I love plot, and the writers I sturdied when I was learning to write create fabulous plots but as I learned from Edith Wharton, always skip the wedding! She focuses on the before and after of all the headline events, as does Tolstoy, and Fitzgerald...all my early heroes. The most interesting thing between sentences and scenes, too, is the author's decisions about what to skip. Of course there may be times when the important interpersonal events happen at a big event, but I totally agree about the larger principle of the lead up and the result and it's based on what's dramatic. Weddings aren't. All you have to do it to think about movies that show weddings and the crazy lengths they go to to make something happen during a stodgy and predictable event. Ditto most headline events.
Excellent analogy and I love the EM Forster quote. I recently spoke to a class on writing short story and urged them to contemplate what the story is about, not the plot line. Or, as Vivian Gornick put it so well, the situation is not the story.
I love plot, and the writers I sturdied when I was learning to write create fabulous plots but as I learned from Edith Wharton, always skip the wedding! She focuses on the before and after of all the headline events, as does Tolstoy, and Fitzgerald...all my early heroes. The most interesting thing between sentences and scenes, too, is the author's decisions about what to skip. Of course there may be times when the important interpersonal events happen at a big event, but I totally agree about the larger principle of the lead up and the result and it's based on what's dramatic. Weddings aren't. All you have to do it to think about movies that show weddings and the crazy lengths they go to to make something happen during a stodgy and predictable event. Ditto most headline events.
Excellent analogy and I love the EM Forster quote. I recently spoke to a class on writing short story and urged them to contemplate what the story is about, not the plot line. Or, as Vivian Gornick put it so well, the situation is not the story.