Plotting without a plot, part two

In last week’s post, I talked about how flash fiction lessens the burden of plot and opens up stories to different shapes and possibilities. This week, I go deeper.

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When the writer Lidia Yuknavitch was on the Write-minded podcast (which I co-host with

Brooke Warner

), we bonded over our plot challenges and how we were each liberated by the writer Nathalie Sarraute’s notion of stories being “tropisms”— “interior movements that precede and prepare our words and actions, at the limits of our consciousness.”

Yuknavitch said that Sarraute freed her from the conventional model of a rising arc of plot, and that after reading Sarraute, she started writing her stories as a “series of intensities.”

“Intensities” is such a good way to visualize Sarraute’s tropisms—and such a great way to think of storytelling (or plotting).

I’ve always been interested in the disconnections that exist between people, especially in intimate situations. So much of life’s drama happens in the ways we hear or don’t hear others, how we’re so focused on speaking our needs, as if we’re still children.

We are still children, of course. Almost everything we say is “I want that / I need this,” in some form. I was drawn to writing short-shorts because their condensation tends to magnify these disconnections, these “intensities.” The existential grist of the distances between us all comes to the foreground with more piquancy because of the brevity of the form.

Flash fiction: an invitation to question the definition of plot

Last week, I discussed the ever-popular Freytag’s Pyramid as a burdensome plot model. Another dominant plot model that has come to be accepted as gospel is Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which Campbell posits that there is a common mythological structure of storytelling that crosses cultures and time periods, which he calls “the hero’s adventure.”

In the introduction to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell summarizes the monomyth: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

Campbell’s theory has permeated writing workshops and authors’ psyches, yet we should ask if this plot structure actually reflects life in the way we experience it and if it’s the best structure to use for our stories.

Do we live lives that mirror an adventure quest? If we live lives that “rupture,” “splinter,” “suspend,” “interrupt,” “dissolve,” “mix,” “scatter,” “swirl,” and “compress,” how can we be expected to render them in a form that speaks to wholeness and cohesion?

In fact, why aspire to unity in a work? Instead of reading for the escalating action embedded in Campbell’s structure, what if we read a piece just for its tone, its lyricism, its mood, its intensities? Can such elements supersede plot?

Brevity allows for other types of plots, other types of reading experiences. “Character is plot” is an old craft adage because each action, each quest to attain a desire that escalates tension and suspense moves the story forward, so we live with a character’s choices and the consequences of those choices.

Agency and action, choice and consequence, therefore reside in the heartbeat of plot. But all stories are about ways of being in the world, and this is just one view into life, so we have to ask how closely it resembles our view of ourselves.

Campbell’s structure privileges the outwardness of an adventure story over a more interior and static story. We’ve oriented our narratives toward an action-oriented plot that eclipses the story of those who stay at home.

In The Odyssey, the focus is on Odysseus, essentially leaving out the story of Penelope, his wife who remains at home, which I’d argue is an equally interesting story. Instead of facing battles and the high seas, Penelope has to reside in the existential angst of waiting in a pensive drama of hope and doubt. She waits twenty years for Odysseus’s final return, and in that time she has to devise various strategies to delay marrying 108 suitors.

Perhaps that isn’t a plot with a “thousand faces,” but that’s a story I want to read.

Story shapes and their cultural roots

Matthew Salesses, in his book Craft in the Real World, emphasizes how the source of such a narrative theory has cultural roots. Western storytelling developed from a tradition of oral performances meant to recount heroic deeds. The Chinese literary historian Zheng Zhenduo says, however, that Chinese narrative comes from a tradition of gossip and street talk—so it is less about adventure and more about day-to-day life.

The literary scholar Ming Dong Gu says that Chinese fiction grew with an emphasis on lyricism and relies on pattern, repetition, and rhythm. It is “organized on a structural principle different from the time-based, direction-oriented, and logically coherent principle of the Western narrative.”

Plot is a statement about reality, a commentary on how life is lived. I wonder how the “plotless” is full of a different kind of plot, one that is more nuanced and subtle.

“The shorter the piece of fiction, the less need for a plot,” said Jerome Stern. “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.”

Some short-shorts certainly have a less discernable beginning, middle, and end. They eddy, as if they’re leaves floating along the slow meandering of a creek. A tiny tale can be like a loop, looping through other loops, creating a quilt, a mosaic. They tend not to propel you forward, as in seeking what’s next, but to hold the world in place for one dramatic moment.

A plot that lingers?

I’ve heard people say that flash has no room or time to linger, that it’s all about that bright moment of illumination, a dramatic act, but I question that.

Perhaps a short-short can linger the way we linger on a street corner, not realizing the light has changed. Perhaps a story can be as much about a mood as it is about an action. The moment can matter as much as a series of moments. A lyric impression, a series of lyric impressions can move with escalating tensions.

Why not? Could it be enough for a work to simply be expectant with meaning?

This isn’t to say that short-shorts don’t need momentum. Every work, whether it’s a six-word story or an experimental novel or even an anti-novel, needs momentum of some sort. But it’s up to the author to decide what the elements of momentum are.

Does momentum arise from direct action (a character desires something, encounters an obstacle, acts), or does it arise from the “subtle, progressive buildup of thematic resonances,” as David Shields puts it. One can create momentum through an image, a mood, a voice. It’s harder to pull off, but the reward is often more satisfying and more meaningful.

The essence of plot: yearning

“A short story, in its brevity, may not have a fully developed plot, but it must have the essence of a plot, yearning,” said Robert Olen Butler.

Yes, yearning. Not a series of plot points that map to a structure, but a yearning, a restlessness, that takes a story from one moment to another with uncertainty lacing itself through the prose.

To yearn in a state of uncertainty means writing toward the mystery, toward the questions. Even though we seek answers, we also know that the answer often isn’t the answer. Or that sometimes an answer is insufficient.

If a writer is pursuing a mystery, that’s a type of plot unto itself. We can feel that anticipation, the suspense that naturally resides between the known and the unknown, the opening up of questions.

“If mystery, the genre, is about finding the answers, then mystery, that elusive yet essential element of fiction, is about finding the questions,” said Maud Casey.

All stories must possess mystery. They either offer a frame in which the reader tries to solve the mystery, to know what happened, or they are mystery itself, each sentence, each scene, built around questions that go unanswered.

Brevity is built with questions, forms itself around questions, nurtures questions, finds its breath in questions. It’s not a style that seeks to speak with certainty, but with nuance.

Sometimes a story can be about mystery itself and nothing more. Brevity naturally provides an opening to mystery because the mysterious eludes all words of explanation. It speaks to something more significant than what can be explained. There is always something beyond.

“Mystery in fiction means taking the reader to that land of Un— uncertainty, unfathomability, unknowing. It’s Kafka’s axe to the frozen seas of our soul. In other words, it will—and it should—mess you up,” said Casey.

A plot-driven narrative seeks resolution and conclusion whereas works of brevity often seek irresolution. These are stories that hang in the air, unfinished.

Jane Alison describes such a narrative as a narrative of wavelets: “Dispersed patterning, a sense of ripples or oscillation, little ups and downs, might be more true to human experience than a single crashing wave: I’m more likely to feel some tension, a small discovery, a tiny change, a relapse.”

As Robert Scholes said, “Quality of mind, not plot, is the soul of narrative.”

Because a quote (from a good friend)

My good friend (and wonderful writer) Pamela Painter sent me this great quote after my post last week. She wrote this for Vancouver Flash Fiction Writing Tips: 2023.

"Forget plot. Plot sits like a boulder on your story. Instead think ‘unstable situation’ and notice that an unstable situation has a past—and a future. Also forget conflict—it too is a dead weight. Instead think ‘tension,’ ‘anticipation,’ ‘apprehension,’ and ‘dread.’

Because writing with vulnerability

Join me in this live two-hour class, and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about Writing with Vulnerability.

I believe that writing with vulnerability is more important than any craft tool because being vulnerable is how we connect with others, so writers who risk vulnerability tend to write stories that are the most compelling.

They write in service of truths that would otherwise go untold.

End Notes

What I’m reading: I’ve been sick, so sick it’s been hard to read, but I lolled in bed yesterday and read Daniel Clowes graphic novel, Monica, which was so riveting and fascinating and layered and vivid. I rarely read graphic novels, but I was so happy I took time for this one.

What I’m watching: I just finished the final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm—solely so I could experience the much-discussed ending, which was brilliant. Perfect Larry David. On the screen and in life.

What I’m listening to: Laraaji’s Segue to Infinity. Such good writing music for my tastes. Wind chimes and zither. A wash of distortion mixing with mellifluous sounds. Harmony and percussion intermingling, but tense, in conversation, figuring it out. That’s it: this is music I like to figure things out by.

What I’m photographing: