To me, the best novels combine plot/story and language in a single, cohesive package. Genre writers tend to understand plot but either aren’t known to me, critically speaking, or write so poorly on a sentence-by-sentence level that their work isn’t interesting. Self-consciously literary writers and critics tend to discount it (as Wood does), sometimes to the detriment of their own work. Since then I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about plot, and being dissatisfied that I’ve never seen it addressed well elsewhere. The first two novels I actually wrote to completion had no real plots and thus weren’t very good novels (my Dad pointed out the former and let me infer the latter). This is frustrating to me because, when I started writing, plot was a major weakness. Unfortunately, Bell asks few questions and offers fewer answers. My ideal book would, as Wood says, ask “a critic’s questions and a writer’s answers.” I’d really like an equivalent of How Fiction Works, but for an important matter that James Wood disdains (“the novel soon showed itself willing to surrender the essential juvenility of plot”). I bought Plot & Structure because the issue of how a novel’s narrative moves seems to be understudied by academics, who tend to produce jargon-laden, overly analytical nonsense, and by novelists themselves.
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