veryrarelystable:

zagreus:

“if it’s not plot relevant, cut it!!” is such awful writing advice

if JRR Tolkien had cut every bit of Lord of the Rings that wasn’t directly related to the central plot, it would have been just one book long, COLOURLESS and DULL AS DIRT. 

all the little worldbuilding/character details are what draw you in and give the central plot weight, FOOL

The plot is not the same thing as the story.  The plot is the mechanics of how one thing causes another.

Some classic stories have no plot to speak of – the characters just wander from one situation to the next.  Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz are examples.

Some stories have partial plots, where some things in the story cause other things, but other things come out of the blue and pass away without consequence.  This category includes classics too: Huckleberry Finn, The Wind in the Willows.

Even in stories with a strong plot, sometimes the most iconic moments fall outside that plot.  Think of the No-Man’s-Land scene in Wonder Woman or the dying dinosaur in Jurassic World II.

Ah, but those aren’t classics, I hear someone say.  Well, I disagree in the case of Wonder Woman (although time will tell), but let’s go right to the top of the English canon, Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

What’s the most iconic scene, if you had to pick one to illustrate for the front cover or the playbill poster?  Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s the Yorick skull scene.  What does that have to do with the plot?  Precious little.  It’s just a way to keep Hamlet busy until Ophelia’s funeral arrives.  And even there it’s not very well fit for purpose, because it doesn’t explain why Hamlet is hanging around in a graveyard anyway.

That’s because, tight though the plot of Hamlet is, the story of Hamlet is not reducible to its plot.  Hamlet is a three-hour exploration of death and skulls and murder and corpses and funerals and ghosts and “what dreams may come”.  The plot is just there to drive you around between the features of that mental landscape.

So the question isn’t “Does this serve the plot?”  The question is “Does this help explore the idea that the story is about?”

(Why yes, I have written all this somewhere before.)