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If you’ve spent any time in an MFA program you’ve probably heard the term profluence. At my first MFA residency the word was thrown around as readily as dialog or plot. But I was mystified by it. I’d never heard it before. In fact, it shows up three times in the list-poem I wrote after residency (which I posted on this blog and titled: inadequate). But the word itself is a bit elusive. When you type it into a word document, it actually comes up as a misspelling. And when I asked non-writer friends about it, they’d never heard of it too.

So what is profluence? And why do I need to know about it?

It’s derived from the word profluent, meaning to flow smoothly or abundantly forth. But as a writing term it was coined by John Gardner. In The Art of Fiction he says:

“By definition – and of aesthetic necessity – a story contains profluence, a requirement best satisfied by a sequence of causally related events, a sequence that can end in only one of two ways: in resolution … or in logical exhaustion” (53).

He goes on to say that this is the “root interest of all conventional narrative,” and the reader must be “intellectually and emotionally involved … [and] led by successive seemingly inevitable steps … to its relatively stable outcome” (55).

So what does that mean?

In a way, profluence is about the paradox of time. It addresses the flow of time in the story itself, as well as the outward necessity of time needed for the reader to experience the story. Profluence is the cause-and-effect connective tissue that constructs the flow of time in the story world, as well as the underlying engine that makes the novel coherent to a reader. No wonder it’s such a big MFA buzz word.

Gardner says:

“A basic characteristic … [of] narrative, so far as form is concerned, is that it takes time. We cannot read a whole novel in an instant, so to be coherent, to work as a unified experience … narrative must show some profluence of development. What the logical progress of an argument is to non-fiction, event-sequence is to fiction. Page 1, even if it is a page of description, raises questions, suspicions, and expectations; the mind casts forward to later pages, wondering what will come about and how. It is this casting forward that draws us from paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter. At least in conventional fiction, the moment we stop caring where the story will go next, the writer has failed, and we stop reading” (55).

In its basic form, profluence is a concept regarding the movement that draws us from “paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter.” Blogger, Michael Hill, refers to profluence as “the sense that we are getting somewhere.” It’s an energy or inertia. It’s the connective tissue that moves you from one page to the next. Profluence is that which moves the story to flow smoothly and abundantly forth.

And without it, your book is dead in the water.

Sources:

Byrd, Syd. “Profluence.” Short Story Craft Blog. Oct. 21. 2005. Web: Feb 12. 2013.

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction. New York: Vintage Books, 1983. Print.

Hill, Michael. “Coaching Profluence for Motivation.”  Situated Geekery Blog. April 6. 2010. Web: Feb 12. 2013

Photos by Helen E. Allen and Michael Blan.

Be sure to read the first two parts of this essay:

• Part 1: Terminology and the Difference Between Narrative and Story
• Part 2: Taking a Closer Look at Story

Got  Plot?

Okay, so I’ve got a story, but do I have a plot? Let’s take a look at how plot is different. Once a writer has established his or her story (what happens) one will need to decide which events to present to the reader. This is the construction of a plot. A plot is “someone’s telling of the story” (Liz), “how the story is presented” (English Basics), or “the arrangement of what happens” (Chea). The author isn’t going to share every event of the story, (well you could, but that would probably be a lot like reading a boring history book), instead an author will select specific events that best engage the reader in the story (see figure 3).

To create a plot, however, one won’t select events at random. There’s another important ingredient.

In Forester’s original example of story he said: “The King died and then the Queen died.” Here we have two events which create a story but it does not have a plot. In order for this to become a plot there must be a connection of causality. Forester thus offers: “The King died and then the Queen died of grief” (Cowgill). Stephenson Chea says that “in examining plot, we are concerned with causality, with how one action leads into or ties in with another” (2). Forester’s addition of the words “died of grief” shows the action of the Queen’s death is a result of the previous event.  Plotting means selecting events with an internal logic, events “that lead the characters from their situations and attitudes at the beginning of the problem to their situations and attitudes when the effort to solve the problem is finally over” (Dramatica). In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner describes this logic as profluence.  He says “a story contains profluence, and the conventional kind of profluence – though other kinds are possible – is a causally related sequence of events. This is the root interest of all conventional narrative”(55).  He goes on to state that the reason profluence is necessary is because “we cannot read a whole novel in an instant, so to be coherent, to work as a unified experience…narrative must show some profluence of development” (55).

If a story is what happens, and plot is the selection of events with a cause and effect relationship, one can begin to see how the two overlap. Ultimately an author in early stages of novel development may be simultaneously figuring out the story (what happens) as well as plotting it (how and why it happens). Humanities Professor Ron Layne states that “the plot is a series of conflicts or obstacl