Sanderson’s lecture series makes much of Big Plot versus little plot. What’s the difference and why does it matter?
Sanderson distinguishes these as:
Big-P Plot
The whole story you can summarise as a logline or one line summary.
A wronged son goes away, comes back stronger, kills the usurper and restores order. See Hamlet, The Lion King, Dune.
We recognize those as plot archetypes. The examples are across genres; tragic drama, fantasy, sci-fi. You get a whole lot more of these in Crime, Western, Mystery and Romance.
More examples?
Some little people and their friends journey across a perilous world to bring down the evil magic user who threatens it. See The Lord of the Rings, Narnia, The Belgariad, Eragon.
A group of warriors band together to defend a village from marauders. See Seven Samurai, The Magificent Seven, Battle Beyond the Stars, Rebel Moon.
Some say there are no new plots, just new twists.
Little-p plot
This is what happens chapter by chapter.
At this level, execution is everything. This is what makes the story unique, captivating, and compelling. It’s not the progress of the plot beat-by-beat. George Lucas lifted huge chunks of The Hidden Fortress for Star Wars. Lucas relied heavily (obsessively?) on Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, which tracks plot archetypes across stories from Gilgamesh to King Arthur and beyond.
Jaws is Moby Dick re-told, but boy does Spielberg do it in style.
Chapter by Chapter
Consider some of the tent-pole chapters in Lord of the Rings;
- Gandalf identifies the One Ring.
- The Hobbits meet with Aragorn.
- The Fellowship assembles
- Gandalf falls
- The Fellowship breaks
The corresponding chapters are very different in Narnia and Eragon, but the story beats and elements are there. Gandalf and Aslan are very different as old, wise mentors. The Pevensey children may be equivalent to the hobbits but in each story, the four personalities and roles are very different. Eragon is much more the classic Arthurian hero than Frodo.
You wouldn’t necessarily recognise these three as the same base story. But Tolkein, Lewis and Paolini set their stamp on genre standards that originate in Greek, Anglo-Saxon and Bilbical tales.
Root and Branch
We’ve covered loglines and story premises before, so why look at Big Plot and little plot now?
Here are the Big Plots for my series:
- A seer on the run from an Empire seeks a rebel fighter in the wilderness to help her escape
- A seer and a rebel gather a family while they evade psychic priests, a fire mage and elite soldiers.
- The seer and the rebel infiltrate a dangerous city to bring down the Emperor
The first two are solid Pursuit Westerns. I can tell you specifically which ones I’ve drawn from – but I won’t. Book One began with the question; what if the veteran white gun-slinger isn’t the protagonist, but the fey, mixed-race, neuro-divergent girl instead? A while new point of view laid across the same beats?
What if Book Three is a World War II, behind the lines, resistance operation? In a fantasy world with magic? Chapter by chapter, the details shift dramatically from Where Eagles Dare, Operation Crossbow, The Guns of Navarone and various Missions Impossible.
That’s where the reader immerses themselves in little plot as much as Big Plot. That’s where the story lives.
If you can’t sum it up in one line, you don’t have a story.
This is true.
What if it’s a complicated plot, like a heist or something
There’s still a core problem statement that encapsulates the plot. The detailed mechanics don’t matter. Who is it about, what’s their core problem, what are the stakes, what are the consequences?
“A mis-matched gang of thieves aim to steal from the Dark Lord himself and find themselves in a revolution.”
“Street-thief Vin learns magic in a high-stakes heist that threatens the Dark Lord’s thousand-year reign.”
That’s the first Mistborn.