What is more important? Plot, or storytelling ability?

[skip.knox]

Prose, characters, dialog. I'll add pacing. And I'll elaborate on prose as it encompasses narration and description at the very least.

All are necessary aspects in writing, and each one is the most important at the point where it is being employed.

Are all combined more important than plot? Of course not, because we're talking about different things. It's a bit like asking the musician which key is the most important, or the painter whether the brush is more important than the canvas.

 

[Finchbearer]

I went in assuming we knew what storytelling is, or at least that it’s most aspects of creative writing outside of the basic plot structure. I’d say yes to all the descriptions you’ve given for storytelling; prose, voice, style and the characterisation and accompanying dialogue that goes along with it. The plot is the bones of the story as I see it.

 

[Mad Swede]

For me oral storytelling is about catching the listeners attention and then keeping it. Pace is quite a large part of that, but so are characterisation and setting description since these have to be detailed enough to let the listener picture the scenes without dropping the pace so much that the listners fall asleep.

In written storytelling I think your prose style matters more because it's easier for the reader to focus on the page and so you have more room to develop setting, characterisation and dialogue. You can't ignore pace, but to me it isn't quite as critical as it is in oral storytelling. Your prose style is, I think, related to genre, in that many readers have certain expectations about the style used in a given book genre. That doesn't mean you can't challenge conventions, but you should be prepared for a reaction if you do that.

 

[Finchbearer]

I don’t know how we got into oral storytelling, but I would not excel at that. I enjoy watching it though, in that for me, it’s a performance.

 

[Finchbearer]

For my first novel, if I had just worked on polishing up the prose until it was near-perfect, it still would have failed due to the problems with plot/character. So, I'd say there should be some kind of balance between the two, even if one element is stronger than the other.

How do you know that it would have failed?

 

[Karlin]

As they Aramaic saying goes, "Mai Nafka Minei?"- what come out of this for us?

Anybody who is writing will do their best at both. I doubt very much that someone will suppress one skill in order to emphasize the other.

 

[Incanus]

How do you know that it would have failed?

Not the easiest question in the world to answer, but I'll try.

First, by my own lights. It just didn't turn out as good as I would have liked it to be. Several important plot and character elements did not pan out well. My standards are fairly high, and the project fell well short.

My best writer friend read a chunk of it, but couldn't get all the way through. A beta reader read even less before bailing out. The only people who read the whole thing were friends and relatives, none of which said they really enjoyed it.

I suppose I could have road tested it a bit further, but I came to dislike the story even more as time went by.

There's a smallish chance I'm wrong about this, but I feel pretty certain I got it right.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Either can destroy the other, and storytelling and plot are intertwined. In theory, a great plotter could write a horrible story, but a great storyteller wouldn't write a bad plot. Plot is too much a part of storytelling.

 

[pmmg]

I don’t know how we got into oral storytelling, but I would not excel at that. I enjoy watching it though, in that for me, it’s a performance.

If I could train my mouth to speak in the way it sounds in my head, I would be good at oral story-telling. Sadly.... My speaking voice is not very polished.

 

[Jackarandajam]

Care to elaborate?

Most of plot is storytelling, BUT.

Storytelling, upon consideration, is very much more important.

A good storyteller can take a boring plot and tell it so that everyone hangs off their every word and cheers at the end. They can tease out every opportunity for drama, suspense, irony, humor, romance, etc., until what started as a story about them going to the grocery store to buy eggs has everyone in the room listening. I've met people like this.

Now that, in a way, is because they change things about the plot, SORT OF. They have a natural or learned eye for accentuating the gold and downplaying or eliminating the dross.

That is why the fantasy genre still exists, tbh.

How many times will we devour books that tell the story of the chosen one, the epic journey, the rebirth of dragons, the hermit wizard begrudgingly taking a pupil, the magic school, the evil sorcerer?
As many times as a good storyteller can whip those parts up into something fun to read.

 

[Jackarandajam]

I went in assuming we knew what storytelling is, or at least that it’s most aspects of creative writing outside of the basic plot structure. I’d say yes to all the descriptions you’ve given for storytelling; prose, voice, style and the characterisation and accompanying dialogue that goes along with it. The plot is the bones of the story as I see it.

There is no such thing as a bad plot, only bad storytelling.

"Bad" here is actually "unskillfull" which makes the whole thing make alot more sense.

When you get into the specifics of the plot, you're really talking about the craft of storytelling.

If you're just talking about the elevator pitch, then a skilled storyteller could make a banger out of a book no matter what that is, as long as they believed in it.

 

[The Dark One]

I find it impossible to split the two (in terms of importance) for the following reasons...

Writing a novel is always about making choices. The careful dripfeed of information (chosen and regulated by the author) is your plot, but the way you do it is the story. There might be 10 things a character (theoretically) does in his/her day... woke up; had shower; had breakfast; went to work; chatted with colleagues; had lunch; murdered Alice; went home to wash clothes; came back to work; went home to get back onto Tindr.

Most of them won't be part of the plot and most of them won't be story. I see the plot points as the various turning points (sometimes carefully hidden or de-emphasised) and the story as everything else that gives the novel its flavour. Both are worthless without the other.

 

[FifthView]

I once posted this in a thread exploring complex plotting. (Yikes, almost 6 years ago!)

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]​

For me, this distinction serves well enough.

I'd been reading through this thread, and I kept wondering to myself, "What is the telling in storytelling?" The general assumption in this thread seems to be that the term encompasses many things, mostly related to how the prose can be polished and shaped in some manner to promote enjoyment for the reader or listener. Maybe it's pacing. Maybe it's colorful language. Maybe it's an impossible-to-define way of stringing nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and all those other parts of the language together to make the story more interesting...in some way? Hmmmm. If we give to storytelling all the charm possible in prose, then storytelling is bound to seem more important than anything else we can say about a story. I mean, it is the telling of that story.

I'm not a huge fan of using such an open-ended, all-encompassing yet hazy definition of storytelling, even if everything rolled together is actually the precise definition of storytelling, hah. I'd rather break it down into manageable chunks, or aspects, or processes when discussing the topic. (When reading, it's the opposite.)

If we look at the two through the lens Forster gives, I think there must be a very hard limit to how successful storytelling can be without plotting.

A string of events, arranged more or less in chronological order, can indeed be interesting, engaging, entertaining if the bits and pieces of those events are interesting in some way, but a very long string of relatively unconnected items might grow rather tedious. A great storyteller probably won't be able to avoid injecting some kind of plot, however subtle or implied, into the telling, if they are telling a long story.

I'm just musing here, hah. I think the answer to the question posed at the head of this thread might depend on the type of story being told, or at least the format.

 

[Finchbearer]

Writing a novel is always about making choices. The careful dripfeed of information (chosen and regulated by the author) is your plot, but the way you do it is the story. There might be 10 things a character (theoretically) does in his/her day... woke up; had shower; had breakfast; went to work; chatted with colleagues; had lunch; murdered Alice; went home to wash clothes; came back to work; went home to get back onto Tindr.

To my mind you could already distill this information into a plot; how long can an unassuming psycho killer go about his daily routine before police realise there is a Tindr killer on the loose? He looks like any ordinary man…

 

[Prince of Spires]

If storytelling for the purpose of this thread means everything from prose to characters to pacing, the we're pretty much comparing apple seeds to apple trees. Yes, they are related, but one is much bigger than the other, making it a not fair comparisson and one that's hard to disagree with.

When I started reading the thread, in my mind, storytelling was mainly about the voice of the author, basically, how the story is told. Which would put it on a much more equal footing to plot in terms of impact on a story.

When looked at it like that, then it very much depends on the author, the reader, and the genre. Some authors have a wonderful voice, they're just worth reading because of the way they tell a story. Others have an average voice, but craft wonderful plots. Some readers prefer one or the other. Some genres rely heavily on plot, while others offer a slice of life type story with very little plot in them. It's a balance. Ideally, you would be amazing in everything. But few, if any, writers are.

Just to go through some examples. Isabel Allende writes fictional family biographies (for lack of a better description). These follow a group of people who do stuff. There isn't all that much plot in there, since there rarely is in life. I have a hard time getting through them, since I have no clue what the whole point of th thing is. I'm missing the plot. My wife however, loves them.

Brandon Sanderson sits on the other extreme. He writes in a basic style. In terms of storytelling, his tales are quite plain. However, his plots are great and adored by his fans. No one will pick up a Sanderson for the amazing prose, but they will for his amazing plots.

And so it is with every writer and reader. I had trouble getting through the later books in the Song of Ice and Fire series, because I couldn't find the plot in them. They were all storytelling to me. Others love them.

So, if you are amazing in one area, then some people will enjoy your novel and recommend it to friends, as long as you are servicable in the other areas.

 

[The Dark One]

To my mind you could already distill this information into a plot; how long can an unassuming psycho killer go about his daily routine before police realise there is a Tindr killer on the loose? He looks like any ordinary man…

Sounds like you're inspired.

I expect to see your first draft by the end of August.

 

[Finchbearer]

Sounds like you're inspired.

I expect to see your first draft by the end of August.

One question: what is Tindr

 

[The Dark One]

It's an app for meeting potential murder victims.

 

[Finchbearer]

It's an app for meeting potential murder victims.

Got it.

So far, it seems that plot is less important than storytelling. You can have a meandering non-circular or linear plot, but still pull a reader through the book with captivating enough storytelling?

 

[The Dark One]

Got it.

So far, it seems that plot is less important than storytelling. You can have a meandering non-circular or linear plot, but still pull a reader through the book with captivating enough storytelling?

That's not at all what I said - nor some others.

Mind you, it all depends on your precise and personal definition of plot and story. If we can't agree on the same definition (and we won't) then the argument becomes a tad moot.

I think of myself, primarily, as a storyteller - but when I think of what a storyteller does... they construct a story around a plot.