The Plot

When I first dabbled in this book, years ago, I remember placing it in lineage with so many others, an endless parade of books which all say more or less the same thing when it comes to that most workaday aspect of storytelling, the plot. Campbell is invoked, the hero's journey extolled, and careful and precise subdivisions of what makes a plot are enumerated. If you watched Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society this would be the point to rip up the book in question and proclaim it “Excrement!” I wonder sometimes if the reason for so many bad movies and books now isn't due to the readers of these books growing into their own and writing the way they've been taught; badly, I mean, using shortcut and formula instead of craft and artistry. I'm a different, older writer now, and whereas before I missed them, the nuance and wisdom of Dibell's book and how it stands out from these other books became apparent with this latest reading.

Myself, I think focusing on plot is putting the cart before the horse and something like Dibbel's book would better serve a book's second draft, but better writers than I — which is to say writers who have actually finished a book — would disagree. There's more than enough pantsing/plotting debate going around, though. I'm of the mind that we don't go to story to find out what what happens, but rather seek to find out what happens in order to have an excuse to immerse ourselves in story.

At one point Dibell says

As I've said before, stories—especially live, convincing stories—will change under your hands. That's the reason I've never been persuaded of the usefulness of outlines. By other writers' experience and my own, I judge that you generally won't know how a story's going to go until you get close to the place where something is just about to happen. It will take its own shape and tell you how it wants to go, if you listen and watch attentively for the ways it's telling you.