You’ve been thinking about plot all wrong
What James Wood says about the difference between 'plot' and 'form' in How Fiction Works
I’ve been reading James Wood’s wonderful book How Fiction Works and enjoying it immensely. It’s a lucid, elegant exploration of the techniques that make fiction feel alive. Rather than offering rigid rules, Wood unpicks the subtle craft of narration, character, and style, placing particular emphasis on free indirect discourse - the blending of narrator and character voice - as one of fiction’s most potent devices. He discusses power of the telling detail (the art of “thisness”), the management of authorial presence, and the way novels create the illusion of reality while maintaining artifice. Throughout, he draws on a stunning range of examples from Chekhov, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Bellow and many others to illustrate how great writers achieve emotional and psychological depth. Wood approaches fiction as both critic and lover of the form, inviting the reader into the mysteries of how sentences breathe, how characters convince, and how fiction mirrors and distorts life. I commend it to you.
However, what I want to write about here is the startling distinction Wood draws between plot and form. While plot is the sequence of events, the machinery that moves characters from one circumstance to another, form is the architecture of how the story exists. Plot is our experience of reading a novel for the first time; form is our experience on re-reading where we have time and space to think about the skill with which a writer has organised events.1 Or, as Wood puts it, “Plot is what is happening: form is what happened.”
In my book Making Meaning in English, I dealt with these aspects of writing rather more conventionally, even to the point of placing them in different taxonomic boxes in my epistemology of the subject: I discussed plot as an aspect of story and form as a part of pattern.2
Of plot I say, “Aristotle saw plot as the most important aspect of storytelling. If story is what is told, plot is how it is told. The events of a story are not its plot. … As Rob Pope puts it, ‘Plot is what motivates and organises the raw material.’”3
And on form,
We should consider one more important aspect of patterns within and between texts: form. The word comes to us from the Latin forma meaning ‘beauty’. This might be important; literature – especially poetry – that has form is perhaps more beautiful than that which is formless… There’s a lot of confusion and debate about what, precisely, the difference is between form, genre and structure. The definition I favour is that writing that has form operates within a tradition. It makes meaning by experimenting with the conventions, not by brushing them aside.
In saying this, I was mainly thinking about poetic form: sonnets, haikus and the like. When it came to discussing form in fiction, I was far less sure of myself and settled for discussing the problem of how writers of fiction have to “bind time.”4
How I wish I’d stumbled on James Wood earlier. N'est-ce pas? Maybe it’s a lot simpler to say that - contra Aristotle - plot actually is the events of a story and that all the cool stuff - the how - is form?
Here’s how Wood gets to the heart on the difference between plot (experience during the process of reading) and form (reflection after reading):
Plot is really just practical form — the form the writer creates, as he or she is creating a work of fiction (working through authorial choices having to do with who is narrating the story, how to arrange all the elements, pacing, and so on). Moral form is the finished outline, the significant shape we can discern of a plot, the sense we make of something once we are able to hold that plot in our minds. Plot is reading Pride and Prejudice, excited to know who will marry whom, turning each page with happy surrender, led by the knowing brilliance of the author. Moral form is closing that novel, and seeing that it is a story about a woman getting a man wrong wrong and then getting him right — a story about error and correction; or, a story about two good marriages (Elizabeth and Darcy, Jane and Bingley) and three much less good ones (Charlotte and Mr Collins; Lydia and Wickham; Mr and Mrs Bennet).
Plot is reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, in the excited ignorance, subtly manipulated by Ferrante, of discovering how two intelligent girls will escape the limitations of their impoverished Neapolitan life, sure that the book’s title refers to the narrator’s friend. Moral form is understanding, after the fact, that My Brilliant Friend is in fact a singular Bildungsroman, that only Elena the narrator will escape, and that the ‘brilliant friend’ is not Elena’s friend Lila, but in fact Lila’s friend Elena, our narrator.5
Put it another way: plot is reading, form is literary criticism. Form is what we are left with when plot is no longer manipulating us, but when we — as readers, as critics — are manipulating plot. The plot of Anna Karenina is all the events and occurrences that lead to Anna’s eventual death. The form of Anna Karenina is the finished story about a woman who committed adultery and who is finally punished — sacrificed — for that mistake.
[my emphasis]
So now we have “practical form”(plot) and moral form, or significance. And making meaning in literature is deeply concerned with search for significance.
I think this is a great way to think about not just possible definitions for the terms, but about the process of reading itself. How we read when we’re enjoying a good yarn is very different to how we reflect after having read it. Plot fades but form endures. Novels that stick with us are those where the plot becomes irrelevant. We re-read because we fall in love with the ways the story is told.
Wood’s great insight is that many readers (and even some writers) overvalue plot because it’s easy to summarise. But it’s form that makes fiction work. Form allows a novel to feel alive, to surprise, to reveal layers of thought and emotion.
Another reason to read my essay on re-reading
For those who are interested, I suggest that all knowledge within English can be placed within one – or more – of six ‘boxes’: metaphor, story, argument, pattern, grammar and context.
The English Studies Book: An Introduction and Companion, p. 219
This could, according to Peter Elbow, include “the experience of anticipation or tension which builds to some resolution or satisfaction. In well-structured discourse [there should be] a pattern of alternating dissonance-and-consonance or itching and scratching.” (The Shifting Relationships between Speech and Writing” p. 15) This back and forth, question and answer is present in all good prose.
I’ve read this based on Wood’s recommendation. Somehow I missed it on release in 2011. It is a luminous, unsentimental study of female friendship, power, and class, where the form lies not in events but in the ebb and flow of intimacy, envy, and identity. I loved it.