Note: This post may contain spoilers, you’ve been warned.
A while ago, I posted some tips on writing “tightly-plotted” fiction. This was in large part due to some reviewers using the term to describe my shaggy-dog space opera Apotheosis. However, after listening to the audiobook American Gods by Neil Gaiman I thought it would behoove me to point out that the “tightly-plotted” label is simply a description of a way someone can put a story together– one well suited to thriller, action-adventure and other fast-moving types of stories. It is certainly not the only way to put a story together, and there are plenty of examples of very well-plotted stories that are by no stretch of the imagination “tight.”
Case in point, American Gods. It is a sprawling, episodic pastoral novel that is as much about mythic stories in general as it is about the mythic story it’s telling. It is also exquisitely plotted. The main arc is very simple, but not quite as simple as Gaiman leads you to suspect at first. In fact, it is quite telling that both con-games and coin tricks are a recurring motif throughout, which in a more “tightly” plotted story would almost slam the reader in the face with what’s going on. However, in something of a genius move, the elaborate, rich and evocative structure of the story itself– with its subplots and sub-stories, its tale-telling and tangents– is an expert exercise in misdirection. The reader is so entranced with Gaiman’s storytelling that he can lay major plot points in plain sight without anyone noticing, so the final third or so he can engage in reveal after reveal and the reader is left stunned at how the trick was actually pulled off.
I suspect most readers were stunned when they realized who Shadow’s cellmate actually was, especially since they were pretty much told flat out who it was in the first few pages and they just didn’t catch it. I’d also suspect that these same readers were patting themselves on the back when they understood who Mr. Wednesday was back during the airplane ride. Also, again we have everything laid out for us when Wednesday lovingly describes the Violin Con and Shadow points out that Wednesday’s favorite grifts are two-man cons. In a “tightly plotted” novel, the reader would inevitably know, right then, what’s happening– what had to be happening; because the advantage, and the disadvantage, of a tight plot is that everything on the page is necessarily in service to the greater plot. The reader knows that every scene is serving, somehow, the central machine, and with some genre savvy they can pick out what’s important and intuit the eventual reveal. But because the structure of American Gods is not “tight” in that sense, there’s no telegraphing to the reader that this particularly entertaining tangent is any more important to the main plot arc then any of the dozen equally entertaining tangents surrounding it. That structure breaks down the genre-savvy reader’s impulse to knit everything together ahead of the writer, so when Gaiman starts taking pieces and putting them together, the inevitability seems much more magical.
American Gods is a classic example of how a plot can be well done without drawing attention to itself– and how it works because it doesn’t draw attention to itself.
