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.