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.

See, my problem is that most of my fanfic reading recently's been in Stargate and examples from that won't help you. Did you read... oh, Transubstantiation, right? The HP fic that was mentioned in here yesterday? In my head, that was weakly plotty. (Wonderful, also - HP fic isn't my thing, but that was fabulous.)