When it comes to narratives and the art of making them bustle and boogey—whether we’re talking about a barroom joke told to a woodpecker, a short story, a novel, or a major motion picture from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—the main thing a person ought to know about plot and story is that story is the entire planet and all of time stretching back to the Big Bang and the void of no yesterdays that precedes it, whereas plot is Google Maps. One of the fun things the marvellous and drunken detective fiction writer Dashiell Hammett likes to do with plot is to employ it in the opening chapter in such a way that the reader starts off with a bit of a mistaken idea of what the story is and where we’re physically supposed to be atop its surface. In Russian Formalism, “fabula” is the earth’s crust and crudeness and wanton babbling brooks—its timequakes and spaceways—and “syuzhet” is the plot, a grocer’s itemized inventory as scrolling banner advert. There is a special feature behind-the-scenes documentary on the Arrow Blu-ray for Terry Gilliam’s classic 12 Monkeys where we see the director arriving on set early in the morning looking like he got his ass kicked by a kangaroo and complaining, as he no doubt searches for the script supervisor, that he never remembers what he’s supposed to be doing on any given day of production anymore. That is a man who is swamped in story and has lost the plot. The secret truth behind how you build suspense that’s used by all the top professionals is that you have the story everywhere all around you at all times and then the plot moves like a slow, rickety sled through the, uh, permafrost. Things are materializing in front of you and you’re impatient because you can’t see them clearly yet. If there are trapdoors in the plot you can play snakes and ladders with the story. Actors who ask their directors for backstory should be ashamed of themselves. The whole fucking cosmos is backstory, thespian.
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