Plot? What is this plot you speak of?
Via Tingle Alley, I rather enjoyed this discussion between John Irving and Stephen King:
John: [...] By today's minimalist, modernist standards, Steve and I are a couple of 19th-century storytellers. Plot is disparaged by critics almost as much as length. If a novel has a plot at all, it is said the plot is contrived.
Stephen: Right.
John: That usually means, when you hear a critic saying a plot is contrived, what the critic really means is, "I don't like plot."
Back to Karina: This bit on plot particularly made me laugh, especially following the panel we held at TorontoTrek a few weekends past on writing grants and genre canlit ("Alcoholic Newfie Zombies from Space"). "You know," I said to Sarah afterwards, looking at the big novel outline that we and the audience had put together in jest, "the only problem with this story is it has too much plot. Really, the main character should encounter the zombies, but spend much of the book pondering the strange rambling house she's come to live in and wonder if this has truly become her life, if all she is can be enclosed in such an old building, etc., etc."
Oddly, though, as I kept talking -- and I did, at some length -- it almost felt like a story that would be fun to write, if only to see how ridiculously introspective and plotless my writing could become.
Posted by Karina Sumner-Smith at 1:01 AM
2 Comments:
So when do you get started?
By 
, at
5:36 PM
September, probably. Though I won't be writing all of it; as a joke that quickly became out of hand, myself and three other panelists decided to actually write the novel that we'd outlined -- zombies, oysters, Japanese tourists and all. It promises to be an interesting (and relentlessly introspective) disaster.
By 
Karina Sumner-Smith, at
11:27 PM
