Beehiiv is where I’ll be sharing a selection of posts from “But anyway, I digress…” which is my regular blog over on my personal website — to see all my posts in full, and for more information about my writing, head over to philipholyman.com
14th October 2025
Hello campers! BAID is back after a spontaneous summer-into-autumn break, but fortnightly service will resume now as I head into Editing Mode during the leaf-drop months. So, let’s get straight to it with something that’s very much on my mind this week…
I’m currently reading How Novels Work by John Mullan which talks about exactly what you’d expect from the title, and it’s come into my life at a perfect time for me.
I’ve recently done a first pass edit of my second novel Obsolete Constellations, seeing if it makes sense (which it does, more or less) and if it feels remotely interesting (which it did to me, and that’s all it needs to do at this stage.) Spread across two huge ring binders, the typescript is now plastered in my red and green pen notes, identifying cuts, moves, new chapter breaks, typographic errors, and scribbles with questions that occurred to me as I went along which cover everything from the currencies of my imaginary planets through to the travel time between them at various stages of their relative orbits.
There’s an immense amount of work to do on that book, and that’s a job for the first part of 2026, I reckon.
I’m also revisiting my first novel The Radiant City, because after endlessly putting it off, I am accepting that I have to knuckle down to approaching agents soon if I’m to have any hope of my books ever seeing the light of day. So I’ll start working through the notes I’ve got from when Gareth read Draft 3 earlier this year, which include some radical new approaches to the opening chapters. I’ll write about that little adventure in a future post, once I’ve actually done some of that editing.
John Mullan is a Professor of English at University College London, and he’s a regular contributor to The Guardian where, for a long time, he wrote a weekly column entitled “Elements of Fiction” in which he explored different aspects of novel-writing — everything from inadequate narrators (a term he prefers over unreliable narrators) to genre to weather to brackets.
How Novels Work collates and expands on those columns, illustrating his points with reference to both classic novels and more contemporary novels which are likely to be read and discussed by book clubs. (HNW was first published in 2006, so the books that book clubs are looking at now, nearly twenty years later, will have changed somewhat. But no matter.)
I’m absolutely loving reading it. It comes to bed with me for a half-hour pre-lights-out read most nights. It’s accompanied me on lots of London train journeys. It got me through a recent afternoon where I was so overwhelmed by other stuff that I couldn’t do anything more conventionally productive. It’s not just revitalising my flagging appetite for fiction reading (which suffered after a very long slog with Frank Herbert’s Dune at the start of 2025), it’s also fuelling my fire to write something new again (alongside all the editing that needs doing, of course.)
A hugely useful bit comes about halfway through HNW, in the chapter on Structure, in a sub-section on Plot. “It’s useful to distinguish between plot, narrative, and story,” Mullan says, before mercifully defining his thoughts on those distinctions for us:
“We can think of a novel’s story as the material of its events and characters — what happens in it. (…) The narrative is the way that this story is told. (…) Plot is something else again. We sometimes talk of a plot being ‘unravelled’, for it is the causal chain that connects events and characters.”
So perhaps another angle for approaching these three terms is to think of story as what is told and narrative as how it’s told, and then beyond that, perhaps plot can be thought of as why it’s told. By that, I mean the point and purpose we find in reading what we are given to read in the way we are given to read it — the experience that reading conjures up within us as we encounter the story and narrative in real time.
I certainly don’t mean “why it’s told” in the sense of any message or ideology or position the writer might be looking to communicate or impose. There may well be some meaningful relation in all this to the values or politics or sensibilities of the writer, but it’s not necessarily the case.
I’m twitching nervously because I’ve realised we’re venturing into the territory of reader-response criticism here, probably the only bit of literary theory that ever really made any remote sense to me two decades ago at university. (I was and still am baffled by things like Structuralism, Marxism, Russian Formalism and all of that. I didn’t get it then and I don’t get it now.)
Reader-response criticism, in essence, seems to assert that art isn’t art until someone consumes it. Until then, it’s just words on a page or, extended outwards, paint on a canvas, or sounds floating in the air. I reckon we could argue for a slight relaxation of that statement — the books I write are already works of art (in the objectively practical rather than the opinionatedly arrogant sense) even though they’re not yet published or being read by other people. Perhaps the point is that they will only become art for those other people at the moment when they get their own opportunity to read them.
I’m curious about whether these gradations of story, narrative and plot — the what, how and why — function in any comparable ways in other forms of creative practice. It’s a simple step to apply the terms to theatre, but what about art forms that aren’t rooted in verbal units of sense and meaning— music, say, or sculpture, or dance, or architecture?
Thinking about garden design, for example — is story the selection of plant species, is narrative the way the individual specimens are arranged within a given pot or bed, and is plot the overall effect of how the garden as a whole is set out and navigated?
Interesting to remember that plot is a familiar term within the world of allotments and horticulture, where it signifies “a defined piece of land with specific ownership, boundaries, and often a particular purpose.” Those definitions, those boundaries, that particular purpose — all seem to point to the creation of a deliberate experiential effect, with as sure a hand as any novelist wielding a pen.