One elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.
Most short stories have but one plot. The very best, however, have what I call a plot-and-a-half – that is, a main plot and a small subplot that feeds in a twist or an unexpected piece of business that ads crunch and flavor to the story as a whole.
So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.
I like writing non-fiction - and when you pick a [non-fiction] subject, it saves you the hassle of coming up with a plot.
Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature.
I know you can't see it, not you, Ed, but maybe if I tell you the whole plot you'll understand it this once, because even now I want you to see it. I don't love you anymore, of course I don't, but there's still something I can show you. You know I want to be a director, but you never truly see the movies in my head and that, Ed, is why we broke up.
I'm not interested in plots. I'm interested only in the characterization of people and what they do.
We actually needed the memory - if you see the film - as a very different kind of a plot device of revealing some information to our main character. So we chose to represent it as these sort of beautiful little snow globes, which kind of, weirdly, that's the way we think of memories - at least, most of the folks that we talked to. You think of these memories as being very pure and absolute and unchanging. That's not actually real life.
I like fast plots with things that explode.
Usually I work out the plot before I start. This time I thought: Writers always talk about not knowing where a book is going - -I want to experience that, too. What I found out is that it's very interesting, but it takes much longer because you have so many false starts. You take wrong turns and you have to go back and start the whole chapter, or the whole section, from scratch.
I begin by assembling notes on characters. Large swaths of the plot become clear to me as I do this.
That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.
I have a catch-phrase to describe my plot-generation technique -- 'What's the worst possible thing I can do to these people?'
At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.
Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.
I hate the word juicy in describing anything: lips, plots, oranges. But especially novels. It feels - icky. Reminds me of saliva.
Plot and character are virtually the same thing.
If often happens too, both in courts and in cabinets, that there are two things going on together,--a main plot and an under-plot; and he that understands only one of them will, in all probability, be the dupe of both. A mistress may rule a monarch, but some obscure favorite may rule the mistress.