Plotting Short Fiction

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Plotting Short Fiction

• Form and Structure

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Definitions

• The selected order of events as presented to the
  reader in a certain order or duration
• The way in which story elements are arranged
• Aristotle wrote that it was a governing principle
  of development and coherence to which other
  elements must be subordinated
• A record of changes, Jessica Page Morrell

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In his book Technique of the Drama (1863), The
German critic Gustav Freytag proposed a method of
analyzing plots derived from Aristotle's concept
of unity of action that came to be known as
Freytag's Triangle or Freytag's Pyramid
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The Nine Stories

• Stranger comes to town
• Story within a story
• Boy meets girl/boy loses girl
• Death
• Sittin' Thinkin' story
• The Journey
• The Coming of Age
• The Exile Return Story
• The Buddy Story

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Types of Plots Character Conflict

• Man against man
• Man against self
• Man against nature
• Man against society
• Man against machine
• Man against God
• God against everybody

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Types of Plots Non-confrontational

• Slice of life ultra-realist (or surrealist)
• Story of epiphany, of revelation about oneself.
• Journey
• Creation

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Types of Plots - Combination

• Situational (see situational irony, or sit-com)

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Other Types

• Action
• Architectonic
• Pathetic
• Predictable
• Revelation
• Sub-Plot

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Action Plots

• (adventure)-- fast moving, event filled plot in
  which the main reader interest lies in the answer
  to the question, "what happens next?" rather than
  in, say, a universal theme or in
  characterization. At the conclusion of such a
  novel, the protagonist usually has not changed,
  and a sequel, full of similar adventures, is
  possible.

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Architectonic

• (double plot) -- a term first used by Henry James
  to describe a novel with more than one dominant
  plot, each of which involves, for the most part,
  separate characters and incidents.

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Pathetic

• a plot recognized in Norman Friedman's "Forms of
  the Plot," describing a novel in which a
  sympathetic but naïve, weak willed or otherwise
  imperfect protagonist suffers misfortune in part
  because of innate character flaws but mostly
  through no fault of her own.

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Predictable

• a plot relying too heavily on archetypes.

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Revelation

• one of Norman Friedman's categories of plot
  types, which depends on the protagonist's
  ignorance of what's going on -- the literal facts
  of her situation -- for suspense. The outcome of
  the plot depends on whether the protagonist
  figures out the truth of her situation and, if
  so, what she does.

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Sub Plot

• (counterplot, secondary plot, under plot) -- A
  secondary plot in a piece of fiction, less
  important than the main plot. Subplots are more
  often found in novels than in short stories,
  since a good short story generally is too short
  to support more than one fully developed plot.

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Plot Directions