Plot vs. Situation
F requently, I see someone talking about something they believe would make a great story. Sometimes it’s a writer. Sometimes it’s a person who has no idea what it would take to write a story. The problem is an issue of plot vs. situation . A situation is the current state of things. For example, if you wreck your car then you have a situation. If you meet an important person, that’s a situation. If you have a disease of some kind, that is a situation. As unusual as your situation may be, it doesn’t guarantee that writing about that situation will produce and interesting story. Plot is what happens in a story. The plot makes or breaks the story. We may begin with a situation, but we have to work it into a plot. Consider the book, The Magic of Ordinary Days . The situation was that a young woman committed adultery and must keep her pregnancy secret. Now, consider also the book Not My Will . It too is built around the situation of a woman needing to keep her pregnancy secret, but the two...