Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Plot

Except When It Does

Today I am going to go right to the point and not waste time with preliminaries because I want to go to bed. But also because I think this topic will not go quietly and I need all the available time to wrestle it down into text. But mostly sleep.

Today’s Shelf Life is about anglocentricity in the storytelling techniques that get preference in the United States. I first reflexively wrote “English-speaking world” instead of “United States” but that is not anything like correct. If you add up the English-speaking populations of India, Pakistan, and Nigeria you get more English-speaking people than the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia put together. So that’s what I think about the term English-Speaking World. It doesn’t actually look anything like what we might imagine on first blush.

It’s funny because—well here’s why it’s funny: I was going to say that Western and specifically anglo narrative structures and storytelling styles have become the lingua franca of publishing and popular commercial fiction, meaning, the anglo narrative structure is the one that is presumed to be “commonly understood” by everybody no matter where you’re from. Then I was like, “haha like English is the lingua franca of business even though franca refers to French” but then I thought, “I better double check before I write that down” and sure enough I was wrong. Lingua franca means “the language of the Franks,” and the Franks were Germanic. That’s why it was funny.

When I say anglo narrative styles I am generally thinking of that Freytag pyramid, you know, with the inciting incident and the rising action and the climax and the falling action and the resolution. With the presumption that there must be a plot driven by conflict, there must be stakes, there must be a climactic moment and then a resolution to end with. 

This is how you get conversations like I see all over the place where someone has written something that doesn’t have “a plot”—oh this is a vignette; this is just a character sketch; this isn’t a story it’s somebody going about their day—and obviously you don’t have a narrative unless it follows the guidance I already mentioned, for example, “conflict is king.”

Well guess what. Not every culture has the same preferences for narrative structure and style and storytelling as anglo culture does. And it’s not like these other narrative structures or styles of storytelling have dwindled and gone away because of anglocentric preferences, they’re around. They’re just not translated into English for English-speakers to read with the frequency that English works are translated to other languages. I guess this is because there’s an awful lot of disposable income for spending on books located in the United States, but maybe I’m wrong.

There are all kinds of stories that don’t follow the Western preference for plot structure and I’m going to talk about those today. (For a refresher on the difference between story and plot, hop in the wayback machine.)

I’ll begin with three types of story I mentioned above. These three are often maligned by agents, editors, and literary magazines, as in, “oh my dog don’t send us these”; they are, the:

• Vignette

• Slice of life

• Character sketch

I happen to think that any of the above can be imbued with enough conflict or action to make even the Americanest publisher happy, but these forms don’t require conflict or action. They’re a bit out of fashion in the moment in the context of publishing in the US but that doesn’t mean they’re not valid forms.

Vignette refers to a brief, concise story—usually limited to one scene—that captures a moment in time and the character’s reaction to what’s happening in that one scene, in vivid detail. Lots of description and character insight, not a lot of plot. For an example, see “Kew Gardens” by Virginia Woolf. 

Slice of life (which I can never type correctly without first writing slive) refers to a story that describes the mundane, day-to-day actions of the characters. Someone (or someones) going about their daily lives. A slice of life narrative can be without much in the way of plot, exposition, or conflict. Guy de Maupassant was a master of the slice-of-life short story; see, for example, “Mademoiselle Fifi.” Travis Baldree’s recently published novel, Legends & Lattes, about an orc barbarian named Viv who retires from adventuring to run a coffee shop, is an example of the slice-of-life narrative style but jazzed up with enough conflict to drive a structured three-act plot.

Character sketch is often taken to mean a short narrative describing a character, physically and otherwise, within a larger narrative. For instance, a new character is introduced and the writer takes a brief moment to include a character sketch to give readers a sense of that character. However, character sketch has been its own narrative form for a long time although the popularity has waned since the 18th century. A relatively modern example of the character sketch at work in a short story is found in “Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor.

The examples I’ve given of the above structures are all short stories (and one novel) that were published and are still remembered today, reproduced in textbooks and taught in literature classes, even though they don’t fit the structure that everyone in the writing, editing, and publishing scene in the US will tell you that you have to use. Clearly, it’s not that these structures and types of stories are universally unpalatable. They’re just not what’s in fashion, in this part of the world, right now. That’s why I’m trying to dismiss the idea that a story has to have certain elements or it’s not a story. Clearly, all of the above are stories.

You might say, well, the US is an anglophone country that originated from British culture and so it only makes sense that we’d give preference to these anglocentric narrative types however the US is home to a great many people from different cultures—I would even risk saying that most of the world’s cultures are represented by people and communities in the US—and I personally know and have heard from a lot of people who have told me they experience blanket rejection of their writing styles because “this isn’t a story, a story has to have X, Y, and Z” when, in fact, in their culture of origin, there work would absolutely be understood correctly as a story.

This is not only an issue for writers who use storytelling techniques that don’t align with the anglo/Western/US preference, but also for writers who are neurodiverse or neuro-atypical and who use storytelling techniques and narrative voices that don’t reflect the neurotypical style or voice. These writers (who may be culturally or neurologically outside the “mainstream”—or both) get feedback like:

• This story isn’t engaging.

• The characters are unrelatable.

• The plot didn’t go anywhere.

• There were no stakes.

As though those things are objective and universal failings. Well, they’re not. I don’t control what agents want to rep or what editors want to sign or what publishers want to publish, that’s not the point of this essay, I just want to shed light on some narrative structures that the dominant and mainstream publishing industry wants you to think aren’t even stories.

A great example of a very different narrative structure from outside the anglosphere is kishōtenketsu, a story structure used extensively in classic Chinese, Korean, and Japanese storytelling. This is a four-part structure, with the parts identified (in Japanese) as:

1. Ki—introduction (with connotations of rousing or waking up) 

2. Sho—development (with connotations of becoming informed, or receiving information)

3. Ten—twist (or turnabout)

4. Ketsu—conclusion (or result, or outcome)

I want to take from kishōtenketsu a very specific example of a culture clash. Many many American editors, writing coaches, and agents—and assorted other sources of writing advice—will tell you to never begin your story with someone waking up in the morning or waking from a dream. In the dominant literary culture of the US, this is considered a gross cliche, completely dated, a milquetoast, predictable opening. But in many forms of Asian storytelling and literature, it is de rigueur to begin a story with your main character waking up. Many an anime begins with the main character leaping out of bed, late for school. In these cultures, to begin a story with a character waking up is just as correct as it is for the storytellers in the anglo culture to begin “in the middle of things” or “at the last possible moment before the action.”

Another notable difference between the four-part kishōtenketsu structure and the western three-act story structure is that kishōtenketsu builds toward a twist and not necessarily a conflict or showdown. And the inciting incident? Nah, you don’t need one. It’s not a requirement.

Further, there’s a preference in the storytelling of many Asian cultures for a collaborative, group, or team effort that resolves the plot, rather than the American preference for a main character in the role of the hero who has a cast of supporting characters. This is down to the fundamental principle of American “individualism”—Americans tend to culturally preference the efforts and perseverance of one person as heroic where many other cultures instead prefer the combined efforts of a team.

From South Asia, specifically, from West Bengal, comes a tradition called the Older Woman’s Narrative or the Widow’s Narrative. It’s a whole style of storytelling that follows the trajectory of a mother from when her children are young through when they are grown and independent; this is usually a story of a woman dedicating her life to spouse and childrearing and then being left behind by the family (a spouse may precede her in death and/or the children may leave her for spouses of their own or to migrate to another part of the country or world).

I have a hard time even imagining this in the US where older women authors routinely write young women characters because it is not easy to sell a story about an older woman here. We just don’t like those very much here in the US. (I know everybody reading can think of at least one story featuring an older woman as the main character, and so can I—and good for you—but stories about younger women, or, frankly, men of any age, are much more dominant.)

You know what else you’re not supposed to do in mainstream US storytelling? You’re not—as a rule—supposed to tell your whole story in a series of episodes unless you have a throughline that mirrors that Freytag pyramid directing the episodes and building the plot to some kind of climax through the episodic storytelling. Well, the Middle East would like a word. The frame narrative of Western greats like Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is borrowed from Arabic storytelling. Obviously we all know about the 1001 Arabian Nights but the frame form holding together a series of related, episodic stories predates the 1001 Nights. The Tantropakhyana, a Sanskrit translation, took the collection of fables in the ancient Indian Panchatantra and added a frame narrative, setting the stage for all the episodic storytelling narratives to come after.

Any type of narrative can be adjusted to fit into the Western ideal of the conflict-driven narrative with an inciting incident, climax, and resolution. That’s not to say anyone should westernize their story or that anyone has to, just something to consider for trying to sell work into the mainstream publishing industry in the US—I see a lot of authors having success (as in, books coming out and selling well) using many of the above techniques but injecting them with some of the “must-have” elements our reading population here in the US can’t do without.

I would recommend to anyone who has been getting some of the “feedback” cited above to consider that rejections you’re getting may not be due to any failing of your writing or story but may be down to the narrow preferences of the US reading public and, by extension, the preference of editors and agents to find narratives that fit the bill. There are many reasons—like an infinite number of reasons—other than “it wasn’t good” for why stories get rejected. Ethnocentrism is one of those many. 

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