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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/1822
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The most reductionist view of a plot is:

Equilibrium \> Disturbance \> Equilibrium.

Or to reduce it down to two words:

Something Happened.

Even trying to subvert it by making your plot:

Nothing Happened.

Is defeated by the fact that you noted down that nothing was what happened. In this world nothing happening is unusual enough to be noteworthy. So you find, in trying to resist the need to "plot" you have accidentally plotted on a meta level.

So plotting, to an extent, is inevitable even if all you are noting in your writing is the unnoteworthy nature of the notes you are writing.

As soon as you leave the arena of "Something" happening, or being satisfied that what you are describing is "something" or a series of "somethings" happening you instantly wander into an area of some permutational difficulty.

For example if your story is:

Something happened and that one complete something was made up of this something and that something happening each of which by themselves would have been less noteworthy than either but not both of these things happening somewhere at some time.

Then already you are playing games with the audience, even if you make the events in your two sub-somethings happen in different time periods on different continents you have still instructed the audience to view these incidents as a diptych. Any smilarities are fair game to be deemed thematic, any differences fair game to be deemed juxtapositional. You as author have spoken and bonded the events together even though there is fundamentally nothing about the events that should naturally connect them.

Any more complex plot is just a nested series of incidents which are inevitably related to one another if only by virtue of being described together in one place.

Much theory can be found about particular deliberate constructions of incidents that are deemed to be aesthetically more pleasant or congruous than others. You should view such assertions as like arguments between people who like impressionism and those who prefer surrealism. Solid structure is skilful application of technique and deliberate non-application of technique is just as valid. Poor application of technique is just as invalid whether you are trying to draw a photo-realistic landscape or a melting clock, to torture the metaphor a little.

Some people like a fine tuned five act story with impeccably separated rising and falling action. Some people delight in ferreting the hero's journey out of every protagonist's daily routine (or break from such). Some people just like describing people they deem to be "interesting" then putting them all into a situation they deem to be "interesting" and letting them bounce around until they have somehow "resolved".

There isn't a right answer about which is correct.

If you can produce an adequate fictional sentence then a paragraph is just the reproduction of that process a couple of times.

A page is just the paragraph process three to four times.

A chapter is the page repeated a few times.

Taking the average length of a sentence to be about 9 words contructing 6000 interrelated and adequate sentences will get you a novel.

How you plot is personal. For me I like to try to stick to well-worn arcs because I don't feel that I know them thoroughly enough to discard them. Maybe you feel that your writing is not that sort of writing. I am a genre writer and as such I want to be intimately familiar with the "rules" before I break them. I want to be a storyteller, an entertainer, not an artist, more a craftsman. Who you are as a writer is more down to what you want out of the experience. For that reason, until you've thought through your artistic aims a plot is just:

Something happened.

Original score: 4