Is there a thought going on that plotty is better than non-plotty? That plottiness is something that should be worked towards? I'm wondering at the provenance of the original question.

Hah, used provenance in a sentence, yay, me.

So... thinking about this some more, though maybe I should stop while I'm ahead... if the plot or action takes place just to give the writer a chance to see what happens to the characters, that wouldn't seem terribly plotty to me. Hurt/comfort, for instance, can have oodles of stuff happening, even fairly complex series of events, but mostly I wouldn't call it plotty. It's All About Them.

if the plot or action takes place just to give the writer a chance to see what happens to the characters

But if you're not in the writer's head, you can't tell -- surely the estimation should be from the reader's POV.

I know, for many stories that live in my head, that I have an emotional beat sheet, and an event beat sheet. Half the time I don't know which drives which -- but if I come up with a intricate and compelling sequence of events that works well with what I really want to do -- get her from emotion A through F -- it still might be a plotty story. Or vice versa.

Ooo, Plot in Service to the Emotions vs. Emotions in Service to the Plot!

Episodes of hurt/comfort in the context of a larger story score higher on the plotty scale (heh, she said score [my god, where is my head today?]) than a series of events designed to bring about a hurt/comfort scenario. That said, I have to admit that h/c is my favorite guilty pleasure genre.

But if you're not in the writer's head, you can't tell -- surely the estimation should be from the reader's POV.

Oh, sure, it's all completely subjective on my part.

a series of events designed to bring about a hurt/comfort scenario

But how can you tell how/why they were designed? It could just be crappy writing that makes you think that.

Episodes of hurt/comfort in the context of a larger story score higher on the plotty scale (heh, she said score [my god, where is my head today?]) than a series of events designed to bring about a hurt/comfort scenario.

Yes, exactly. I don't know that it's possible to judge which is which objectively, though. (Actually, I'm pretty sure it's not.)

That said, I have to admit that h/c is my favorite guilty pleasure genre.

Oh, me too. We can be mildly embarassed together.

I don't know, Connie. If I'm reading along in a plot-oriented story, and suddenly trip and fall into a soup of h/c? I'm more annoyed, because while I find h/c basically annoying, I find it especially annoying when it wrecks my expectations of a story. And because there's an inevitable shift in tone between the two. Same thing often happens when a plotty story detours into romance and then out again (as opposed to romance being its raison d'etre): whoops, I am reading a chapter 12 from a completely different book!

Still thinking I don't understand this whole Plotty thing.

Hrrm.

Because the big divide I seem to see is external/internal journey, where a lot of the time I see plotty defined as the external WRT: fic. But it's not a distinction I see so much outside of fanfic, which could just be how I limit my reading.

Plot in Service to the Emotions vs. Emotions in Service to the Plot!

Ah-- this adds a whole layer of complication to the thing. My stories are normally the first kind, and so I think of them as non-plotty, emotion-driven, but they have so many events to serve the emotions that if I stand back, I can see you could read them as plot driven.