Grammar for describing novel plots?
Many writers find that mastering a genre of writing, such as the novel, requires that at some point they break down other writers' pieces of work in the genre in order to study their structure: to understand the nature of the component parts and the way they are combined.
I am not asking for a definition of "novel", which would require a careful consideration of edge cases. But what grammars have been developed that enable the plots of many novels to be summarised?
I am looking for something a little more detailed than the three-act structure that is used in screenwriting and Freytag's five-act pyramid of rising and falling action that is used in stage drama. Something similar in its degree of complexity to Propp's morphology of wondertales is more what I am seeking.
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Story structure is essentially a sequence of incidents. It is important and contrary to what is said in some of the comments, literature has it just as much as light entertainment.
But while all conventional stories have story structure, those incidents must happen to someone in some place and some time. The incidents, and therefore the structure of the story, are only interesting because they happen to interesting people in an interesting place at an interesting time.
There isn't a huge amount of variation in the size and complexity of various story shapes. What makes the difference between shorter and longer works is the amount of content devoted to the people, places, and times.
In other words, the skeleton of a elephant is no more complicated than the skeleton of a mouse. There is simply more flesh on the bones, and the bones are corresponding bigger to hold the greater weight.
Don't expect to find more structure in a large novel than you do in a short one, therefore, or even than you find in a short story. Expect the same bones, but larger, and a greater amount of flesh.
Flesh is composed differently than bones. Flesh comes principally from observation. It is not more detailed structured that makes for a longer novel, but deeper and more detailed observation.
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I'd like to add a different perspective to this focus on plotlines and plot formulas. For that, I'd like to tackle the question the OP presented in the comments:
I essentially mean to ask "What concepts do you use when you break down someone else's novel?"
I did a four year university course on Literature (in Portugal) and I never talked about plotlines and plot formulas (which led to a. my deeply ingrained notion that these are geared towards 'entertainment genres', which are incredibly 'corseted' by rules, and to b. my feeling of complete 'alienness' when plotlines take the stage in writing circles). Nevertheless, we did study Propp's morphology when we studied Popular Literature, and we did talk about climax and theatre play structures.
The concepts we focused on in order to break down novels weren't plots (or structure in general), but the collection of narrative elements and how they were used to produce certain effects. Besides that, two of the most important focuses were actually on:
a) tension and how the author created and managed that tension;
b) how the events and the characters represented the author's contemporary society and, at the same time, how they represented humanity as a whole.
So, what concepts do I use to break down novels? The narrative elements and how they can be used to underline an idea (whether that idea is a philosophical message worthy of 'capital L Literature' or it's simply the state of mind of a character, or maybe just the excitement of a car chase scene).
As for structure, specifically, we focused on how the sequence of events (including any narrator monologues that might be dropped in) produced the tension and how it fluctuated throughout chapters and novel. Then, we would focus on how that tension would underline this or that idea (whether it belonged to the main plot or a subplot). But never did we talk about how the events should happen in one or the other way. We viewed structure as 'descriptive' rather than 'prescriptive'.
Of course, I studied literature and not creative writing. Nevertheless, (and since I started writing in highschool) my course taught me, as a writer, to look at the structure of my stories not as plot formulas but as a collection of events that must produce a certain effect, whether they follow genre rules or not. In fact, it taught me to go beyond prescription of plotlines (in the shape of formulas) all together.
I apologise if I sound dismissive of plotlines and plot formulas. I do think being aware of those is useful, but I see that focus as simply one perspective and the OP's question in the comments made me feel that mentioning a different perspective (and where that perspective derives from) was relevant.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27996. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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