Stochastic Plots
Everything everywhere all at once
Quick plug at the top… if you’ve been working on a novel, or if you’ve been wanting to start one, I’ll be offering a great new Novel Generator course in 2026 through the 92NY Unterberg Poetry Center. We’ll meet virtually on Wednesday nights from February-December and discuss strategies for organizing and writing a novel, as we also workshop the class’s novels-in-progress throughout the year. Each student will bring in new pages (~40-50) every other month to share with the group, and by the end of the year everyone will have either finished a novel, or gotten well on their way. Send me an email or leave a comment if you want more information!
Apologies for the very long wait for a new post! I meant to finish this sooner, but then there was a leak in my shower, and then the oil change light came on, and then my friend needed a ride to the dentist, and then our rain gutters started overflowing, and then my father found a beehive in our Radon pump, and then the coolant system broke in my other car, and then there was this weird blight on my tomatoes, and then my parents came to town for eight weeks, and then my daughter broke her glasses, and then my dog hurt his paw (he's fine), and then…
This is, for better or for worse, just how life is. A series of self-interrupting events, often surprising, but typically disconnected in any casual sense. It tends to be pretty exciting, even challenging, to get through on a daily basis—most of us are fairly absorbed in these kinds of ups and downs all the time. Job stress, relationship drama, family tensions, home repairs and renovations… it is overwhelming, all-consuming.
Yet one of the first things we learn as writers is that it rarely makes a very good story. That is to say, it isn’t much of a plot.
If I were to take all those things I mentioned earlier and write them down in a story called “My Hectic Summer” it would be full of conflicts and even some drama. But it would not be especially compelling—few of us would really want to read it.
If you’ve ever met up with a friend for coffee, and asked them how life is going, and then sat there listening to some similar outpouring… you know what I’m getting at here. Just because there’s a lot going on in someone’s life, that doesn’t make it inherently interesting to anyone else.
But—if we focus on one thing, tell it in vivid detail, from start to finish, in a sequence of causal events, describing your moment-by-moment reactions with pathos or humor? Then even a relatively simple story about a burst tire can become a thrilling adventure, a worthy tale for an audience. You have taken life and made it into a story.
As EM Forster put it in Aspects of the Novel, “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot...”
One of my professors used to tell a story about going to a party in his own college days, and going to leave his coat on the bed in the spare room, saw a typewriter on a desk with a huge stack of pages behind it. The host of the party came in and saw him looking at the stack of papers and said, “Oh that—that’s just my novel.” And our professor said, “Wow, that’s a really long novel!” And the host laughed and said, “Oh, well, it’s easy—I just sit down at the end of every day and I write a page about everything that happened to me and then I put it on the pile.”
That—my professor would then say to us—is not a novel. That’s, at best, a diary. A novel has to have a focus, a shape… a beginning and an end, not just a lot of middle. There are stakes and desires. More than anything it has to have some logical sequence of causal events, which daily life just doesn’t, most times, have.
Stuff just happens. Then plotting is what we do, retrospectively, looking back on things that have happened and organizing them in our minds. “Oh my hair was dirty after the leak in my shower meant I couldn't wash up, which meant that I was distracted by my dandruff and some got in my eye, which meant I couldn't see the Check Engine light in my car, and so then it overheated just when my friend was expecting me to pick them up from the dentist’s… in this version of my story called “Summer” if, at any point, the chain of events was altered, the whole thing would work out differently. (Had there been no leak, I would have seen the Check Engine light, and then I would have made it to my friend on time.)
It becomes a plot, and not just a bunch of stuff.
But isn't art supposed to mirror life? Is it maybe a little dishonest to present our lives in this kind of logical, structured form that didn't happen, or that we, living it, usually didn't see until much time has passed?
If it is a facet of modern life, perhaps since industrialization but certainly since digitalization, that our lives are under a kind of constant informational assault, hyper-interrupted and fragmented in ways that, frankly, might be driving us all to the brink of madness, but which are nevertheless also part of the daily texture of existence in a time of text messages and Breaking News alerts and phone notifications and social media… then do we maybe need to create fiction that honors that chaotic and sometimes nauseating quality of our lives? To not do that would be to risk having art detach from reality, become increasingly unable to represent what it means to be alive in our modern, stochastic world.
I thought about this a lot last summer as I caught up on the hit TV show The Pitt, on HBO (I’ll never, ever call it “MAX”) about the lives of doctors and nurses and other health care workers in an emergency room in Pittsburgh. In some ways the show is a kind of reboot of the 90s TV phenomenon, ER, which also started Noah Wyle. In that show, Wyle played fresh-faced newbie Dr. Carter. In this one, he’s the seasoned veteran Dr. “Robby” Robinavitch.
One of the ways that, thirty years ago, ER broke new ground in TV storytelling was by lacing sudden and chaotic interruptions into the emotional dramas of its characters. Two doctors in the middle of discussing a marital crisis or the mental health of a nurse on shift, would suddenly be ripped away from that conversation as a team of EMTs burst through the doors with a gurney, carrying some patient in intense medical crisis. Watching it, audiences were always on edge—never knowing if a kid with a fever or a man who lopped off his arm or a woman with a gunshot wound was about to erupt into the story. While “normal” TV shows tended to follow fairly predictable sequences of cause-and-effect plotting, ER got attention by smashing that model.
In many ways the hourlong TV drama never went back—there have been dozens and dozens of Fire/Police/Medical dramas built on the ER formula in the years since, to the point where this sort of storytelling has become normal, if not even a little boring. I’ve written before on this very Substack about TV shows like Yellowstone that seem to exploit this tactic by constantly one-upping the existing dramas, often not even bothering to resolve the previous ones. But are the daily lives of Montana ranchers truly as intensely stochastic as the daily lives of Emergency Medicine doctors? (To be fair a friend of mine who works in an ER once told me that, unlike what’s seen on TV, he found he spent the vast majority of his time just giving “banana bags” of vitamins to unhoused people and dealing with minor stitch-ups from kitchen accidents.)
In any case, what The Pitt seems to do that feels new is to increase the pace and the chaos, well beyond what audiences have become used to in the post-ER years. There are still occasional moments of downtime, little moments of character building, side conversations—but these plot points come across as quick interruptions to the chaos, instead of the chaos interrupting the plot points. For the vast majority of the show there is only one crisis on top of another and another and another.
There isn't a pause for emotional drama. Almost every shot is in motion, every conversation is a walk-and-talk. There are patients overflowing the waiting room, patients overflowing the ER hallways. Stuff is happening in the background of almost every shot. (There's a three-episode arc during which Doctor Robby literally can't find a moment to pee.) Everything is happening everywhere and all at once. I often found myself having totally forgotten about a loose thread from a previous episode, or even earlier in the same one, such that when it resumed it would feel like it had been days since it last existed. But in The Pitt every hour-long episode is an hour in the ER, meaning that everything is happening in (pretty much) real time, all the time.
In the final few episodes, which follow a mass shooting event, there is such an even higher tempo from the hectic baseline that I almost forgot to breathe while watching.
It's incredible television, but it also strikes me as a very different kind of plot. Instead of a few intersecting, identifiable arcs that resolve over the course of an hour, in The Pitt there is a constant chaotic churn, and scenes don't coalesce into arcs the way you'd expect. A new patient arrives suddenly and interrupts the situation we were just invested in. And then that interruption is interrupted. And then that one.
Doctors just leave the story abruptly as their shifts end and they go home. Patients die totally unexpectedly, and there’s barely a moment for anyone to mourn them or to figure out what went wrong. Other patients are whisked off to surgery and will never be heard about again. There’s basically no way to keep tabs on all of it—you end up simply giving in to the relentless speed of it. You give up on expecting a story with cause and effect. You end up with a bunch of stuff.
In short, The Pitt breaks a lot of the rules of plots that we talked about before. An episode can feel a lot more like my bad “My Crazy Summer” story than an episode of ER. But it's one of the best new things on television. How?
Let's start by saying that the acting is excellent, nuanced, complex. We genuinely become attached to both Dr Robby and all the young doctors in training. The show makes the nurses, staff members, patients, all feel rich and layered and interesting, and very quickly—it’s excellent at the “single brushstroke” technique of characterization that I’ve written about before. And it has to be—there’s no time for two brushstrokes in The Pitt, at least not two in a row. But even the most interesting characters in the world need some kind of plotting to compel us, right?
If a typical plot moves in an arc, building momentum through a series of conflicts, to a point of climax, after which things resolve. In the book Meander, Spiral, Explode, Jane Allison argues that we should expand the repertoire of plot forms to get beyond the “masculo-sexual” wave form. She proposes other “natural” structures that can work as models, like a meandering river, a series of “wavelets”, a radial explosion, a whirlpool, and so on.
But none of those really capture what you see in The Pitt. The closes we get is (above) her final proposed form, the tsunami, a huge wave made of other smaller waves. This gets the scale and intensity, but still suggests a kind of greater underlying order to the events than we really see in The Pitt.
My visualization of an episode of The Pitt would look something like the scatter plot above, where as time progresses along the X-axis, we jump around from character to character and story to story, never for more than a few moments. They overlap, collide, come apart, reconnect. But the overall effect is one of total randomness.
I've been calling this plot form a “Stochastic Plot” looking more like a great big swarm of insects, if we want to stay with the idea of a natural form. “Stochastic” is a mathematical term to describe a scattered, truly random distribution of points “that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.” I have heard it used recently in relation to terrorism, as a way of explaining the way that the random and unpredictable nature of the strikes are a key feature of its terrorizing effect. And that seems apt to the anxiety it induces here in the viewing process. You're on the edge of your seat all the time because at any moment something else unpredictable might occur, even in the middle of the many layers of ongoing action you're already wrapped up in.
And beneath the surface of the randomness, I expect that a keen student will still find patterns, logic, order—there is, always, some reason the writer or writers have put things together in the way they have. We are still not watching a live-stream of reality—it is only made to feel that way. This is precisely what is so impressive about it.
Recently I rewatched the Robert Altman movies Nashville (1975) and Short Cuts (1993) and both felt somewhat similar in nature to this kind of story—everything is decentralized, there is no single main character, and the movie leaps around in a seemingly random way from one piece of the story to the next. Characters from one story will intersect with, and interact with, others, but there’s never any predicting which way it might go next. I thought also of the 2019 film Uncut Gems, which focuses on a disastrous day in the life of a single character but with similar constant interruptions that make you feel as if you’re having a two-hour panic attack. Clearly there’s a way of making this work on the screen, and when done well it can be very powerful indeed.
Could this work on the page for a novelist? One big difference between written and visual mediums like TV or film is that a book has to be actively paged through, a reader has to move themselves along, line by line. A video format means that the story is just happening. You have to actively choose to change the channel or turn off the show. The default is that it keeps going. Not true with a book.
But of course we have all had the experience of being wrapped up in novels that seem to be “unputdownable” and where time flies by without us realizing. So I would say we have to at least take that as a prerequisite, which is of course a tall order. But if you are able to compel a reader in that way, you should be able to pull off the kind of constant plot interruption technique without issue. You might follow one character through an hour or a day in which they have to withstand a warzone, or a hurricane, or a social media feed. Novels like Jenny Offill’s Weather or Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland are able to represent this reality/time fragmentation with a longer story told in small separated pieces (often called a “crot” in literary circles) which can create a similar kind of dynamic, stochastic effect.
And these (very good!) novels don’t in any way sacrifice those things we love about fiction that we don’t get from TV: interiority, lulls in action, moments of introspection, or quiet observation. But they keep things jumping, always, fragment to fragment, moment to moment, in a way that feels authentic to the way modern life feels to us today. It is just happening and we are in it, trying to navigate it to the best of our ability. To some degree these models return to one of the oldest storytelling forms—the picaresque—as we slip in and out of disconnected episodes and challenges in the course of a journey, each of us an Odysseus, a Don Quixote, a Moll Flanders, or a Huckleberry Finn, unable to see the bigger invisible forces and patterns all around us.
That opening paragraph may not offer up a plot but it would make a great poem.