by Marge Piercy
A woman in your building just got a new dog, an adorable little Pug that begs to be picked up. As you do, the hyperactive little thing squirms out of your arms and falls on the hardwood floor, breaking a bone. She suggests you pay the vet bills. You don’t think it’s your fault.
A very persistent person at a bar sits next to you and suggests you get to know each other. That’s the last thing on your mind.
You’re home for Thanksgiving. You really want to please your mom, who you haven’t seen in a long time. She is anxious for you to meet and like her new boyfriend, who not only has politics that are opposite yours but aggressively baits you.
The guy in the upstairs apartment has come home at 2 A.M. again and pumps his stereo up full blast. This has got to stop and you go upstairs to tell him so.
Exercise:
It is late at night in the suburbs or in the city or at a resort—your choice. A couple has returned to their room from a party, where one of them is upset with the other for what they see as excessive flirtation. Create dialog using physical tags and silences as well as what is said out loud in order to suggest the dynamics of the couple—who is the stronger? Who loves the other most? Who is the most possessive? What kind of shape is this relationship in—stable, rocky, dying?
Exercise:
Take this same kind of argument—Who has been flirting too much?—and move it into a public place such as a restaurant or on the subway or at the party in a corner. See what happens when there are other people around who may overhear. Do each of them care equally who hears them arguing? Is one more embarrassed by a public argument than the other one?
Exercise in Indirection:
As we have said, not all characters tell the truth. A person may be withholding information or actually lying. You want to create a situation in which the reader can guess or suspect that the character is not being truthful or not being open—their conversation is not transparent. They are intentionally misleading or throwing another character off track. Such a scene is interesting to write. What you want is to arouse the reader’s suspicions. Perhaps one character does not feel comfortable lying outright, and manages not to answer the question or provide the information requested. Instead they change the subject, pretend to misunderstand the question, provide a great deal of verbiage or information but not to the point of answering the actual question asked. This is a subtle exercise, but one that can be fun to write.
Perhaps you want to use the context of a murder mystery. Perhaps you like the context of a jealous partner trying to find out whether their significant other is having an affair. Perhaps it is a mother or father questioning their teenager about where they have been so late or who they have been with. Perhaps it is a manager in an office who is trying to find out what happened to some document or office supplies. Perhaps it is a professor trying to find out whether a student plagiarized a suddenly insightful and well-researched paper. Perhaps it is an ex trying to find out whether their previous spouse is seeing someone new.
6
Plot In The Novel
True story: I know a writer who told me he needed a motel room to start his novel. What he would do was push all the furniture to the middle of the room, then cover all four walls floor-to-ceiling with a blank roll of newsprint. He would then proceed to outline his book, chapter by chapter, to the end, listing every incident in a flow chart. He thought visually, he told me. He needed to see it all written out on paper. Ideally he would sequester himself in the room with pots of coffee and finger food for however long it took. When finished, he would have the book entirely worked out. All he would now have to do was to transcribe the incidents to his laptop, fill in description and dialog. I was skeptical but kept my mouth shut. Every writer I know has a different way of going about it. A friend who writes novels as well as for Hollywood writes at night, sometimes all night, beginning after dinner and typing until dawn with the TV blasting for company. A Pulitzer Prize winner we know wrote his first three novels on the Long Island Railroad, commuting to his job in New York City. He liked to roughly sketch every scene on a different index card and then fully compose it on a legal pad. Now he’s the chairman of a writing department and has an oak paneled office overlooking a lake. Still starts with the index cards.
It wasn’t the motel room that worried me about the outline man or the days of powdered doughnuts and coffee. It was the idea that he could completely control the story without involving himself in the inner lives of his characters. He wanted to control every speech, all the action and reaction like a puppeteer, ignoring the process of entering his characters’ states of consciousness and experiencing the world through them. He wanted to by-pass the mystery of the writing process, the frightening walk down unknown roads.
The danger of over-plotting, of imagining that you can entirely avoid the unknown and list the elements of a novel like the ingredients of a recipe is perhaps as dangerous as jumping into a project without a clue. Of course there are writers who do just that. Some fine writers start with a piece of blank paper and nothing more.
As we have mentioned, a large number of the submissions that we receive at the press every year are by young men who believe their adolescent experiences are the stuff of great fiction. There are a lot of scenes in bars; a lot in bedrooms—not sex scenes, but in bed, trying to decide why they should stub out their cigarettes and get up. The problem is that besides bitching about their jobs, school, women, their parents, they have very little to say; nothing happens. After ten pages maybe a friend will come over, and start bitching about jobs, school, women, their parents. Thinking about plot beforehand can help a writer avoid the problem of getting to page fifty and feeling written out without a thing left to say.
All writers face the problem of how to shape their ideas and experiences into a form that maximizes meaning and dramatic tension, that seduces a reader into wanting to turn the page. This is obvious for writers of fiction. However, people who have their own stories to tell of a life full of incident, sometimes imagine that all they have to do is remember their stories and type them up. Then they wonder where they’ve gone wrong, why editors reject their work and their very exciting lives, why even friends find reading their output makes for tough going. Because these issues are somewhat different for writers of memoir and autobiography, we’ve devoted an entire chapter to Personal Narrative Strategies. But for those who choose to fictionalize their life’s adventures, however close to the truth, they, too, need to know something about plotting.
Some writers plot out the book from start to finish and know their ending before they begin. Some writers have only a vague idea of the ending, plot a few chapters ahead of themselves, write a draft of those chapters, and plot out a few more until they find the ending. There is no right or wrong way to go about it.
Plot is the element of fiction most often in disrepute. It is considered by certain critics that truly serious fiction should somehow be free of this basic element of every story. But you dispense with it at your own risk. It is so basic to the narrative impulse that even a simple tale that has no characterization beyond labeling (the prince, the princess, the wicked witch) is nonetheless identifiable as fiction because it tells a story.
One basic plot is The Quest. Simply put, the main character wants something and sets out to get it. The “something” can be physical, emotional, conceptual; anything from a lost treasure to lost confidence to the answer to a secret. They can lose something and need to get it back. They can feel they are lacking something and set out to achieve it. They can be hired to take it away from somebody else. They can be commissioned to discover it. This concept—the protagonist wants something and sets out to get it—seems almost too basic to include in an essay for people who have undertaken serious fiction writing, but we are continually amazed, as we plow through stacks of submissions, how many writers fail to begin by asking the most basic question: What does your main character yearn for? What do they want? What sets them in motion? What gets in their way?
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br /> Take Little Red Riding Hood. (Fairy tales and myths are often as sophisticated structurally as they are symbolically and deserve serious study.) She’s given a mission: Take this basket to Grandma. Think about it. Would there be a story at all if she never left the house? What if she set out to go to Grandma’s and made it there without incident? No trickery, no wolf, not much of a story.
Now of course you could write the story of a little girl who never leaves the kitchen. You could write the story of a little girl getting to Grandma’s and having lunch. Who’s going to stop you? Such a story would not rely on plot; you’d have to employ other elements to keep the reader turning pages. Description: the careful poetic description of the rare forest flora. Character insight: Riding Hood hates her mother and longs to be reunited with her absent father and Grandma is her only confidante. Lively dialog: “Grandma,” Riding Hood takes the old woman’s hand, “you’re so frail. The doctor says you may not make it through the night. Tell me, Grandma. How can we best honor you, with burial or cremation? What is your wish?” Grandma musters the last of her strength and shrugs, “Surprise me.”
You will want to employ all these elements in your writing: description, character insight, dialog. But you do not want to ignore the element of plot.
Think about The Odyssey. In its most basic form, Ulysses wants to get home. Obstacles get in his way: some really bad weather; Polyphemus, the Cyclops; Calypso, who saves and seduces him; Circe, the enchantress who turns Odysseus’s men into swine; the Sirens, those sea nymphs who sing Odysseus’s men into a trance; the lotus eaters. This is a plot as good today as it was 2800 years ago. In his novel The Wanderers, Sol Yurick created a modern version of The Anabasis (a Greek classic about the return of an army in hostile territory), recasting an army of Greek mercenaries making their way from Babylon to the Black Sea into an urban street gang encountering cops and rival gangs as they cross New York neighborhoods on their way back to their home turf in Brooklyn. The reason for obstacles, of course, is to enable your readers to see your characters in action, under stress, making choices either right or wrong, that will determine the outcome of the story and their lives.
The simplest way to begin thinking about the plot is this: First, figure out who your main character, or protagonist, is. Develop her dramatic need. Then, figure out obstacles to get in her way. This yearning, this dramatic need, need not be obvious to the reader, or even to the protagonist herself, but you should know what it is. Nor is a character in a novel so simple as to want only one thing. But there is often one desire, however difficult it may be to articulate, that is more central than all the rest. In Dorothy Allison’s novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, the main desire of the protagonist, a teenager named Bone, is to be loved by her mother. She isn’t aware enough of herself to articulate this. She’s a richly drawn character, a complex young woman. The obstacle to that love is the abusive man whom her mother is sexually obsessed with as well as the grinding poverty in which the family lives (and of course because of that poverty, the lack of choices the family has).
In a detective story, the dramatic need may be to find the murderer or the evidence; the witness or even something meaningless. The Maltese Falcon is the object of every character’s desire in Dashiell Hammet’s famous noir mystery novel of the same name. But what is it exactly? Why is it so desirable? The author tells us that it is a fabulously valuable gold statuette of a falcon, created as as tribute for the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV, but not many readers really give a damn. It’s the action that rivets their attention, not the statue. If you say the Maltese Falcon is hot stuff, then the reader believes it’s hot stuff. The movie director Alfred Hitchcock called such objects “the macguffin,” a made-up name for a made-up thing, the sole object of which is to create a yearning that will propel characters into motion, make them want to overcome all obstacles to get it. In fantasy or science fiction, you are free to invent anything you can render believable; nonsensical elements in plot work just fine. You want space travel? Invent the warp engine with a sentence. You want time travel? Invent the time machine. You want totally equal sex roles as in Woman on the Edge of Time? Invent the brooder. But even in realistic fiction, you can invent the world’s biggest emerald or a new element or a formula for curing AIDS. The reader will not believe it if your protagonist survives in the last ten pages because of a sudden new cure for AIDS, but if that cure is carefully posited into the plot with convincing medical details and you are dealing with the effects on a country suddenly liberated from sexual fear, then posit away. The reader will accept your premises if the story is a good one and the characters are convincing.
There are many in-depth studies of plot, from those that analyze the elements of story structure in fairy tales and myths to the writing of screenplays. Many of them talk about the nature of The Quest, the search to satisfy a yearning or a need. They present the protagonist in the beginning of the story as existing in a kind of limbo; that is, knowingly or unknowingly, spiritually or materially, in an incomplete or unsatisfactory state in their lives. Perhaps, as with Oliver Single, in Le Carre’s Single & Single, they are in hiding; or as with David Greene in Storm Tide, the protagonist finds himself with neither a career nor confidence in himself. In Richard Price’s Clockers, being a drug dealer literally makes Strike, the protagonist, sick to his stomach. Suzanne, in Three Women, has yet to reconcile with her mother and her oldest daughter.
Sometimes it is called an Inciting Incident, or The Call to Action, but invariably some event shakes the protagonist out of his/her present state and sets him or her in motion to change. Oliver Single suddenly receives notice that five million pounds sterling have been deposited into his bank account; David Green meets a seductive older woman who recruits him to run for political office; Suzanne Blume’s adult daughter loses her job and moves back home and Suzanne is presented a note in court: her mother has had a stroke.
The traditional three-act structure (set-up, confrontation, resolution) common to many plays and almost all commercial movies is the standard model used when talking about plot. Some books that discuss the finite number of recurring plots in literature even list films as examples. But here you have to use common sense. Novels are not screenplays. Novels do not have to conform to a rigid structure. Many novels are adapted for screenplays and rewritten to fit the classic three-act structure and in the process sometimes bear only a token resemblance to the book from which they were adapted. Indeed, the most truly faithful novel-to-film adaptation I’ve ever seen is the British Granada Television version of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. But of course, this was a TV mini-series that ran about twelve hours rather than the standard Hollywood ninety-minute theatrical release.
Novels are about change over time, about memory and reflection, about characters and their most intimate thoughts. No less an important medium in our time, films are about characters changing through action. Novels depend on language to tell a story; films, visual imagery. Others have compared fiction and film far more knowledgably and in depth. We bring up the issue here only to make a point about not confusing the two. Many writers who want to write fiction are more knowledgeable about film than they are about literature. They have seen hundreds of movies in their lives and have read only a fraction of that many novels. They are astonished that what works in film does not come across on the page.
As a case in point, in a manuscript we recently read an American diplomat meets and begins a relationship with a third world terrorist. The author was relying on a number of clichés to pull it off: that they were both good looking, tall and thin; that they had good sex, the first time, every time; that the terrorist had been tortured and was therefore sensitive and sympathetic; that the American diplomat was a lonely foreigner.
Every serious screenwriter will tell you that when they bring two characters together with the intention of showing them falling in love, it takes a lot more than two movie stars, some repartee, a series of facial close-ups, reaction shots and a love scene. But
it is sometimes the case in writing fiction that we are imagining movies, and thinking in movie language, rather than trying to figure out how to show people making a real connection over time. We made a lot of suggestions to the writer. We asked her to think about imagining her couple more fully: the small physical details that lovers notice, or the fascinating and sometimes even off-putting differences that a person of one culture might notice in a person from another; the conversations but also the failures of language that would draw and repel two such lovers. Whereas it is true that a fine writer can say a lot with an image or a few perfectly chosen words of dialog, fiction allows you the space to spread out and create an entire world, the world that in a film includes all those visual clues provided by the actors and the designers, the costumers and location people. As a fiction writer you’re not only writing the script, you’re the entire company.
A woman approached me once in a workshop and said, somewhat confrontationally, “I’m a journalist. I don’t write fiction because everything I need to say about a story I can say in a paragraph. Then I have nothing more to say.” It turned out she did very much want to write fiction, but didn’t understand that her five or six sentences were a mere outline of facts; that she was stopping short of the creation of her main character’s yearnings, her history, family, friends, neighbors; where she lived, what went on in that town; the situations she looked forward to and those that she dreaded; all the details that would provide her protagonist with the interactions that constitute a believable and interesting life.