Plot is a very significant element of fiction. It is about the events that make up the main story. However, it is not just about events, it is about how these events occur in the story.
Stories are about actions or incidents performed by people (as I said when dealing with diction that diction is about the choice of words a writer makes when telling the story which is actions performed by nouns). These actions or incidents or events are presented in chronological or sequential order. But this order must follow a cause and effect pattern in order to be of interest to readers.
So, Plot is the plan of the development of the actions of the story.
Actions nouns (people, places or things) perform as contained in fiction, are series of actions. Now, Plot deals with how these series of actions take place, or how they happen. It also deals with the Time they happen. The importance of Time is not that one event happens after the other, but one event happens because of the other.
English novelist, E. M. Forster, in his 1927 presentation at Cambridge’s The Clark Lectures, titled, Aspects of the Novel, illustrates what a Plot means. Using this illustration: “The king died, and then the queen died,” he made a distinction between a bare story and a story with a Plot. Of course, in this sentence, there is an order, a sequential order, but no Plot. Edward Forster then added a Plot to it by writing, “The king died, and then the queen died of grief.”
Plot is not just about series of actions in chronological order or sequence, but about human responses – what happens because of another thing. It is causation, conflicts, responses.
The importance of Time in Plot as an element of fiction as mentioned above, is hinged on the cause of the action, for example, the queen died of grief because the king died. The death of the king is why the queen died also – she died of grief. She loved the king very much and couldn’t bear his death – grieving, she died too. So, Plot is about what happened and the reason it happened.
From the above, we see that Plot is about the plan of the development of the actions. The development of the story a writer tells is very important. A writer is telling a story that is not aimless; he/she is telling a story that should spark off interest, curiosity, giving a reader something to move him/her to read on, something that would engage the reader’s imagination.
In Nigerian’s playwright, Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Blame, the protagonist, Odewale ran far away from ‘home’ and finally lands at Kutuje because the oracle tells him he’s going to kill his father and marry his mother. This pronouncement on Odewale is the reason why most of the things that happened in this 20th century drama adapted from Greek Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex happened.
The Gods Are Not To Blame presents a tight plot of causative sequential order. The king and queen of Kutuje (Adetusa and Ojuola) have a baby boy. They consult the oracle about his future, and are told that he will kill his father and marry his mother. The Yoruba royal couple gives the baby boy to a palace messenger to go and kill the baby in the bush. The messenger out of compassion gives away the baby to a stranger from another land (Dr Lekan Balogun of the Dept. of Creative Arts in his 2019 modern adaptation of the play in commemoration of the University of Lagos 50th Convocation makes the man the palace messenger gives the royal baby to, an Igbo man (Alaka). So the child Odewale in Lekan Balogun’s adaptation is raised in Igbo land and that’s where he runs from back to Yoruba land, to Kutuje when the oracle gives him the terrible prediction again, this time, as an adult. So, Odewale interacts with Alaka in Igbo when the latter traces him to Kutuje after his foster Igbo father died.).
The sequence of events or actions PLUS the responses of the characters to those events are what give Literature what we call Plot.
CONFLICT
Plot has conflicts, dilemma or difficult choices a character must make.
Illustration: boy meets girl, they fall in love and marry. These are events with no Plot. Plot has conflicts, choices to make – not easy choices, but tough choices to make, like a royal couple giving away their first baby to be killed, sacrificed to ‘Ifa!’ But, if boy meets girl and is undecided about marriage, and she falls pregnant, he tells his parents and hers of his intention to marry her, and custom demands that they have to go through months of marriage counselling classes. It also happens that it is a taboo for a girl to be pregnant before marriage, he then decides to ‘elope’ with her, go to another city and get a special licence at the registry, and marries her quickly before she starts showing. In so doing, he incurs the wrath of both his family and hers, you have a plot.
Plot has structure. It is the way plot is structured that hooks a reader to a story and keeps him/her hooked till the end. Structure is about the organization of events in a story. And that would be our topic next week.
