The Plot
I do not mean to say that somebody had stolen my notes, or that a crucial computer file had gone missing. What I mean is that the living heart of my novel was gone. The sentient force that inhabits all vibrant creative endeavors had vanished—swallowed like bulldozers in the jungle, you could say. Sure, all the research and writing I’d completed two
... See moreElizabeth Gilbert • Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
The word “plot” on its own is pretty useless. It’s just a series of events that happen in a story. But structure is the order in which those events happen and, maybe even more importantly, the timing of when they happen. Then you add in a character who needs to change and does change by the end, and presto! You’ve got a story worth telling.
Jessica Brody • Save the Cat! Writes a Novel: The Last Book On Novel Writing You'll Ever Need
In the fall of 2017, July started to feel a second novel coming on. This time, though, she wanted to do things differently, to embrace the mystery of not knowing—what the writer Grace Paley called “the open destiny of life”—for as long as she could. “I felt like there was a way in which one’s anxiety is very calmed by having a plot,” she told me re... See more
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I still think up short stories from time to time, as though there were money in it. The habit dies hard. There used to be fleeting fame in it, too. Highly literate people once talked enthusiastically to one another about a story by Ray Bradbury or J. D. Salinger or John Cheever or John Collier or John O‘Hara or Shirley Jackson or Flannery O’Connor
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