DylanRS
Dreamer
(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.
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.
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Myth Weaver
