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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26185
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26185
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

There are no great plots. There are great stories and there are lousy stories. Great stories and lousy stories can have exactly the same plot. The soundness of a story lies in the rising tension of the story arc. The greatness of a story lies in the telling.

There are, I think, different kinds of great story. There is the story whose greatness lies in it high moral seriousness (like The Brothers Karamazov, Heart of Darkness, or King Lear) and there are stories whose greatness lies in their high comedy (such as Much Ado about Nothing, Jeeves and Wooster, or Pickwick Papers). But it is never in the plotting, always in the realization, in the perception of the human condition and the deftness in which it is told.

Being a plotter may give you a sound foundation for the mechanics of telling a story, but it is never going to bring you to greatness in itself. It is in the agonizing businesses of seeing and recording the fate of your characters in all its grittiness and pathos that you will find greatness or fall short of it.

Art is blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Art is pain and madness and unbearable joy. None of this is ever found in the outline, it cannot reside or be discovered anywhere but in the making of the full text.

Original score: 6