On Moving Past Plotlessness
Author Andrea Uptmor discusses moving past plotlessness after learning to write beautiful sentences in MFA program.
During the three years of my MFA, I took fiction seminars on deliciously specific topics: the history of the novella, the influence of the Somali diaspora on Nurrudin Farrah’s work, the inaccessibility of truth in modernist novels. My cohort and I spent hundreds of classroom hours describing the subtle themes and temporal space of one another’s stories, using phrases like “metaphysical claustrophobia” and “distant third.”
But only one seminar in those three years focused on plot mechanics: how to make one event turn into the next. And rarely in our workshops did we ask one another, “Are you doing enough to move the story forward?”
As a result, I became what many MFA alumni become: a plotless writer.
My First Failure
Before my debut novel The New People, I wrote another book, which never found an agent. The feedback was consistent: This is the hardest kind of pass to write…there needs to be a more dramatic arc…I had a bit of hesitation about the plot, which does feel fairly quiet. (Emma, in The New People, faces similar feedback for her novel; I used quotes from real agent rejections.)
I was devastated. And sort of confused, too. Some of my favorite writers don’t follow a traditional narrative arc but instead write more conceptual or essayistic or character-driven novels—Ayşegül Savaş, Sigrid Nunez, Katie Kitamura, to name a few. So why was every agent telling me that I had to have more plot to get published?
My mistake had been in not going far enough in either direction. My failed novel had the snappy tagline of a satisfyingly plotty book: a woman in her 50s returns to art school to finish the degree she abandoned when her son was born, only to confront the secrets she thought she’d put to bed years ago. That description was one of the reasons I got so many full requests from agents—and also the reason my inbox filled with apologetic rejections. I had set expectations and not fulfilled them.
Instead of making choices that escalated the story’s tension, my characters had long, meandering conversations about art. A new mother myself, I lingered over scenes in which my protagonist pondered the wonder of parenthood, her child’s beautiful fingernail clippings casting half-moons in the toilet bowl, et cetera. I spent so much time polishing these scenes that I overlooked the larger beats of the story, the narrative cause and effect that would keep a reader turning pages.
Starting Over
Putting that novel to bed caused a deep creative grief, and I wasn’t sure I had it in me to write another. But slowly I dusted off and started again, this time with a specific goal to focus not just on the quality of the prose but on the momentum of the story.
I wrote The New People in spurts and starts over about two years, the bulk of it in early mornings in front of my fireplace with my dog curled at my side. In the book, a young, newly married couple moves into a house during the 2008 recession, unaware that the former owners—a couple of down-on-their-luck retirees—are still hiding out in the garage attic. I chose alternating chapters between two main characters, downstairs Emma and upstairs Charlotte, because I wanted to frame the book as a portrait of two marriages being pressure-tested under the political and economic unrest of the time.
But after my first draft, the setup was uneven on the page. Emma’s storyline includes a new job and fertility treatments—scenes in which people challenge her and force her to make choices. Attic-bound Charlotte, on the other hand, was dormant. Her chapters were heavy with flashback and grousing with her husband. She felt authentic, but the lady didn’t lift a finger when it came to moving the story forward.
I was lucky that my agent, Natalie Edwards of Trellis Literary, saw enough potential in the book to sign me before I started on some course-correcting revisions.
I spent a few months rewriting Charlotte’s chapters, discarding stagnant backstory and instead giving her a mission to sabotage Emma’s home. With Charlotte’s new agency, the book coalesced then into a more interesting shape, with a more equitable division of labor between the two protagonists—and dare I say, an actual plot.
Check out Andrea Uptmor's The New People here:
Three Takeaways About Writing Plot
A few things I (re)learned about writing plot along the way:
- It’s not enough for a character to want something. She should also act upon that want. This isn’t necessarily how we do things in real life, is it? Most of us spend 99% of our waking hours in a great soup of interiority, ruled by fantasies and longings that we would not dare carry out. But imagine if Gatsby and Daisy had not given in to their attraction, or if Raskolnikov had not taken the axe to the pawnbroker’s apartment. Those novels would have immediately deflated, with no inciting action to set the rest of the story in motion.
- Plotting requires risk-taking and restraint. I took things too far at one point, sending my editor a scene in which Emma has a messy confrontation with a problematic student who, through a series of carefully plotted events, accidentally ends up at her doorstep. My editor found it “too convenient to be realistic,” and she was right.
- Killing your darlings can be easier than you expect. I probably cut 15,000 words out of The New People over the course of its writing. Very nice words, I might add: a funny scene with a bumbling ethics committee at the university where Emma works, Charlotte’s camping-trip honeymoon half a century earlier. Like a high school breakup, it felt like the end of the world to part with these scenes—but now I hardly think of them.
After the book went to print, it was hard to stop thinking like an editor. But even if it’s out of my hands now, a novel is never finished. Readers will give the story a new shape with their interpretations and reactions, layering their own experiences and reading histories on top to give the book a whole new meaning. It’s a relief, in many ways, to be joined by these new collaborators. In fact, that’s the point of writing a book, isn’t it?
