Chapter 4 - Action v. Plot

What makes a good story? It doesn't start with a worked out plot, according to Richard Cohen in Writer's Mind © 1995, it starts with motivation: a character doing what comes naturally for that character. Cohen writes that a (well formed) character's personality will naturally lead to choices, these choices (sometimes with fate and chance intervening) create a chain of consequences, and this chain becomes the plot.

For the blog this chapter, I'll review three aspects of each work related to plot:

1. Are the characters the kind of characters who create plot? Specifically, can I imagine what they were doing before the novel started and what they will be doing after? Are they well motivated and are the choices they make the ones I'd imagine them making?
   
   
2. Cohen states that perhaps the only universal principle of plot is "events should arise convincingly from their premises." One of the items I'll review for each of the works on the bookshelf is what events arise, what are the premises for these events, and are they are convincing imagined by the author.
   
   
3. Suspense is created with the right amount of foreshadowing, according to Cohen. Solutions to problems, answers to questions, surprises, explanations for events, all have to be foreshadowed for the reader otherwise he or she feels his or her intelligence has been insulted. In the books for this chapter, how did the author foreshadow events? What was foreshadowed, an answer, a solution, a surprise, etc.?
   

The bookshelf for this chapter is:

• Wild Palms by William Faulkner
  
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  
• Black Prince by Iris Murdock
  
• The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdock
  
• W, or Memories of Childhood by Georges Perec