Instead of a ‘plot point’…

…think ‘plop point’.

Way back in the day when people used to have landline telephones, I was on one in my house in L.A., talking with my writing partner. Pacing in my kitchen, careful to avoid my then four year-old son Will playing on the floor, busily occupied with his Thomas the Tank Engine trains.

The conversation went on for several minutes as my partner and I were breaking story on a critical part of the script. When I hung up the phone, I heard Will’s voice say:

“Daddy, what’s a plop point?”

Of course, I had been on the phone talking about plot points, but that’s not what my son heard. To his ears, it sounded like I was saying plop point.

That night as I was doing my best to avoid rewriting some pages, it occurred to me, Will had got it right: A plot point is a kind of plop point.

Syd Field gets credit for coming up with the term plot point, but I found video of Rod Serling using the term a decade or more before Field. In any event, here is how Field defines a plot point:

It is any incident, episode or event that hooks into the action and spins it around into another direction.

Imagine you’re driving down the road and this big ass boulder goes KERPLOP directly in front of you.

Wherever you were planning to go, you’ll either have to change destinations or routes to get there because that boulder is functioning like a plop point spinning you and the plot in another direction.

I reference plot point as plop point in my classes to make this point: When you are working with your story’s structure and you are looking at what can hook into it to change the direction of the narrative, it’s not the result of a character sitting down and mulling over a series of choices, then deciding on one. Maybe in a novel that can work, but a screenplay — like a movie or TV show — is primarily an externalized reality. Action. Dialogue.

So when you think plot point, think plop point. Something big goes PLOP in front of the characters. They have to change directions… and with it, the plot.

A plot point is an event, something that happens, something significant enough that it spins the narrative onto a different pathway.

You know… a Plop Point!

If you want to hear more writing wisdom from the mouths of my two young sons, you can go here to read about how Luke gave me the name of this blog.