Fuck the Plot

or...You'll Rebel to Anything

I have a hard time with structure.

This is not true in my non-writing life. In my personal, day-to-day, I am a “structure-hound” (one of the other teachers at my school used this phrase the other day and it delighted me to no end.) Outside of writing, I need to follow rigid, self-imposed rules or my life collapses like a poorly made soufflé. I’m not a planner girlie or a calendar guy even though I very much want to be. The Rules are stranger than that. I need to sign up for races to make myself run specific numbers of miles on specific days. If I don’t grocery shop on Sundays (preferably first thing in the morning or after a long run) I feel flung into space all week. I get up at 5:30 every morning whether I need to or not. If I didn’t think people would notice I would absolutely wear specific outfits for specific days. Basically I am happiest when my life is very orderly and very predictable and very neat.

When it comes to writing, though, I am neither orderly nor neat. I fight against structure. I don’t like outlines or beat sheets or character sketches. Oftentimes I write longhand but not always, which means most of my projects are a patchwork of Google docs and notebooks and ideas jotted in my phone. When people tell me to use Scrivener I nod along, knowing I would never even learn how to use the program. The novel I just finished, which took me more than seven years to write, started as memoir and then became a too-long short story and then became a novel. I didn’t think much about the plot until an advisor in my MFA program asked me to read Save the Cat. I will admit here that I think I am too pretentious and annoying to like that book. I rolled my eyes as I read. Art isn’t formulaic, I whispered to myself.

I love/feel very validated by this quote that I screengrabbed from The Paris Review Instagram.

I still believe this. As much as I like to talk and think and even write about craft, I fundamentally believe that every project teaches you what it needs. What worked for one novel probably won’t work in the same way for the next. Prescriptive writing advice that goes further than “try to read and write a lot and see what happens” often bums me out.

All this said, once every few months I teach a creative writing class all about plot and structure. I am teaching this class tomorrow night. Planning for the class inspired me to write this little essay. In fact, teaching this class, as so often happens, made me think differently about plot and structure.

I also love this from the amazing George Saunders essay “What Writers Really Do When They Write”

Over a year ago two students came to my class with lots of fragments and ideas. I love fragments and ideas. Some of my best friends favorite books are fragments and ideas. But these students wanted to know how to sew these fragments together into A Book. So we looked at different methods and read craft essays and practiced. I even printed out a Save the Cat beat sheet and forced us all to jam our ideas into that framework. I did the exercise with my students and…fuck. It kind of helped.

If you ever read my book you probably won’t feel the Hero’s Journey, Three Act Structure pulsing through its veins. I like unfolding and following and meandering far too much to write a highly plotted novel. And yet as I embark on writing a brand new novel, a scary one that will involve a lot of research and figuring out how to braid stories together, I’m excited to learn new structures. And maybe I’ll reread Save the Cat, just so I can roll my eyes and have something to rebel against.

Save them!