When authors play God

 A J.K. Rowling plot spreadsheet for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

The Guardian considers the importance of plot in telling a good tale:

It is no accident that one non-literary meaning of “plot” is, as the OED has it, “a plan or project, secretly contrived by one or more persons, to accomplish some wicked, criminal, or illegal purpose; a conspiracy”. The very invention of that plot-heavy species of fiction, the thriller, often involves this kind of secret and ingenious villainy. The British thriller reaches back to the so-called “sensation” novels of Collins in the 19th century. The improbable yet weirdly persuasive plot of his bestselling novel The Woman in White derived from the dastardly yet brilliant scheme of his villain, Count Fosco, to steal a rich young woman’s inheritance. Collins pioneered the use of multiple narrators and disorientating time shifts to present the evidence of this scheme and yet to obscure it too, for like his protagonist, Walter Hartright, the reader must be challenged to work out the plot. 

Collins was the first novelist who pleaded with reviewers not to give away the plots of his novels when they came out in book form, for these were their essence. Victorian critics worried aloud that Collins was teaching readers to read just for the plot, made all the more exciting – in the manner of the TV mini-series – by being structured in weekly instalments. Where was the edification in that? 

Does every novel have a plot? Not exactly. Anthony Trollope breezily confessed: “I have never troubled myself much about the construction of plots.” Even Trollope devotees will recognise that the author often seems to be discovering outcomes as he goes along. His lack of interest in intricate plotting is justified by its supposed unlifelikeness. A plot is an imposition of pattern. In life, one thing leads to another, but without design. In contrast, Trollope’s near-contemporary Dickens eventually dedicated himself to the machinations of plot. All his novels were originally published in weekly or monthly instalments, and were therefore still being written even as they were being published. For many we have his original number plans, which reveal how carefully – from the beginning – his plots were laid. In those number plans we can see how Dickens, as he begins a novel, looks ahead to eventual revelations and denouements. 

The best plots foresee their endings even as they begin. A highly literary novelist, winner of the 2011 Booker, who recently exploited this power of foreseeing was Julian Barnes in The Sense of an Ending (the clue is in the title). Barnes rings a postmodern change on the power of plot to foresee a narrative shape. His novel’s ending shifts what we think of the evidence given in the earliest parts of the narrative in a way that, we realise, has been carefully planned. Any quick internet search will allow you to listen in on readers of the novel arguing about what exactly has been revealed (Who has slept with whom? Who has fathered a child?). Barnes slyly manages to combine artful plotting with narrative indeterminacy. 

The beginning only truly makes sense when we reach the ending.