Definitions can be a key to great fiction.

Mo Black

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Aug 5, 2019 · 8 min read

Misconceptions

I don’t think I need to do much work to convince you that the term plot device gets thrown around a lot when it comes to reviewing media.

The term is almost like a magic spell, y’know? It’s just complex enough to show everyone else in the room that you take your media seriously, but not so complicated you have to think about it much.

You don’t just flip through the pages or watch the pretty colors on screen like the other plebeians. No no no. You care about the nuts and bolts of the stories you consume. You understand arcs, and progression and character growth and payoff and… other fancy stuff!

Pleb: I really enjoyed the new Tower of Doom movie, Tower of Doom 3: Return of the Dragon Spire King. I think it was the best one yet.

Me: Reaaalllyy???

Pleb: Yeah?

Me: What if I told you the dragon… WAS JUST A PLOT DEVICE!

Pleb: *dies instantly*

Okay, okay, I’ll be serious for once. But hopefully you get the idea here. You’ve definitely been on at least one side of this kind of conversation before.

I’m of the firm belief that creative writing is a science. Not in the sense that there are controlled experiments on “good storytelling” we can run or data we can collect. But I believe that we can build a better understanding of what makes our writing work through rigid definitions and reasoning.

The point of this piece isn’t to come down from Heaven and declare this is what the thing is and everyone else is wrong. Rather, the hope is, by developing a precise notion of a concept that appears everywhere but doesn’t always have a precise definition in every context, you better understand how to build the kinds of stories that work.

Or at least how to avoid the kinds of stories that don’t.

Definition

Since no piece of writing exists in a vacuum, including this one, I want to use the most common and agreed upon definition for plot device that exists — at least as far as I can tell. For this, we turn to self-described “pop-culture wiki” TV Tropes.

On its page for “Plot Device”, we find the following definition (as of the time of writing):

A plot device is an object or character in the story whose purpose is purely to drive the Plot, maintain its flow, or resolve situations within it. It could be something everybody wants to obtain, a device that must be destroyed, or an annoying teenager who must be protected at all costs.

It may also be an object or gadget introduced early in the story for the sole purpose of solving a sticky situation later on.

It’s not a terrible definition and I think it’s fairly intuitive at first glance. When we call something a plot device, we’re generally saying that the story element offers little to the story’s value other than being necessary to move the events of the story.

Here’s my hang-up with this definition though. Isn’t everything a plot device, under this thinking?

I promise it’s less stupid than it sounds.

You shouldn’t have elements in the final draft of your story that don’t drive the plot. Period. Some may ask, “But what about character development?”. Character is plot.

How your protagonists change and grow learn over time should be directly related to the events unfolding on-screen. Slow, pace-breaking sections of what’s supposed to be, say, an action adventure story, can’t be justified with “it’s character development”. No, that’s called bad writing.

At the end of the day, stories aren’t real. We as writers are in full control of what goes into them and what gets cut. The only utilitarian “reason” why a character or device or mechanic exists in a story is to make the plot “better”, however we choose to define it.

Plot is everything because it’s primarily through the events of the story that we understand it. Plot is what ties characters to locations to themes to the messages that resonate with your audiences. Other than word choice, clean grammar, and the like, no other goal in writing exists but to advance the plot. For comedy, you construct the plot so that the irony in each situation makes us laugh. For tragedy, the situation conspires so that our characters suffer. Even in slice-of-life stories, which I’ll concede lack “over-arching” plots, still contain plot episode-by-episode, chapter-by-chapter, installment-by-installment.

This doesn’t mean that the term plot device is useless. Obviously plot device still refers to a specific practice that can stories if a writer isn’t careful.

Here’s a slightly different definition of the word that I think will go further in understanding how stories work:

A plot device is any functionally interchangeable story element that drives a significant part of the plot.

What does ‘functionally interchangeable’ mean?

Strictly speaking, no two things are interchangeable. If my fantasy story had a magic artifact called the Zircon of Heart, and I wanted to replace it instead with a different artifact, the Sapphire of Mind, I would have to Ctrl + F replace and the texts of the two stories wouldn’t be the same, at the very least.

Functional interchangeability refers instead to the core characteristics of a story element and how those characteristics affect the overall flow of the story.

Say I’m writing a YA romance novel starring a shy engineering geek, Alex, and an obnoxious jock Ted. The two first cross paths at a science expo: Alex is captain of their high school’s robotics team and she’s there awkwardly showing off her work, while Ted is meeting Ivy League recruiters to talk about his resume.

The science expo in this example is functionally interchangeable. They could have met at a coffee shop, or at the library, or through mutual friends or on Tinder. Or maybe Alex’s cousin was in a car accident with Ted’s uncle, and the two got placed in adjacent hospital rooms so Alex and Ted met each other there.

Fundamentally speaking, what’s important here is that Alex and Ted need to meet somehow. For now, it doesn’t exactly matter how.

What does 'drive the plot' mean?

There are two main ways a story element can drive a plot. They both center around asking yourself “What would happen if this thing didn’t exist?”

1. If not for this story element, most events don’t have a reason to take place.
2. If not for this story element, the one event that set the story into motion would not have taken place.

In my romance example, if the science expo didn’t happen, Alex and Ted would never have gotten to know each other. So the science expo drives the plot. Therefore, in this example, the science expo is a plot device.

However, if I do this right, neither Alex or Ted are plot devices. Although they both drive the plot, if Alex was an outgoing, self-obsessed, dimwitted narcissist instead of a timid, intelligent bookworm, presumably this would radically change how her romance with Ted plays out.

Use of Plot Devices

For a term so often used as a derogative, this definition may come off as surprisingly broad. Thinking of your own story, you may have realized that you perhaps use a ton of plot devices in your own writing. You may be tempted to go back to the drawing board and rethink your entire project until nothing that drives the plot is functionally interchangeable.

Don’t.

Plot devices are neither a sign of bad writing or authorial laziness. Even the TV Tropes page says as much. I want to move away from thinking that focuses on what “drives the plot” and focus instead on what parts of our stories matter.

If you’re hung up on say, what to cut from a draft, identifying which story elements are plot devices and which story elements cannot be replaced without changing the nature of the story is an incredibly useful skill to have, in my opinion anyway.

There are however, a few rules to keep in mind about using plot devices poorly:

1. Named characters should never be plot devices. People are not functionally interchangeable, so don’t treat them that way in your writing! The consideration of diverse characters makes this a more pressing rule. If all the white men in your stories are people but all the women and people of color exist only to facilitate the story of said white men… just don’t do it, okay? You’re better than that I’m sure.
2. Plot devices should never take agency from the characters. I’ve seen this story too many times. A character will stumble upon a magic artifact, a high-tech suit, or say, a sentient high school sailor uniform, y’know if we’re just naming random examples, here. This artifact gives the character the power to confront their challenge and drive the plot. It becomes a problem when the character is made a passive agent of the plot device’s power. It should always feel like the character is working to their goal, and not like the plot device is progressing in place of the character. Otherwise, the character becomes a plot device as well, which would bring us back to point (1).
3. Plot devices should preserve the obstacles your characters must overcome. Sci-fi and fantasy stories are especially prone to running into this problem. Writers will introduce a problem and solve it with a plot device, but the plot device’s application ends up being so broad that it’s hard to imagine why the characters wouldn’t use that plot device for every problem in the story. This is the fundamental cause of The Lord of the Rings' classic eagle problem.

The Bottom Line

One of the most important realizations for aspiring creative writers is that the story is entirely yours to control. Your characters don’t have “minds of their own” and stories don’t “call” you to change their direction or whatever. You make decisions all your story’s decisions from the first scene to the last.

The problem of creative writing is at its core a decision-making problem, and a better understanding of common ideas like plot devices can make you better equipped to succeed at the craft.