nature of conflict, he knows what is dramatic. To him, it may feel as if a plot idea is inspirational: “I just thought of it.” But you have to get to the stage where you have earned this kind of inspiration.
When you compose a story, your mind does not go through the steps I outlined. If you know a plot in advance, you can easily ask the right questions; but when you start from scratch, so many possibilities exist at each turn that you cannot go through them consciously. You have to let your subconscious be the selector—and it can become the selector, throwing you the right, most dramatic situations, only if you know what conflict is and why it is necessary. When you know this, and when you have practiced by laboriously composing a few plots, your imagination begins to work automatically and saves you a lot of the steps.
What I have so far described of Notre-Dame de Paris is not the plot, but the plot-theme. The writer’s job is not finished. But once you have this kind of central conflict, you do not have an “anything” anymore. You have set a limit to the nature of your story, a limit that will be your standard of selection in regard to events.
If you are not clear on your plot-theme, your story will fall apart; it will have no logical continuity. Also, you yourself will not know what to do. You will start to include events because you feel like it, probably on the principle of association. One scene makes you feel something else, so you write another which has nothing to do with your central line. Your story is going nowhere, and you do not know where to go.
Before you construct a story, you must decide on the central conflict, which will then serve as the standard telling you what you have to include in order to fully develop this conflict, and what is superfluous.
Let me give a few more examples of plot-themes.
Suppose you want to write a love story. If two persons are in love, that is not a conflict; you have to make their love clash with some serious value of theirs. Suppose they belong to opposite nations at war. A plot is now possible, but not if they merely sit at home and long for each other; what you need is to put them into an action conflict. Let us say he is an army officer and she a spy for the other side, with a dangerous secret to reveal, and you bring them to a position where he has to either let her escape or shoot her to save his country. This is the kind of conflict that can serve as a plot-theme—it has enough material in it to give you the line for a story (an unoriginal one, but bromides, it is said, became bromides because they were good the first time).
Suppose you want to write a story about unrequited love. If a man is desperately in love with a woman, but she is not in love with him, that is not yet a conflict. But suppose she has to marry him for some outside reason—to get an inheritance, or to be allowed to stay in America—and he agrees to marry her in name only. Conflict, and thus the possibility of a good story, is immediately introduced.
Plot conflict is not conflict merely in a character’s mind or soul, while he sits at home. A plot conflict has to be expressed in action. When you construct a plot, therefore, you must be a “materialist” and concern yourself only with values and issues that can be expressed in physical action.
Not everything is dramatizable by means of plot. For instance, the theme of Anthem is the word I, and the story is built around one idea: What would happen if a man lost the concept I, and how would he regain it? This is not a plot-theme, because it is internal.
In Anthem, there is no plot—no conflict of two or more persons against each other. The hero’s adversary is the collective as such; and the collective has no particular purpose beyond objecting to him escaping. He is not fighting individuals, but the whole system. By contrast, We the Living, my most tightly plotted story, has not only a social message, the evil of a collectivist society, but also a conflict among specific persons. The story is not “Kira [the heroine] against the state”; the villain is actually