Thank You For Smoking, by Christopher Buckley

Satirical tale of a smooth-talking s(m/p)okesperson

I re-watched the movie recently, which I remember really liking when I was younger (fifteen maybe?), so then I also read the book. It's kind of amazing to compare them, they're both great i.m.o., and they both contain the same basic elements. But... the elements have been rejiggered and moved around,

I know I hit this note too often but: the role of plot/narrative in fiction (and narrative non-fiction) seems completely misunderstood, to me. I think we mainly read for a mood or feeling or atmosphere -- in this case, biting social satire, a way to gape at the absurdity of the world, like an old court jester was allowed to tell the King the truth that nobody else could say -- and plot only exists as a kind of propulsion, a way to keep us reading, as soon as the thing is over we'll basically forget what the plot actually said.

And to me -- though, you know, I read everything with the bias of someone who already had their opinion to begin with -- this book-to-movie comparison perfectly illustrates that, because (for whatever reasons, I wish I could talk to the scriptwriter) they took this very short book which could have been filmed as-is and instead made a movie with the exact same elements and the same overall feeling but a slightly different plot bouncing you through it.

I've said before and I'll say again that I think you could write a successful novel without a plot so long as you found some other mechanism to push people through it, some other source of open questions that the reader can't help but stick around to solve. My attempts to write such a novel have admittedly failed badly, but all my other attempts to write novels have also failed badly, so I don't think this is dispositive. I suspect that one source of alternative mechanisms would be to study mobile games and social apps, which seem very good at compelling us without a narrative structure, but I have not in fact studied mobile games or social apps, so I don't know how to transfer their trick to writing. If you do, let me know.