The Case for the Plotless Novel
The breakup happened in late summer, suddenly and abruptly, via a WhatsApp video call. I was in California to help my mother prepare for her wedding. She was getting married to her childhood sweetheart of over forty years and I would be spending a few weeks there with my family. I’d gotten laid off from my job about a month before, so I was glad for the chance to recuperate on the West Coast. But the call took place two days into my trip, and I was sitting on the front patio of my stepdad’s porch because it was the only place in the house where you didn’t have to worry about being overheard. The harsh, Southern California sun roasted my face as I squinted into the phone camera in disbelief. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. It wasn’t supposed to happen at all. Summer isn’t the season for heartbreak; it is the season for falling in love, and being in love, which is what we had just done. The breakup was discombobulating because it didn’t make sense for something so terrible to be happening somewhere so beautiful. Endings are meant to happen in the winter, in the darkness, and the cold, with Elliott Smith on repeat. Instead, I was baking in the Orange County rays and hearing the remnants of an upbeat Madonna song playing in the house, since we were in the middle of selecting wedding reception playlists.
None of this, I thought to myself, was supposed to happen, except it did.
It is our jobs, as writers, to make sense of the senseless, to create narratives as a form of meaning-making. We write stories in an attempt to understand other people and ourselves, and the illogical, and often cruel, world we live in. I am riddled with the disease of self-mythology, creating arcs and plot devices in my head to allow myself to better comprehend the neverending horrors of daily life. I tell myself that the ex-boyfriend that I dated in my early twenties was a valuable lesson in learning what I wanted, and didn’t want, from a relationship. The job I had for over a year that made me have a panic attack every time I heard the Slack notification alert go off made me realize that I did not want to have a career in copywriting. Every traumatic experience I’ve had is ultimately a moral lesson to build character, because according to story structure, personal suffering is a key component that leads to eventual self-actualization. We tell ourselves that our suffering will have been “worth it” in the end, once something better comes along. But what if nothing better comes along? What transpired broke every narrative convention, every storytelling tool, and corrupted every plot beat as established by Save the Cat and every storytelling exercise. What if instead of living in a conventional three-act novel structure, we are inhabiting a plotless one? I had lost faith in storytelling itself, because the story that I had been writing for myself turned out wrong.
In Peter Brooks’s essay collection Seduced By Story, he challenges this notion of creating narratives merely as a way to cope with the unknown, and are egotistical: “We are left with many mini-narratives everywhere, individual or collective and, in my cases, dominantly narcissistic and self-serving.” He disavows how we invent plotlines and character arcs and fictional fantasies to get through human life, the mundanity of the every day. Perhaps there are no definite answers to life’s problems, and our job is to merely exist; maybe there is nothing that we can expect to save us, because we have to save ourselves. He does go on to say that “story may be a necessary part of our cognitive interaction with the world because its mode of explaining takes place within time, and humans are time-bound in a way that they are not place-bound.”
In the aftermath of the breakup, I was in a state of psychosis, wondering what was real and what wasn’t. I replayed the moments of our relationship in our head like a dead-wife montage from a film. I questioned my own memories. I had been in love, and I was so sure that he had been, too. At 31 years old, I finally learned that true love felt like home, and peace, in another person. Up until that point, my life revolved around trying to be exceptional and resilient, favoring my independence and what I could achieve for myself professionally, only to realize that the most sensational, beautiful thing a person could ever do is allow themselves to love, and be loved. As a millennial, I did everything that my generation was told to do in order to be successful: graduate college, get a job, acquire health insurance, contribute to a 401K. I had lived the life I thought I was supposed to be living, until that person came into my life and took it apart, and then rendering it in technicolor.
Nihilism and helplessness poisoned my thinking. I fell into a deep, depressive black hole. I thought I had done everything right. I worked hard at my job. I worked hard at the relationship. But both were beyond my control and they collapsed. For the first time in my life, I didn’t know what was going to happen next. I couldn’t make sense of anything, because the very structure that I had believed in and would be my salvation had failed. I started wondering what self-narratives served, and how much self-mythology was merely a coping mechanism that we subscribe ourselves to in order to make it to the next day. Happiness is never guaranteed. I was surprised to learn that the breakup affected me more than the layoff did. I had been unhappy in the role, and I used my layoff as a reason to look for a job in a completely different industry—there I was again, rationalizing my job being terminated as part of a greater, self-serving developmental arc. I told myself that I could, ostensibly, handle unemployment: there would always be some other job down the line. But what terrified me was the thought of never being with that person again, because I knew that what we had was special, and extraordinary. It is a story that I feel so lucky to have lived.
In the plotless novel, conventional, action-heavy story structures are discarded in favor of character-driven stories. Each character’s journey is relatively low stakes compared to those in science fiction, adventure, and fantasy, where the plot is to defeat the dragon, rescue the princess, and save the world. In a character-driven novel, the plot is to save one another. My favorite plotless novels almost read like psychological fiction, where you are allowed access into a person’s interiority to understand their motivations, their traumas. You are granted an intimate glimpse into the inner-workings of someone else, a window into a life you would never lead. You grow to empathize with them, and if the author is good enough, reading about characters doing something as mundane and normal as falling in love will feel as high-stakes as the world ending. I know that heartbreak feels that way.
I love these novels because they are all about feelings, and I think that the reminder that simply being human is enough of a task itself is comforting. Novels like the Outline trilogy by Rachel Cusk and Larissa Pham’s recent debut Discipline involve characters going through traumatic life changes, but the novels are thin on plot, favoring narrative development in character as they grow and try to make sense of their lives. They learn to accept that there will be no greater power to save them, that they have to find the answers within themselves to absolve them of what gives them pain. A lot of these stories are not linear, nor follow a conventional timeline, but the arc that is present is that of growth—through conversations, and relationships, and day-to-day quandaries. Sally Rooney novels are miraculous and wonderful for the very reason people love to criticize her: they are about ordinary people, and their interiorities, and how meeting the right person can transform you for the better. Her novels are often criticized by men as mundane because they are rooted in the everyday, yet she writes about something so universal: the joy and wonder of human connection. In the real world, love itself is the closest thing that we have to magic. We take it for granted.
It does help to think of the bad times as chapters that we can close and move on from. It’s useful to tell yourself that things will get better with the next chapter because the only way out, as they say, is through. We can tell ourselves whatever narratives we like as long as they feel real, and true, to us. I’d grown frustrated with how my life was no longer following a clean arc. But this was also a philosophy that came at my own detriment. We put pressure on ourselves to do things according to a certain timeline, and tell ourselves that if we don’t accomplish things by a certain point, we have failed. But storytelling isn’t linear, either, and requires some psychological distance, and grounding in real-time. “We lack not just present time to devote to a story but also past time to draw upon, the temporal distance between events and their telling that traditional narrative requires,” writes Hannah Kim in her LARB essay When Story Loses the Plot;
Storytelling demands leisure, or at least a relaxed mind, since immersion requires the mental margin to forget ourselves and linger in the unfolding. That capacity for temporal extension—for losing oneself inside a story—is becoming harder and harder to exercise.
“Storytelling” also has been co-opted by corporate brands and marketing to sell products that need a human element, a clean, predictable arc that their consumers can hold onto. Brooks goes on to say that storytelling as justification mystifies more than it solves, stating that storytelling can sometimes act as an evasion of reality. But what is crucial in identifying a good story is how it connects to you. I think there is a comfort in knowing that salvation, and hope, comes in understanding ourselves and people through stories. “The narrative of the past worked out in psychotherapy may be a blend of fact and fiction: its test lies more in its therapeutic results than its verifiability,” Brooks writes. “The analyst needs to reach a coherent story of who he or she is. But developing a narrative is a tool toward self-understanding rather than the goal.”
Nothing about our relationship made sense, but it did. We were doing long distance. We met at speed dating in Ridgewood, Queens that we both went to “as a joke.” I noticed him because he was the one man at the event who wasn’t white and lived in Bushwick and was a DJ. He lived in London, I lived in New York. I loved guitar music. He liked to go to noise shows where a man would clang swords against one other. We were opposites in every way but shared a love for music and art and adventure. We made each other’s worlds bigger and challenged each other. He was shy, and kind, and I found him interesting. I liked making him laugh. But he would scoff at the emotional weight of Sally Rooney novels and seemed uncomfortable with the idea of owning your own narrative because that meant having agency. He told me that the one thing he would never do again was to be in a long distance relationship, but we ended up accidentally falling in love through digital screens, across oceans, during hour-long FaceTime calls in the middle of the day over the course of a year. Just knowing that he was there, on the other end of the phone, was enough.
We’re so plot-focused that we forget that character arcs and development also count as plots. I think it is about finding the perfect balance of doing it for the plot and your heart. I followed my heart through the illogic of it all and it led me to the most fulfilling experience of my life. I made my brain let go of the steering wheel, let my heart drive it instead. Doing grand, crazy gestures like booking a spontaneous trip to London for Valentine’s Day felt like the most normal thing in the world. I was rewriting the story of what happiness was to me, free from the pressures of structure and narrative convention.
We had conversations about what we were doing. Were we doing the right thing? Was this the smart thing for us to do, to be in a relationship with someone who didn’t live in the same country? There were so many questions that we couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer. We knew that it felt amazing to be together. Once we started thinking about what we thought we “should” do and what our future would look like and how to figure out the logistics of it all, things got hard. Trying to apply conventional structures to our relationship made things difficult. But there was a period of five months where we didn’t see each other and it allowed us to build on our connection from a distance. It helped me realize that what we had wasn’t purely physical, and something much more meaningful. We were able to forge a connection from different countries that deepened our intimacy and understanding of each other so that when we did meet again, it felt better and more amazing each time.
Sometimes I wonder if timing and geographical distance is what made the relationship work. Were we only in love because we met under such impossible circumstances (speed dating) and because we didn’t have to see each other every day, turning each visit into a honeymoon period since the regular factors of relationship (decline boredom, predictability, routine) didn’t apply to us? But the rigid framework of conventional storytelling didn’t apply to our relationship. I think it would have been a privilege to discover that our relationship failed because of those issues, because that meant we were given the resources and circumstances to at least give it a proper go. Our story ended too soon, and too early.
Being in a long-distance relationship had its challenges. He was fixated on the narrative of what we should be doing: how we should be navigating our logistical issues, what made logical sense for us to do so that it could work. I shared these concerns, but they didn’t really worry me. Fighting for something that seemed impossible didn’t seem hard when you knew that the other person was worth it. I wanted him to live in the moment, to forget about the structures of plot, to allow himself to enjoy our time together without already looking ahead to define the ending, or conclusion, because we were still writing the story together. All that mattered was if we made each other happy, and that was a question we always knew how to answer.
I’ve been on both sides. I’ve suffered through debasing plotlessness while also needing arcs and plotlines and character development to make sense of my life, to give it meaning, to make it worth something, to make me understand the impossible. Because I think all that we’re doing is trying to understand ourselves, and each other.
So much about the human experience is allowing yourself to do things for the plot even if it seems daunting. If it is the wrong move, then you’ve learned something. You can grow from your mistakes, course-correct. But to take a chance on something, and to take risks, is to experience something new and profound. Allowing yourself to experience things beyond your wildest imagination is the point of life. We are constantly writing our own stories, tossing out discarded storylines, arcs that don’t enhance the plot or character development. The people who no longer serve us get written out of the storyline so that we can make room for new ones.
I lost a bit of myself during that time, and the pain has changed me forever. But the love did, too. I can’t return to who I was before the relationship because I have outgrown that version of myself. Falling in love as deeply as I did changed me because it allowed me to believe something so much bigger than myself. It is spring now. Winter has ended, and I will have no more use for my Elliott Smith records until at least fall, and plan to be spinning Madonna’s “Express Yourself” instead. I’d lost a sense of myself for a period, and who I was, but I know now that what is ultimately worth living for are the stories that we get to tell.
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