Producing plot

[Jubal]

So, I thought I'd open a bit of a discussion for writer-y types as I've struggled with this a lot lately.

It feels like plot is something I find really difficult to produce when writing fiction: I can do it, but I often find that my plots don't hang together as well as I'd like, and take ages to come up with, unless they're really very simple.

I feel like part of my problem is that I think quite mechanically about plot, but organically about themes: I'm usually writing toward some sort of aesthetic, image, or scene I had in my head as the core element, and the plot then forms to give me a way to explore that. I intuitively understand fairytale and folklore plots best, since they operate by simple, memorable rulesets by and large, but I worry those can be plodding when I want to write good SFF that's actually interesting to adults.

So how do you go about writing plot, or if you're not a writer, which writers do you feel produce plot best and why?