Aristotle Says Your Novel Should Be a Symphony

By David Griffin Brown

About 2360 years ago, Aristotle defined plot in a way that sounds too simple to be of much help: "A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end."

Beginning, middle, end. Three checkpoints on a timeline? Three acts of a play? Not quite. He goes on to explain:

"A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it."

What he was describing was a chain of consequence more than a chronology. A beginning launches something. A middle follows it and leads to something else. An end takes over from the middle and leads to a conclusion.

This is the same idea Aristotle returns to, from a different angle, when he talks about the ideal unity of story elements, and again when he complains about shitty plots, which he calls episodic.

In other words, a story isn’t a mere sequence of things that happen. It should be more like a symphony, where all the instruments are working together. The different movements may have their own internal structure, but they are all part of the same composition, and they build on each other, leading inexorably toward the coda.

The Cowbell Test

Aristotle gives us a helpful tool for diagnosing unity: "…the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed. For a thing whose presence or absence makes no visible difference, is not an organic part of the whole."

This is advice developmental editors frequently give to clients: this character could be cut without impacting the plot whatsoever. Or this scene could be picked up and moved twenty pages forward or back without any break in the story logic.

Aristotle makes the point that even though Heracles was one man, a poem about everything Heracles ever did would not automatically cohere into one story. A life story is not a plot. This is a common struggle of new memoirists who conflate memoir with autobiography and assume that “everything that happened to me” is a strong enough through-line to keep readers glued to the page.

Homer, he notes, understood this well. The Odyssey doesn't include every adventure Odysseus ever had, only the ones that directly relate to his central trajectory: getting home.

Maybe your protagonist has a great backstory, an evocative subplot, or a fascinating side quest, but if none of these elements actually intersect, create consequence, or complicate the main trajectory, they aren’t part of the symphony. They are like a kid in a balcony seat trying to play along with a cowbell.

The fix isn't always to call security and get the kid thrown out. Sometimes you need to invite the kid onstage and put him in front of a xylophone. Maybe he’ll suck and you’ll end up cutting him anyway. But maybe he’ll make a brilliant addition to the ensemble. The point is, he will be purposeful. He will add to the whole rather than taking away from it.

Episodic Isn't Always the Enemy

Aristotle said, "Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst." Sounds damning, until you look at what he actually means by episodic: "…the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence."

So his complaint was never against episodes themselves. It was against episodes that don't cohere or connect in some way, either to each other or to a greater whole.

Some of the best-loved books are structurally episodic—and entirely unified at the same time. Anne of Green Gables moves through dozens of loosely connected incidents, and none of them individually connects to the next by strict causality. But they all have the same throughline: Anne's desire to be loved and to belong. Pull out the currant wine episode and the house of cards won’t technically fall down. But each of these episodes contributes to the gradual deepening of Anne's belonging and in this way they’re all connected, all important.

Jane Eyre does something similar across five settings and three genres. Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, Moor House, Ferndean: each section offers a fairly self-contained arc, complete with its own inciting incident and resolution. But a thematic trajectory circles the same misbelief: that Jane is unworthy of love and must choose between independence and connection.

Even The Call of the Wild, structured in four nearly self-contained episodes (learning the ropes, the rivalry, the test of leadership, and the call itself) holds together because each episode strips away one more layer of Buck's domestication. The episodes are connected by sequence, yes, but also because each serves the same transformation. Unity operates at the level of theme and arc rather than through scene-to-scene causality.

So the issue with episodic structure isn't that a story has episodes. Nearly every coming-of-age novel does, and for good reason: growing up doesn’t produce a clean causal chain. The test is whether the episodes are bound by something bigger, like an overarching goal, a much-tested misbelief, or a unifying theme. In that case, removing one episode would weaken the overall thesis.

The Causal Symphony

Aristotle’s principle of unity tells us that every instrument should be playing the same song. The episodic can work if it gives us movements within an otherwise cohesive score.

The last thing we need to address is the connective tissue between scenes. For that, Aristotle gives us a simple framework: "It makes all the difference whether any given event is a case of propter hoc or post hoc." Because of this, or merely after this.

There’s a famous video clip that has been making the rounds in craft circles for years—a short lecture to writing students by South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone. They explain that scenes need causal transitions: therefore or but.

This happens, therefore this happens, but then this happens, therefore this happens, etc.

What you don’t want for a transition is “and then.” Propter hoc good, post hoc bad.

The detective uncovers a murder weapon, therefore she hands it over to forensics for analysis, but then the fingerprints don’t match the prime suspect, therefore she follows up another lead.

And then kills momentum. The detective searches the warehouse and then searches the office and then she buys some groceries and then she goes home and then she plays some Minecraft. If you don’t build with causality, you don’t create momentum and therefore don’t give readers a reason to turn the page.

Tuning the Orchestra

If a beta reader tells you the middle of your manuscript sags, or that they could put it down without needing to know what happens next, you might be looking at a unity problem. If you can’t get beta readers to even finish reading the damn thing? Same plus ten.

Start with your scene transitions. If you can name an “and then” bridge, call security.

Next, move on to the cowbell test. Run it against every subplot and secondary character. If cutting one element doesn’t disturb the logic of the rest of the book, it’s not currently part of the orchestra. You have two options: cut the cowbell kid—or sign him up for xylophone lessons.

David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling, Story Skeleton: The Classics, and Fake Query Letters by Dead Authors. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his work has appeared in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review, White Wall Review, and Grain. He has published three novels: When the Sky Breaks, We've Come for Your Eggs, and No Country for Old Dragons. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. As an editor, he pays special attention to structure, relationship arcs, and voice. David lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Kosapsum Nations.