Pipe Smoke, Torrential Rain, and the Secret of Every Great Story
An Examination of Story Plot, within a story plot, about a story plot
Throughout the past three months, while still in the throes of demotivation, I’ve made an effort to wrestle down the cloud of ideas relating to what Narrative plot really is, and what it accomplishes for the average human.
I started taking long walks through the many neighborhoods surrounding my house. I naturally walk at a very fast pace, so in order to slow down, I started smoking a pipe as I walked. Pipe smoking is a wonderful ritual that not many people agree with, but having a well-lit pipe to keep you company is a great way to slow one’s life down. It allows the soul to reach out, to examine the trees, the houses, the freshly mown lawns, and to quiet all the swirling noise going on inside.
On one of these nights, I set out from home around 10:30 with a certain destination in mind. Pausing to light, tamp, and relight the pipe, I continued down the driveway, and into the surrounding neighborhoods.
I’m not sure any man can walk down a nice neighborhood sidewalk, with no phone in his pocket, a nice pipe lit, and not find himself more calm than when he started. I was certainly enjoying the night, but considered cutting the walk short and going back home since I had forgotten to drink something before setting out. After thinking for a moment, I decided to continue.
In many great stories over the years, we see a temptation for the character to abandon what they set out to do at the beginning. Admittedly, this hits pretty close to home, I’ve always had trouble completing projects, regardless of whether the idea is good or not. This problem extends to my ability to reach the destination of my walk. Nevertheless, I decided to continue despite the thirst. Had I not continued on the walk, I would have never experienced what ended up happening**
Smoking Pipes is something I’ve come to enjoy the past couple months. When you have a nightly routine of smoking a pipe, it means you live within a context to do something besides work. Pipes allow you to consider whether your efforts are going to the right place, and to appreciate this exact moment in my life. I don’t tend to get that focused self-reflection in many other places.
The term context is very important to the point I’m trying to describe. In our regular lives, there are always a million things going on at once. The laundry always needs done, the bed made, dinner cooked, kitchen cleaned, emails responded to, projects finished, Kids taken care of (if you have them, I don’t yet). There’s always something executive that needs to be completed in the context of your daily life. Changing context is a way to move from life’s duties to something more introspective, creative, and fulfilling. This idea of setting context is also one of the core aspects of creative storytelling.
One of the answers every writer must have before seriously putting together any story, is what is the changing context that moves the character from the established setting?
Kurt Vonnegut described story plot as the change of a character’s Fortune, good or ill. The character’s fortune can start wherever the author wants; however, the context in which the established character’s fortune changes is one of the key points of any story. As an example, he often makes the graph below:
Colored lines represent different types of stories. You can see they can start in any manner possible to dream up by the author, but they all fit within this framework, where outside things are happening to the established characters that change their fortune for the better, for the worse, and everything in between.
If anything gets taken away from this, it’s that stories are about the force that moves the conscious being from an established baseline of fortune. This theory covers every story I’ve read.
Anyways, I was walking away from my house, looking at the moderately-sized puddles on the side of the road, considering drinking from them just a little bit to moisten my dry mouth, knowing what a terrible idea it was. The road I was walking down was full of nice houses, with beautiful landscape, and I was deliberately slowing my natural pace, taking time to examine the trees and houses as I walked past. It was quite a long ways, and I enjoyed being out by myself, contentedly puffing on the pipe.
Finally reaching my destination, my pipe was now about half smoked; a perfect time to start heading home. As I began walking again, a light rain started, and I covered the top of my pipe with two fingers to keep the water out as I continued smoking. Light rain is common where I live and it didn’t bother me at all, the walk was still going well.
At this point in the story, we’ve completed setting the environment, and baseline fortune of the character. The author (God) can make almost anything happen to the character (me), but what I have written so far is not currently a story. It’s a lot closer to a factual series of events, i.e., young man goes on walk, walk successful thus far. The context setting is not unimportant, however; there are many little things I’ve mentioned in the setting that will all come together at the end of the story.
As I was walking home, content, in my own little world, I began to notice the rain getting stronger. I had around a mile to cover to get to shelter, and the rain was turning into a real storm at this point. I began to notice streams of water running down the sidewalks and road, and walking through them was soaking through my shoes. The rain got even stronger, and my attempts to keep my pipe lit failed, the water was streaming through my hands.
The world was now completely different. It had gone from a nice night out to a torrential downpour, and I was still blocks away from home. As I was hurrying back, I noticed a stand of large trees, all with thick foliage. Stepping off the road and under the trees, suddenly the world changed back to the dry pleasant place it once was. I looked down at my cold pipe, and slowly relit it, the white tobacco smoke curling up through the branches above**.
These moments of rest are something we often see in stories, where the character can pause to get some rest and consider their current state just before the climax. It was really quite something, and I drew this exact distinction while smoking below the stand of trees, the pounding rain on all sides of my little shelter.
As in every story, the character must move on, and so I did, back into the downpour, keeping a tighter seal over the top of my relit pipe and walking the last couple of blocks toward my driveway. I was still thinking about that resting moment on my way back, when suddenly I realized something: I was currently living inside a real story, the exact thing that had me ruminating for months, trying to figure out how the writing I wanted to complete felt so far away, and yet now I understood. This is what a real story is supposed to be, and I was completely immersed in one at this very moment.
Spontaneously I stopped halfway up the driveway, the rain pounding on my shoulders, and just stood there, watching the water stream down the driveway, watching the sidewalk drain, just watching, wanting to stay immersed inside this story for as long as possible. I really had gotten my foreshadowed wish for a glass of water.
It was a great time to celebrate life, coming home out of the torrential downpour**, still hesitant to leave the story, I spent some more time on the porch before going inside to dry off, enjoying a bottle of water and finishing the last of my pipe.
While this was just a few paragraphs, we can all agree that there was a story behind my ill-fated walk that night. As the story progressed, we see the character’s state change from his established baseline, go down, rest, further down, then shoot up. If we were using one of Vonnegut’s graphs, it would look something like this:
(The baseline Characters Fortune could be lower, however we happen to be privileged, living in the greatest country on earth, so can’t really complain too much about that.)
This happened to also be a factually real event which was really significant. The context setting was the pipe smoking, the need for long walks, long months of torment making no progress on my book, the rainstorm, the tree shelter..** All these little things came together to create the self-realization that I was currently living inside a story, which re-established my good fortune. It was really quite something to see come together.
Authors note:
As of 3/9/26 at 1:13 AM, I still need to do a bit more editing, specifically introducing a couple more examples of how story plot works, i.e. the carrier bag theory, and others.
The main point is good however, that a well-set context (Setting, Scenes, Imagery) interacts with the story plot (Character Change) to create something worth reading.
