Lecture 11: Adding Complexity to Plots

Adding Complexity to Plots...............................................................

Lecture 11

I

n the last two lectures, we saw that many narratives have the same basic

structure, and we saw that varying this structure, such as rearranging

the chronology or braiding several plotlines together, can make plotting

both interesting and challenging. The fairly large-scale approaches that

we’ve looked at affect the structure of the narrative as a whole, but in this

lecture, we’ll look at several more focused techniques that can be used on

a smaller scale to make a plot more subtle and satisfying. These include

VXVSHQVHÀDVKIRUZDUGVÀDVKEDFNVDQGIRUHVKDGRZLQJ:H¶OODOVRH[SORUH

the important topic of withholding information in structuring plots.

Withholding Information and Suspense

z Because plotting seems daunting to many writers, it’s important to

keep in mind that one of the fundamental principles of plotting is the

withholding of information. At the beginning of a plot, you want readers

to know very little—just enough to intrigue them—but at the end, you

want them to know everything. We might even say that plotting is the

mechanism by which the writer decides what information to withhold

early on, what information to reveal, and in what order to reveal it.

z Because all books and stories are read over time and can’t be imbibed

all at once, the most fundamental thing a writer withholds from the

reader is how the story ends. In the simplest kind of stories, this is the

PDLQUHDVRQWRNHHSUHDGLQJWR¿QGRXWKRZLWDOOWXUQVRXW%XWWKHUH

are other kinds of withholding that result in more subtle plots.

z Consider, for example, Shirley Jackson’s well-known story “The

Lottery.” It’s about a small New England village that holds a lottery

once a year among all the adult villagers; the person who “wins” the

lottery is then stoned to death by the others. The main reason this story

ZRUNVLVWKDW-DFNVRQLQWURGXFHVWKHFRQFHSWRIWKHORWWHU\LQWKH¿UVW

paragraph but withholds its purpose from the reader until the end.