Roane, on the subject of PWP, which we were talking about in chat last night: what you’ve got in “Without Words” is a type of plot that they don’t bother teaching us about in writing school. It’s a very internal, personal plot whose development is driven by and happens within the characters’ inner selves; the conflict, such as it is, exists in the perception of the reader rather than in the characters within the story. Japanese literary tradition recognizes this as an authentic story structure and has a name for it (Kishōtenketsu). Since I read about it, I’ve come to recognize that it rests at the heart of a lot of stories that we in the West would tend to label as “character studies.”
In reality, I don’t think there is such a thing as a story without plot. I think there are just plot structures that we’re conditioned not to think about or that are invisible because they haven’t been labeled.
That would be an interesting project, wouldn’t it? Go around reading ‘plotless’ stories and picking out the nature of the plots they secretly contain. I wonder how many new structures we could discover…