When I think about the books and stories I appreciate most, the ones that really stick, plot is not typically the key feature. It has happened more than once that I’ve talked up a novel I love to someone, and they pick it up, get bored, and say, “Nothing happens in this book.”
This is true of many of my favorites. I don’t love them for what happens. A sequence of events is less interesting to me than how the characters behave, what their interior lives are like, how they speak or don’t speak to one another, or how they relate to themselves, each other, and the world around them. I’m fascinated by what drives humans to act the way we do. I appreciate human vulnerability, I like to see how people think. I get attached to characters and want to hang out with them. What happens is just there to give them something to react through. Plot can be fun, and it can provide pacing, and it can have twists and whoa moments, but there’s often not much to go deeper on, and what happens is not that interesting to revisit.
Other favorites I love because they help me see the world and its people in the present and the past. They plop me into Newfoundland, or the American west in the 1860s, or Paris at any time in its history. When they imagine the future, they give insight into the times from which that future was imagined.
Or I love them for the craft of the writing. Dialog feels alive. I underline sentences. I circle words that make my brain fire. I marvel at how the author says things without saying them, uses language, unfurls the story.
I’m thinking about all of this because WordPress.com’s writing prompt today asks us what books or movies we wish we could experience again for the first time. I frequently reread books, and I can’t say I’ve ever thought “I wish I’d never read this before so I could read it again for the first time.” Each reading builds on previous ones, and the experience is deeper and richer and more layered: I can see new things I didn’t see before.
The only circumstance I could think of where the pleasure happens best on the first time is when you’re just reading along, no idea what’s going to happen, and then holy crap, you did not see that coming. Once you know what’s going to happen, you can’t unknow it, so the first time really is the most special.
And then, if once the thing happens, it makes you rethink humanity and how we interpret and understand the universe and our place in it, then in that case, plot does matter. And when I think about it that way, two short stories I wish I could experience again for the first time are Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”
Butterfly Mind 