Perception and plotting

One of the writer complaints I hear regularly about plotting is some variation on “I can’t come up with a plot that’s compelling for the reader. I can’t make the reader care about what happens to the characters. I can’t make the reader care about what’s at stake.”

I often have to bite my tongue to keep from replying “Honey, ‘the reader’ doesn’t exist. There are thousands of readers—hundreds of thousands, if you’re lucky enough to hit the bestseller lists—and the only thing you truly ‘can’t’ do is make even one of them care about anything.”

I don’t say it because it’s not really what the writers mean. When you’re writing a book, the only “reader” you have is yourself, at least until it’s far enough along to show to someone else. Writers who complain that they can’t come up with a compelling plot or high enough stakes or characters “readers” will care about are nearly always actually complaining that they can’t come up with a plot/stakes/characters that they find compelling enough to write about for thousands of words. They just don’t always realize it.

The biggest reason why they don’t realize it is that they have absorbed too much how-to-write advice about just what a “compelling plot” is. “Plot is about conflict/action” is so ingrained in how-to-write culture that if an editor says “This story has no plot,” many writers assume it means they have to add action and/or some kind of obvious conflict. And no matter how many times those writers get told that it’s not about adding action/conflict, it’s about adding plot, they can’t get it into their heads.

A “compelling plot” has come to mean something that is objectively compelling (though nobody ever explains how one ought to objectively measure the compelling-ness of a story, and the only person the plot has to compel is that lone faceless imaginary reader).

I think a big part of the problem is that, for those particular writers, the kind of story they find compelling and the kinds of stakes and characters they care about and are interested in have little or nothing to do with action, or with the kind of conflict they have come to associate with plot as it is talked about in all the writing advice. And frankly, writing a story that one does not find at least interesting, about people one dislikes trying to achieve goals one finds boring, comes under the heading of Advanced Writing Professionalism—Do Not Try This At Home Kids.

A lot of what makes anything “compelling”—whether it’s a story, a character, a plot twist, an idea, a setting, whatever—is a matter of the viewer’s perception. By “the viewer,” I mean whichever individual person is looking at it, at any given moment. That can be one of the readers, or a different reader, or the writer, or the editor/agent who’s listening to an elevator pitch. Those individuals’ perceptions aren’t all going to agree. (This is why some people are passionately devoted to books I can’t stand, and why some people dislike or even sneer at books I am passionately fond of.)

The objective importance of any aspect of a story is less important than the way a reader perceives it. Objectively speaking, saving the universe ought to be important to any reader who lives here, but if a reader doesn’t perceive saving the story-universe as something that is actually possible or worth doing, they aren’t going to find the story compelling. Objectively speaking, none of the writers I read ever knew my aunt Marie, and therefore can’t possibly have based a character on her, but if I perceive one of their characters as being very similar to her, I’m going to react to that character the same way I reacted to my aunt. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how I feel about my aunt, whether the character is supposed to be a good guy or a bad guy, and how well those two things match up.

The writer can’t control that. The most a writer can do is control the presentation of the story, which is going to be colored by the writer’s likes and dislikes and perceptions.

Where I’m trying to go with all this is: If you want to write a story, start by thinking about the stories you like. Do they have lots of action? Are they tall tales? Quiet domestic stories? Thrillers? Family sagas? Character studies with minimal plot? Murder mysteries that depend heavily on character revelation? What are the scenes that you love most, and keep re-reading—the big action climax, or the emotional turning point in mid-book, or the shocking revelation of the backstory, or the scenes that wouldn’t show up on a plot diagram but that have snappy dialog or significant character emotional development?

At least as important: What are the scenes you skim, or skip entirely? If you consistently whip through the battlefield scenes, or the angsty confrontations, or the steamy romantic encounters, you probably won’t enjoy writing a story that has lots of them. What are the books you avoid picking up, or that you put down as soon as you’ve read the blurb? When you read a good review or recommendation for a story, which ones do you think “Well, that’s definitely not for me” and what did the reviewer/recommender focus on that got that reaction?

Look at what you love and hate to read, what you remember best about what you love to read, and what you dislike most about stories you find boring or annoying. Then write the kind of thing you love to read, whether it has what other people consider a “compelling plot” or not. It will be a lot more fun, and you’ll do a lot better job, than if you set out to write somebody else’s idea of what a story should be.