And Then—Turning a Story into a Plot .............................................

Lecture 9

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s noted earlier in the course, literature is the creation of order out of
chaos—the creation of meaning and structure out of reality, which
is otherwise meaningless and without structure. We’ve already seen
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person, a scene, or a situation, we select the details that best get across what
we want the reader to see and understand. When we write dialogue, we
suggest real speech without actually reproducing it, thus imposing purpose
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chaos is through the creation of stories and plots, which will be the subject of
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Introduction to Plot
z Given the prevalence of stories in all human cultures and in our own
personal lives, it’s easy to think that stories occur naturally in the world,
like fruit hanging from a tree, and that all a writer has to do is pluck
them. But the reality is more complicated than that.

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can be broken down into a few fundamental components: a situation or
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z The initial situation needs to be dramatically productive, that is, it
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characters need to have some sort of relationship to that situation. The
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some believable and dramatically satisfying way, though not necessarily
happily or pleasantly.