VanderMeer's Wonderbook, Chapter Four: Narrative Design
The first point made in the chapter is that all stories are designed. They must, in some sense, contain a pattern, even if that pattern is purposefully random. Even the most dadaist story has some rubric behind it and thus is designed. The point in Dada, one might argue, is not to avoid designing the story, but to divorce the story from a sense of having been designed. In essence, by choosing to utilize randomness as an element within the work, a dadaist is creating a design that has no meaning in the work, but they are still choosing a process that will dictate how the piece is designed. The human mind cannot help but design. Look into Zipf's law, for example, and you will see that the patterning of language is far more complicated and is deep within us on a level that is not entirely understood.
To a writer of fiction, however, the concept of narrative design is more essentially connected to two central aspects of a story, the plot and the structure. VanderMeer summarizes the lack of agreement around these two concepts quite nicely, and ends by saying that, essentially, each writer must determine the exact nature of these mysterious ideas. Still, one must have some certain understanding, and thus the chapter.
I tend to think that their is a far more clear way of considering the plot and the structure. To me, the plot is the series of events, not as seen by any character, but as they are imagined to occur in the world of the story. This means that the plot includes elements that might only be revealed later. Secret twists are generally born from revelations of events that happened earlier. Those events are already within the plot. The sequence of events that are connected is the plot, and it can also include elements that are outside the scope of the telling of the story. For example, if the story involves a character discovering that they were born to a noble household but kidnapped at birth and then abandoned on the roadside to die, the story may not contain those events. Yet, they are still essential for the plot, especially if the noble family has been searching for her all this time, or if she had been replaced with an evil monster disguised as the princess, who seeks the throne for herself and her demonic kind. All that is in the plot, even though it happened long before the story itself and may never be fully explored in the story.
By contrast, I think of the structure as being the structure of the written piece. It is the events as they are revealed in the story, and how they will be unveiled as well. In the structure, the girl starts as a peasant who was found on the side of the road by the old couple that adopted her. The perspective is close to her as well. She knows that the king is sick and his daughter is due to take the throne, but that is about all she knows. The questions that arise in the structure are connected to the plot, but more specifically about how the story will be told. It may well be that the best way to tell the story is with a prologue that reveals aspects of the larger story, or it might work better to have it be utterly a surprise to the reader and the character. Those are structural choices and they do not reflect the plot itself. Similarly, in choosing the nature of the voice, while that can be considered separately as well, it is important to recognize that the perspective will have to inform the structure. Who is telling the story cannot be thought of as totally disconnected from how that story is actually told. The structure will reflect that, as it must be informed by the knowledge of the teller.
If one limits the two concepts to both being, essentially, about the events and their order (which is probably a bit too drastic, but useful) the difference is quite apparent. The plot is the order in which those events occur, and includes all the events, even those that will not be in the story. The structure is, by contrast, the events that are to be told in the story and the order of their telling. It becomes clear that more needs to be considered, especially if one thinks of a complicated story that is told by multiple characters, where the choice of who is telling what section is clearly structural, but the essence remains. In a way, it is almost easiest to say that the difference is between the objective world in which the story occurs and the subject presentation within the story, but the world of the story is clearly not objective and has no existence beyond the story.
I do think, though, that distinction is clear and points out what is distinct about plot and structure. The plot is a designed element, and thus is not objective, and it may need to be changed to accommodate a character or even aspects of a voice (if, for a small example, it becomes clear that the story must be told in a certain dialect, that can change the setting and plot, or just the personal history of the character). However, the changes to the plot are changes on a level outside of the telling itself. The plot is not within the story in a certain sense. That is to say, the story is a telling of events, from a certain perspective or set of perspectives and with specific reasons for telling that story in this way. However, that story has to be seen as window in on a fictional world that the writer has imagined, and which is not limited to the story itself. The plot describes the events as they occur in that world.
Structure is the window that is chosen. It is the perspective on the plot. This includes the order in which events are told. That can be a function of character, not only in how they had events revealed to them, but also in that a first person narrator can have specific tendencies and obsessions. It might be that they keep circling back to certain events, or they may avoid telling specific events entirely for as long as they can, or they might just be the sort that only fills in the reader at the last moment, when they realize that an important detail requires explanation. These all change the order of how the events of the story are told. The shape of a plot is clear, as it must always move one way like time, but the structure of the story is not at all bound in that way. A story can be a circle, which begins with a central event and then unpeels layers surrounding it from before and after. This would be a good choice for telling about a bombing, or other similar disaster. You begin with the bombing itself, the explosion and the immediate events around it. Then, you go back and forth between the stories of those who were victims, unveiling how they came to be there, and the stories that came out of the bombing, the events immediately after. By going back and forth between the events, moving further out from the bombing, the explosion is seen as the center of the story, and everything else is place in relation to it. The plot would still go from beginning to end, but the story would be something else entirely. Yet, it is also worth recognizing how important it would be to design a plot that would allow this movement through time. Their would need to be connections between past and present, and the plot would have to be symmetrical around the explosion, in a way. Both aspects need to be designed harmoniously to achieve the result.
To a writer of fiction, however, the concept of narrative design is more essentially connected to two central aspects of a story, the plot and the structure. VanderMeer summarizes the lack of agreement around these two concepts quite nicely, and ends by saying that, essentially, each writer must determine the exact nature of these mysterious ideas. Still, one must have some certain understanding, and thus the chapter.
I tend to think that their is a far more clear way of considering the plot and the structure. To me, the plot is the series of events, not as seen by any character, but as they are imagined to occur in the world of the story. This means that the plot includes elements that might only be revealed later. Secret twists are generally born from revelations of events that happened earlier. Those events are already within the plot. The sequence of events that are connected is the plot, and it can also include elements that are outside the scope of the telling of the story. For example, if the story involves a character discovering that they were born to a noble household but kidnapped at birth and then abandoned on the roadside to die, the story may not contain those events. Yet, they are still essential for the plot, especially if the noble family has been searching for her all this time, or if she had been replaced with an evil monster disguised as the princess, who seeks the throne for herself and her demonic kind. All that is in the plot, even though it happened long before the story itself and may never be fully explored in the story.
By contrast, I think of the structure as being the structure of the written piece. It is the events as they are revealed in the story, and how they will be unveiled as well. In the structure, the girl starts as a peasant who was found on the side of the road by the old couple that adopted her. The perspective is close to her as well. She knows that the king is sick and his daughter is due to take the throne, but that is about all she knows. The questions that arise in the structure are connected to the plot, but more specifically about how the story will be told. It may well be that the best way to tell the story is with a prologue that reveals aspects of the larger story, or it might work better to have it be utterly a surprise to the reader and the character. Those are structural choices and they do not reflect the plot itself. Similarly, in choosing the nature of the voice, while that can be considered separately as well, it is important to recognize that the perspective will have to inform the structure. Who is telling the story cannot be thought of as totally disconnected from how that story is actually told. The structure will reflect that, as it must be informed by the knowledge of the teller.
If one limits the two concepts to both being, essentially, about the events and their order (which is probably a bit too drastic, but useful) the difference is quite apparent. The plot is the order in which those events occur, and includes all the events, even those that will not be in the story. The structure is, by contrast, the events that are to be told in the story and the order of their telling. It becomes clear that more needs to be considered, especially if one thinks of a complicated story that is told by multiple characters, where the choice of who is telling what section is clearly structural, but the essence remains. In a way, it is almost easiest to say that the difference is between the objective world in which the story occurs and the subject presentation within the story, but the world of the story is clearly not objective and has no existence beyond the story.
I do think, though, that distinction is clear and points out what is distinct about plot and structure. The plot is a designed element, and thus is not objective, and it may need to be changed to accommodate a character or even aspects of a voice (if, for a small example, it becomes clear that the story must be told in a certain dialect, that can change the setting and plot, or just the personal history of the character). However, the changes to the plot are changes on a level outside of the telling itself. The plot is not within the story in a certain sense. That is to say, the story is a telling of events, from a certain perspective or set of perspectives and with specific reasons for telling that story in this way. However, that story has to be seen as window in on a fictional world that the writer has imagined, and which is not limited to the story itself. The plot describes the events as they occur in that world.
Structure is the window that is chosen. It is the perspective on the plot. This includes the order in which events are told. That can be a function of character, not only in how they had events revealed to them, but also in that a first person narrator can have specific tendencies and obsessions. It might be that they keep circling back to certain events, or they may avoid telling specific events entirely for as long as they can, or they might just be the sort that only fills in the reader at the last moment, when they realize that an important detail requires explanation. These all change the order of how the events of the story are told. The shape of a plot is clear, as it must always move one way like time, but the structure of the story is not at all bound in that way. A story can be a circle, which begins with a central event and then unpeels layers surrounding it from before and after. This would be a good choice for telling about a bombing, or other similar disaster. You begin with the bombing itself, the explosion and the immediate events around it. Then, you go back and forth between the stories of those who were victims, unveiling how they came to be there, and the stories that came out of the bombing, the events immediately after. By going back and forth between the events, moving further out from the bombing, the explosion is seen as the center of the story, and everything else is place in relation to it. The plot would still go from beginning to end, but the story would be something else entirely. Yet, it is also worth recognizing how important it would be to design a plot that would allow this movement through time. Their would need to be connections between past and present, and the plot would have to be symmetrical around the explosion, in a way. Both aspects need to be designed harmoniously to achieve the result.
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