Playing plot games. I hate them, personally. My husband likened it to warfare – to win the war, you need to win the battle. To write a really good book, you need a really good plot. Which, taking it down a level, means, you need really good characters. Really good situations. Really good (now, say it with me,) Goals, Motivation, and Conflict. To take it down even more levels, really good chapter breaks. Really good sentence structures. Really, really good hooks, and twists on those hooks.

Meta games, that's what my husband called them. Except in meta games, you keep going up a level, instead of down. You have a character, and her background. And then something happens. And then something else happens. And then another character gets involved, and lo and behold, as long as something else continues to happen, you have a plot - in today's world.

It wasn't always so, this focus on conflict and resolution. Yes, good stories did, always have, and always will have some sort of conflict and resolution; but at one point in time, indeed, at all periods in time, it has also been how the story has been told, more than just the story. The verbiage used. The way each character expressed themselves. The way the author described a scene.

I saw a movie again recently. "A Room With A View", by Ivory/Merchant. It is a fairly simple story, really, with not a whole lot of world-shaking conflict. You know from the first kiss in the Italian countryside, in a barley field studded with poppies, that Lucy Honeychurch will marry George Emerson. Poor Mr. Vyse is merely a stooge in their love story. But the words used throughout, the language of camera, landscape, body and voice, was exquisite. The performances, mingled with the words used, made watching the film a pure emotional delight.

How to recreate something like that, but in our time parameters? I've been fretting that I'm not plotting right. When I asked my oh-so-prolific father how he goes about putting his ideas down on paper, he said that it's the best part of writing, the simple telling of the tale. Six or seven typewritten, single-spaced pages would do for him to set it down. (This is from the man who writes seven to ten hours, every day. So he's had some practice at it.) I try. I 'tell the tale', and it sucks. Or it doesn't suck too much, but for some reason I can't get excited about it. Or I get excited about it, but what I think is a chick-lit ends up sounding like a 'legitimate' romance.

How to plot? That, begging the Bard's pardon, is the question. And after an illuminating, intellectual discussion after dinner over the end of a bottle of wine with my husband (actor, director, painter, gardener), we came up with the best plotting device, ever.

Discipline. Sitting down, four to five hours every day (or, heck, if you have a full time job, one hour), and writing. Writing plots until one strikes the imagination in just the right way. Writing until you can't stand it, and then writing some more, without letting yourself procrastinate. This may seem extreme, until you realize just how many well-known writers say that if you think you may want to do anything else than write, then you should.

Writing isn't for wimps, folks. And the bedrock, the bottom line, the layer upon which most of your writing rests upon, is plotting.