BooksGoSocial Conference Magazine
On Plot and Plotting by Robert I. Katz
Years ago, when I was just beginning to write seriously, one of the first books that I read on writing was Writing to Sell, by Scott Meredith, who founded the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, at one time the largest and best known such agency in the world. Before he became an agent, however, Scott Meredith was a writer, and his insights on how to write and how to sell what you’ve written were worth the price of the book. He focused a lot on plot. To me, the most valuable piece of information in Writing to Sell was the “plot skeleton,” a schema to which all successful stories, and all successful novels, must inevitably conform. To wit: you start with a protagonist for whom the reader can feel sympathy. The protagonist has a problem that he or she must solve. The protagonist’s efforts to solve the problem fail, often making the problem even worse. Finally, when all seems lost, the protagonist solves the problem—or comes to realize that the problem was not worth solving in the first place. An example of this latter might be a man who is obsessed with making money, but who realizes in the end that what he really needed was the love of his family; or a man who is obsessed with a beautiful but unsuitable woman and who realizes in the end that the girl next door was the one he wanted all along. Years ago, when I was in college, I happened to be walking along the halls of the English Department when I overheard a professor, a well-known poet in his own right, make a comment to one of his colleagues about the “banality of plot.” The comment bewildered me, but now that I am a writer, I understand what he meant. Real life has no plot. Things often happen for no reason whatsoever. Real life rarely makes for an entertaining story. Plot is artificial. Plots have to make sense. Real life does not make sense. After my first novel (Edward Maret: A Novel of the Future) was published in 2001, I began attending science fiction conventions. At one of these, I listened to a panel that was taking questions from the audience. One question was, “What advice would you give the beginning novelist?” Connie Willis had the best answer: “Learn 78
