4 July 2016
We writers like to talk about elements of craft. Character, theme, setting, voice, point of view, language. But I seldom hear fellow writers talking about plot. When I first taught a seminar on non-traditional plot construction at NYU's Graduate Writing Program, some students signed up because they hadn't previously given the topic any thought. John Barth quotes Norman Mailer as saying that he tended "‘to mumble about technical matters like an old mechanic.' ‘Let's put the thingamajig before the whoosits here,' said Mailer, ‘is how I usually state the deepest literary problems to myself.'"
