how i think about theme and plot

I'm currently engaged in the effort to unfuck one of my problem child WIPs, and at risk of jinxing myself, I've turned a corner. While the efforts of my unfucking centre around plot--making the sequence of events make sense and feel satisfying, because currently they do not--I started making actual progress when I set down my follicle-damage-inducing attempts to rearrange, cut, or add scenes.

Plot and pacing (which is closely linked to plot) were the things I found most daunting when I started writing long stories. This is a common experience! Particularly in fandom, many writers are happy to say they write plotless things; there are whole subgenres of fic ostensibly founded on the lack of a plot. But is there even such a thing as a PWP? What is plot, anyway???

A lot of what's contained below will likely read as incredibly basic and obvious to people who already write fiction, especially longer fiction, but there was a time at which these things were neither basic nor obvious to me, and sometimes I need to be reminded of how engine go brr. I have to pretend I was a baby longfic writer again, and revisit what it took to "get" plot, which was not Freytag's Pyramid or three- or five-act structures or the Hero's Journey or anything else you can visualize via diagram, but themes.

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