Wednesday, On Plot

More types of the mosaic kind of stories, those that don't follow the traditional plot line.

Slice-of life stories. A bit different from character sketches because the character or set of characters aren't the really important thing about this kind of story. The character of characters are used to show social content and situations. They look at economic and other like situations by pitting the characters against the social events of perhaps an era. The danger lies in not having a plot to drive the incidents from event to event. This can make the reader yawn.

Theme and Variation is another type of story that doesn't depend on plot to carry the story. Here a single concept is the focus of the various scenes in the story. Here, choosing scene, character and details are most important. Because these stories seem abstract, they are hard to pull off. I've only tried this once and fortunately there was a suspense plot underneath the action or I don't think I could have pulled it off. In this type of story, the incidents must be vivid and the meaning subtle. The stories are often shown by opposites. The opposites can be just a shade different from each other, not the good or the bad but the focus of the good or the bad.