Plot Device
Quick answer: Plot device defined: any object, character or event that exists to move the story, from Othello's handkerchief to the MacGuffin, and how to hide the machinery.
A plot device is any object, character, event or circumstance that exists chiefly to move the story where it needs to go: the lost letter, the overheard conversation, the storm that strands the guests. In other words, it is a gear in the narrative machine, and the craft lies in making the gear look like life.
The term is umbrella-wide, covering everything from the ticking clock to the prophecy, and it carries a faint smell of accusation: calling something 'a plot device' in a review usually means the machinery showed. For working writers the term is neutral, a category of tools to be used well or badly.
A handkerchief runs the tragedy
The most famous plot device in English drama is a square of embroidered cloth. In Othello, a handkerchief dropped by Desdemona and planted by Iago becomes the ocular proof that convinces a husband to murder his wife. As evidence it is absurd, and Shakespeare knows it: the play works because Iago has prepared Othello to need so little. The device is tiny; the desire it feeds is enormous, which is the pattern all good plot devices follow.
Alfred Hitchcock later coined a name for the device stripped to its purest form: the MacGuffin, the thing everyone chases whose actual nature barely matters, secret plans, a briefcase, the formula. His point was liberating: the audience cares about the pursuit and the people, not the object, so the writer should spend invention on the chase.
Why devices exist, and when they show
Devices are efficiency. Story needs pressure, coincidence needs management, and characters need reasons to collide; devices supply all three at low cost. Nobody has written fiction without them, because plot itself is arranged causation and something must do the arranging.
They fail when the arranging becomes visible, when readers feel the author's hand pushing rather than the characters' desires pulling. Warning signs: an object with no life beyond its function, a character who exists only to deliver information, a storm that arrives exactly when the plot requires isolation. The fix is rarely to remove the device. It is to give the device a second existence, roots in character and setting, so its plot duty looks like coincidence's day job.
Choosing and disguising your device
Start from desire, not mechanism. Decide what your protagonist wants, then choose a device that concentrates the want into something concrete and contestable: a will, a key, a diagnosis, a seat on the last boat. Give the device history, let more than one character want it for different reasons, and make it cost something to hold.
The trap is the single-use device. If your lost letter has never mattered to anyone before the plot needs it, readers will smell the workshop glue. Weave it in early, let it be touched twice before it turns the story, and the device stops being a device in the reader's mind and becomes simply a thing in the world.
Devices in the wild
Once you start naming devices, you see the stock ones every genre keeps in its cupboard. Romance runs on the interrupted declaration and the misdirected letter; Austen turns the plot of Pride and Prejudice on Darcy's letter, a folded sheet of paper that reverses the heroine's entire understanding. Mysteries keep the snowbound house that seals suspects in, the will read aloud to assembled relatives, the overheard quarrel. Fantasy stocks prophecies and heirlooms; thrillers stock the mole, the deadline and the case that was never really closed.
Familiarity is not a defect here. Readers arrive knowing the cupboard and enjoy watching a known tool used freshly; the letter device is four centuries old and Austen's remains the best because of what the letter says about the man who wrote it. The lesson runs one way: borrow any device you like, but root it in these people and this place until it could not be transplanted back out. A stock device grown into its story stops reading as stock.
The family tree of devices
Most named tricks of storytelling are species of plot device. The MacGuffin is desire's empty container; the ticking clock converts time into pressure; the red herring misdirects; the deus ex machina resolves from outside and is the family's black sheep, since it moves the plot without the characters earning the movement. Mistaken identity, prophecy, the love triangle, the frame narrative: all devices, all respectable when rooted. The label turns pejorative only when function outweighs life, so treat 'plot device' as a diagnosis of visibility, not a category of shame.
What poets can take from this
- Build devices out of your characters' desires, never bolt desires onto a device.
- Give every functional object or messenger character a life beyond its plot duty.
- Let a device be seen twice in ordinary use before it turns the story.
- If a coincidence helps your protagonist, charge them for it somewhere else.
- Name the device privately in revision, then check whether a stranger could spot it.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which an object that three characters want for three incompatible reasons changes hands twice without anyone stealing it. The object must be something that would fit in a coat pocket.
Questions
Is a MacGuffin the same as a plot device?
A MacGuffin is one species of plot device: the desired object whose specific nature hardly matters, since it exists to motivate pursuit. All MacGuffins are plot devices; most plot devices, a ticking clock or a prophecy, are not MacGuffins.
Is calling something a plot device an insult?
In reviews, usually: it implies the machinery showed. In craft discussion it is neutral. Every story uses devices; the question is whether they are rooted in character and setting or visibly bolted on.
How do I stop a plot device feeling contrived?
Give it history, multiple claimants and a cost. A device that existed before the plot needed it, and that more than one person wants for different reasons, reads as world rather than mechanism.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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