Networking with Writers: Don't Lose the Plot

This is an expansion of a piece I wrote out last year to explain why a writing group I was in seemed so inclusive to some new members but so hostile to others. It is based on my experience there, but what happened so regularly there is sadly general behavior, both online and offline.

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If at any point you don't have a clear, concise idea what your novel is about, you will have problems getting other writers to take you seriously. You need to have a good idea of the sort of story you are writing for yourself more than for communicating with others, but it renders any discussion about your story rather difficult if you don't even know what it is you are working on.

Plot makes a story. At the highest level, there is a relatively small number of plot recipes which you can choose from (though you can choose multiple, leading to many combinations). When another writer asks you what your story is about, and you can’t give them a sentence – or even a full paragraph – which summarizes the sort of story you’re trying to tell, in particular focused on the sort of ending you’re trying to reach, most who've been writing for more than ten minutes will become immediately and irrevocably uninterested in hearing more. 

Why does this happen? It becomes immediately clear that you don’t have a story. You’re relaying a series of events. That’s not the same thing.

There is, to be sure, a certain niche for literature divorced from plot, which does not try to do anything but lay out cause and effect for a series of events which leaving things generally where they started. Some of this is even quality literature which is worth reading, but it is so because the writer was of extremely high skill. For every one play, book, or screenplay which follows this pattern that is worth the time it takes to consume it, there are several thousand that are not worth the paper they are printed on, much less the time it takes to read them. Even historians who set out to relate events as they happened write their account with plot in mind – both modern historians and the historians of old (if you don’t believe me, find a copy of something first-century AD historian Flavius Josephus). Plot is a core and non-optional element of storytelling.

You, the hipster budding writer who can’t be bothered to figure out why something so mainstream as plot is so important, are not going to be the one among thousands that produces something that is plotless but worth reading. Plot is like a magic spell – the decision not to use it is meaningless and empty unless you know how to use it and choose not to. 

If you want to learn how to write like that and make it entertaining, you should do so - but you should first hone your ability to write a proper story, so you only have to learn one very difficult thing at a time. You are not an all-powerful literature giant, not yet - and if you get ideas that you are, you will certainly never be.