Original subtitles

Boy meets girl.

Boy loses girl.

Boy goes out with girl's brother.

I mean, that's a story.

You have three characters.

They have potential for growth and for change,

and they experience each other.

They have conflict-- they're torn apart,

they're brought back together.

That's a story.

There's not a whole bunch of different stories,

but how that story occurs, that's the plot.

Where did the boy meet the girl?

What did the girl think about the boy?

Where was the brother?

Where was he at the time and what was he thinking?

What's going on in boy's life?

What's going on in girl's life?

All these things we slowly begin to understand,

and we understand the tensions and the conflicts between them

that cause the changes and the revelations.

Story is what happens.

Plot is when the reason it happens

or the reasons that it happens are revealed to the reader.

The story is a cloud-like definition

of the novel you're going to write.

If it's a nice, calm day with no wind,

the cloud is going to look the same way.

As you write your novel, if the winds kick up a little bit,

it may alter quite a bit, and you

have to be able to move with that story.

But the story alone is not a novel.

It's just a story.

This happened.

That happened.

This happened.

The end.

A story-- you can't have a novel without a story,

but a story is not a novel.

I think it's easy to start with something simple

when you're crafting a story, because I promise you

it's going to become extremely complex before you

get to the end.

You'll start saying all kinds of things about the girl or about

the second boy.

There's all kinds of stuff that's

going to be going on in the story.

And so if you could start it as easy as possible,

that's good because it leaves a lot of room

for complexity, which is going to come

in when you start plotting.

The story.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The simplest way to describe plot

is that it is the structure of revelation.

I like that term because it works on two levels.

One, it's a pedestrian level.

Well, when do I find out what the girl's mother is like?

When do I find out that her brother is gay?

When do I find out that the boy who's been going out with her

is only going out with her so he can find a place to sleep,

because he needs a place to sleep

because it came from Salt Lake City

and he doesn't have any money?

When do I find out these things?

That's very pedestrian thing.

But the other reveal that happens

is you find out who the person is through why they're there,

what they've done, why they've done what they've done.

You want to be surprised.

You want your assumptions to be a question.

You want the novel to tell you something about the world

that you didn't know about when you started reading this book.

And so as elements and character traits and situations

reveal themselves, we become more and more engaged

in what is happening and we worry more or more

about what will happen.

And so that structure, the bones of your novel,

make it so the reader is involved in a story

that, you know, they may already know that story.

But now as they are reading it, it

gets a very specific tenor, a very specific character,

and we're worried about this situation which

couldn't be anywhere else.

Which is just like our lives.

You know, you meet somebody, they become your best friend.

You know, and you don't find out for three years

that they've been killing people, you know,

every weekend.

You're having a regular relationship with somebody,

and that might have its own issues and problems.

But when you find out that this person is also killing people,

it's a whole new world of the novel opening up.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Pretty late in the book of "Devil in a Blue Dress,"

Mouse, Raymond Alexander, is talking to the white woman

that Easy's been looking for.

And he says, "Now, am I going to lie to you, Ruben?

Your brother is dead.

I'd only been in an earthquake once,

but the feeling was the same.

The ground under me seemed to shift.

I looked at her to see the truth, but it wasn't there.

Her nose, her cheeks, her skin color, they were white.

Daphne was a white woman."

Now, Daphne is not a white woman.

She looks like a white woman, whatever that is.

But in truth, she's, in American terms, a Black woman,

or you know, in new terms, a multiracial woman.

She has a Creole mother and a Black father.

Easy has spent the whole novel looking for this white woman.

We have spent the whole novel with him

looking for this white woman.

And now when he finds her, she's not a white woman.

She's something else, somebody else.

We understand, begin to understand,

what the underlying motive is in the story.

We understand her problem and why she's been acting the way

she's acting, or we begin to understand that.

That's a plot move.

It's using the story.

Story is easy-- looking for Daphne--

but it changes because the plot reveals

that she is indeed not what she said she was.

And so now Easy knows that the woman he thought

was a white woman is actually a Black woman.

The woman that he fell in love with as a white woman

is actually a Black woman.

Easy has to make a choice.

Easy says, I don't care, I don't care that she's a black woman.

And we believe she's been hiding this

because she's ashamed of it.

And so when Easy comes to her later on in the novel

and says, listen, it doesn't matter to me what race you are.

I fell in love with you, who you are.

I want to be with you.

And she says to him, I can never be

with a man who does not know me as a white woman,

because that is the identity I've chosen,

now that's another plot twist.

It's not that she's ashamed of being Black,

but she can only be white.

What you do once you have a big plot twists like who

she is, what she is, then you can

have all kinds of like little tremors of different kinds

of changes through the novel.

And this is the reason that people read novels--

to understand character, to understand character

transition, to understand why what I want I can never have,

or what I'm trying to escape from is myself.

These are big issues in any kind of novel,

and without plot you can never get there

because you just know everything from the beginning.

It's just a story.

But it's not just a story.

It's a story about characters, and the characters

are deep and complex and always changing.