Here’s something I often see in manuscripts I critique: great voice, no plot. Some of the best writers can take me for a stroll in a park or just have me sitting on the bed in their bedroom with them, and I see and hear a whole, rich world through the eyes of a quirky character or thoughtful narrator. These writers make me see things in new ways. They don’t describe everything—they focus on the idiosyncratic detail. They don’t have the characters say everything—they have them dribble pithy pieces of wit and wisdom over the page.
I fall in love with the voice in these manuscripts. Unfortunately, the lovely snapshots of locker rooms and tea houses, and the pearls dripping from the lips of the heroes, can’t carry me through an entire book. Without plot, I find myself saying, “Who cares?”
We read books for story. And story needs conflict. Most of us don’t want to spend our time following a character through a day or a week or a year, in which nothing happens. I don’t care how well you can describe the bristles on the toothbrush, unless there is blood on those bristles and the character contracts AIDs by getting the virus into her own bleeding gums, don’t bother spending three paragraphs describing the morning brushing routine.
If you won’t plot, only the most loving of your family and friends will plod through your manuscripts. The rest of us will give it up. Why do plotless literary novels only sell 700 copies even though their authors are brilliant and their descriptions are deliciously rich, or strikingly spare, or achingly moody? Because plotless novels are boring to most readers.
And there is no reason we can’t marry voice and story. There is nothing to say that wonderful prose can’t be used to tell a rollicking tale. I’m not advocating for car chase novels that never slow down to enjoy the scenery along the coastal highway. I’m simply saying if you want to write a satisfying story you have to have…well…a story. Meandering around in the wildflowers or the mean streets for 300 pages is not a story. It’s a setting. Story has beginning (character in conflict) and middle (character trying to reach goals and screwing everything up) and end (character, we hope, ending victoriously).
All stories have these things. Take Katherine Fitzmaurice’s wonderful, literary MG novel, The Year the Swallows Came Early. It is as far from a car chase action-adventure as you can get. It’s full of beautiful prose and deeply thoughtful characters. But it starts with a character wanting something. She wants to love her mother and to be loved by her mother. She wants a happy home. She starts off with a grudge against her mother—she’s not a bratty kid and the grudge is not one that comes out in bad behavior, but her mother has wounded her tender heart and young Groovy Robinson has a hard time accepting things as they are. She wants answers. She wants to understand. But mostly she wants to fix her family so they can all be happy.
She she struggles through the middle of the book, trying to find out why her mother did what she did, because you can’t fix things until you understand them, and when she finally finds out—when she succeeds in her goal—she suffers even greater loss. Her goal of having a happy family seems to be completely impossible.
In the end she does have a happy family. It doesn’t look exactly the way she envisioned it, but it is good. She has grown. She has learned. She has understood. And her relationship with her parents is better than it was at the beginning of the book because it is based on truth, not wishful thinking.
Ms. Fitzmaurice’s novel is a story that carries us through a space in a character’s life where she travels from one place to another. Where she faces obstacles and grows. This is plot. This is what all stories have. Some books don’t have plot. They are not stories. They are long poems, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t read them.
