Action and plot are not the same thing (as last weekend’s big movie, “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” so amply demonstrated).
When I attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop, I had a couple of epiphanies. One was about revising. Another was about plot. As in, my stories didn’t have any. I went around saying stupid things like, “Well, stories don’t need plot. Ray Bradbury’s stories don’t have any plot.” Everyone knows that Ray Bradbury stories don’t have plot because nothing actually happens in them, right? My instructor, Jeanne Cavelos, told me, “Why don’t you analyze a couple of Bradbury stories for plot and get back to me.” So I did.
Holy cow. Ray Bradbury stories have plot. The stories I analyzed were two in which (I thought) nothing much happens: “Homecoming” is about the reunion of an Addams Family-type family, with vampires and mummies and ghosts and all, from the point of view of the family’s youngest son who is completely normal. He watches the goings on, the magic, the dancing, the flying, the jokes about blood banks, the astral projection, all the time wishing he could be a part of it. His uncle (who has bat wings) finally sits him down and explains that no matter what, he’s still special and everyone loves him. The boy understands. But he’s still distraught, the odd one out. That’s it. The second one I read was “The Million-Year Picnic” from The Martian Chronicles, about a family who has just arrived on Mars as colonists. They go out for a picnic along the canals. The boys really want to meet Martians. Father keeps promising that they will. Finally, he leads them to the edge of a canal and shows them their reflections in the water. “There they are, boys. Martians.” And the boys finally realize that this is their new home, the old Martians are gone, and it’s just them now.
These outlines seem so simplistic, but of course the stories are poetic and powerful because it’s Ray Bradbury writing them. It’s easy to think they have no plot because nothing much happens. But here’s the thing: They do have plot, the characters make discoveries, they grow and change. But it’s all happening internally. It’s not the world changing, it’s their attitudes, the way they look at the world, and it totally works. Both of these stories are only a few pages long, but the conflicts and narrative drives are set up in the first paragraphs: Timothy in “Homecoming” wants to belong; the boys in “The Million-Year Picnic” want to meet Martians. You can point to the moment, the exact sentence, in the stories when the conflicts resolve, for better or worse: Timothy will never belong, and he realizes it; the boys have to adjust their worldview to fit their new home.
These stories are thick with plot, even though they don’t have much action.
On the other hand, I’ve read lots of stories by newish writers (and seen lots of big budget Hollywood movies) that have lots of action, but absolutely no plot. Things happen. The characters are cardboard cutouts moving through a predetermined set of actions. Often, the characters will explain to me (the reader) why things happened after the fact, or what their motivations were, because it wasn’t set up ahead of time. Characters seem to go through the motions, and the reader doesn’t know why they’re doing anything, what they want, what drives them. Without that sense of conflict and resolution, of character motivation, all the things that make up plot, the story won’t have any narrative drive. The reader won’t have a reason to keep turning the page. Movies especially seem to pad out so-called stories with explosions and fistfights when the characters aren’t interesting enough to follow for their own sakes. The most action-packed story in the world can still be boring as all get out if I don’t care why any of this stuff is happening.
I’ve seen many writers talk about a two-sentence way to describe the difference between plot and action (I’m not even sure who to reference, or who to attribute it to, I’ve heard it from so many different people. I heard it first from James Morrow at Odyssey):
The King died and then the Queen died.
The King died because the Queen died.
The first sentence is a sequence of events. Pure action. The second sentence intrigues me. It presents questions. It makes me want to know more. It has plot.
I’ve also heard, attributed to Raymond Chandler, that if you don’t know what happens next in a story, bring a man through the door with a gun. But remember, while this may be a good way to jump start a story by forcing you to reassess where the story is going and why the characters are there, don’t forget that you need to go back and make sure the guy with the gun has a really good reason for being there and impacts the story in a meaningful way. Because action is never a substitute for plot.
