I admire wonderfully crafted plots in narratives, even when the plotters themselves aren’t especially admired as fiction writers. Two examples of brilliant plotters are William Goldman (whose plot twist in MARATHON MAN literally made me gasp) and Ira Levin, whose plotting in ROSEMARY’S BABY is a thing of beauty, particularly the setting-up of Rosemary’s husband as an ambitious and skillful young actor, which makes the betrayal of Rosemary (towards his own careerist goals) plausible, while making it equally plausible that she would buy into the line of crap he peddles to her.
I do have one issue with the plotting of Rosemary’s Baby, but it seems completely well-crafted outside of that one possible flaw. I’ll share it with you later on–for now, I’m wondering if anyone else has an issue with the plot.
Sarah Waters’ books are variable in readability, but their plotting’s always tight; Fingersmith is told from the POV of both main characters reinterpreting events (first half of book one character, second half the other) and it works absolutely perfectly to only reveal the bits you need to know.
Read Ira Levin’s first book “A Kiss Before Dying.” Stepehn King praised it to the skies in “Danse Macabre.” He refered to Levin as “the Swiss watchmaker of book plotting.”
While I haven’t read a lot of it recently, to the best of my recollection, most of Isaac Asimov’s fiction is tightly plotted, with no plot holes or loose ends.
Okay, now let me share what I think is a plot hole in Rosemay’s Baby, after seeing the movie this weekend for the first time in 40 years. How the hell is an unemployed actor and his unemployed wife going to aford a big apartrment in a classy apaprtment building on the park in NYC.? No matter how well Guy was doing in commercials and such, the plot dictates that he is desperately in need of a break in his acting career–so WTF is he doing renting an expensive apartment in Manhattan? It’s necessary for the plot, but hardly plausible. A decade later, John Lennon and Yoko Oko, hardly an unempoyed couple, were taking an apartment in the same building.
Stephen R. Donaldson’s Gap series starts off as a small tale (a novella, really) of a pirate who massacres a family and kidnaps/mentally compels their young daughter to be his slave at a space station in the ass end of nowhere.
As you read through the series, the scope of the universe kept getting bigger so that by the fifth and final book interstellar empires are toppling because of the actions in the first book.
When I was finished with the series, I asked myself - how the hell did this happen? The first book was nothing and gave no inclination (on first reading) that any of the stuff in the four subsequent novels was even possible. So I reread the first book… and, yeah - it was all there - Warden Dios, the Amnion, Holt Fasner, Sorus Chaterlane. But the casual (or first-time) reader largely glossed over that stuff as background info given to add verisimilitude to the story, considering it irrelevant to the overall plot of Morn Hyland and Angus Thermopyle,
The Prestige – the novel by Christopher Priest – was so wonderfully well plotted and executed that I refused to see the movie; they could only fuck it up.
Nope–they don’t know the Woodhouses when the apartment is rented, and have a young woman (played by a former Playmate of the Month) lined up to bear Satan’s spawn, but she kills herself unexpectedly after the Woodhouses have taken the place. The question is why were they even looking for a big, roomy apartment on no income. It wasn’t the Satanists’ apartment to lease, anyway, unless you’re assuming that every NYC landlord is in league with the forces of evil.
There are good odds that they could control who got that apartment - not every apartment in the city, but one or two in their own building - but I’d forgotten about the other potential vessel.
Maybe it’s that mythical ‘rent control’ thing I’ve heard about. I’ve no idea how it works, but it supposedly explains the apartments of the Friends characters - Grandparents passing on tenancies.
I also love the parts of it that the author described in the author’s note - the victim becoming the hero, the villain becoming the victim, etc. Who’da thought we’d be enraged on behalf of Angus by the end?
I have read it, and I reckon the plotting was pretty good, but not outstanding. Really it’s Fingersmith that I’m thinking of, plus probably Affinity and Tipping the Velvet. Nightwatch sent me (literally) to sleep every time I tried to read it, so I’ve no idea how well that one’s plotted.
I always thought the movie Ruthless People had an unusually intricate plot, especially for a comedy. But there are some absurd coincidences which could only have worked in a comedy, too.
