Plot, situation, and incident/event

A lot of writers stall at the very beginning of story construction – at the idea stage – because they have never thought about the difference between situations, incidents/events, and actual plot, much less how to move from any one of these to any of the others.

I think the problem comes about because situations and incidents can be interesting (especially to writers) without being a plot … but I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I need to clarify what each of those things is.

Situations are general. They’re the overall circumstances that the characters find themselves in. They can be large, overarching circumstances – two powerful groups of people are feuding with each other, and their feud is tearing their country apart. Or they can be character-specific circumstances – a person is given a seemingly impossible task to perform, on pain of death. They can even be fairly specific circumstances – the sole survivor of a disaster has to survive on his/her own, or the rat that Cinderella’s godmother turns into the coachman is carrying fleas infested with bubonic plague.

The more specific and interesting a situation is, the more it looks like an actual plot, especially since the more specific it is, the more it resembles the teasers on the front cover of books. But a situation can almost always apply to multiple possible plots – the feud could be the Capulets and Montagues from “Romeo and Juliet,” or the British and the American colonists just before the Revolutionary war. The impossible task could be slaying a dragon or spinning straw into gold. The sole survivor could be the one remaining non-vampire in I am Legend, or Robinson Crusoe on his desert island, or the thirteen-year-old plane crash survivor of Hatchet.

Incidents and events are specific and constrained. They are a specific thing that happens to specific (though sometimes as-yet-unnamed) characters. Usually, this means an incident is a single scene or chapter, though it may be a long one. “A bunch of young rowdies gate-crash a party, and their leader falls in love at first sight with a girl he sees on the far side of the room.” “A person walks into a bar carrying a wooden shoebox and offers 100 gold coins to whoever can open it.” “A man kills another in an illegal duel, and his friends sneak him away just as the police show up.” Incidents usually imply other aspects of the story or the backstory, such as whether there’s a love story or a mystery involved. Sometimes, they’re also attached to a specific setting or time period – “In the late 1700s, a man is caught stealing valuables from a church, but the priest tells the arresting officer that he gave the treasures to the thief, and the officer is forced to let him go.”

Because incidents are specific, they also tend to be vivid and compelling, which again provides the illusion of plot. But incidents are like a snapshot of a moment, rather than a two-hour movie … and while most writers start by assuming that the incident is the beginning of a particular story, many times the incident turns out to belong somewhere in the middle, or at the end. Often, incidents focus on one particular character – the thief caught stealing, the love-struck rowdy, or the duelist fleeing arrest – but when the writer digs into things, the interesting character who becomes the protagonist is the generous priest, the girl who has unknowingly become the rowdy’s object of affection, or one of the duelist’s sneaky friends.

Plots are the sum of what happens in a story. To put it another way, incidents and situations are both necessary to have a pot, but they aren’t quite enough to make a plot on their own. A series of unconnected incidents isn’t a plot; they need to be connected somehow. Genre fiction commonly connects incidents largely through cause and effect – one incident results in the characters reacting in a way that creates or causes the next event. Usually, the incidents arise out of the initial situation/circumstances; often, the chain of incidents shifts the situation (by the end of the story, the feud has been settled, the task has been performed, the survivor has returned to civilization, the coachman rat has been cured or has spread the plague to everyone).

Incidents and events can also be linked through theme and/or situation, as with the various subplots in the movie “Love, Actually.” The link can be an object that passes from one person to another, a place (like several of James Michener’s novels that follow the history of a particular family or country through time), a task (like the aliens trying to move their entire species to a new planet in John Brunner’s The Crucible of Time), a person, even a motif that recurs in otherwise-random-seeming incidents. However, since the cause-and-effect plot is what most Westerners are used to considering “a plot,” it can be useful to at least imply the existence of such a plot in the background, even when the primary link between the incidents is more abstract.

Getting from a situation or an incident to a plot during the early part of story construction involves a deep dive into whatever piece the author has to hand. If it’s a situation, the first question is whether it comes with actual characters (Cinderella, godmother, rat-coachman) and setting (just-pre-bubonic-plague Europe gives a time but the specific place needs narrowing down; does the author want to set this in France? England? Italy? Which city?). If it’s an incident, there are more likely to be characters, so the initial deep dive tends to revolve more around who they are and how they came to be in this situation. In both cases, it is important to look at different angles – is this the beginning of the story, or could it be the end, or somewhere in the middle? The illegal duel could be the start of a novel about the duelist’s travels, or the end of a pursuit that’s taken the whole book to get there. (Or both, if you’re into sequels or if it’s a mid-point turn in the story.) It’s also important to consider all the characters who are present or implied, not just the one who initially looks like the obvious protagonist.

If one still hasn’t got sufficient understanding to point at a plot, the next decision may be what kind of plot one wants to write. For some writers, the standard cause-and-effect plot is the only one they can bring themselves to think of as “a plot,” so the main questions revolve around how characters got into this situation/incident, how they will react to it, and what the next incident/event in the chain will be. This is true whether it’s going to be primarily an action plot or primarily an emotional/revelation plot; it’s the answers that differ, not the type of questions to ask oneself.