#14 Plot 101: Lessons From My Favourite Novel

The Wheel of Time is one of the most famous and well-written epic fantasy adventures in history. It is my favourite series and is a treasure trove of knowledge. Barbara Baig, a master creative writing teacher and prodigious writer herself, advised that we should learn from the best and when it comes to fantasy few can top Robert Jordan. 

In this episode, we review the elements of plot and use the Wheel of Time Book 1: Eye of the World to analyse the lessons on plot.  

Key knowledge you will acquire in this episode:

• Definitions of Story and Plot
• The Elements of Plot
• How to Create An Exceptional Plot: Eye of the World Case Study

For more information on related content check out my website at www.TheRealGaryKhan.com 

Music Credits:

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Tulpa
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Transcript

Gary Khan : 0:12

"The Wheel of Time turns and ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth and even myth is long forgotten when the age that gives it birth comes again." The Eye of the World. "Some men choose to see greatness, while others are forced to it. It is always better to choose then to be forced. A man who is forced is never completely his own master. He must dance on the strings of those who forced it." Hello, Kryptic fans the best community online since the beginning of time. Welcome back to another episode of The Author's Journey with your very humble friend Gary Khan. Crafting a masterful plot escapes even the most accomplished authors at the best of times, one need only look to the poverty of plot in Hollywood scripts to determine how lacking this skill is. This episode aims to remedy that if you believe yourself a master, perhaps you need the lessons this episode teaches more than others. Master storytellers have one thing in common. They have mastered plot. You can be a master to first we look at some important distinctions between story and plot, and then we look at the elements of plot. And lastly, we study the plot of the Wheel of Time book one, I have the world What a treat. There's many lessons we can learn from studying a monster like Robert Jordan. So what's the difference between story and plot? story is a series of events recorded in chronological order. While plot is a series of events arranged deliberately to reveal the dramatic, thematic and emotional significance. Your plot is what the readers follow in your book, because you have arranged it in a way that best tells the story. Here's a protip first draft your story in chronological order from start to finish. And once complete, draft your plot by rearranging the order of events. For example, you could start your story in medias res, that's Latin for into the Middle of things, where you start your story literally in the middle. This is usually an action scene that draws the reader in before slowing things down in a flashback to the beginning of everything. If you're a master, you can play around with this different type of starting and ending and twisting of the plot. But you get that with a little bit more experience. What I've done to develop my skill set is take old childhood stories and fairy tales, and rearrange them in the chronological story parts and then take that different chunks and put them into the various slots of plot just to experiment what the different variations do to the actual plot itself. It's a magnificent exercise to conduct and one I highly recommend that you practice and try out just to help you get to grips with the difference between plot and story. Now if I had to say simplified plot is made up of a defined structure, which you can think of as slots. you carve up your story into slot sized chunks, and then drop them into the structure of blood, which is typically static. Interestingly, you can change the emphasis of a novel by changing the sequence in which you tell the story. That's really what plot is in its basic elements. Now, what is plot made up of? What are those slots that we have, that we call this magical thing called plot? Well, there's specific names to different slots, the most basic that all of us studied is introduction, beginning, whatever you want to call it, the middle and the end. Those are the logical general slots of any story. In the beginning, vendors happened, the end, right? However, in most Complicated more theoretical literature, where you actually have the slots called different things. And so here the names of the slots and what they each entail. The first slot is the introduction, or the exposition. It's the beginning, you introduce your setting your characters, the main conflicts, and the driving motivations that propel all the characters in the story forward towards some kind of goal. Then you have the inciting incident. This is a significant event, which occurs and changes the characters forever forcing him or her to embark on a journey towards the specific goal. Then you have the rising action. This could be broken down into further slots. And in future episodes, I will break down those slots for you so we can see what that entails. But really, your story moves forward in this part, it builds up to something. There's various complications that are around Along the way, to the goal, it increases the intensity of the conflicts in everything builds up to the main event. And then there's the climax, the final battle, the big showdown, or the major self discovery in the moment to which the entire story was building. This is your punch line, your main point where you have the most action, the most drama, the most change or the most excitement. After that, you've got the falling action. It's the wind down where things start to settle post climax and your characters the world and everything is forever changed in some way. The story slows down and you begin to tie up your loose ends and allow readers to reflect on all the events and absorb and internalize the lessons learned from the story. Then lastly, you have your resolution, or the Now moment if you want to be sounding very fancy and academic. This is your final statement. Fits across multiple characters, chapters, pages, paragraphs or lines, however you want to use it, and it wraps up your story. The characters resolve all the remaining issues, the story ends. Alternatively, you can leave a little bit of a gap, allowing you to continue the story, either in another book, or in another part, etc. Especially if it's part of a bigger series. Now that is the structure of plot. Interestingly enough, you can have plots within the plot. Those are called subplots. You have the main plot, the main driving force of the story, I'm going from A to B is a hero. He is something happens to him inciting event, he has to journey along. He builds up the skills and trains to fight the Big Bad Wolf, or bad character, whatever it is. He has that final battle. The story ends and he's learned a big lesson about himself and about Fighting and about the battle. And he shares that with the audience. And then he lives happily ever after the end or the moment. Right now in all of that you could have a subplot. And usually there's something like a romantic subplot. That's where the character along the main storyline falls in love. And these chapters or paragraphs or pages, whatever it is, with a character deviates from the main story, to fall in love to do build on that he has that will be in romance and relationship. And that will also follow a start, middle and end much like we've structured the main plot, except what you have to do when you're tying up all your different issues. You have to make sure all your subplots come to the logical conclusion as well before your main plot comes to its conclusion. Now, that's unless you have a series in which case across the broad spectrum of the series, you can tie up the plot when and where you Want to type the subplots in line with that. So if you have five books, your subplot for the romantic portion could tie up in the fourth book, for example, or in the last book, or in the last scene of the last book, wherever it is. And that's really how that works. Those are subplots, okay, then you can have plots fitting into bigger plots. So entire books in a bigger series would be considered subplots. So book, one will have a start and a finish point, it'll have an introduction or exposition. And it will have a resolution and a nominal all the way through, there has to be a logical conclusion. Even if you're going to leave a little bit of a gap. There's got to be some kind of finishing off of that particular part of the story. And then you would move on to your next plot, if it were, but that all fits within the broader sense part of the bigger plot. Again, if you had five books, you could have book one and two being part of your introduction. And exposition, etc, you get the idea. And I just find plot so interesting. Aren't you having an interesting time analyzing this? Now, let's move on to our case study the Wheel of Time book one, the Eye of the World, and what can we glean? How has Robert Jordan used the plot to masterfully tell his story? Let's take a look. Now before I continue, just a warning, spoiler alert. All right, But lucky for you, there are 14 books. So this spoiler alert only suppose the beginning or the exposition as they would say. So not to worry too much. But you're gonna want to read the book and then listen to this podcast, so we can unpack how Robert Jordan has done this and learn from it. So the introduction or exposition starts with the dark one, an evil overlord with magical abilities, who can draw on what's called the One Power or magic you he defeats Ferran telemon, a hero who's named the dragon, who has had enough power to try and push back in and rebel against the dark ones powers. Now he is defeated. But in his last dying attempt, he uses the male half of magic to try and fight back with the dark one. However, the dark one has corrupted the male half of magic, and he uses this power to make men mad. The dragon and his hundred companions of other magic wielding individuals who wield this power the One Power, or go insane and they begin to start tearing the world apart, which is the Dark One's evil plan, the dragon uses his powers. In the last ploy we gained a bit of sanity, and he destroys the dark one in the last final attempt and emulates himself completely setting change into the new world. This weakens the doc one enough for other forces to come in and imprison it. Skip 100 or so, couple of years, centuries, centuries boss, and we are introduced to Randall Thor and his father, who are hitting back into the village from the farm. They live in a very small part of the nation in the north, and we are introduced to ran to met and a one and parent and the naive. And again, all of his friends and the kids in the village that he's grown up with, we get to see the character we get to see village life, we get to see what their relationships are, we see that Rand has a little bit of a thing with a gwaine and is possibly betrothed to a we see all of this come into play. And yet to make it interesting strangers arrive at the village, a man and a woman. The man is named land woman moraine. We hear of another false dragon called the dragon reborn, who can use the male half of the magic. He's risen up in the different parts of the country, and we hear that acid Die. Women who can use the female half of magic will the One Power have been deployed to put down the rebellion to prevent those men going mad and tearing the world apart as has been done in the history books. So already just from those paragraphs, you can see a good introduction to the world. We've met the characters, we've met the, the the big, dark forces in good forces. We see there's a chosen one, narrative and story arc happening here as well, that come into play. And we see the innocent villages, the friends from the village, and they are going to have an important part in the story as we as we introduce to them. Right now we move on to the exciting inciting event tronics which will walk like creatures attack rat and his father in the home. The father time, gets wounded in the battle and ran finds out as he's dragging his father back to the village painstakingly that he's adopted. Ram seeks out moraine, the ESA die who's visiting the village at the time and asks that she heals of his father. She agrees and they go back to the Eden where the fathers vacated. Rand Matt and parent find out that one of them has something that the doc one fears and because of that the dark one who's trapped in a prison of magical power has dispatched his evil forces to kill them. Right just to be safe. Now ran met parent ingrained in Eve leave with Landon moraine, who promised to help them escape the clutches of the dark one. There's a heartfelt goodbye as we have a sense of the previous life being forever different. There's no way these guys can go back to living normal village life because the dark one wants to kill them. They've got a fleet to safety, Tom, the gleaming or the traveling storyteller who's visited the village and born a lot of the news about the dragon reborn decides to To travel with him. Now let's look at the rising action. And again, the rising action can be broken down into a lot of different parts and will be the bulk of the book. So this is where you want to focus on how you convey the rising action very well. But in the Wheel of Time, we see the group of friends journey across the nation to safety, while the forces of evil intercept them at every turn, and attack them as they continue to flee, ingrained and naive begin being taught respectively, how to wield the female side of the One Power. Because the Aes Sedai moraine is able to see that both can wield the power. Rand discovers the prophecy of the dragon and the dragon reborn that will come and as told by Tom about this, they also know that there's a soul that cannot be touched at the center of iron fortress called the stone. It's in the city called tear. And the key is that the person who can wield that sword once it's been done and only the Dragon reborn can wield it. Will it show that the man doing that is indeed the dragon reborn. And currently the false dragon or the so called false dragon who's causing up a stone that other part of the nation is hitting with his army to go and fight at this place called tear. So that's where they busy headed. So they saying, Okay, let's stay clear of all that drama. We don't want to be involved. So we discover as different events occur and the friends get into trouble as they being consistently attacked by the evil forces that ran has the ability to channel the male half of the One Power. That's one step closer to him, possibly someone being someone very important as well in the story. So there's various journeying across this nation, and we go to different cities. And again, a little bit of exposition comes in here where we introduced to different characters different factions, reintroduced to the white cloaks to the rest of the asset dye community to the children of light Man, I wish there was enough time to do a five hour podcast where I could explain what all of these different factions bring to the mix. But Robert Jordan has masterfully we've the world where there's so many conflicting political parties trying to vie for conflicting goals. It's amazing. In any case, we bought up to the climax we ran in is a company are led into a trap, and to escape the trap, they are forced into a funny position where the forces of evil, ambush them and now being confronted by one of the doc ones male acolytes. agonal they enter into a battle and ran somehow teleports to toe and gap in the middle of this wild and vicious battle in time to land in front of a orc army that is hitting to destroy the world. Now he summons up the One Power and taps into that dark, corrupted power and uses it against those evil forces. So he taps into evil to attack evil and obliterate the army. The dark one reaches out to him and speaks to Rand invited him in to become part of his evil army as a male acolyte. There's a special group, right and he says, join me into this, join me with in this in this evil adventure, but Rand refuses and so the Dark One since another Acolytes of the RAND has just beat one of them. And this guy's name is ishi and he arrives and they fight using beams of darkness and beams of light rands sword is infused with the light and they attacking and fighting one another and in a miraculous feat, ran shoots a beam of light into issues hot killing him, and thereby calming everything down. Now the poor friends were grappling with everything while this was going on and realizing Geez, look at this guy. Paul, what's going on? And we enter into the falling action. Round goes back to chicken, his friends and he finds out everyone's okay after the great battle, and he manages to find in the eye, the horn and the dragon banner symbols of the dragon reborn. Now they take those things along with him and they returned to the local city fell dhara the resolution or the Normand LAN and random practicing sword fighting because land is now showing Rand how to go about doing this and master himself and his skills. While moraine eavesdrops on the final words that they share between them. And she says an end of the book with this little statement, and a little teaser for what's to come. The dragon is reborn, pointing to Rand being the true dragon reborn. Now along the journey, there are several plot twists. They are subplots and plots within a larger plot because this is just the beginning of a 14 book series. So, as you can see, there's a overarching chronological story starting with the Dark Lord in the past, and there's things that happened before that. So when we first see that introduction to the Dark Lord defeating loose Theron, we realize that that's actually in medias res, because there's a part of that before that. And in later books eight 910 we get glimpses into the past before the dragon regional dragon was defeated. So, so well done so well put together. There's so much we can learn from that. But let's summarize. plot is the structure into which you fit your story. It has to have all the elements of plot, but can have subplots plot twists, and can be part of a bigger plot. There's a lot you can gain from studying masterful plots like Robert Jordans Wheel of Time. You take your story, write it out chronologically, cut it up into bite sized chunks, take those chunks and rearrange it into your slots in a way that this tells the story that creates that drama that brings the dramatic and the impactful forward so that you have different focuses. So what you start with is what you're going to capture your audience's what you tell them is important. So Robert Jordan, is what he's done has started off with the big battle between the thematic dragon and the thematic dock one, the age old good versus evil battle. And that's it for this week. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. If you have, please subscribe to join the cryptic community. Again, as I said before, the most awesome people on the planet, the most magnificent writers and aspiring authors who share and cultivate one another's craft. You want to be a part of it, because that is what we do. We just write the shit out of things. That's it. For me, I thank you very much Best of luck with your writing and as the Icelandic people say bless Transcribed by https://otter.ai