by The Anatomy of Story- 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller (mobi)
Not surprisingly, plot techniques such as "three-act structure" that do not account for both the whole story and the detailed plot threads fail miserably. Writers who use the old three-act structure techniques are always complaining about second-act problems. That's because the techniques they use to create plot are fundamentally flawed. The mechanical and simplistic techniques of three-act structure don't give you a precise map showing how to weave a great plot throughout the difficult middle section of the story.
One reason writers underestimate plot is that they have many misconceptions about what it is. They often think that plot is the same as story. Or that plot simply tracks the actions of a hero going after his goal. Or that plot is the way the story is told.
Story is much larger than plot. Story is all of the subsystems of the story body working together: premise, character, moral argument, world, symbol, plot, scene, and dialogue. Story is a "many-faceted complex of form and meaning in which the line of narrative [plot] is only one amongst many aspects."1
Plot is the under-the-surface weaving of various lines of action or sets ol events so that the story builds steadily from the beginning through the middle to the end. More particularly, plot tracks the intricate dance between the hero and all of his opponents as they fight for the same goal. It is a combination of what happens and how those events are revealed to the audience.
KEY POINT: Your plot depends on how you withhold and reveal information. Plotting involves "the masterful management of suspense and mystery, artfully leading the reader through an elaborate . . . space that is always full of signs to be read, but always menaced with misreading until the very end. "2
Plot is any description of a sequence of events: this happened, then this happened, and then this happened. But a simple sequence of events is not a good plot. It has no purpose, no designing principle that tells you which events to tell and in which order. A good plot is always organic, and this means many things:
■ An organic plot shows the actions that lead to the hero's character change or explain why that change is impossible, ■ Each of the events is causally connected.
Each event is essential, ■ Each action is proportionate in its length and pacing. ■ The amount of plotting seems to come naturally from the main character rather than being imposed by the author on the characters. Imposed plot feels mechanical, with the wheels and gears of the story machine clearly evident. This drains the characters of their fullness
and humanity, making them feel like puppets or pawns. Plot that comes naturally from the hero is not simply one the hero concocts. It is plot that is appropriate to the character's desire and ability to plan and act.
■ The sequence of events has a unity and totality of effect. As Edgar Allan Poe said, in a good plot, "no part can be displaced without ruin to the whole."3
Organic plot is very difficult to grasp, much less create. That's partly because plotting always involves a contradiction. Plot is something you design, pulling actions and events out of thin air and then connecting them in some order. And yet the plot events must seem like necessary stages that develop of their own accord.
Generally, the history of plot evolves from an emphasis on taking action to learning information, which are the two "legs" by means of which every story moves. Early plot, using the myth form, shows a main character taking a series of heroic actions, which the audience is inspired to mimic. Later plot, using a broad version of the detective form, shows a hero and an audience ignorant or confused about what is happening, and their task is to determine the truth about these events and characters.
Let's look at some of the major plot types to see the different ways storytellers design the sequence of events and create an organic plot.
The Journey Plot
The first major strategy of plot came from the myth storytellers, and its main technique was the journey. In this plot form, the hero goes on a journey where he encounters a number of opponents in succession. He defeats each one and returns home. The journey is supposed to be organic (1) because one person is creating the single line and (2) because the journey provides a physical manifestation of the hero's character change. Every time the hero defeats an opponent, he may experience a small character change. He experiences his biggest change (his self-revelation) when
he returns home to discover what was already deep within him; he discovers his deepest capabilities.
The problem with the journey plot is that it usually fails to achieve its organic potential. First, the hero almost never undergoes even slight character change when defeating each of his opponents. He simply beats the character and moves on. So each fight with a strange opponent becomes a repeat of the same plot beat and feels episodic, not organic, to the audience.
A second reason the journey plot rarely becomes organic is that the hero covers so much space and time on the trip. In such a sprawling, meandering story, the storyteller has great difficulty bringing back characters the hero encounters in the early part of the story and doing so in a natural, believable way.
Over the years, writers have been painfully aware of the problems inherent in the journey plot, and they have tried various techniques to solve them. For example, in Tom Jones, which uses a comic journey, the author, Henry Fielding, relies on two major structural fixes. First, he hides the true identity of the hero and that of some of the other characters at the beginning of the story. This allows him to return to some familiar characters and see them in a deeper way. Fielding is applying the revelation technique, also known as the "reveal," to the journey plot.
Second, he brings back many of the early characters over the course of Tom's journey by sending these characters on journeys of their own, all with the same destination as Tom. This creates a funnel effect and lets Tom bounce off one character and then another again and again over the course of the story.
The difficulty of creating an organic plot using the journey is clearly seen in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain comes up with the brilliant idea of the raft, a miniature floating island, on which he can place Huck and a second character, Jim. But the vehicle is too small, so Huck and Jim have no ongoing opponents and encounter a succession of strangers "on the road." Also, with his main character stranded down the Mississippi, Twain has no idea how to bring the plot to a natural end. So he arbitrarily stops the journey and uses deus ex machina to save the day. There is no reason for Tom Sawyer to reappear, other than to return the plot to its comical roots, put on a spiffy polish, and say, "The End." Even Mark Twain can't get away with that.
The Three Unities Plot
The second major strategy for creating an organic plot was provided by ancient Greek dramatists like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Their central technique was what Aristotle referred to as the unities of time, place, and action. In this technique, the story must take place in twenty-four hours, in one location, and must follow one action or story line. The plot is organic because all actions come from the hero in a very short time of development. Notice that this technique solves the big problem of the journey plot by having opponents the hero knows and who are present throughout the story.
The problem with the three unities plot is that although the plot is organic, there isn't enough of it. Having such a short time period greatly limits the number and power of the revelations. Revelations are the learning part of plot (as opposed to taking action), and they are the keys to how complex the plot is. The short time period in these stories means that the hero knows the opponents too well. They may have hatched a plot before the start of the story, but once the story begins, they are limited in how much of themselves they can hide.
As a result, with the three unities plot, you typically have the time, opponents, and complexity of action for one big reveal. For example, Oedipus (in the world's first detective story) learns that he has killed his father and slept with his mother. That's a very big reveal, no doubt. But if you want a lot of plot, you have to have reveals peppered throughout the story.
The
Reveals Plot
The third major plot type is what we might call the reveals plot. In this technique, the hero generally stays in one place, though it is not nearly so narrow an area as unity of place requires. For example, the story may take place in a town or a city. Also, the reveals plot almost always covers a longer time period than unity of time allows, even up to a few years. (When the story covers decades, you are probably writing a saga, which tends more toward the journey plot.)
The key technique of the reveals plot is that the hero is familiar with his opponents, but a great deal about them is hidden from the hero and the audience. In addition, these opponents are very skilled at scheming to get what they want. This combination produces a plot that is filled with revelations, or surprises, for the hero and the audience.
Notice the basic difference between the journey plot and reveals plot : in the journey plot, surprise is limited because the hero dispatches a large number of opponents quickly. The reveals plot takes few opponents and hides as much about them as possible. Revelations magnify the plot by going under the surface.
When done properly, the reveals plot is organic because the opponent is the character best able to attack the weakness of the hero, and the surprises come at the moments when the hero and the audience learn how those attacks have occurred. The hero must then overcome his weakness and change or be destroyed.
The reveals plot is very popular with audiences because it maximizes surprise, which is a source of delight in any story. Another name for this is the big plot, not just because there are so many surprises but also because they tend to be shocking. Although still immensely popular today especially in detective stories and thrillers—the heyday of the reveals plot was the nineteenth century, with writers like Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers) and Dickens. Not surprisingly, this was also the height of stories like The Portrait of a Lady in which extremely powerful villains use negative plots to win.
Dickens was the master of the reveals plot, perhaps unequaled in storytelling history. But Dickens's reputation as one of the great storytellers of all time comes partly from the fact that he often expanded the reveals plot by combining it with the journey plot. Needless to say, this required tremendous plotting ability, since these two plot approaches are in many ways opposites. In the journey plot, the hero meets a vast cross section of society but quickly leaves each character behind. In the reveals plot, the hero meets a handful of people but gets to know them very well.
Antiplot
If nineteenth-century storytelling was about superplot, twentieth-century storytelling, at least in serious fiction, was about antiplot. In stories as wildly different as Ulysses, Last Year at Marienbad, L'Avventura, Waiting for Godot, The Cherry Orchard, and The Catcher in the Rye, you see almost a disdain for plot, as if it were the magic act you have to perform for the audience so you can do the more important work of character. As Northrop Frye says, "We may keep reading a novel or attending a play 'to see how it turns out.' But once we know how it turns out, and the spell ceases to bind us, we tend to forget the continuity, the very element in the play or novel that enabled us to participate in it."4
If you were to sum up the plot of some of these stories, it might go something like this: The Catcher in the Rye involves a teenage boy walking around New York City for a couple of days. In The Cherry Orchard, a family arrives at the old homestead, waits around for it to be sold at auction, and leaves. L'Avventura is a detective story in which no crime may have occurred and none is solved.
I suspect that many twentieth-century writers were not rebelling against plot per se but big plot, those sensational revelations that so shock the reader, they knock over everything else in their path. What I am calling antiplot, then, is really a range of techniques that these storytellers devised that would make the plot organic by making it express the subtleties of character. Point of view, shifting narrators, branching story structure, and nonchronological time are all techniques that play with plot by changing how the story is told, with the deeper aim of presenting a more complex view of human character.
These techniques might make stories feel fragmented, but they're not necessarily inorganic. Multiple points of view can express collage, montage, and character dislocation but also a sense of vitality and a flood of sensations. If these experiences contribute to the development of the character and the audience's sense of who that character is, they are organic and ultimately satisfying.
Plot digressions—which are common in antiplot—are a form of simultaneous action and sometimes backward action. They are organic if and only if they come out of who the character is. For example, Tristram Shandy, the ultimate antiplot novel, has often been criticized for its never-ending digressions. But what these readers fail to realize is that Tristram Shandy isn't a story with a main plotline interrupted by digressions. It is a story of digressions interrupted by what appears to be a main plotline.
The main character, Tristram, is essentially a man who digresses, so the way the story is told is a perfectly organic expression of who the hero is.
A version of antiplot is backward storytelling, like Harold Pinter's Betrayal, in which the scenes are laid out in reverse chronological order. Backward storytelling actually highlights the organic unfolding of the story by highlighting the causal thread between scenes. This thread is normally buried under the surface; one scene seems to naturally follow another. But by going backward, the audience is forced to become conscious of the connecting thread between scenes. They can see that what just happened bad to evolve from the event that came before it and the event that came before that.
Genre Plot
While serious storytellers were making plot smaller, their popular counterparts, especially in movies and novels, were making it even bigger through genre. Genres are types of stories, with predetermined characters, themes, worlds, symbols, and plots. Genre plots are usually big, emphasizing revelations that are so stunning they sometimes flip the story upside down. Of course, these big plots lose some of their power by the fact that they are predetermined. The audience knows generally what is going to happen in any genre story, so only the particulars surprise them.
These various genre plots seem organically connected to their main characters simply because they have been written so many times. All padding is gone. But these genre plots lack a huge requirement of an organic plot: they are not unique to their particular main character. They are literally generic, which means they are mechanical. In certain genres like farce and caper (heist stories), this mechanical quality is taken to such an extreme that the plots have the complexity and timing of a Swiss watch—and no character at all.
Multistrand Plot
The newest plot strategy is the multistrand plot, which was originally devised by novelists and screenwriters but has really flowered in dramatic television, beginning with the seminal show Hill Street Blues. In this strategy, each story, or weekly episode, is comprised of three to live major plot strands. Each strand is driven by a separate character within a single group, usually within an organization like a police precinct, hospital, or law firm. The storyteller crosscuts between these strands. When this plot strategy is executed poorly, the strands have nothing to do with each other, and the crosscut is simply used to goose the audience's attention and increase the speed. When the plot strategy is executed well, each strand is a variation on a theme, and the crosscut from one strand to another creates a shock of recognition at the moment two scenes are juxtaposed.
The multistrand plot is clearly a much more simultaneous form of storytelling, emphasizing the group, or the minisociety, and how the characters compare. But that doesn't mean this plot strategy can never be organic. The multistrand approach simply changes the developing unit from the single hero to the group. When the many strands are variations on one theme, the audience more readily experiences who we are as humans, and that can be just as insightful and moving as seeing the growth of a single person.
CREATING AN ORGANIC
PLOT
Now that you are well armed with knowledge of some of the major plot strategies, the big question arises, How do you create an organic plot for your particular characters? Here is the sequence for writing an organic plot:
4. Decide whether you wish to use a storyteller. This can have a big effect on how you tell the audience what happens and thus how you design the plot.
5. Figure out the structure in detail, using the twenty-two structure steps of every great story (which we'll discuss in a moment). This will give you most of your plot beats (major actions or events), and it will guarantee, as much as any technique can, that your plot is organic.
6. Decide if you want your story to use one or more genres. If so, you must add the plot beats unique to those genres at the appropriate places and twist them in some way so that your plot is not predictable.
Although you should decide if you want a storyteller before using t he twenty-two building blocks to figure out your plot, I am going to explain these powerful and advanced tools in reverse chronology, since this is the easiest way to understand them.
1. Sell-revelation, need, and desire
2. Ghost and story world
3. Weakness and need
4. Inciting event
5. Desire
6. Ally or allies
7. Opponent and/or mystery
8. Fake-ally opponent
9. First revelation and decision: Changed desire and motive
10. Plan
11. Opponent's plan and main counterattack
12. Drive
13. Attack by ally
14. Apparent defeat
15. Second revelation and decision: Obsessive drive, changed desire and motive
16. Audience revelation
17. Third revelation and decision
18. Gate, gauntlet, visit to death
19. Battle
20. Self-revelation
21. Moral decision
22. New equilibrium
At first glance, using the twenty-two steps may appear to stunt your creativity, to give you a mechanical story rather than an organic one. This is part of a deeper fear that many writers have of too much planning. But the result is that they try to make the story up as they go and end up with a mess. Using the twenty-two steps avoids either of these extremes and actually increases your creativity. The twenty-two steps are not a formula for writing. Instead they provide the scaffolding you need to do something really creative and know that it will work as your story unfolds organically.