What's next?

Copyright 2018 A. Barake

E.M. Forster in his "Aspects of the Novel" lectures discusses the difference between plot and story. Plot includes meaning. Can we know meaning, and do we want it in a story? The novelist's art can make meaning crystallize in the reader's mind by drawing on shared experiences, on context, on cultural tropes. Can this not happen through simple storytelling as well?

A poetry teacher I remember from long ago said that the writer must try to control intent as closely as possible. He was dead against the scatter words to the winds approach of free-association that some of us were playing with. In fact he chastised us quite severely about it and the reprimand stuck to this day.

I was thinking of plot versus storytelling because of the wild popularity of the Harry Potter stories and the recent hype around Rowling's imminent release of a "serious" novel for adults. Harry Potter works are driven by the "what's next" urge. I remember reading stories to my younger brother before bed and he could not wait for the next instalment, to the point of learning to read so that he could get to the denouement of the latest twist before the next evening.

So will Rowling's addition of plot to storytelling make her serious novel more successful? I don't think so.
Plot is a luxury, at least in the commercial sense.

The success of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy adds evidence to my claim. I think the sexual encounters are the equivalent of the "what's next" of a standard story. Same principle as in detective fiction. There are comments on readers' site about skipping across the sexual descriptions just to get to the next variation setup. So it is about anticipation, more so than about meaning, or description.

Tipping the balance of writing towards such commercially successful mechanisms makes the writing more cinematic, flatter dimensionally. I am not making a value judgement. I think that it is not sustainable. Art is about Eros, about tension and sublimation, and repeated denouements lead to wanting bigger and bigger bangs.

So conservation is a goal of plot artistry, learning to fish rather than being served the trout all cooked. Playing with the mind. It sounds pompous, but writing in a sustained way is to influence and seduce and to keep the love alive. Boring is the worst insult you could throw at a writer, and that risk exists if stories begin to repeat as they ultimately have to. Even the Thousand and One Nights  had to end in a boring marriage.