On Plot

by S. Andrew Swann

What is a "Story?" (SF or otherwise.)

A character with a problem.
Every story is about a character trying to deal with some sort of
difficulty. Characters who have happy lives, who are content with
their lot, and who have achieved their goals are not good fodder for
fiction. The people we read about are people in trouble.

The central problem.

Most genre stories can be thought of as revolving around some
central problem, or problems. The central problem(s) can be
considered to be, in some sense, what the story is "about." Will the
mystery be solved? Will the protagonist survive? Will the rebellion
succeed?

Begin with a crisis...

Whatever the length you're dealing with, short story or novel, you
want to begin with a character in crisis. The reader should find
characters in difficulty within the first chapter, the first page, and
ideally, the first paragraph. Structurally, it may not be possible to
have the story's main problem begin on the first page, but every
story should begin with some problem, often with the first line.

...end with a resolution.

If the story is organized around a single central problem, it ends
naturally when you've resolved that problem. If the story deals with
a series or complex of problems, it ends when the last problem is
dealt with, or when all the problems identified as most important

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are solved. A story can persist as long as there are problems to

deal with.

What makes a Story SF?

The central problem and its context.
A story is SF when the central problem dealt with by the
characters is a science-fictional idea, or when the central problem
is resolved by science-fictional means. This means that if the SF
elements are removed from the story, either the central problem, or
its resolution, will cease to exist, causing the story to collapse.

"If it's a western, it ain't SF."

It is by no means a consensus, but there is a large body of thought
that says that a story has to have more than an SF setting to be
SF. In other words, if the characters and plot can be successfully
transplanted to a non-SF setting, it isn't really SF. If all you're
doing is setting a western in a post-apocalyptic setting, you're
probably better of simply writing a western.

What is Plot?
Cause and effect. Stimulus and response.
Plot is the structure of events within a story and the causal
relationship between them. There is no plot without causality.
"Captain Stronghead piloted his spacecraft to Proxima Centauri," is
an event with no plot. "Captain Stronghead piloted his spacecraft
to Proxima Centauri in order to escape the despotic regime on
Earth," has the beginning of a plot.

The causal chain.

The plot of a story is a chain of events, each event the result of
some prior events, and the cause of some subsequent events. The
plot of a story will extend beyond the bounds of the story itself.

How does Plot develop?

Things get worse.
Up until the resolution of the story's central problem (or up until
the resolution of the most dire of the story's problems) the
situation should steadily get worse— or more difficult— for the
protagonist. Even if the protagonist's situation objectively
improves, which happens in many "rags to riches" stories, the
forces arrayed against the character should grow comparably in
magnitude. If the protagonist picks up a bat, the antagonist should

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S. Andrew Swann On Plot

pick up a knife. If the protagonist picks up a knife, the antagonist

should pick up a gun.

The active protagonist.

Not only should the difficulties increase steadily until the climatic
moment when the central problem(s) are resolved, but the
difficulties should be increased as a result of positive action by the
protagonist. Your characters should not sit by and watch the world
fall apart, doing nothing. The characters in your story should have
an active part in destroying the world around them. Every attempt
to solve a problem should make the problem worse, or create a
new, more tenacious, problem. Problems can worsen without
interference by the characters, but the characters should always
be doing something about the problem(s), and what the characters
do should worsen— or at the very least, change— the problem(s)
they are trying to solve.

Complicate, Complicate, Complicate

Things getting worse is not a matter of simply increasing the
magnitude of the problem. (Discovery of the fact that the asteroid
about to hit Earth is 1500km across rather than 500km across.)
Things getting worse in a story sense means a proliferation of new
problems rippling from the old. (The realization that the technical
failures in the escape spacecraft are the result of sabotage.)
Complication means that the problem the characters were trying to
solve is not quite the same as the problem they actually face.

Character as Plot.
Motivations, desires, goals.
Since plot is not just event, but the casual relationships between
events, plot can not be isolated from character. Characters do
things for reasons, and those reasons form an indispensable
element of plot. Every character in a story desires things to varying
degrees, and has personal goals in mind, some of which may not
have anything to do with the central problems of a story. Whatever
these desires and goals are, they form the basis for your
character's motivation to act. You want the characters within your
story to be acting from these desires and goals, and not from the
external demands of the plot.

Conflict with others.

A great source of difficulty for your characters is when their
personal drives are at odds with the central problem in the story. A
man whose highest ambition in life is to live a quiet life and raise a

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family is going to be torn if he is drafted into an army in the middle

of a civil war. He will act differently than a man who has a
hedonistic lifestyle and whose desire is simply to make each
moment as pleasurable and exciting as possible. Placing these two
characters together in a combat situation and they will start
arguing immediately.

Conflict with self.

Perhaps the greatest source of difficulty for your characters, and
the most emotionally satisfying when finally resolved, is when the
characters have goals and desires that are mutually exclusive. If
both goals are illustrated in the story, and are of comparable
importance to the character, the character will be in a constant
state of tension that can border on agony. Consider the family man
above. Give him a strong sense of justice that has placed him in
this civil war to battle against the atrocities that he's seen the
enemy perpetrate (perhaps his family was victimized, driving him
into the war.) Give him and the hedonist an opportunity to capture
enemy soldiers that've been committing such atrocities. Then have
the hedonist begin committing similar atrocities upon the enemy
soldiers. What does the protagonist do, is he after justice or
revenge?

How does Plot create Suspense?

Certainty of threat.
The first basis of suspense is the foreknowledge that something
bad is going to happen. The reader has to anticipate some event for
there to be suspense associated with that event. A surprise
bombing creates no suspense beforehand, but leads to suspense if
it creates an expectation of future bombings. Often, in stories
relying heavily on suspense, the reader will be given information
that the characters don't have. The reader will be told that a
character's car is wired to explode, and then will be given the time
to think about the fact as the character walks through the parking
garage.

Uncertainty of outcome. The author as evil bastard.

Suspense can be defused completely if the reader is convinced that
the author is going to figure some way out for the characters in
trouble. This why it is difficult to work up suspense over the fate of
a character in any ongoing TV series. (How many times, for all the
threats it endured on the show, was the Enterprise really in
danger?) If you wish the reader to feel real suspense, you have to
convince the reader that you, the writer, are an evil bastard that

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will, occasionally, follow through on your threats. This means

allowing bad things to happen to good characters. If you let the car
explode at least once, you let the reader know you could do it
again.

Coincidence, Mystery and Surprise.

Coincidence shouldn't make things easier.
Sometimes you can get away with using an accidental confluence
of events in a story, such as having otherwise unrelated characters
be at the same place at the same time. You can get away with this
in two cases. The first is when the fact of the coincidence is one of
the initiating forces of the story. (The whole story is the
consequence of this chance meeting in an airport.) The second is
when the coincidence makes things worse for the protagonist. (The
protagonist is trying to sneak out of the country, and the guy he
bumps into is a reporter who recognizes his face.) Coincidences
seem contrived and false when they're used to help the character.
(The guy in the airport is an old college chum who's more than
willing to loan our hero the two grand he needs for an airline
ticket.) Remember, it's not a coincidence if it is a logical
consequence of prior events in the story. (Our hero's at the airport
because he has an old college chum who's an airline pilot.)

Lay groundwork for your revelations.

To paraphrase the last point, most events should be a logical
consequence of prior events. Mysteries should not be mysterious
once solved, and surprises should not be surprising in retrospect.
The solution of mysterious events (as in a classic murder mystery)
or the surprising revelation, should be— as much as possible— the
result of the bringing together of already known information with
some final crucial element that brings the whole into focus.

Never withhold information the reader should know.

Withholding information from the reader is annoying. The reader
should always have the following information unless there is a
overwhelming reason not to provide it; the identity of the point of
view character, where that character is and what that character is
doing, and all the relevant background information known to that
character that is needed for the reader to understand who the
character is, where the character is, and what the character is
doing. Holding back these basic elements of information does not
create surprise, mystery, or suspense. It creates confusion on the
part of the reader, and annoyance when the reader realizes there
wasn't a legitimate reason for the writer to be coy.

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The payoff and the appearance of inevitability.

A problem resolved is a climatic event.
Whenever a major problem is resolved in some way, you have a
climatic point in your story, a point of high tension and drama.
When the problem is a major one, or the central one, the climax is
comparably major. These events need to be given weight within the
text comparable to the weight the characters give them. They need
to be dealt with in fully developed scenes. There is nothing quite as
dissatisfying as having a major problem in the story be dealt with
off-screen.

The resolution should feel inevitable, even if it surprises.

This is the same point as "Lay groundwork for your revelations,"
only more so. The resolution of your story can be thought of the
ultimate surprise, the revelation of the central mystery. Even more
than the smaller mysteries and surprises, the primary resolution of
your story should be the logical coming together of facts and
events known to the reader. Inevitability comes, like suspense,
from foreknowledge.

Don't dangle threads without dealing with them.

Lastly, when you raise a question or a problem in a story, do so
with the intention of eventually dealing with it before the end of the
story. Dealing with it can be as simple as an acknowledgment that
the problem isn't going to be solved within the space of the story,
but the acknowledgment needs to be there or the reader will feel as
if the writer simply forgot about it.

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S. Andrew Swann On Plot

A four step exercise in Plot development:

1. Create a character.
2. Give this character a problem to deal with.
3. Imagine at least three different ways this particular
character might possibly deal with this particular problem.
4. Pick one (or more) of these options, and imagine at least
three different ways it a) wouldn't work, and b) would make
the character's situation worse. (Short of killing off the
protagonist and ending the story.)

By doing this, you have evolved from a character dealing with a

problem, to a character dealing with a worse problem that's
directly and causally linked to the first. This is all plotting is; the
evolution of the character's difficulties, through the story, until a
resolution is reached.

© 1994 S. Andrew Swann

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