Interesting idea, let me try to parse my thoughts on this by writing it out.
One real-life situation where you regularly see one person's plot being used by another is ghostwriting for franchises, as in this confession (http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2013-winter/selections/amy-boesky-656342/) of a Sweet Valley High ghostwriter who is now a professor of literature. (I think I read some of the books by her back in high school. I always suspected something like this was going on, given how the credit was "created by" Francine Pascal.) She describes how Pascal, the creator, gave the writers outlines and style guides which the writers wrote into final products, kind of like frames and parts being assembled into cars. In this context the plot is a factor of production, a means of creating products and not a final product in itself.
Of course, if you expand on the car parts metaphor you can come up with a market for plot as a component of story, along the line of parts being traded between hobbyists or businesses. It would be a product that's interesting for people who already have the skill to put it into a finished product, and so the market will be smaller market than the one for finished books, but that doesn't mean it can't exist.
Plot, however, is much more contingent than car parts. If you stick a sound engine into a car and hook it up right the car will run (or so I'm led to believe--I don't know a thing about cars), but turning a plot into a good story requires more than doing everything right by a technical manual. Even a small change in characters or setting could make an otherwise workable plot fly apart, which results in more work for the writer fixing what's broken. Even rigidly defined characters and setting aren't a complete antidote because really subtle details of writing could similarly result in the product going off spec.It would be as though adjusting a valve in the engine turned the car door purple or something, and what's more you could not predict this until it happened. The process is just too fluid and unpredictable.
Fundamentally the writer herself goes into the writing in a way that I don't see happening with, say, putting together cars. Obviously a dedicated car hobbyist or artisan is going to leave their mark on the cars they put together, but their style isn't going to be disruptive to the manufacture. Unlike in writing, the tiny details of a car hobbyist's personality and craft won't blow up the engine unless there was some defect or mistake.
This's why I can see plot changing hands mostly in a franchise setting where the individual quirks of the writers are suppressed in the interest of having a homogeneous product. There the outline acts more like a car engine because those disruptive influences are controlled. In the hobbyist or professional market for writing, on the other hand, individuality neither can nor should be suppressed because it's the whole point.
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Date: 2013-04-24 05:50 am (UTC)Interesting idea, let me try to parse my thoughts on this by writing it out.
One real-life situation where you regularly see one person's plot being used by another is ghostwriting for franchises, as in this confession (http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2013-winter/selections/amy-boesky-656342/) of a Sweet Valley High ghostwriter who is now a professor of literature. (I think I read some of the books by her back in high school. I always suspected something like this was going on, given how the credit was "created by" Francine Pascal.) She describes how Pascal, the creator, gave the writers outlines and style guides which the writers wrote into final products, kind of like frames and parts being assembled into cars. In this context the plot is a factor of production, a means of creating products and not a final product in itself.
Of course, if you expand on the car parts metaphor you can come up with a market for plot as a component of story, along the line of parts being traded between hobbyists or businesses. It would be a product that's interesting for people who already have the skill to put it into a finished product, and so the market will be smaller market than the one for finished books, but that doesn't mean it can't exist.
Plot, however, is much more contingent than car parts. If you stick a sound engine into a car and hook it up right the car will run (or so I'm led to believe--I don't know a thing about cars), but turning a plot into a good story requires more than doing everything right by a technical manual. Even a small change in characters or setting could make an otherwise workable plot fly apart, which results in more work for the writer fixing what's broken. Even rigidly defined characters and setting aren't a complete antidote because really subtle details of writing could similarly result in the product going off spec.It would be as though adjusting a valve in the engine turned the car door purple or something, and what's more you could not predict this until it happened. The process is just too fluid and unpredictable.
Fundamentally the writer herself goes into the writing in a way that I don't see happening with, say, putting together cars. Obviously a dedicated car hobbyist or artisan is going to leave their mark on the cars they put together, but their style isn't going to be disruptive to the manufacture. Unlike in writing, the tiny details of a car hobbyist's personality and craft won't blow up the engine unless there was some defect or mistake.
This's why I can see plot changing hands mostly in a franchise setting where the individual quirks of the writers are suppressed in the interest of having a homogeneous product. There the outline acts more like a car engine because those disruptive influences are controlled. In the hobbyist or professional market for writing, on the other hand, individuality neither can nor should be suppressed because it's the whole point.