E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, Plot, Story, Genre or How I Learned to Love Plot and Start Writing

In 1927, EM Forster of Passage to India and Howard’s End fame delivered a series of lectures at Trinity College which have since been put into book form as Aspects of the Novel. The lectures break the novel down into its component parts like an anatomist taking apart a corpse. I cannot recommend the book highly enough. Even if one disagrees with Forster about particulars, it is a snapshot into the mind of a talented novelist on the craft.

He lobs bombs left and right as he proceeds through the lecture. He disagrees with Aristotle on the use of action, regrets that a novel must tell a story, describes English language novels as less than world class, and classes Joyce’s Ulysses as a fantasy. (Quick! Reshelve it with the rest of the genre fiction!)

His thoughts on story and plot are most interesting and germane to a writer working in the 21^st century. Plot, so long the red-headed stepchild of writing, has again taken her place on the dais. If a writer wants people to read what they write, it would be wise for them to include plot within it.

Forster’s take on the issue is noteworthy. Clearly, he believes it to be of import as he devotes two of his nine lectures to it, one chapter entitled story and the other plot.

Forster heaps scorn upon the story. Story, which he defines as a narrative of events arranged in time, is old, and has as its only virtue that it leaves the audience wanting to know what happens next. He summons the ghost of Scheherazade from Arabian Nights, who is only able to survive by leaving the king in suspense every morning so he won’t have her executed because he wants to hear what will happen next. Forster paints a picture of cavemen huddled around a fire “fatigued with contending against the mammoth or wooly rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next?”

And Forster looks at this and sees the presence of story in the novel as a flaw. He writes of the fact that a novel must tell a story “I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different- melody, or perception of truth, not this low atavistic form.”

All those facts which Forster presents as flaws on the face of story I look upon and see nothing but marks of beauty. Who would not be proud of keeping an audience awake, held in suspense by nothing more than the power of their words? And as for the primitive, primeval ancestry of the story- Well, like vampires, its antiquity is what gives it strength. The novel has been the campfire of the past few centuries ‘round which we have huddled to hear tales which yes, keep us awake and wondering what will happen next, but also give order to the world.

Let us move on to plot, which Forster has a higher opinion of. Plot, Forster says differs from story in causality. The famous example from Aspects of the Novel is that a story is “The king died, and the queen died afterwards,” whereas a plot is “The king died and then the queen died of grief.”

The element of causality in the second example links the first event two the second, and makes whole what could be two random happenstances. Here he does present a vital truth which writers should understand. A plot, unlike a story, is linked by causality. Event A, leads to B, which leads to C, and produces a greater effect than A happened, then B happened than C happened. Voldemort killed Harry’s parents, Harry became an orphan and went to Hogwarts where he foiled Voldemort’s plots and eventually threw down Voldemort himself, which is vastly more interesting than if Harry had never met Voldemort before and then defeated him.

But we must ask ourselves now, are not all the shameful angles present in story not also present in plot? Is the plot not of antediluvian lineage? Does it not usually move forward in time? Does it not leave us in suspense? And if story is shameful for those reasons, why is plot laudable?

And what is the difference between story and plot again? Oh yes, causality. A leads to B, etc.

But if plot is just story with one added component, a crucial component it is worth noting, is Forster making an artificial distinction?

Are what Forster calls plot and story basically the same, but what Forster calls “stories” are bad plots and what Forster calls “plots” are good plots? The answer is of course yes.

Forster because of his genius, makes the lesser argument appear the greater, convincing us all for almost a century that there is a division between these two words.

I see in this distinction, as with so many things which may not entirely make sense in literature, the shadow of elitism. Story is for housewives who purchase novels at the grocery store, and pencil-necked geeks who find in fantasy stories power they didn’t have in high school. Plots are for novels purchased by college-educated intelligentsia at independent bookstores. Midwesterners and southerners write stories. Real people live near oceans and write plots.

This frisson of elitism is present even in Forster’s own work. In his chapter on story, he imagines asking three Englishmen “What does a novel do?” The first, a bus driver, and the second, some sort of businessman, both agree that a novel tells a story and enjoy the fact that it does. And the third man, who Forster admits is himself, says “Yes- Oh dear, yes- The novel tells a story.” It is this regret, this hesitancy to admit that the stories Forster enjoys could be the same as those enjoyed by a bus driver, which hints at the reason behind the division.

I reject it wholeheartedly. There are good plots and bad plots, which are differences of quality, not kind, as Forster puts forth.