PLOT is not ACTION.
It can be easy to confuse the two. I sure have. I’ve heard great and award-winning authors summarize their view of plot as, “The stuff that happens.”
Well, yes… a successful plot is the stuff that happens, but stuff happening is not, in itself, plot.
I recently re-read an old novel I’d written oh, two decades ago. It… has a lot of stuff happening in it. Armies amassing. Negotiations. Double-crossings. Kidnappings and escapes and chases and…
And I wanted to skim over all of it! And I wrote it!
I realize, peering back in my memory, that I did all this “moving characters around” because I thought I had to. I had to Keep Things Moving.(TM) I needed to End Each Chapter With a Cliffhanger and that had to mean Physical Danger.(TM) (R) (U)
Now, today-me, reading this exhausting pile of action-plot, knew that there was backstory not being presented. I recalled my dreams for this book, and why these people were fighting and who cared about what and… none of THAT was on the page. Like… nothing. I was so afraid of “butler maid” dialog or “telling” that I had scene after scene of confrontation with no CONTEXT.
And the worst thing? The main character is young and naive – there is every reason he could be asking questions, discovering things and relaying them to the reader as he does – but instead I cut away from him so the people In Power can be seen Doing Things.
Wow I Am Capitalizing A Lot. It is the Capitalization of Frustration. Seriously, though, yes, the People in Power could “Show” the action of the war they were perpetrating, but they were literally the worst people for the real plot, because there is no reason for them to discuss their motives and even if they did, they aren’t the people in danger, the people we care about.
Plot is not action, and definitely not action for action’s sake. Plot is rooted in character – the stakes and tension of the characters we care about.
Things Which Are Also Plot:
A character learning something.
An emotional moment.
A character learning another character had an emotional moment.
Characters expressing what they are feeling.
Characters changing their minds, making decisions.
All that stuff I was avoiding – maybe because I’d internalized some patriarchal fear of “mushy” writing, maybe because that stuff is legitimately harder to do well than describing physical things – all that emotional stuff adds weight and context to the action, and without it, the action is just… motion. It might as well be driving directions.
So, sorry past-me, I give that novel draft one star. (And now I’ll re-write it.)
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