A lot of people have heard me toss around the words “plot-based” and “character-based” as if they were widely-accepted terms of literary criticism. Which they are not. But, I think many fellow readers and authors understand what I mean. Even so, an explanation—in the form of this post—has been long in coming.

Here’s what I mean:

Back in elementary school, you learned that every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Later, you might have gotten a modified picture of “introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution”, possibly with an actual “plot diagram” as seen here.^1…

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Last night I had a dream that one of my friends had a pair of bike wheels, and asked me a question:

“Which of these two wheels has more spokes?”

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“What? You hadn’t watched My Neighbor Totoro?”

For a long time I’d known that the “my” and the “neighbor” weren’t really proper in the translation of the real title, 「となりのトトロ」. But today I learned that “Totoro” isn’t really even correct—or if it is, it’s only because of the movie’s success. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My Neighbor Totoro¹ is a kids’ movie about two sisters moving into a house in the country with their dad. While exploring, they meet some curious sprites, from the soot-creatures that appear later in Spirited Away to the now world-famous…

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