# How complex does plot really need to be?



## Yora (Apr 10, 2018)

After some years of struggling with a lot of inspiration and total blanks when it comes to plots, I have started to wonder if an intricate plot is actually really needed to make a compelling story. When I look at classic Sword & Sorcery stories and many of my favorite movies, they have plots that are barely there. Unless it's an investigation story like Blade Runner, there barely is any kind of planning involved beyond the current scene, and there's no back and forth between heroes and villain trying to defeat the other with smart moves. Instead the heroes just keep pushing ahead and deal with things as they run into them. Or they chase after the antagonist and do the same.

That you can have fun stories with not much in the way of plot feels like great news for me. But unfortunately for me, I've never heard anything in the way of advice on how to make a story compelling without relying on dangling a mystery before the readers that the protagonists are trying to solve.

What's the difference between a great simple story and a mere string of scenes?


----------



## Adela (Apr 10, 2018)

Good final question. I'd like to know the answer too. I've found in my own writing that the string of scenes, as you call it, a plot has developed. I'm hoping to turn it into a trilogy.
Mystery works A LOT. You might be surprised how much someone will keep reading because of only a small mystery in the plot of a small story.

Would like to see what others have to say.


----------



## Svrtnsse (Apr 10, 2018)

Yora said:


> What's the difference between a great simple story and a mere string of scenes?


I'll give this one a go. One word answer: character.

Longer answer: A string of scenes can feature anyone, but a great story will feature someone you're interested in.

Even longer answer:
As above, I think it's about the character. When you care for someone, what they're doing becomes a lot more interesting than if some random dude you don't know is doing the same thing.

A great example of this is sports. I used to scoff and laugh at people who took an interest in sports - especially people who are fans of some football team and especially if it was some crappy team that never won anything. I sometimes watched the olympics or the world cup, or other things like that, where I felt it was important and really mattered.

However, at some point I came to understand that it's not actually the act of sportsing in itself that most fans are interested in, but rather the teams and the players. They care for their favourites and for what happens to them, both when doing the sports, and outside of it. They get to know the people and they care for what happens to them, and they follow their stories.

Take football, any kind of football. At it's core it's a bunch of dudes on a field trying to score points while another bunch of dudes are trying to score more points. It's not very complex, and it's not very interesting in and of itself. What makes it interesting is whether you care about who wins or not. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of dudes running around in a field chasing a ball.


----------



## TheCrystallineEntity (Apr 10, 2018)

Elaborating a bit more on what Svartnsse said above: 

Also making the characters and their motives, struggles, and journeys matter, yes, to the reader, but most importantly, to you, the author.


----------



## Demesnedenoir (Apr 10, 2018)

Just what is a great simple story to you? I’ve little doubt definitions will vary. Is Star Wars Episoe 4 simple? Treasure Island? Conan?


----------



## Yora (Apr 11, 2018)

It certainly sounds right. Interesting people in interesting places.

Smells awfully like discovery writing, though.


----------



## Gurkhal (Apr 11, 2018)

I think the complexity of the plot is linked to the message of the story, or what the author wants to tell us about.

The most basic plot is; "Good triumphs over Evil" which is kind of simple and don't really need much of a plot to get this message across. If we throw in some more stuff like "exploration of identity", "what home is" and "the nature of love" then the story's plot will need to be very much more advanced and complicated in order to provide for characters and scenes and sub-plots relating to all these previously mentioned things.

But to more directly answer the first post I think that what separates a story from a string of scenes is the red thread that connects the stories through one or more character, and I suppose that the later scenes are dependent on what happened in the earlier scenes.


----------



## Yora (Apr 11, 2018)

I guess that's the advice of connecting scenes not with "and then" but with "therefore". Certainly something to keep in mind for any story.


----------



## skip.knox (Apr 11, 2018)

I don't know how I would go about measuring complexity. Number of characters? Number of scenes? Number of twists? I can think of examples and exceptions for just about every measure. Also, sprawl is not the same as complexity, and complexity is not the same thing as depth. _Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf_ is about as simple a plot as you can get. Four people, one night. 

For myself, I try to start as simple as possible. The plot tends to sprawl, and much of my planning time is spent trying to keep the thing as lean as possible.


----------



## Yora (Apr 11, 2018)

In this case I mean specifically complexity. The amount of information that is required to keep track of the events.


----------



## skip.knox (Apr 11, 2018)

How much information is needed? Just exactly enough, of course. 

I'm finding it difficult to answer this in the abstract. You may have noticed. How much is too much? How complex is overly-complex? 

That would vary by audience, surely. Middle grade, YA, all that, but that's too obvious. I'm sure you're talking about grown-up stories for grown-ups. Maybe try this. Every story has a spine, a core, a point. The thing you can summarize in the elevator pitch. Complexity comes from layers--additional characters, sub-plots, twists. If those layers support the spine, then they're in; if not, they're out.

That's the hardline modernist approach, right? Especially in our field, some will argue that it's not only right and proper but even needful for there to be additional layers that add color to the world. We aren't just telling a story, we're telling a story set in a fantastical world and part of the purpose of a fantasy story is to create a sense of wonder. To borrow my own metaphor, it's not just about supporting the spine, we must also add flesh.

It may be in that area that we can go astray, adding not only descriptions but also sub-plots and characters in the expectation that it adds wonders when all it does is add distractions and make the reader impatient. I honestly have no clue on this score. In my WIP I have a bullfight scene. It flows naturally; I didn't shoehorn it in. But I would not be surprised if my editor said take it out. It does not further the plot; it's just cool because in this one area of France they don't kill the bull or hurt it. Young men try to snatch ribbons from the bull's horns. That's it. The whole thing is very exciting, but it doesn't further the plot. But it does add color and it varies the pace of the narrative. 

I'm all the time saying let's not talk generalities let's talk specifics, but even when dealing with specific examples of writing it can be difficult to say what is the right choice.


----------



## Yora (Apr 12, 2018)

In case of that specific scene, I'd say try to make it reveal character. You see your character in action, or at the very least having thoughts about the action that is being oserved. If it helps giving the audience a clearer image of what the chracter is like, it's a useful addition to the story.

What I am concerned with is the question of how to keep the audience engaged and eager to see what happens next if there are no or few long term questions that await to be answered. If the readers are not waiting to get a revelation about a complex mystery, what else is making a story compelling to keep reading it?
Obviously character. But what does that look like in reality?


----------



## Helen (Apr 12, 2018)

Yora said:


> After some years of struggling with a lot of inspiration and total blanks when it comes to plots, I have started to wonder if an intricate plot is actually really needed to make a compelling story. When I look at classic Sword & Sorcery stories and many of my favorite movies, they have plots that are barely there. Unless it's an investigation story like Blade Runner, there barely is any kind of planning involved beyond the current scene, and there's no back and forth between heroes and villain trying to defeat the other with smart moves. Instead the heroes just keep pushing ahead and deal with things as they run into them. Or they chase after the antagonist and do the same.
> 
> That you can have fun stories with not much in the way of plot feels like great news for me. But unfortunately for me, I've never heard anything in the way of advice on how to make a story compelling without relying on dangling a mystery before the readers that the protagonists are trying to solve.
> 
> What's the difference between a great simple story and a mere string of scenes?



A string of scenes won't have an underlying emotional journey.


----------



## skip.knox (Apr 12, 2018)

What does that look like? I guess the first thing I'd say is go back and read scenes that affected you, that made you want to keep reading. Pay particular attention to how the scene (or chapter) ends, but also look at how it begins and progresses. Look, too, at what the author did earlier in the book to lay the groundwork for that moment.

For myself, I aim for a few targets. One is vulnerability. Let the reader see your character in an unguarded moment, when they are less clever, less brave, less serious. Humor helps. Surprise nearly always works. Let your character be unexpectedly clever, unexpectedly brave, unexpectedly funny. 

Another hook is to have characters care about each other, not only in words but in deeds. We would not care so much about Frodo (who doesn't actually have much depth to him) without Pippin and Merry, and especially Sam. 

Something much harder to achieve is genuineness. This is more along the lines of something you botch more than something you master. Whatever your character has, they must manifest in ways that are consistent and believable. If you do this, the reader won't notice. It will simply be Character A being Character A. If Character A behaves ... well, out of character, the reader notices instantly. It rings as false as having a Chevy Camaro drive through your medieval village. IMO, people should spend as much time in character building as in world building.

Character is not the only way to create good transitions, though. You've already mentioned mysteries. End on a puzzle. Better yet, end on a puzzle only half-solved. It's easier to say no to the whole candy bar than to say no when you're halfway through it. If you look at mystery novels, you'll see they do this all the time. They unwrap part of the mystery, then say what about this or that? End of chapter.

Ending _in media res_ works in other areas, too. You may not want to end smack in the middle of a fight (unless it's something epic like Borodino), but you can certainly end a scene with action looming or at the point of a reversal. Especially with fantasy, one can end with a big reveal, such as the arrival in Rivendell. Or think of the scene in Lothlorien, where we get vivid description of the forest, then we have arrows pointed in our noses. If the scene ended with the description, it would be easier to put down the book at that point.

But, really, I'd start with books that have worked specifically for you. What tugged at your curiosity or your heart or your pulse. Put on your editor's glasses. Watch the author, not the story, and you'll create your own guidelines.


----------



## Yora (Apr 12, 2018)

Now that's some great sounding advice. Don't know yet if it's good, but it's exactly the kind of things I was hoping to find. Some good leads on what specific things to ponder further.


----------



## SergeiMeranov (Apr 16, 2018)

To touch on the character bit, I agree with everyone else that said previously that character tends to set great stories apart despite similar story structure.  To me, character is going to be one of those things that's hard to define.  Good character, for me, means a character that I can either identify with or who I care enough about to see what happens to them and be invested in their future.  This, again for me, usually starts with them being interesting in and of themselves.  I'll use an example outside of literature because I've just been rewatching this show:  Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation.  If you told me you wanted to tell me the story of a mid-level local bureaucrat's quest to build a park on an abandoned lot that would get a hard pass from me.  What makes it interesting is that character's personality and the humor and craziness that comes with it.  The same is true of great works of literature too.  What sets your characters apart from a blank slate abstraction of that character?  What makes your grizzled general different than every other grizzled general?  What makes your king different?  Why is your spy more interesting?  Getting the reader invested in that is a great way to get them to keep reading.  I don't care if the average person conquers bureaucracy and builds a park or gets married, but I cared whether Leslie Knope did those things because I liked the character.

There's a reason we're able to abstract many stories under general headings like "Hero's Journey" or whatever.  Sometimes the story is made interesting by the subversion of expectations, i.e. telling the story from a non-traditional viewpoint like the villain or the wise old sage training the new hero, having the antagonist win, etc..  Sometimes it's interesting by the actual people having interesting personalities that are brought out via dialogue.  Sometimes it's their motivations that make them unique such as an unusual reason for the Hero going out on the journey.

I'd say as a larger matter that a story does not need to be "complex" to be interesting.  I put complex in quotes because so often what I think people imagine when they imagine a complex story is a bunch of twisting and turning plotlines.  That, in and of itself, doesn't make a story interesting.  It just makes it complex.  In fact, complexity itself is usually a bad thing.  It doesn't matter how many plot lines you have if none of them are good plot lines.  You see this all the time with Hollywood movies that will throw a romance subplot on top of a main plot that already isn't doing so well.  The addition of the subplot doesn't do anything to rescue the rest of the film.  This is all a long way of saying that my advice is to focus less on the abstract concept of simplicity vs. complexity and more on the nuts and bolts of the individual story and the characters.  Make them good, make them believable, and the readers will keep reading.


----------



## Devor (Apr 16, 2018)

The question is ambiguous enough that I think there's a wide variety of ways in which to answer.  What I thought of, however, was a story like a journey, say Fellowship of the Ring, where the characters move from one random obstacle to the next.

First there's Tom Bambodil, then there's Rivendell, and the pass in the mountains, and Moria, and so on.  It's all connected, sure, but in terms of plot it's not.  The goal is to pass through each mostly independent obstacle, unharmed, and get to the next one.  That isn't meant to be a criticism - they're not _too _disconnected - but it's still the nature of the story.  The map in Fellowship could have looked a thousand different ways without changing much of the plot itself (that isn't as true in the later two books).

That's different than a book like, say, Harry Potter, where Harry is in school developing complex, changing relationships with hundreds of different characters.  His relationship with Snape, for example, changes constantly, and there's an unbroken throughline from the first book to the last.

For me, personally, I find too many disconnected scenes to be a bit of a turn off.  There's some room for it - Fellowship is fine if you consider all of LOTR - but I want to see things connect and change and grow.  To me, the big settings in fantasy stories creates a problem where we want to explore, but exploring means the characters keep moving, and some parts of the story don't stick around long enough for me to care. 

I don't need _complexity_, exactly, but _development_.  Of course, you can develop your characters through disconnected scenes - the characters learn to trust each other more, or faults start coming to a head - and for some readers, for some stories, that's enough sometimes.  But at least for me, the more that there is developing, setting, side-characters, plot details, and so on, the better it usually is.


----------



## Penpilot (Apr 16, 2018)

Yora said:


> What's the difference between a great simple story and a mere string of scenes?



For me, a simple story is about simple goals and simple consequences. Star Wars, defeat the Empire by blowing up the Death Star. Go good guys. Medals all around. Lets just ignore all the thousands of innocent support personnel that are probably stationed on said Death Star or all the thousands of families that will be affected because their loved ones were killed, regardless of innocence or not. Forget this is like a 9/11 attack on the Empire. The Rebels are heroes... or are they?

In a story, scenes lead into one another. The choices and actions of characters within those scenes have consequences and drive the story forward. Things don't just happen to characters. Character's make things happen. In Star Wars, when Luke and his uncle go shopping for droids, Luke chooses to take R2-D2, and the consequences of that are heavy.  They lead to the death of his family, but that choice also leads to the revelation of the holo message from Princess Leia and to Ben Kenobi, etc.

A simple series of scenes is just that. They may be related, but they're not connected by consequences and choices as deeply. I'd recommend you google up "Scene and Sequel" story structure. This is one of the tools I use.



Yora said:


> What I am concerned with is the question of how to keep the audience engaged and eager to see what happens next if there are no or few long term questions that await to be answered. If the readers are not waiting to get a revelation about a complex mystery, what else is making a story compelling to keep reading it?
> Obviously character. But what does that look like in reality?



IMHO, unless it's something very literary, stories should always have long and short term questions/goals, or they're not really stories. They're just random scenes. Sometimes those questions are about some task that needs to be done. Sometimes those questions are about an internal struggle that a character faces. Can this character overcome their addiction, character flaw, or something else that they struggle with?

Story in it's simplest form is about somebody with a problem and how they go about solving that problem or not.

Here's a link to an example of a story in about a simple a form as possible. If you've googled up what "scene and sequel" is, take note of the basic form of it in the story.

English Fairy Tales: The Old Woman and Her Pig


----------



## Yora (Apr 17, 2018)

Devor said:


> I don't need _complexity_, exactly, but _development_.  Of course, you can develop your characters through disconnected scenes - the characters learn to trust each other more, or faults start coming to a head - and for some readers, for some stories, that's enough sometimes.  But at least for me, the more that there is developing, setting, side-characters, plot details, and so on, the better it usually is.


Development sounds like a really good term to think about in terms of writing. I had not thought much about it before, but the way you mention it, it sounds quite significant.

The first  thing I think about when I hear "developing character" is the gradual process of revealing character. But characters being affected by events and changings through the course of a story seems like a rather big component in making a story compelling. In most stories you know for certain that the protagonist will survive all the obstacles and by the end complete the quest, so to speak. But even then you don't have any certainty at all how the character will change and what character we will have by the end of the story. Even when we know that a character will surely overcome an obstacle, that section of the story can still be made very gripping by leaving it open how it changes the characters developers.
Prime example for this: Zuko from Avatar. Who is one of my favorite characters  and in my opinion has the best character arc found anywhere in fiction. The way he is written you can never know how he will decide at the many points when it comes to chosing between what he feels he wants and what he feels he needs. Every time you see the capacity in him to do the right thing, but you also know his weakness that can just as likely make him do the wrong thing again. When he goes on the path of good, you can never be sure he will stay on it. In fact, you can be almost certain that he will fall again, but it probably won't be the end of that story. It's a hugely compelling story of character development.



Penpilot said:


> In a story, scenes lead into one another. The choices and actions of characters within those scenes have consequences and drive the story forward. Things don't just happen to characters. Character's make things happen. In Star Wars, when Luke and his uncle go shopping for droids, Luke chooses to take R2-D2, and the consequences of that are heavy.  They lead to the death of his family, but that choice also leads to the revelation of the holo message from Princess Leia and to Ben Kenobi, etc.



Luke and Owen shoping for droids is an interesting scene, even though we don't know anything about them. But knowing that we're in a movie, we know which ones they are going to buy, and we already know quite a lot about those two droids. Knowing that they will buy R2-D2 and C3PO makes it interesting to see what they are doing. And of course you get a nice moment of tension when they first don't want R2-D2 and already go back inside with only C3PO.


----------



## Chessie2 (Apr 21, 2018)

One piece of advice that really helped me in the beginning was to keep plot simple. Less experienced writers think they need to create these complex stories but that's actually a signal of weak storytelling. Think about it: one story goal per main character is enough to power you through the entire book if you have clear idea of motivation. Add in setting, conflict with story goal and other characters, etc and there's no need to further complicate matters.


----------



## Mythopoet (Apr 23, 2018)

It needs to be 57 complex.


----------



## skip.knox (Apr 23, 2018)

54 complex. Oh, you 57ers!


----------



## Mythopoet (Apr 23, 2018)

*looking down my nose* 54 complex is good enough for _some_, I suppose.


----------



## Firefly (Apr 26, 2018)

One thing you mention is a need for having some greater mystery or puzzle that needs to be figured out.

I personally love books with some sort of mystery plot, but I wouldn’t ever say that you need one. The reason mysteries work so well is because they create tension, but mysteries are far from the only mechanisms that can do that. Having strong character goals and stakes, for one. Anything that the audience has to wait for can cause tension if the writing is good enough.

I also agree with what others have said about character growth and arcs. Susan Dennard wrote a really interesting post on “Story Dominoes”, about how she connects the events in her story through her character’s emotions rather than the plot, which I’d recommend reading.

For me, the difference between a random scene and one that “matters to the plot” is whether or not it changes something. If l’m writing a story, and two characters are going from point A to point B, and in between they fight a monster, I could make that “plot-relevant” in a lot of different ways, whether that’s weaving it into the character arc by having one character realize how dangerous their Epic Fantasy Quest is really going to be, or if it’s by introducing mysterious questions about the world’s magic system. The way I see it, it’s not the complicated plot that’s important, but the sense of forward movement, change, and tension.


----------



## Yora (Apr 28, 2018)

I meant to include goals and stakes under the broader category of puzzles. The characters have a desired state to reach, but are faced with the challenge of how to get there. They need to gain more knowledge of the situation and come up with plans for action how to attain the goal and maintain the stakes.

Emotions as connecting and driving element over plot is always very interesting to me. I'll try to find it.


----------



## Firefly (May 1, 2018)

Hmm... I have a harder time imagining an enjoyable story that has absolutely no form of goals or stakes in it. To me, goals/stakes are more of a character thing, really. If a character doesn't have anything to lose or gain, why would they ever do anything? By definition, there has to be some sort of character goal (Even if it's just to survive) in order for there to be conflict.
I suppose you could write a character just sitting and watching stuff happen, but unless that "stuff" also involved characters with goals, I feel like that would veer into fantastical documentary land pretty quickly.
Or you could have characters just do stuff for no reason, (which, come to think of it, I _have _actually seen people do, though probably not on purpose)
but that always seems to take away from character's credibility and make them less fun to be around. Your goal doesn't always have to be super defined, or super logical, even, but I feel like all characters have to have a _reason _for doing things in order to be at all convincing.


----------



## Black Dragon (May 3, 2018)

I believe that simpler is (usually) better.  Too much complexity can weigh down a story and confuse the reader.

See the following:

Fantasy Writing: Beauty in Simplicity


----------



## evolution_rex (May 4, 2018)

Anyone ever see the movie Primer? Some very, very hard to grasp time travel elements in that movie. And that was sort of the movie’s point, it’s gimmick even. It sold the movie to people and allowed the director, a nobody in the business, to go on and direct two other movies.

I really, really enjoy intential confusion, complexity, and ambiguity. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea but you do have an audience for it. But the key word is intentional. You have to know exactly how your twists, turns, hints, and relevations are going to come off to the reader. You need to decide how difficult you want it to be for them to figure things out and then you have to actually see if you can make it that clear/unclear. The line between irritating confusion and fun confusion is thin and you’ll find it isn’t going to be felt the same way by everyone because you will never know how much effort a reader wants make.

And thats kind of what makes complexity challenging in the first place, your asking readers something. Most readers want to get lost in a world not a maze. For many, your story had to be _worth_ the complexity and mind-bending, which is quite possibly the most important thing.


----------



## Alexius (May 11, 2018)

Yora said:


> After some years of struggling with a lot of inspiration and total blanks when it comes to plots, I have started to wonder if an intricate plot is actually really needed to make a compelling story. When I look at classic Sword & Sorcery stories and many of my favorite movies, they have plots that are barely there. Unless it's an investigation story like Blade Runner, there barely is any kind of planning involved beyond the current scene, and there's no back and forth between heroes and villain trying to defeat the other with smart moves. Instead the heroes just keep pushing ahead and deal with things as they run into them. Or they chase after the antagonist and do the same.
> 
> That you can have fun stories with not much in the way of plot feels like great news for me. But unfortunately for me, I've never heard anything in the way of advice on how to make a story compelling without relying on dangling a mystery before the readers that the protagonists are trying to solve.
> 
> What's the difference between a great simple story and a mere string of scenes?


I think if you look at the contrast between those two scenarios, it's almost like movie versus a book. In a movie the adrenalin can be kept going with plenty of action and a minimum plot. In a novel a certain amount of complexity can be included to deliberately "mislead" the reader so they get that OMG moment further on. Also, the reader can know key information the MC doesn't. A more complex plot is good in a novel, but not for its own sake, only if it's well conceived.

Fantasy also has another angle though. The earliest novels, ie Beowulf etc. had straightforward mythical heroes battling baddies. Tends to come across a bit simplistic nowadays unless it's part of a back story in my opinion.


----------



## Yora (Jun 9, 2018)

Today I came across the idea that "plot is what is happening, story is how it affects the characters". Certainly something to ponder.

I also remembered one good example of interesting stories that have basically no plot. A lot of Lovecraft's stories are made up that way.
I've been thinking again that I am not really that much interested by plot and all my list of "what I would want to read" consists of characters, creatures, places, and phenomenons. Things that are generally considered to be supporting elements to rest a plot on, but not "story" in themselves. But most of Lovecraft's work are pretty much that, minus the characters. The stories of course need an observer, but he's generally a completely blank slate with no distinguishing features or personality. Another comparable writer would be Clark Ashton Smith, who worked around the same time. His writing is even more messy and unstructured but just as much, if not even more interesting and fascinating.
While I wouldn't recommend to anyone under any circumstances to write stories like Lovecraft or Smith, I think they are interesting examples of how we can open up our definition of what is a story. These works are certainly not poetry (though that's where Smith's main body of writing lies) but something that we would today recognize as plot can sometimes be difficult to find.

I think it would probably unsellable to publishers, but that's no reason not to practice writing it. And even if there's not much of an audience for it, it could still end up being valuable writing practice. And that never hurts for maybe later trying out something that is more recognizable as a novel.


----------



## Orior (Jun 20, 2018)

I think that you should write a plot that leaves  the reader thinking about it after they put the book down.
Leave random hints, and then take them up later, so that they think "I knew it, I should have seen it coming!"
A good plot that's not too complicated can really get any reader's interest.
But who are you writing for? Who is your target reader? If you are writing YA fantasy, don't make the plot too complicated. If you're writing for readrs that know fantasy books very well, and that have seen many worlds invented or created, well, create a plot that they've never seen before.

Orior


----------



## Yora (Jun 20, 2018)

My own instinct is to actually do the oppposite. Creating a plot that is completely fresh, unexpected, and clever is really damn hard. How would you even begin to plan such a thing? And keeping it from becoming overly complex would be even harder.
I think when you want to show something that is different and lets people see things they have not seen before, it's more practical to take a simple plot that is easy to follow and combine it with original and highly imaginative places and people. If you have a world that follows different rules than what you usually have and includes things that have not been used (much) before, that simple plot will end up playing out in a different way.

Could of course always be personal preference, but I think it's very hard to really impress people with the ways that characters tricked each other and got out of tight spots with really clever solutions. Showing them places and things they have never seen before should be much more memorable.


----------



## Hallen (Jun 21, 2018)

There's lots of interesting thoughts in the thread. I wouldn't really disagree with any of it. I do have my own thought on the subject of complexity.

Plot is the mechanical structure you hang your story on. Just like the frame of a house -- there are a million ways to decorate making it a home but the frame is all the same. 
Plot can be as complicated as you need it to be to tell the story you want. 

The key point of any story is conflict. You will not have a compelling story without it. I mean "conflict" in the technical, writing way, not in the war or argument way. Conflict can be internal or external. It can be the character coming to grips with something new. It can be a bad guy trying to thwart their progress. It can be a cave for somebody who is claustrophobic or a desire for a cupcake that is only sold at a store across town. Conflict is anything that motivates a character. It can be big or small. It can last a scene, or it can last for a full series.  

I think the best books have conflicts with the highest stakes. The plot can be fairly thin and unimaginative, but if the conflict is good, meaning the characters have to be sympathetic, then the story is usually good. An example is Hunger Games. The plot and the world are fairly simple. But the conflicts are epic. And, I don't just mean the fight or be killed aspect. It's all the internal conflict about dealing with this death game, the idea of being killed by one of these other kids, the idea of something greater than oneself, the raw horror of being forced into something like this, and so on. Those conflicts make for a hugely compelling story even if the writing is a bit weak. 

Of course, the world, magic systems, races, and characters can be immensely complex too. But that is not a guarantee of a good story. I think that there is a certain level of competence and experience one must achieve before being able to effectively write something that is truly complex. One gets there in stages. Malazan, The Book of the Fallen is probably the most complex thing I have ever read. It's part of the strength of the series. But, it's the characters and the conflicts that make it epic.


----------



## Firefly (Jun 22, 2018)

Hallen said:


> There's lots of interesting thoughts in the thread. I wouldn't really disagree with any of it. I do have my own thought on the subject of complexity.
> 
> Plot is the mechanical structure you hang your story on. Just like the frame of a house -- there are a million ways to decorate making it a home but the frame is all the same.
> Plot can be as complicated as you need it to be to tell the story you want.
> ...



^^^ I agree with everything said here. Totally beat me to the punch. I've been giving a lot of thought to this and I think this is exactly the answer I've been looking for.

I think the word 'plot ' might have been confusing our discussion this whole time. Framing it as 'story ' helps  really get to the root of it. Story is really nothing more than character+goal+conflict (And stakes, according to some people). No need to complicate it any more than that. 

 I do think you need those basic elements though, particularly for a novel. A shorter story might be able to hold itself up without that, but I think it's pretty much necessary for anything longer than a few thousand words. The vessel of plot, even if it is a very simple plot, is what makes the killer worlds and characters compelling.


----------



## Yora (Jul 15, 2018)

I just had a new insight:

Generally, the plot of a fantasy story revolves around a hero stopping a great threat or ending a great evil. And almost universally, the story ends with the hero performing this heroic deed. And at first thought, one might assume that it is this great heroic feat that is the main central thing that makes that character great.

But actually, this really isn't the case at all. We don't start liking a great character at the end of the story after the deed is done. And all the supporting characters aren't going to do an equivalent deed. And in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy actually fails to stop the great threat and the problem kinda happens to fix itself. He's still a great hero. And he was the whole time. He was interesting and entertaining for the entire adventure, which does not get lessened to any degree by him failing to fulfill his big quest.

This further supports my feeling that the overarching main plot doesn't really matter that much. What the main plot does is to be the incentive that gets the characters going at the start and keeps them going even though they run into hardship. And it really is about the journey, not the destination. 99% of the time there is no doubt that the heroes will accomplish their quest and defeat the evil at the end. We don't follow their story to see whether they will succeed. Often it's really easy to even predict how they will succeed. We follow them because we like seeing them in action against the various obstacles along the way.


----------



## Svrtnsse (Jul 15, 2018)

Yora said:


> I just had a new insight:


This is a great insight, and very well worded too.


----------



## Yora (Jul 15, 2018)

I had just about finished my first more or less complete outline for a plot with the key scenes and various plot points a few weeks back, when I looked at the whole thing and realized that it was indeed a working plot, and a quite decent one. But it really wasn't at all what I _wanted_ to do.

I guess I could write that story for practice purposes, but it doesn't at all make use or even provide space for the big creative ideas that are motivating me to write in the first place. Even though I think the plot is quite clever as a whole, the roles for the various characters to play are all very generic stuff, fitting for a generic fantasy setting. My motivation is ideas for a slightly unconventional setting with which characters interact in new ways. Characters who think and act differently from Medieval European Fantasy characters and have to deal with situations that are different from Medieval European Fantasy situations. In a way, my fresh ideas are all only about the journey, but I don't actually have any ideas about destinations. I think stopping to worry about the destination and looking only for an excuse to keep the characters moving forward might be helping me with my outlines.


----------



## Hallen (Jul 15, 2018)

Yora said:


> I just had a new insight:


Yep. 
Bear in mind that a novel is a melding of both character and plot. 

Literary novels have a tendency to be heavily character driven. The changes in the character drive the plot and the resolution of your novel. This is also true of romance. Speculative fiction, Fantasy, is generally (just generally, not always) driven by plot. 

That does not mean that the characters should remain static. Far from it. What a plot driven story would typically mean is that the events around the character drive the changes in the character. Again, not 100%. Some of it should be the character growing on their own as well. 

If you have a novel where the character grow, but nothing happens, or, the plot goes somewhere but the characters are cookie cutouts who never changed, then you probably don't have much of a novel.


----------



## Darkfantasy (Jul 15, 2018)

I don't think complex plots are always more compelling. But I think it's the character that really carries us through the story not a complex and compelling plot. I may be one of few but the plot can be as grand as you like, but if the character is flat and dull, cliche or stereotypical I'll put the book down.


----------



## Devor (Jul 15, 2018)

The way I see it, a story needs to be *good plus something*.  A plot doesn't need to be complex to be good, but done right a complex plot can be your story's plus something.


----------



## Writer (Jul 17, 2018)

Rather than focus on how complex I think its how intriguing it is since complexity does not always mean interesting it can often be a put off.


----------



## Firefly (Jul 25, 2018)

Honestly, the more I try to think about this, the more I get confused about what the word "plot" even means. I mean, I have an idea of it in my mind, but when I try to break it down and define what it actually IS, I can't seem to do it. Looking around the interwebs, most explanations of how to "plot" don't even seem to be about plot at all, the they seem to be about structure-which I always thought was a completely different thing. It feels to me like plot is more  a confusing web of entirely different concepts rather than one single thing. Is it pacing? Reveals and plot twists? Goal/conflict/stakes? Causation and consequences?

I get even more confused when people start talking about character driven plots versus plot driven ones. It seems to me like the construction of the plots themselves is pretty similar, and the only real difference is how much focus is on internal vs external conflict.

Or maybe all this is completely off track and I'm missing the obvious here. I'm beginning to recognize that plotting is not my strong suit...


----------



## Yora (Jul 25, 2018)

Action A leads to action B. Action B leads to action C. Action C leads to action D.
That's the plot.


----------



## skip.knox (Jul 25, 2018)

Hey Firefly, what's a plot twist? As you understand it.


----------



## FifthView (Jul 25, 2018)

Yora said:


> Action A leads to action B. Action B leads to action C. Action C leads to action D.
> That's the plot.



I love this.

I think there's more to it, at least in the way the word is often used, and can understand Firefly's consternation. Maybe a thread on plot would be in order? It seems to me that "plot" as discussed often includes the quality of those ABC's, and that more is meant than merely the standard progression of events. _How_ do those events interrelate in the reader's experience of them?

Presumably, not to jump the gun in answering Skip's question to Firefly, a plot twist is no different than every other P following an O in a story, except that A-O in the story with a plot twist seemed to be leading to a different "P" than actually happened?

—so, quality in addition to the mere progression of events.

Edit: So when we discuss different types of plots, we may still have the same ABC-type of progression, broadly speaking, but....these are different plot types. Simple vs complex is an interesting question, also. It does seem to me that "plot" is difficult to discuss in a vacuum, because other things determine the plot, and these can be different from story to story.


----------



## FifthView (Jul 25, 2018)

Yora said:


> What's the difference between a great simple story and a mere string of scenes?



Not sure this will help, but...

I've been playing Horizon Zero Dawn, and I am much more engaged, and loving it, than I was with Skyrim.

Skyrim was a bit of letdown for me, perhaps due to the hype and the fact that I waited so long to play it.

But—and it's taken me a long time to understand this—I have a love/hate relationship with massive open-world games. Even those that eventually bore me were fun, to a point. But I'm a completionist by nature and can't let every little side quest, or collection opportunity, pass me by. I feel a nagging impulse to go collect or do the side quest. (I'm inserting the collection aspect even if Skyrim did not have a lot of that. Because, Assassin's Creed, sigh. Love those games also, to a point but...) Far too often in these games, the overall plot, the main quest throughline, can get lost.

Perhaps that's my fault. I could just stick to the main quest, work to finish "the story," in lightning speed like some players do it.

TL;dr: So far, Horizon Zero Dawn, even with a nice but limited number of side quests and collection opportunities, has a very strong main story throughline. These other diversions seem to add to the experience of completing that throughline. And I love it far more than so many other open world games I've tried that lose the throughline somewhere during the playing. I actively avoid open-world games now, most of the time, for this reason.


----------



## skip.knox (Jul 25, 2018)

I asked Firefly that question because in order to answer it, one would presumably have to say something about plot, in order to say anything about the twist. Peppermint or otherwise. I thought that might be an opening into further conversation.


----------



## Demesnedenoir (Jul 25, 2018)

The plot twist would be an interesting topic. Generically, it is breaking an expectation. But this can take many forms. The murder mystery where everyone is guilty... or as in Angel Heart, the detective himself is the guy he's been hired to find (by the devil come to collect is his soul). 

A classic "twist" combo is what I sometimes call the "twist, flip, and rebound" and it's very effective when done well. In a whodunnit formula this might be... You set reader's expectations that the butler did it, then some event absolutely convinces the reader it was the maid (twist) but then some major piece of evidence makes it appear that neither the maid nor butler could possibly have done it (flip) and then in the end we discover it was the butler after all (rebound), right back where we started. As a reader, this sort of scenario tends to be gratifying.


----------



## Heliotrope (Jul 25, 2018)

A twist can also be a sort of reversal....

Say the plot starts out with an MC cop trying to stop a villainous drug lord... but half way through the "twist" is that the cop has to work for the very drug lord he was searching for in order to take down an even bigger foe.

Or, he discovers the drug lord is only small time, and the real problem is bad cops selling drugs from the evidence vault....


----------



## skip.knox (Jul 25, 2018)

So, per both Heliotrope and Demesnedenoir, one of the things we can say about plot is that it sets expectations, else there would be nothing for the twist to, er, twist.

This immediately raises more questions. Just one expectation or many? How does one go about creating an expectation? Does the reader bring expectations to the story even before opening the book? (of course they do) The cover, the blurb, even the genre all play into this. Geez, there's baggage even before I've written Word 1. 

Is there more to plot that merely creating expectations and then fulfilling them (even by way of twists)?


----------



## Demesnedenoir (Jul 25, 2018)

Plot is a rabbit hole filled with Mad Hatters if you let it be, heh heh.

"If I had a plot of my own, the story would be nonsense. The story would be what it is, because the plot would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what the plot is, the story wouldn't be. And what the plot wouldn't be, the story would. You see?"

That's when I punched the Mad Hatter in the nose.


----------



## Firefly (Jul 25, 2018)

skip.knox said:


> Hey Firefly, what's a plot twist? As you understand it.



I included plot twists in that list mostly because they include the word 'plot'. I don't really have a workable definition for plot twists yet, although I have been thinking about them a lot lately in order to try and figure out what makes them work. I hadn't looked up the definitions when I wrote that, but here are a few now, from Google and Wikipedia:

an unexpected development in a book, film, television program, etc.

A plot twist is a literary technique that introduces a radical change in the direction or expected outcome of the plot in a work of fiction. When it happens near the end of a story, it is known as a twist or surprise ending.

Emphasis mine.
It of course mentions the unexpected/surprise nature of twists, but I think that has more to do with guiding reader reactions than it does with plot. (Which is also an interesting subject and worthy of discourse, but not what we're looking for here.) If you take that away, you get stuff that's underlined. The effect or impact of the twist, the way it changes the _development _of the story from there on out... which kind of lines up with what Yora's explanation of plot as a causal chain of ABC. And the bit about changing the direction of the plot also pretty much defines turning points, which  might explains the connection to structure as well. Lots to think on! Not quite sure yet how correct this is, but I feel like I'm really starting to understand this better now. Thanks guys. I have to go for now, but I feel like I'll probably be back later with more thoughts. And maybe a better answer to the original question that started this thread.


----------



## Penpilot (Jul 27, 2018)

Firefly said:


> Honestly, the more I try to think about this, the more I get confused about what the word "plot" even means. I mean, I have an idea of it in my mind, but when I try to break it down and define what it actually IS, I can't seem to do it. Looking around the interwebs, most explanations of how to "plot" don't even seem to be about plot at all, the they seem to be about structure-which I always thought was a completely different thing. It feels to me like plot is more a confusing web of entirely different concepts rather than one single thing. Is it pacing? Reveals and plot twists? Goal/conflict/stakes? Causation and consequences?



To me, plot is simply the collection of events that take you from the beginning to the end. Structure is simply a way to organize those events so they makes sense and build towards the ending. We all tend to do this naturally, but making it concrete makes it easier for the writer to recognize when they're missing something.

Plot is a winding road where you can generally predict what's coming up. A plot twist is like a sudden 90 degree turn in the road. It's abrupt, and it's difficult to see what lies beyond.


----------



## skip.knox (Jul 27, 2018)

>the collection of events that take you from the beginning to the end

If that's all there is, then there's no difference between plot and story. These words are vague and slippery, so I wouldn't lean too hard on the difference; I'm just going to use it to elaborate.

It was said above that plot is in part a matter of setting expectations with the reader. I agree. To that I would add another element: pacing. There is the pace of a narrative, even pace in dialog, but here I'm speaking of the pace of the story overall, which in a general way I would say that would be how quickly those events in the collection come at the reader.

I was aware of this sort of thing as I wrote my first novel, but it was all rather abstract, like learning a language in a classroom but never speaking it in real life. Now that I'm on my third novel, I'm very much aware of pace, and I take very seriously the matter of setting expectations. It's really difficult--for me, at least--because as I create scenes I'm the author, but when I think about the expectations, I'm thinking as a reader. 

To give a rather ham-handed example, in my WIP I have five main characters. They travel as a group for much of the book. As a reader, I would expect to get updates on each of these. There's only one POV, character, but I would want to see each character change, each play a role from time to time, and would expect them to interact with one another, not merely with the POV character. As an author, I'm asking myself what various scenes do to create and satisfy these expectations. Those are standard expectations. There would also be expectations peculiar to this particular story. 

Expectations and pacing. What else?  Gee, maybe someone ought to write a book....


----------



## FifthView (Jul 27, 2018)

After some quick online reading, I've found that a lot of people reference E.M.Forster on the difference between story and plot:

_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, a form capable of high development.  It suspends the time-sequence, it moves as far away from the story as its limitations will allow.  Consider the death of the queen.  If it is in a story we say “and then?”  If it is in a plot we ask “why?”  That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel.  A plot cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave-men or to a tyrannical sultan or to their modern descendant the movie-public.  They can only be kept awake by “and then—and then—”  They can only supply curiosity.  But a plot demands intelligence and memory also. _

[from _Aspects of the Novel_]​I think this pretty much sums it up, doesn't it? Except for the swipe at moviegoers; this was written in 1927, heh.


----------



## Devor (Jul 27, 2018)

FifthView said:


> _A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality._



I find this to be a good working definition of plot.  But the rest of the quote is not what I typically associate with "story" - I'm more familiar with the idea that a story is about the character's internal change over the course of the novel.


----------



## FifthView (Jul 27, 2018)

Devor said:


> I find this to be a good working definition of plot.  But the rest of the quote is not what I typically associate with "story" - I'm more familiar with the idea that a story is about the character's internal change over the course of the novel.



I think he was trying to delineate between two narrative structures—both of which will exist in a novel.

The dig at "tyrannical sultan" was apparently a reference to 1001 Arabian Nights. I've not read those stories, but I assume from the thrust of the quote that they were told as if telling a series of events. They _do_ supply curiosity: What happens next? And this is a good thing for a novel to do, in addition to tweaking the question of _Why?_ via plotting.

So now I'm thinking that a plot twist is this: When story-structure overtakes plot-structure for the reader. In other words, the twist is a chronological event, but does not (however momentarily, or not) follow the sense of causality that the reader has been experiencing during the experience of that plot structure.


----------



## Heliotrope (Jul 27, 2018)

I like that example FifthView.... part of what was bugging me about this discussion was that we kept talking about "plot" in terms of novels... but what about Flash Fiction? I have been writing quite a bit of flash lately, and I find the people I query are very adamant that the piece MUST have a plot. It cannot simply be a character sketch, or a tableau. So how do you plot in 400 words? You certainly can't have a sequence of scenes in that short of a piece. There needs to be something else.

I was also reading, recently, that lack of plot is a major reason why manuscripts are turned away by traditional publishers (whether in short pieces, or novel length pieces):

_While some stories have bad plots, others have no plot. "One I received was about a woman shopping for a hat. That was it," bemoans Paul Taylor of Cenotaph. Alejandro Gutierrez of Conversely complains of "stories that just begin and end with nothing important happening or being resolved by the main characters." Some plotless stories ramble from one event to another; others are a hodgepodge of action with no emotional content to involve the readers.

The solution? Ironically, most editors felt the way to resolve "plotless" or "hackneyed" stories was to focus on characters. If the characters are believable, with interesting goals and motivations, their interactions will drive the plot. "Most of the ideas for stories have already been used; it's up to the writer to put a new spin on it to make it fresh," says David Felts. "If the characters are real enough then a recycled plot can work, because if the character is new, the story is too."_

Five Fiction Mistakes that Spell Rejection

So I like the idea that the "plot" is the "WHY" of the through line.... The story is the series of events, but the "Plot" is the big question that keeps reader's reading to find the answer at the end.


----------



## FifthView (Jul 27, 2018)

Heliotrope said:


> So I like the idea that the "plot" is the "WHY" of the through line.... The story is the series of events, but the "Plot" is the big question that keeps reader's reading to find the answer at the end.



I'm tempted to call it the Why-throughline, rather than the "why of the through line," although even there I think both exist.

In other words, it's not a single big question, but questions throughout about the causality of each thing that is happening in the series of events.

Edit: But I suspect I might have a tendency to overthink this, so grains, salts, heh.


----------



## FifthView (Jul 27, 2018)

Also, not to make this too complex, but....there is the distinction between what we call "plot points" and all those other events that happen between each plot point, re: causality as it applies to the working plot, heh.

In case anyone wants to take a stab at disentangling the web of these considerations...


----------



## DylanRS (Jul 27, 2018)

(TL;DR in bold) Whenever someone complains about a bad story and pins it on the plot, I always have this sense that "plot" is a red herring on why the story was bad. Every element forms a great ouroboros of ouroboros...s? For the reader criticizing the work, identifying the plot is kind of an exercise in hindsight bias and contrivance.

I've always been of the philosophy that...well...this isn't quite true but if I think too long about it I'll take an hour to even spell the word "the" in the first sentence: plot doesn't matter. This is despite the fact that if your story is bad your plot is probably bad. Again, please give me some leeway on that scandalous three word sentence. It's not quite what I mean.

There are two stories that, to me, highlight this idea very well in seemingly opposed ways. One, at least to me, kinda flies in the face of "plot". For the other, if you were the kinda person who thinks of stories in a purely analytical sense that zeroed in on plot, this story would be objectively terrible. It's the most basic, "lazy" plot there is. And yet it clearly isn't a bad story. They are: Pulp Fiction and Avatar, the Last Airbender.

For me, even if Tarantino didn't intend this, Pulp Fiction is a straight up case study of this idea. The very name of the movie seems to denigrate it if you subscribe to the idea of plot needing to be inherently solid on its own. There's a briefcase that glows when you open it, and you never even find out what's inside of it. The story doesn't follow a linear path at all. There's no overarching reason established for why you should care what's going on. This movie really resonates with that idea that "plot doesn't matter." And also with some ideas presented elsewhere in this thread about how characters themselves are the entire reason for the plot mattering.

For Avatar, the synopsis of the entire show reads like a dirty criticism of a terrible story. "Chosen one gets forced into a quest of mastering his magic and taking down the dark lord." You could write that in a much more derogatory way, but there you go.

The true answer, I think, is just a very difficult one. It requires you to be cognitively "uncomfortable"; it's work. And yet, instead of making this wall of text even longer, I'll sum it up in one word: fidelity. I know, that's a crazy vague statement. But that's what it is. A story is good if it's got high fidelity. With the characters, their motivations, how they react to the environment...etc. *I'm of the opinion that you can write a million compelling stories about an orphaned boy wizard with a pet owl going to a school for magic.* And yet, when a story is bad, everyone wants to talk about how it fails in "plot." That's because it's easy as hell to do so.

Describing why a story has high fidelity is like describing the world itself. It's not as cognitively easy as examining the "rules of storytelling" and coming up with what aspect of plot fell through. To me, having a great "plot", as others here have very lucidly put, is about why the reader is reading. Does the reader light up and easily explain why the story matters to them when they get asked? Does it have direction? Edit: by fidelity I mean inner-faithfulness. It never sacrifices what it has already established within itself in order to say something interesting. Actually, fidelity might not be quite the word I'm trying to grasp, but maybe in that error someone might understand what I mean.


----------



## Demesnedenoir (Jul 27, 2018)

The funny thing is if you cut Pulp Fiction into a linear film, it’d be... iffy at best. In a sense, the film is one big gimmick. There is a plot in Pulp Fiction, IMO, it’s just not linear. Would I read the book Pulp Fiction? No. The movie was fun in its day, but the gimmick has worn off for me. It’s a bit like watching Sixth Sense or Memento more than a couple times... the gimmicks wear out.

And personally, I tend see “the writing” blamed more than the plot. But, “the writing” can mean many different things to many different people. For that matter, so can plot.

No comments on on other references, I’m not a fan to say the least, heh heh.


----------



## DylanRS (Jul 27, 2018)

Agree to disagree. The character interactions/dialogue are engrossing to me. The gimmicks don't register as gimmicky to me, if that makes sense. And my point wasn't that it doesn't have a plot. My point is that a lot of people rely on sort of post-hoc plot considerations to explain why a story misses the mark, instead of getting into the nitty gritty of every element and their interactions. Pulp-fiction has a plot, but it's good (to those who love it, like me) because of something more detailed than the formula. I love all the interactions and their consequences, which begets the plot. Plot feels secondary and yet...primary. It's inter-relational.

Maybe this makes more sense: a lot of the time someone might say that a book is bad because it's -insert reductive and post-hoc pigeonholing into the flavor of the month "plot"-. But really it's because that's ALL it is. A color-by-numbers. I don't think it's to do with the most basic understanding of what the plot "is" that makes the story bad. I honestly believe I could technically read nothing but teen-dystopias with a "strong female protagonist teen" leading a rebellion against her oppressive government for the rest of my life _if they were all written with true care_, which is of course a tall order. I'm not saying I have a preference for this type of story. It's just an example.  

So vaguely my reply to the thread title is that it doesn't matter how complex the plot is. Or rather, people have a habit of reducing a story, in discussion, to the simplest take on what it's plot is.


----------

