the plot is not what really happened
Of course, nothing “really happened” since a novel is fiction. Life is nothing like a novel. And you should not try to make your novel like life. It won’t work if you do. Life is full of events, interactions, and living that could be many stories, plus what you ate for lunch. A story is more like an analysis of something that happened in life with all the extraneous things that actually happened taken out.
We all tell stories, all the time. It is how we understand the world and is a basic part of what being a human is. Perhaps something happens at work and you want to tell your friend or partner or mother. You tell them “Something weird happened at work today.” And go on to tell your story. But you don’t tell uninteresting things. And you don’t tell everything that happened that day. You leave out all the things that happened that have no relation to your story - your interesting thing. That is plot.
A plot is like an analysis of an out-come. It is everything that happened that contributed to the out-come and nothing that did not. It’s like a mathematical proof. And all the events of the story are arranged in a cause-and-effect style. Indeed, cause-and-effect is what it’s all about. The reader wants to know why something happened and the novel answers that question.
A novel is also written to be more interesting and dramatic than how things are in real life. Writers are often told to listen to people talk as a study for writing dialogue. Certainly, you can find snatches of overheard dialogue that are great, but as a whole real people speak is a mess when transcribed. It is full of boring stuff, repetitions, bad grammar that is hard to follow, etc.
In Life one doesn’t’ know what people are thinking. A lot of stories we tell each other are concerned with trying to figure out what other people were thinking; and getting help doing it from the person you tell your story to. A novel can tell you what the characters are thinking, or what some of them are thinking. And the reader really wants to know what the protagonist is thinking. What they are thinking, what they decide to do -> what happens because of that -> how they think and feel about the outcome -> what they decide to do next, etc., etc. That is the great thing about novels, we get to know what the characters are thinking (some of the characters). In life you do not.
Things to remember about plot:
- Dialogue is not like real people speaking just written down. It should leave out all the boring stuff. It is more witty, mysterious, emotional. I have another post just on dialogue.
- Don’t include events that have nothing to do with the out-come. Leave out everything that the reader doesn’t need to know to get the story. Everything. From pouring a cup of coffee, routine actions: she walked into the room, put down her bag and sat down, routine dialogue: hello – hello – nice to see you today - to someone’s relationship with their great-aunt that has nothing to do with the out-come.
- Leave out the boring stuff as Elmore Leonard said “I try to leave out the parts readers skip”
- Don’t include red herrings. The only exception is in mystery/detective stories and then they must be plausible. Readers expect everything to be important to the out-come and if something isn’t, they get annoyed, plus they invest time in trying to figure out how it fits in.
- Remember cause-and-effect.
- The reader really, really wants to know what the main character is thinking/feeling - give it to them. Don’t think it is suspenseful to withhold this - it’s not suspenseful it’s unsatisfying.