Women don’t write plot. Is there a need to explain that statement that came to me through an undergrad workshop advisor? Should I write an expository essay on that statements meaning to me? I have. I wrote a manifesto outlining plot’s historical sources.

The subject is the privileging of conventional narratives.

The reader’s trained expectation for literature to represent Life.

Life, it is hard to shake the concept of universality, a one humanist truth translated to all human behavior everywhere.

The reader’s need for identifiable representation (often stereotypical) with flesh and blood counterparts.

Life is not plotted. Plot is an attempt to make meaning from linear strings of cause and effect. Plot is the literary equivalent of determinism. Determinism as prescribed in dictates of greater forces. Greater forces throughout history, defined in the West as male, some women, most often white, and most often originating from the part of the globe within the latitude and longitude 48° 41’ 27” N / 9° 8’ 26” E. The exceptions to this profile have at certain points of history been conquered by the patriarchal White-Euro/Anglo-Male and andocentric (often privileged) White-Euro/Anglo-Women (this weighted language trope contains obvious limitations). However, it is impossible to escape the impact this one group has had on everyone who does not fit the above description, i.e. the rest of earthly existence. Even liberation is a system of binary contrasts to the established “conventions” of male authority. Anything outside the established “conventions” is burdened with labels, Other, alternative, experimental. 

Literary conventions have historically been subverted. Yet, fiction writing classes, workshops, MFA programs teach (for the most part) the primary pillars of convention, character development, and plot. 

The circuitous path explored, appropriation of any fragment regardless of gender and genre to inform practice, eventually informs liberation from the constrains of patriarchal codes and convention internalized in fiction—particularly genre, plot, and linearity.