What's plot? Discover the definition of plot, different types of plots, the various elements of a great plot including Vonnegut's story shapes!
Links of the week October 5 2020 (41)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
12 October 2020
In fiction writing, a plot is the cause and effect sequence of significant events that make up the story's narrative. These events can include things like an inciting incident, mid-plot point, climax, and resolution.
But there is so much more to plot than this boring definition. So, today we are going to talk about what plot is all about.
Let's take a deep drive on plot and figure out how to use it for our own stories! We'll start with types of plot.
On February 8, 2018, at 10:22 p.m., Donald J. Trump opened his Twitter app and name-checked a private detective. "Steele of fraudulent Dossier fame," the president wrote. "All tied into Crooked Hillary."
It was a remarkable occurrence: an American head of state publicly acknowledging the work of a private eye, in this case a former British spy named Christopher Steele.
Trump had reason to fear, and disparage, Steele. A veteran of MI6, the United Kingdom's foreign intelligence service, with expertise in Russia, Steele helps run a private intelligence firm in London called Orbis Business Intelligence. In mid-2016, during the U.S. presidential campaign, Steele uncovered what he believed to be salacious and treasonous behavior by Trump, who was then one in a crowded field of Republican candidates.
The leads Steele and his contacts developed - about Trump's sexual proclivities (potential blackmail material) and what Steele suspected was evidence of Russian collaboration with Trump's campaign (potential impeachment material) - so alarmed him that he alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with whom he had consulted on other projects.
Akwaeke Emezi, who became the first non-binary transgender author to be nominated for the Women's prize in 2019, has said that they will not let their future novels be entered for the award after the prize asked them for information on their sex as defined "by law".
When Emezi made the running for the Women's prize last year for their debut novel, Freshwater, judges said they were not aware of Emezi's gender when reading submissions and described their longlisting as a "historic moment".
Emezi said that when Faber got in touch with the Women's prize about submitting The Death of Vivek Oji, they were informed: "The information we would require from you regards Akwaeke Emezi's sex as defined by law."
"Forget about me - I don't want this prize - but anyone who uses this kind of language does not fuck with trans women either, so when they say it's for women, they mean cis women," wrote Emezi. "And yes, this does mean that them longlisting [Freshwater] was transphobic. It's fine for me not to be eligible because I'm not a woman! But you not about to be out here on some ‘sex as defined by law' like that's not a weapon used against trans women."
"I'm a very sociable person. The fact that I dislike interviews doesn't mean I'm a recluse," the poet Louise Glück said early on in our interview.
Glück had been put in an uncomfortable spot. On Thursday morning, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Journalists were lining the street outside her home in Cambridge, Mass. Her phone hadn't stopped ringing since 7 a.m., an onslaught of attention she described as "nightmarish."
By now, Glück should be accustomed to acclaim. In a career that has lasted more than five decades, she has published a dozen volumes of poetry and received virtually every prestigious literary prize: The National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Humanities Medal, among others.
She's revered by literary critics and her peers for her spare, direct and confessional verses.
Amazon is the opposite of our romantic imagination of Italian villages lined with bakeries and old cobbler shops. But the pandemic persuaded Italians to overcome their reluctance to online shopping - and Amazon.
Adam Satariano, who writes about European technology for The New York Times, talked to me about his article on why Amazon's playbook started to work in Italy, and if the country is a template for other parts of the world where Amazon hasn't caught on.
Adam: Online shopping has never been as common there as it is in the United States or elsewhere in Europe. Italy has the oldest population in Europe, and people tend to prefer shopping in stores and paying in cash. Roads in many parts of the country, especially in the less affluent south, are pretty bad.
Author Rumaan Alam kept his expectations low, even as the film rights to his upcoming book "Leave the World Behind" became the center of a bidding contest among Hollywood studios this summer.
During two brisk weeks in July, the Brooklyn-based novelist kept interrupting his family vacation on Fire Island to field phone calls from agents, producers and executives. Sam Esmail, creator of USA Network's "Mr. Robot," was on board to direct a feature based on the socially conscious thriller. Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington had agreed to star and produce. Studios including Netflix, Apple and MGM were making offers.
Alam remained skeptical until that Monday when, while on the beach with his husband and two sons, he got the call from Michelle Weiner, head of Creative Artists Agency's books department, who was handling the auction, saying they'd scored a deal with Netflix. "I was waiting for the day when Michelle's assistant would have to send me, like, a consolation bottle of Champagne," Alam said. I was sitting there in the sand kind of dumbfounded."
From her offices in White River Junction, Vt., Chelsea Green president and publisher Margo Baldwin says she has every reason to be pleased. To date, sales are up 40% this year over the same time last year. The company did more than $1 million in sales in April and again in May. Nor is one category thriving more than others. Every genre, from health books to cooking, gardening, health, and politics, is up.
But as the publisher prepares to release a highly controversial title later this week, it's the politics of American publishing that worries Baldwin, and are driving a radical edge at the 36-year-old publishing house. The title in question is Naomi Wolf's Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love (Oct. 9), which was previously acquired by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and canceled amid a firestorm of allegations about inaccuracies in 2019.
At the time, Wolf was challenged for mistakenly describing the sentences of two Britons tried for sodomy in the 19th century as having been executed when they were not. In fact, while gay men were put to death for charges of sodomy, her critics pointed out that the term Wolf had misinterpreted meant that death sentences for those two individuals had not been carried out.
Baldwin, who published Wolf's The End of America in 2007, said the book's cancellation was an overreaction by HMH to a relatively small number of errors, all of which have been addressed in the forthcoming edition, and none of which have altered the premise of the book.
The Women's Prize has issued a statement saying that eligibility for the prize extends to "all women" where a woman is defined as "a cis woman, a transgender woman or anyone who is legally defined as a woman or of the female sex".
The clarification was provided after writer Akwaeke Emezi, who identifies as non-binary, said on social media they would be required to provide information on their "sex as defined by law" by organisers. They were longlisted for 2019's prize for their debut novel Freshwater (Faber) but under the new terms and conditions will not be able to enter new novel The Death of Vivek Oji (Faber).
The prize emphasised it seeks to celebrate "the experience of being a woman in all its varied forms". However, organisers confirmed that "anyone who wishes to enter must also be legally defined as a woman or of the female sex to be able to do so". The two key documents required to demonstrate this are birth certificate or a gender recognition certificate.
The policy means transgender women who have yet to legally change their gender would not be able to enter. In 2018, the government revealed that only 4,910 people had legally changed their gender since the Gender Recognition Act came into force in 2004. Individuals who identify as non-binary would only be able to enter if legally their gender is female.
The first time I ever saw one of my books on a "best of crime fiction" list, I felt sure that someone had missed an important piece of information. I wasn't sure if it was me or the writer of that list. In my mind, "crime fiction" was exclusively written about crime and criminals from the perspective of detectives trying to thwart the criminals and their crimes.
I'd grown up on Dell Shannon and Ed McBain novels I got from my grandfather, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and G.K. Chesterton books from the library. A child of the 70s and 80s, I'd been exposed to an endless stream of cop TV show-Adam-12, Kojak, Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey.
The problem for me was that none of these stories aligned with what I'd been taught about the police or detectives. My first lesson from my father was never to trust the police. This isn't too surprising, when you consider that my father has a long history of criminal behavior and incarceration. Even my grandfather, who was a law-abiding citizen, cautioned me about the police.
While other kids at school were learning to call 911 in case of an emergency, I was learning that the police were not necessarily there to help people like us, people with a "history" with law enforcement.
The prestigious TS Eliot prize has revealed a shortlist that shows that poetry is "the most resilient, potent, capacious and universal art we have".
Announcing the 10 titles in the running for the £25,000 award for the year's best collection, the most valuable prize in British poetry, the poet and chair of judges, Lavinia Greenlaw, said the jury had been "unsettled, captivated and compelled" by the books they chose.
"When the pandemic hit, certain concerns of ours began to seem rather trivial," said Greenlaw, who together with the poets Mona Arshi and Andrew McMillan read 153 collections to come up with the shortlist. "We had to be convinced by them as relevant in a profoundly changed world, which meant that we had to be able to connect with them at the level of essential human experience, which is where I believe poetry is really produced, and poetry is really received."
A previously unpublished writer has described the "extraordinary" moment a publisher offered him a six-figure advance on a three-book deal.
Egmont Books snapped up Jack Meggitt-Phillips' children's novel The Beast and the Bethany before it could go to auction.
Film rights are being chased by a firm headed by a Harry Potter producer.
"I did have to check a few times that it wasn't spam," said Mr Meggitt-Phillips, originally from Cardiff.
"I felt very sorry for the neighbours at the time because I jumped up and down and squealed not unlike a pig."
When I made the extremely practical decision to abandon my career in publishing to become a writer, I didn't know I wanted to write children's books. I thought I wanted to write for adults. Accordingly, my first published work was an illustrated book about fortune-telling; my second was about opera; my third, about urban legends; my fourth, I'm not exactly sure, because right about that time, I stopped being interested in adults.
I had had some babies, you see, during this period, and suddenly, I was spending all my time with children; I read only children's books; I talked only to children; I thought only about children. I had nothing to say to grown-ups, and most of the time, I didn't understand what they were saying to me. Why did they want to talk about real estate when they could talk about pterodactyls? Why were they obsessed with traffic when they could be obsessed with buried treasure? Adult conversation had become incredibly dull, and adult books, duller.
It was in this spirit that I decided I would become a children's book writer.
The poet Rita Dove was once asked what makes poetry successful. She went on to illuminate three key areas: First, the heart of the writer; the things they wish to say - their politics and overarching sensibilities. Second, their tools: how they work language to organise and position words. And the third, the love a person must have for books: "To read, read, read."
When I started mapping out How to Write It, I wanted to focus on the aspects of writing development that took in both theoretical and interpersonal aspects. No writer lives in a vacuum, their job is an endless task of paying attention. How do I get myself an agent? What's the best way to approach a publisher? Should I self-publish?
There is never one way to assuage the concerns of those looking to make a career out of writing. Many labour tirelessly for decades on manuscripts that never make it to print. The UK on average publishes around 185,000 new titles per year, ranking us the third largest publishing market in the world, yet the number of aspiring writers is substantially greater.