The Writing Life Too

Morning sky is pale grey with an equally pale pink swath running through it and the trees are being tossed around by the wind. Well yesterday I found the quote I was looking for. I was writing about problems that are most immediately visible in a manuscript and one of them is when the story is episodic. While it’s fine for scenes to stand up on their own, good fiction (and memoir) must be tied together with theme, language and voice, and of course, characters. Thus connectivity is the key and all fiction is causality related. So here is the quote I was looking for—from not Henry James, but E. Forster from Aspects of the Novel:

Let us define plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Or again: The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.” This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development. It suspends the time-sequence, it moves as far away from the story as limitations will allow. If it is in a plot we ask “why?”