes seeming to find all these rich kid shenanigans a little hollow. 

Predictably enough, upon reconnecting Gatsby and Daisy start up an affair, and predictablier, Tom finds out.

3) Act 3 starts with my favorite scene in the book, because I too hate stuffy New York summer days. It’s so hot and everyone is hanging out all drunk and sweaty and we get that amazing, awful, key scene of revelation, when Daisy fatefully looks at Gatsby and says, “You always look so cool.” 

Seriously, reread that scene if you ever find yourself having trouble moving a story forward, and take a look at the staging: the characters are all trapped, basically, in a hotel room, ramping up the tension to an unbearable degree – there’s this big confrontation – and then everyone is physically launched, in their cars, towards their various dooms. 

Anyway, once Daisy says this, even dum-dum Tom knows now that she’s in love with Gatsby. There’s a big fight and they all drive back through Long Island, shaky with revelation and gin. Talk about characters colliding… while driving home, Daisy hits and kills Tom’s mistress Myrtle Wilson (accidentally! Ok it’s an absurd coincidence but just go with it). Later Gatsby says he was driving; Mr Wilson, distraught with grief and rage, tracks the car back and goes to Gatbsy’s and kills him (in his POOL, hello SYMBOLISM), then kills himself; meanwhile Daisy and Tom have peaced out of town and left no forwarding address. No one comes to Gatsby’s funeral. He’s the loneliest character I’ve ever read, probably.

By the end, the wrong people have been killed for the wrong reasons. No justice is served. But the book is definitely over; decisions have been made; nothing will be the same for any of these key characters. Nick is left to muse about how the East Coast really chewed them all up and spit them out again, and be sad about having just turned 30. Seriously, he’s really dramatic about it.

What was the Main Dramatic Question of this book? I’d say there’s a few – let me know what you think in the comments!

Now what?

So what’s the takeaway here? How did this little American Literature 101 help us with our own plots?

Take a look at your characters you’ve created, and their secret hopes, desires, fears. Think about what your Main Dramatic Question is. And remember to give your characters moments of confrontation, and high-stakes decisions to make. Mash them together in uncomfortable situations as often as you can. Trap them in rooms together. Give them work to do.

Most of all, throughout the writing process, I’d just urge you to remember that you don’t have to nail it all on the first draft. Fitzgerald went through approximately 80,000,000 revisions to get Gatsby into the streamlined iteration that was published. As he wrote to his editor Max Perkins in 1924: “What I cut out of it [The Great Gatsby] both physically and emotionally would make another novel!”

For now, just give yourself enough to keep your draft moving.

Exercises:

1. What’s your book’s Main Dramatic Question? If you’re not sure, brainstorm a few.

2. Sketch out some iterations of a 3 act structure for your story.

3. Outline the plot of one of your favorite books. Think about how it’s structured, what what narrative work each chapter does.

This lesson is pretty solo, but if you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask myself and your fellow work-shoppers below

Up Next (Monday Nov 18): Monday’s lesson will be all about setting. Where is this happening? How to fully figure out the macro setting (the place) and the micro setting (the interiors).

Amy Shearn is the author of five novels, including the forthcoming Animal Instinct, a queer exploration of divorce, sex, and surviving the pandemic. She works 1:1 with writers, teaches for the educational cooperative Writing Co-Lab and elsewhere, and writes a monthly newsletter called How to Get Unstuck.