Plotting without a plot

Part one of a two-part mystery about plot

Part one of a two-part meditation on plot.

I recently taught a flash fiction class, and I said that one thing about flash that I appreciate is there is less burden of plot.

I say “burden” because when I’m writing longer works, especially novels, I feel the weight of keeping the action escalating—and it’s a burden because I’m insecure about my plotting abilities.

Maybe I’ve just told myself I’m an inadequate plotter (and made myself into one in the telling), but I love how flash fiction, by lessening the pressure on plot, opens up other storytelling elements.

Most craft books say the primary elements of fiction are character, setting, and plot, but I think it’s worth questioning whether that’s true. Rhythm, spatiality, and texture seem as important to me. Mood. Tone. That ineffable sense of voice (or perhaps it’s more appropriately called “being”).

Plot—defined as stories with a beginning, middle, and end (three acts) and a character who faces a conflict and changes—tends to be less pronounced in flash fiction because the story is spawned by a situation, a moment that might be quite ordinary, not by the grand arc of a lavish storyline.

I’ve always liked Irving Howe’s definition of flash stories: “One might say that these short-shorts constitute epiphanies (climactic moments of high grace or realization) that have been torn out of their contexts.”

That statement reminds me of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the “decisive moment”—the split second a photographer has to anticipate in order to take a photo that will reveal the larger truth of a situation.

Plot is perhaps the most tyrannical of all craft elements.

As an uneasy plotter, I’ve stopped thinking of the conventional notions of plot because I find them too onerous, and sometimes unhelpful, especially the mathematical and dogmatic convention of Freytag’s Pyramid, with its seven steps of storytelling: exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, and denouement.

Plot, and the conventional definitions of it, is in some ways the most tyrannical of all craft elements. There is a hammering of Freytag’s pyramid that goes on in many creative-writing classrooms and craft books. The pyramid kidnaps young writers each year. But stories don’t have to shape themselves in such a way.

The writer Megan Giddings questions Freytag’s pyramid because of the way it forces writers into using time in a way that can “inhibit a writer from thinking deeply about the expansions and contractions that lead to richer plots, big characters, or capturing an essence of living.”

She says that such a stringent requirement of making sure the tension is consistently rising “means that quieter moments, humorous moments, moments where time slows and allows room for thought, might feel like they need to be cut.”

Freytag’s pyramid promises resolution, understanding, completeness, whereas a different shape of plot provides “less of an expectation for answers, more room to think about the complexity of being a person,” says Giddings.

A linear narrative promises arrival, cohesion, a world you can trust, should trust, whereas the nonlinear allows for the inchoate and the oblique to play a larger role. The nonlinear allows for the search for different shapes, for an aesthetics of dimensionality.

A story with different shapes

When I think of flash, I think of words like “rupture,” “splinter,” “suspend,” “interrupt,” “dissolve,” “mix,” “scatter,” “swirl,” and “compress”—and, in fact, the title of my collection of one-hundred-word stories is Fissures. These aren’t words of solidity. They represent a world that isn’t holding.

Imagine a plot formed around one or all of those words—the shape of the narrative trajectory changes dramatically, allowing a new kind of narrative geometry to emerge.

The reader has to be alert. No one is taking them by the hand. A story is being framed and reframed continually. It’s a process not of familiarization but of defamiliarization, of decenteredness. So the reader is on edge, vulnerable, perhaps alienated, seeking wholeness, questioning—active, always active.

Like Megan Giddings, instead of trying to force my stories into a geometrically determined plot, I like writing about situations that provide “less of an expectation for answers” and “more room to think about the complexity of being a person.” I like exploring the small, telling pivots of a moment because I believe that such small moments can be as important as the larger dramatic moments we often think define life.

Such small moments often don’t fit in longer works, though, or they can’t be given the proper weight, because of the larger story surrounding them. “Character change” is sometimes even too big of a way to put it.

Take the story “Hourly” by Scott Garson, in which he captures the stagnation of a menial job and the frustration of unexpressed creativity in a single moment—a single gesture. In its entirety it reads:

They gave me a job at Halloween Town. Strip mall with vacancies. Sad. I was a wizard, vaguely swinging my wand. “Everything change,” I commanded.

Small interior movements

I often think of small stories like this as “tropisms.” I was introduced to the notion of tropisms as a young writer by Nathalie Sarraute, who said that a tropism was a biological term used to describe the almost imperceptible movements that living organisms make toward or away from whatever impinges on them.

Her brief stories trace the contours of nuance, attempting to capture the “interior movements that precede and prepare our words and actions, at the limits of our consciousness.”

Traditional narrative forms that focus on character change and plot overlook the true ways our senses perceive the world, Sarraute said. In her book Tropisms, she aimed to “take hold of the instant, by enlarging it, developing it,” by dramatizing small interior movements.

There are few if any “events” in her fiction, beyond the domestic and the familial. Traditional markers of character, the presentation of personality, disintegrate. She delves into the unspoken. She exposes politeness for its veils of aggression, the ways it can create anxiety in others.

“There is a plot, if you like, but it’s not the usual plot. It is the plot made up of these movements between human beings,” she said.

Sarraute encourages a keener attention to life. She shows how there is much to miss if we don’t look at the world through a microscope to explore unnoticed crevices, to peek inside the fissures that form our days.

In writing fragments, a writer becomes an archaeologist, looking for what is missing while sifting through ruins. It’s a different way of reading the world—sensing the whole on the edge of a fragment.

Life is a collection of ruins in the end. We’re all sifting through the remains. By necessity, our aesthetic, our world view, is determined by ruins. The irony, as Lydia Davis points out, is that “any complete picture is an illusion. . . . A picture that seems less complete may seem less of an illusion, therefore paradoxically more realistic.”

Because a small change

Dear Reader,

I’ve now written 118 newsletters, and it’s been a joy. I love writing them, and I love you reading them, and I love the conversation and community that have ensued. I want to continue all of that, but I’m afraid I need to pay my rent (and buy groceries), so I’m going to start a subscription to this newsletter next week.

The newsletter will still be free—twice a month—but the other two newsletters will be available only for those who subscribe. I’m sorry. Perhaps if enough people subscribe, I can open it all back up for free.

In fact that’s one way to view the subscription: as a donation.

I deeply appreciate those of you who subscribe so that we can keep this conversation going.

Because a quote about flash fiction plots

“The shorter the piece of fiction, the less need for a plot. You can write a fine story in which little happens: A man curses his neighbor, a widow quits her mahjongg group, or an unhappy family goes on a picnic. Simple shapes work better than something fussy and complicated.”

– Jerome Stern

End Notes

What I’m reading: I just started reading Claire Jiménez’s What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez because she’s going to be a guest on Write-minded. I love how she’s both storyteller and cultural critic. I love how her characters love and fight, and how she shows how they are flawed and vulnerable. The novel is a compelling portrait of a fractured family

What I’m watching: STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces. Because I grew up on Steve Martin. I read Cruel Shoes. I watched him being a wild and crazy guy on SNL. I went to The Jerk for my 15th birthday. I read his memoir, Born Standing Up. This documentary (by Morgan Neville, who I used to hang around with in the early 90s) is a type of religious observation to me.

What I’m listening to: Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. I decided to focus on Schoenberg as my composer to study this year, with the idea that his experiments in tone and “atonality” (a word he didn’t like) are a key in understanding all of 20th-century art.

What I’m photographing: I took the most lovely walk at the Albany Bulb, which is always photogenic