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It was my indispensable road map. I also realized—and learned this more with every novel I wrote—that the plot needed to be complicated enough and interesting enough to keep me sitting in a straight-backed kitchen chair seven days a week. Below please find pretty much everything I know about plot:
    If you wind up boring yourself, you can pretty much bank on the fact that you’re going to bore your reader. I believe in keeping several plots going at once. The plot of a novel should be like walking down a busy city street: First there are all the other people around you, the dog walkers and the skateboarders, the couples fighting, the construction guys swearing and shouting, the pretty girl on teetering heels who causes those construction guys to turn around for a split second of silence. There are drivers hitting the brakes, diving birds slicing between buildings, and the suddenly ominous clouds banking to the west. All manner of action and movement is rushing towards you and away. But that isn’t enough. You should also have the storefronts at street level and the twenty stories of apartments full of people and their babies and their dreams. Below the street, there should be infrastructure: water, sewer, electricity. Maybe there’s a subway down there as well, and it’s full of people. For me, it took all of that to stay emotionally present for seven months of endless days. Many writers feel that plot is passé; they’re so over plot—who needs plot?—to which I say, learn how to construct one first and then feel free to reject it.
    The length and shape of the chapter goes a long way in determining how your plot will move forward. Maybe an understanding of chapters was one skill that was transferable from my short-story-writing days. (Which, by the way, were over. As much as I had loved the story, I now loved the novel, loved the huge expanse of space there was to work in. I never went back.) A chapter isn’t a short story and needn’t be able to stand alone, nor is it just a random break that signifies that the novelist is tired of this particular storyline and would like to go on to something else. Chapters are like the foot pedals on a piano; they give you another level of control. Short chapters can speed the book along, while long chapters can deepen intensity. Tiny chapters—a lone paragraph or a single sentence—can be irritatingly cute. I like a chapter that both has a certain degree of autonomy and at the same time pushes the reader forward, so that someone who is reading in bed and has vowed to turn off the light at the chapter’s end will instead sit up straighter and keep turning the pages. (If you want to study the master of the well-constructed chapter—and plot and flat-out gorgeous writing—read Raymond Chandler. The Long Goodbye is my favorite.)
    Although my novel was written in three separate first-person sections, I wrote it linearly—that is to say, page two was started after page one was finished. This is one of the very few pieces of advice that I’m passing out—along with not going into debt for your MFA—that I would implore you to heed. Even if you’re writing a book that jumps around in time, has ten points of view, and is chest-deep in flashbacks, do your best to write it in the order in which it will be read, because it will make the writing, and the later editing, incalculably easier. Say you know the girlfriend is going to drown. It’s going to be a powerhouse scene. You’ve thought it through a thousand times and it’s all written out in your head, so you decide to go ahead and drown her in advance, get that out of the way. You have yet to work out why it happens, or what she’s doing in the water in the first place, but at least you know she’s going under, so why not go ahead? Here’s why: Because then you have to go back and write the boring parts, the lead-up, but you aren’t letting the scene build logically. Instead you’re steering the action towards this