By the same token, each of your characters has an emotional acre that they tend, or don’t tend, in certain specific ways. One of the things you want to discover as you start out is what each person’s acre looks like. What is the person growing, and what sort of shape is the land in? This knowledge may not show up per se in what you write, but the point is that you need to find out as much as possible about the interior life of the people you are working with.

I say don’t worry about plot. Worry about the characters. Let what they say or do reveal who they are, and be involved in their lives, and keep asking yourself, Now what happens? The development of relationship creates plot. Flannery O’Connor, in Mystery and Manners, tells how she gave a bunch of her early stories to the old lady who lived down the street, and the woman returned them saying, "Them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do.

Overall, we found that speed was good. Books, movies, and TV shows with faster plot progression were liked more than their slower-moving counterparts.

Just as atypical lyrics make songs more interesting to listen to, a faster plot progression makes a story more stimulating. Rather than just plodding along, moving faster between more differentiated topics and ideas is more exciting, which leads audiences to react more favorably.

In addition, we found that within stories, there were times when plots should move faster and times when they should move more slowly. At the beginning of a book or movie, the canvas is blank. An audience doesn’t know who the characters are, what the setting is, or how everything relates. So the beginning of a story sets the stage, building a base or jumping-off point for the rest of the narrative.

Starting slowly is key. It takes time for the audience members to digest the characters, their relationships, and everything else, so a plot that moves too quickly at the outset may confuse them.

Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.

The third thing I’m asking myself as people tell me their stories is: What’s the plot here? We tend to craft our life stories gradually, over a lifetime. Children don’t really have life stories. But around adolescence most people begin imposing a narrative on their lives. At first there’s a lot of experimentation. In one study, for example, McAdams asked a group of college students to list the ten key scenes in their life. When he asked the same students the same question three years later, only 22 percent of the scenes were repeated on the second list. The students were in the early process of understanding the plot of their lives, so they had come up with a different list of episodes that really mattered.