What important part of the plot does the illustration help you understand and appreciate? A. The illustration shows the troll’s gratitude for Arne’s stone-breaking skills. B. The illustration shows Arne wearing the belt, which gives him the power to break rocks. C. The illustration shows Arne plotting to save the princess. D. The illustration shows the relationship between the old woman and Arne.
Answers
Explanation:
At least since Scheherazade wove 1,001 tales for King Shahryar, readers have fallen under the spell of master story-tellers. Though authors think a lot about how to craft their plots, readers don’t often give much thought to how a plot is built, beyond consuming it. We just love being on the roller coaster ride: What happens next? And next? How will the characters ever get out of that mess? And the next, even harder one? How will things turn out for the characters we come to care for?
What most readers want in plot is a fast-paced but also logical chain of events, including some twists and surprises. At story’s finish, everything should just feel right, as if events led to the place they naturally would. Enjoying and critiquing a plot of this familiar type feels easy and natural.
What happens, though, when a work we are reading doesn’t follow the typical plot conventions? Great literature often does not.
Roller coaster riders on this yellow coaster are enjoying the ride just as readers enjoy riding the structure of a good plot. But readers can appreciate plots on a deeper level too.
Riding the plot roller coaster is fun! But there are more ways to enjoy plot than just to consume it.
For one thing, some great works were written before plot as we know it was fully developed. Later writers of great fiction may experiment with plot structures or focus more on other elements of fiction like character or narrator perspectives. Some important works may even avoid bringing the plot to a firm finish or resolution, to make a point or for some other artistic purpose.
Such departures from convention may frustrate some readers who don’t expect them, making it hard for some who don’t find a fast-paced plot full of events, their favorite entry into a story. But unexpected or highly artistic uses of plot can be the very element that lifts readers to a more extraordinary aesthetic experience.
If you want the meaning and power of great literature to open up for you, it helps to consider and appreciate how a plot in fiction is built, not just read to find out what happens next.
The best plots don’t just grow; they are carefully built. Knowing the parts of a typical plot can help you see and enjoy when authors structure them well, or poorly, and also notice when they purposely avoid following conventional plot shapes.
First, What is a Plot?
A plot is a series of fictional events arranged in a particular order for the purpose of conveying a story and giving readers a particular aesthetic effect. Especially, plots function to keep readers interested to the end.
This woodland road through a narrow lane of trees with falling leaves beckons travellers the way plots induce readers to keep reading. They ask questions and read on for the answers.
Plots beckon readers by getting them to ask questions. They keep following the path to find the answers.
Thus, the plot in most works is not just a “story.” A story is nothing more than a series of successive events, but a plot is a curated series of logically interconnected events.
E. M. Forster, the author of A Passage to India and A Room With a View, has famously distinguished between “story” and “plot” this way:
‘The king died and then the queen died,’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief,’ is a plot. . . . Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say ‘and then?’ If it is in a plot we ask ‘why?’
— E. M. Forster
Ronald B. Tobias, writer and writing instructor, reminds us that following a plot does demand something more of readers than just consuming a series of events:
“Story requires only curiosity to know what will happen next. Plot requires the ability to remember what has already happened, to figure out the relationships between events and people, and to try to project the outcome.”1
–Ronald B. Tobias
Plots also demand that we consider how and why events are connected, and how they relate to the goals and psychology of the central character, and often, to the major themes and ideas of the fiction.
Most plots hook their readers through inspiring interest in a central character, a.k.a. the protagonist. Plots begin by inducing readers to ask a central question: Will the protagonist find love, or defeat an enemy (the
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