I talk about this all the time in other contexts, but I don't seem to have done so here.<\/p>\n
There's a particular kind of plot that I encounter fairly frequently in the slushpile: a character starts out in one situation, but wants to be in a different situation. So they perform the obvious straightforward action that will put them in the different situation, and they succeed. The end.<\/p>\n
I find this plot template immensely unsatisfying. I've taken to calling it a \"linear plot\": the action proceeds in a straight line from point A to point B, with no obstacles and no narrative tension and no doubts that the protagonist will succeed.<\/p>\n
Example (not from a real story): Jimmy lives in Europe in the early 1900s. He wants to go to the US. So he buys a boat ticket, and he goes to the US. The end.<\/p>\n
The protagonist has a goal; that much is good. But there's nothing in the way of his accomplishing the goal; he has the means, the motive, and the opportunity to achieve the goal, and he succeeds on his first try.<\/p>\n
So here's a basic attempt at complicating things: Jimmy desperately wants to go to the US, but he can't afford to.<\/em> So he saves up money for a while, and then he buys a boat ticket, and he goes to the US. The end.<\/p>\n Here there's an obstacle to his achieving the goal. A good start. But without more detail, it's not an interesting obstacle. It would be possible to write a fascinating story in which the whole plot was about Jimmy's travails in trying to save up money for the boat ticket, but if achieving the goal of saving up money is as straightforward as achieving the goal of buying the ticket was in the previous example, then it's still barely more than a linear plot.<\/p>\n I guess the moral here is that every time a character has an important goal (this usually doesn't apply to trivial goals like tying shoelaces or crossing the street, though it sometimes does), they should usually face interesting obstacles to achieving that goal.<\/p>\n The next step, of course, can be to complicate the plot further. In an ironic twist ending, after years of scrimping and saving, Jimmy gets on the Titanic<\/em> and dies. (Or, more interestingly, he gets on the Titanic<\/em> and survives, and that has an effect on his later life.) Or he gets to the US and finds that things aren't as happy-ever-after as he expected. Or he's halfway across the Atlantic when he's abducted by aliens. Or he realizes that he doesn't want to go to the US after all. Or whatever. Achieving a goal and having it not be what you expected, or failing to achieve a goal, or having the goal changed when halfway there—there are plenty of interesting ways to complicate a goal-oriented plot.<\/p>\n But generally the first step is keeping the original goal from being too easily achieved.<\/p>\n Of course, none of this is necessarily relevant to stories where the emphasis isn't on the plot.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I talk about this all the time in other contexts, but I don’t seem to have done so here. There’s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}