WRITING, GEORGES SIMENON remarked, is a vocation for unhappiness. He was probably agonising over the plot of a novel at the time. Plot is a bugbear for many writers of fiction, and a common source of writer’s block. Characterisation, theme, setting and dialogue seem to flow naturally and often enjoyably. But plot is where the process gets painful.

There are no simple remedies – it is one thing to write a wonderful opening to a story, but to continue it and bring it to a satisfying end, you need to be able to plot. Your story needs a plot as much as your body needs a skeleton.

We are often told that there are only a handful of plots in the world – woman meets man, they quarrel, they reconcile, for example. But for a practising writer, that’s just a formula, in this case for Jane Eyre and thousands of other stories.

E. M. Forster wrote that “a story [is] as a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality.”

It’s more complicated than that but Forster does suggest a useful distinction between narrative – how a story reaches its audience, and how its events are ordered – and the story itself. Most writers think of the plot as a combination of the two: it’s the underlying sequence of events together with how you filter them to your reader. Of course this is inextricably entangled with the other elements in a story.

Some writers plan their plots in detail before they start writing. But too much preliminary planning can sometimes suck the juice out of an idea, resulting in a bland and flavourless book. Many novelists start writing with only the first few chapters mapped out in their minds and a vague idea of where the story will go after that. E. L. Doctorow memorably summed up this approach: “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Even crimewriters often work like that, although you would think that they of all people need to know where they are going. But it can be easier to do much of the plotting as you write the first draft, allowing characters, setting and theme to develop a joint momentum with the story – and then tidy up the result when you produce the second draft.

Reginald Hill, author of the intricately plotted “Dalziel and Pascoe” novels, once said that the plot is something he puts in afterwards. Some crimewriters will tell you that they have even changed their minds about the identity of the murderer as they neared the end of a book.

Many first novels have overcomplicated plots because their authors are desperate to keep their readers interested. But a good plot doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t even have to be fully resolved.

Perhaps the best plots give you the sense that their stories continue beyond the covers of the book. Indeed, Anton Chekhov said that when you had written your story, you should cross out the beginning and the end because “it is there that we authors do most of our lying”.

Good comic writing, like good crimewriting, needs tight and careful plotting. P. G. Wodehouse wrote and rewrote until he felt that his books were right. Timing and misdirection are crucial. A plot need not be plausible but it does need to aim for internal consistency, especially if you are writing for a print medium. (You can afford to be a little more slapdash if you are writing for film or television because it is much harder for the viewer to pause to analyse what’s happening.)

Memorable plots tend to have elements of surprise and originality. Once you have read Flann O’Brien’s brilliantly surreal The Third Policeman, you are unlikely to forget how it ends. Readers like books in which stories come at them from unexpected angles. As John le Carré puts it: “The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.” A predictable plot is dull, however well constructed, and this poses a particular problem for writers of genre fiction.

There are no hard-and-fast rules in writing fiction, only guidelines, opinions and suggestions. Few people turn to In Search of Lost Time or The Waves for the quality of their plots; Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf provide other attractions. We read Raymond Chandler for his language, not his convoluted and improbable plots. A good editor would savage the plot construction of Wuthering Heights.But genius can get away with anything – even technical incompetence. The rest of us must remember the importance of plotting, where the art of writing a story becomes a craft.

Andrew Taylor’s latest novel is Naked to the Hangman (Hodder)

Andrew Taylor will talk about writing a good plot at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on Wednesday October 10 at 10am
Call 01242 227979
www.cheltenhamfestivals.com

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist