The three functions of storytelling, for the reader:
--Entertainment
--Escaping Reality
--To Understand More of the World
'There have been storytellers since people had full enough bellies to stop and think for a moment. And whether te story is told round a camp fire or in the pages of a book,' or in the Divinus IC, 'the audience is seeking the fulfillment of these same three needs: entertainment,
escape, understanding.'

However, all is pointless if you cannot hold the reader's attention.
This is done by raising intriguing questions and delaying their answers. 'Make 'em laugh; make 'em cry; make 'em wait.' - Charles Reade
While a single intriguing question may be enough for a novel, ideally there should be ones raised every chapter (or in our case, post).

These narrative questions are of two types: Suspense and Mystery.
The former are questions which look forward into the future for their answer (what happens next?), the latter are those which look back into the past for their answer (how did we get into this bloody mess?).
'A storyteller who believes that depth of theme or brilliance of style excuses him or her from raising questions and delaying their answer may be in danger of the cardinal literary crime: boring the readers.

What is a plot?
We must first distinguish story and plot. E.M Forester (whose books Kho has definitely read >.>) does this for us:

'Let us define plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died, and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.'



It is CAUSALITY (o.o) that differentiates story ("and then-and then-") from plot. Without causality, there are no answers to the fundamental questions of 'what happens next?' and 'how did we get into this bloody mess?'

'A classical plot is a narrative of causality which results in a completed process of significant change, giving the reader emotional satisfaction.'

A 'process', as understood in the above definition, is 'an event that occurs in time' and so has a beginning, middle, and ending. This process should be 'complete'; while a story is just a straight line going into infinity, a plot is a series of loops which eventually comes back on itself to complete the journey:



Not all questions need to be neatly answered, but the main questions must; so that the reader can confidently say, by the end, why (as in Forester's example) the queen died. The unspoken contract between reader and writer is: I will raise the questions, the author says, and by the end of the book (or equivalent) I will supply the solution. Failing this makes for disgruntled readers.

The completed process should involve CHANGE which is SIGNIFICANT. The change does not have to be in the outer world, it could be internal. Whatever it is, there MUST be change. If the story charts the journey a character from A to B, B can be anything: happy, sad, up, down. Anything other than A, that is.

And finally, this journey should be EMOTIONALLY SATISFYING to the reader. Fiction is, first and foremost, an emotional experience - it appeals to the heart first, rather than the brain (otherwise it would be an essay). This satisfaction, ultimately, comes from a good answer to a good question.

All stories are quests; somebody wants something and goes on a journey to get it - it could be money, survival, a return to normalcy, a relationship, or anything else. The character succeeds or fails, or something inbetween. Full stop.

There are FOUR basic requirements for a plot:
--1) At least two characters: Just as there is only story, there is only one subject matter of fiction; the human condition. The characters can be disguised as aliens, rabbits, carrots, computers, they are all in effect human/quasi-human. A plot, therefore, needs people. Why two or more? Why not just one? For two reasons: 1) personal relationships lie at the heart of the human condition, even if only by their absence. The author has come across no book that has only one character - even those featuring 'the last man on earth' or Paul Sayer's catatonic hero in The Comfort of Madness have other characters in the form of memories. 2) your job is to make your character's life as hard as possible. Hell is other people.
--2) A protagonist or protagonists: The who of the story, can be one, two, or many. Discussed by the author in another chapter.
--3) An issue which involves conflict: Achieving the goal of the quest immediately is no fun and boring. There must therefore be struggle, conflict, hardship. Plot requires change, and significant change can only come about through conflict. Things might happen by happy coincidence, but if that keeps happening the reader will soon get bored. Conflict does not have to be on a large scale - war, destruction, apocalypse, the earth splits open and releases the mutated cockroach people who have been biding their time for millenia! - it can be small, internal, quiet.
--4) Some sort of resolution of that conflict: This requires that all important choices have been made and nothing significant is left for the protagonist. Tragedies end in death, removing all options for at least one character - but it can also be unsatisfying as an escape from a tight corner. If the protagonist is alive by the end and conflict still rages, has the major conflict been resolved? This is particularly difficult where the conflict is internal, and can be answered by understanding completely what the protagonist's quest is. Has the holy grail been found, or have the protagonist's hopes been dashed? Or is it an inbetween, sweet-sour or irony? While beginning a story with an accident or coincidence is fine, one should be wary of endig it that way. Inferior ancient Greek playwrites would at times put themseles in such a bind that they could only end their play by calling on a god to exact summary justice - what has come down to us today as deus ex machina, the god in the machine (no, not Vakarlon >.>). Modern equivalents are 'the cavalry arriving' or the heroine waking up and it was all a dream (spoiler alert: as happens in Alice in Wonderland, to the author's dismay as a child). 'You can't paint your character into a corner and then deny the existence of walls and floors.'

Two conventions of resolution (which you can completely ignore, but are good to know):
--Place the resolution in the hands of the protagonist: where the protagonist uses his or her skills, resourcefulness etc. to resolve the quest, rather than an all-powerful hero/heroine coming to the rescue.
--Good-guy bad-guy final showdown: self-explanatory.

Sources of Antagonism:
Someone or something needs to oppose the protagonist, or there's no point, the quest is done before it starts. There are three levels:
--1) Inner: Inner turmoil perhaps, psychological struggle, guilt, self-hate, doubt, anger, broken heart etc.
--2) Interpersonal: Character A and Character B have different mutually incompatible goals and motivations which create conflict.
--3) Environmental: Can be physical, where a character's wellbeing is threatened (burning building, poverty, illness), or social, where a character's social status is under duress (society's disapproval, consequences of breaking the law etc.)

Having sources of antagonism that are purely from one level may create a shallow story. Making use of all three levels can contribute to the depth of the plot.