Companion letter: Reconsidering "plot" in fiction
Thinking about how Abang Adik worked the death penalty into its plot made me reconsider how to write a piece of short fiction I've been trying to complete...
However you found your way here, welcome! I’m Emily, and I write letters about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world and our place in it.
This is a companion letter to Living in a world not of our own making. It makes sense to read them together 💛
For a long time, based on an exchange with someone I knew a long time ago, I wanted to write a short story that was, vaguely, about how someone could be so good in one way, and bad in another, and who got to see they were bad or good, and what that said about human relationships. I also had the idea that I would bring the death penalty to the story somehow, since I had reported on it myself as a journalist and could bring some perspective to bear.
But I didn’t start the story until an image came into my head one day, triggered by a completely unrelated childhood memory. As it continued to radiate in my head, I wrote it down and suddenly, I had a beginning, and then my first scene—but then I didn’t know where to go from there. That has generally been my problem writing short fiction. I’ve written what I think to be several promising beginnings but they don’t have any middle or ends. For a while I just sort of accepted that I couldn’t do “Plot”, so fiction wasn’t for me. But that was because I was thinking about plot as this big idea that had to be scaffolded from the start, and then filled in, even if I were to fiddle around later with the chronology and shape of the story.