by Marge Piercy
When you must have characters quarrel, it is far better if the reasons for their quarrels do pertain (1) to the ongoing needs of the story; (2) to some revelation of character about one or both of the quarrelers; (3) to our understanding of the dynamics of the relationship; or (4) to some point about the politics or economics or general situation of the characters of the society we ought to understand. In science fiction or in historical fiction, this latter reason may be particularly important.
Another common type of plot is that in which it is not so much the change in fortune or circumstance of the protagonist we are concerned with as it is maturing (as in the classic Bildungsroman; i. e., Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or the first three books of Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest novels). Or in a variation, the plot is about a learning or changing experience, as in Conrad’s Lord Jim or Pinocchio. But not all change is for the better. There are also tales of the degradation of character: for instance Conrad’s, Heart of Darkness or Faulkner’s Sanctuary.
In some novels, the primary learning experience occurs not in the mind of any of the characters, but in what the reader is supposed to understand. These novels do not generally have a simple plot in the same sense that a novel fixed on a single or small group of protagonists may have. Dos Passos’ USA trilogy, Doctorow’s Ragtime, Gone to Soldiers are all examples of the genre. Only in the reader’s mind will the final story assume its shape, for none of the characters can see what the reader sees or know more than their own stories. It is the pattern of the whole that is the plot and indeed, such novels are usually roughly about some historical event: a war, a depression, a revolution, a particular moment in history.
Another type of plot is the revelation story. This is not the same as a mystery. It is not who done it, but what the hell is going on? A classic example is Shirley Jackson’s much anthologized story, “The Lottery.” The suspense lies in the protagonist and the reader figuring out the situation.
Coincidence is part of every plot. Little Red Riding Hood happens to meet the wolf. He could have been off chasing a rabbit or snoozing. Most sizable predators sleep a fair amount. Ask your cat about that, a small predator but one who can explain much mammalian behavior to you, as can your dog. Your hero happens to win the lottery and get rich overnight. Two of your characters meet on a plane after they have sworn never to speak again ten years earlier. A woman behind a fast food counter recognizes a face from the post office wall. Our lives are full of coincidences, and so is fiction. But a light hand is required. And it is far, far better to use coincidence to set up your plot than to use coincidence to resolve it. That is, few readers will challenge you if your protagonist wins the lottery in an early chapter and the plot moves on from there, about the impact of sudden riches. But in the plot mentioned above where the coal miner wants a fur coat, if, in the end, she wins the lottery and gets it that way, we will feel cheated, manipulated. That is the difference between using coincidence to launch versus using coincidence to resolve. It is probable in general that we are able to accept complication from coincidence better than resolution from coincidence.
One problem with apprentice writing can be an over-elaboration of plot. It is something the writer keeps tripping over and that keeps tripping up the reader. Instead of going deeper into character, the writer keeps inventing new events, new schemes, new travels and twists of fate. Often the best plots are the simplest. Sometimes plots are borrowed and reinterpreted. A good story is always there for the retelling. World War II was a whopping good story and a lot of us have had a go at it over the years and many more writers will come to it. King Arthur, Tristan and Ysolde, Robin Hood, Bluebeard, Billy the Kid, Adam and Eve, King David, Helen of Troy, Faust: these names evoke basic stories that can be told again freshly in every generation. They can be made new again and again because they are rich in resonance and each writer finds something different in Merlin, in Guinevere, in Lancelot. The descent of the hero or heroine into the underworld to confront death in pursuit of knowledge or some item, some person, some task, goes back to the story of Inanna’s descent into the land of death as first told by the Sumerians, and we have been telling versions of it ever since. Such stories survive and are retold because they are capable of bearing great meaning, but that meaning changes over time. Arthur is one writer’s fatuous fool, another’s naïve dreamer, another’s failed schemer; for someone he represents what was left of Roman values, for another Celtic strength; for one he is Christianity’s hero combating the ancient mother goddess religion, for another he is the last Druid king.
Plot is in many ways inseparable from questions of viewpoint. By looking seriously at Morgan le Fay in the cultural context of her times, by adopting her point of view, Marion Zimmer Bradley got a completely new angle on the Arthur stories. Many basic stories of our culture appear in the long run inexhaustible. Only some truly fresh approach and an apprehension of new and interesting values in the tale is needed.
There are certain plots always capable of reuse even though they lack that mythic dimension; for instance, “The Pardoner’s Tale” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is also the plot of B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, just as Romeo and Juliet serves as a model for West Side Story.
Occasionally a basic new plot emerges. Joanna Russ has identified a plot in the writings of a number of contemporary or relatively so (nineteenth century) women writers that could be called Rescue of the Daughter. Frequently the younger woman is not actually a daughter but is a daughter figure, one in whom a continuity of values or life can be expressed. She is stolen, lost or embedded in a hostile or dangerous situation. This is of course an old plot, too, being your original Demeter and Persephone myth, but it has proved particularly prevalent in women’s writing in the West in the last hundred or hundred-fifty years.
No plot contains within its outline any information on how serious it is, how meaningful, how lightweight. Take the basic mystery plot: a crime has been committed from which certain consequences are visible. Who done it? That’s your basic formula mystery but also the plot of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex.
In the chapter in which we discuss viewpoint, we write about ironies that arise from flawed viewpoint or from multiple viewpoints. There are also ironies that are built into plots. The irony may be in the protagonist’s sacrificing everything or working for years to attain something that when she or he gets it, destroys him or proves worthless. The irony may be in the character’s trying to get rid of something that turns out to be necessary, precious, vital. These are ironies of plot, built into the basic story and developed through character but not issuing from it.
The most satisfying resolutions of plot tend to be those in which the ending feels “right” to us. However difficult that may be to describe, there is usually a correct reward or disaster or suspension awaiting the characters at the end of every story. This outcome should be one which issues either from the character of the protagonist or from the nature of the important relationships set up between the protagonist and important others, friends or enemies. In plot- driven fiction, the ending may be a stunning or exciting outcome to a course of action which should not be too easily foreseen but which doesn’t come out of nowhere, either.
Sometimes you may have to choose between more than one “right” ending (and indeed there are novels, such as John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman that include more than one). We’ve all been disappointed at one time or another by the endings to some books we’ve otherwise liked. We may have felt that the author let us down, they did not fully think through all the possible choices available to their characters, or they wrote in a happy ending where we expected disaster, let someone off the hook. Unlike today’s commercial movies, in complex novels, villains don’t always get punished. The ending is your choice. In one submission we received at the press, an ending kept us from publishing the book. The writer began with an eerily created, quietly explosive rural town, a place in which people live in fear and keep their mouths, and curtains, shu
t. The main character, an army vet pushed to his limits, finally confronts the corrupt and omnipotent county sheriff. But by the end of the book the crooked cop has disappeared, as has the woman with whom the protagonist had begun a relationship, and her jealous, gun-toting half-brother. They simply dropped out of the last quarter of the book and were written off in a sentence at the end. If characters have become real to us and integral to the story, they cannot simply drop from sight or be quickly dismissed.
While all books are unique and it is difficult to theorize about the “right” or “satisfying” ending, you never want to create situations you can’t fully imagine. If you can’t bring yourself to write a fight scene, don’t create a potential showdown between two violent characters that gets arbitrated off-stage by a kindly judge. All our experience would tell us that this is not what would happen. Therefore it doesn’t strike us as “right” or “satisfying.” When considering the ending to a plot, you don’t by any means need to know it before you begin, but be prepared to finish what you start. The plot has to issue from what comes before it. The deus ex machina refers to the resolution of a drama in Greek theater by a god being lowered onto the stage to solve or resolve the situation. This would not work nowadays (unless, of course, as in The Three Penny Opera you are calling attention to it and attempting satire). Your ending must issue from your story, rather than being tacked on or produced by an outside force.
The theory of story structure can be explored further. There are books that advertise themselves as analyzing the plots of every story ever written and contend that there are only a finite number of plots. There are books that go deeply into the structure of myths, list the common character types and map out sequences of action. There is never a danger in studying what others have learned, only in believing there is a formula for creating. In searching for a formula, rather than mastering the fundamentals in your own way, you’re basically renting a motel room, tacking paper to the wall and following a mechanical flow chart. Rather, allow yourself to engage in the mystery of the creative process.
Make ‘Em Suffer - An Exercise for Creating a Plot
Some plots in their most basic form are quests. The protagonist wants something and spends the length of the story attempting to get it. When he or she does get it, we the readers feel a sense of satisfaction, because we watched someone work hard to achieve their goal. (Or maybe the protagonist fails to reach the goal—that’s okay. You’re the creator, you can do anything you want.)
Too many writers know the setting of their story, or the characters they want to write about, but fail to give their characters a material goal or an emotional yearning (or both!). The pursuit of this yearning sets your character into action.
Even fiction that is not about “action heroes” needs complication to set the characters in action.
In this exercise you are going to:• Create a protagonist (tell us his/her name and something about him or her).
• Give that character a dramatic need, or an emotional yearning.
• Create obstacles to achieving that need or satisfying that yearning.
Remember, we talked about• Inner Conflicts.
• Interpersonal Conflicts.
• External Conflicts.
• And, if you can, figure out how (and if not why not) he/she achieves the goal.
Remember, too, sometimes we set out trying to find something we think we want and end up with something different altogether—and maybe not something tangible, but an emotional or intellectual understanding.
This exercise can be done in outline form. No complete sentences or graphic detail are necessary.
7
Personal Narrative Strategies
Some years ago I had the following conversation with my mother: I was thinking about getting her some novels for her birthday and she said, No, she didn’t think so. She didn’t like fiction any more. Because I write fiction, there was an awkward moment, but when I pressed her as to why, she said, “Well, because, you know with novels it’s ... like somebody just made it all up.”
Right. So I went out and got her a book of memoirs and she was thrilled. She loved it. So I asked, “What did you like about it?” She said, “Some true stories are like ... I met this one and then I met that one, but this book, well, it’s just like a novel.”
What she meant was that the memoir presented her with a life that had a shape rather than a mere listing of events. It had a unifying idea and took the trouble to describe places and go deeply into characters, all the fundamentals necessary to lift a life story above the level of mere reporting. In short, it had all the things you find in a novel.
It seems to me we’re culture obsessed with personalities; from Walter Scott’s “Personality Parade” to People Magazine to Vanity Fair movie star profiles to celebrity tell-alls, we’re nuts to know what goes on beneath the veneer of social discourse and that persona which we portray to others. Some of this curiosity is probably as low-minded as the tabloids themselves: we all like to see the high-and-mighty take a fall. Some of it is based on our own insecurity. We want to see how we’re doing compared to the next person. If others suffer some of our same pain and frustration, then we’re not such losers after all. But I think, too, that we’re all seeking the answer to a fundamental question, What does it mean to be alive? In a world where we’re running around sixteen hours a day, who has the time to put things in perspective? So we read about other people’s lives in hopes of seeing a shape, a meaning, a direction in our own.
Depending on your tastes, you will select different lives to read about and obviously receive different kinds of insights. We’d like to think that the examined life of a saintly person would give us more moral or spiritual guidance than the memoirs of a movie star, but on a practical level, seeing the long term arc of someone who was admired by millions and then drank himself into ruin just might be all the wisdom we need to turn our lives around.
The two questions we’re most frequently asked in memoir workshops are these: How exactly do I organize the telling of a story as large as my entire life? On a more personal level, the question that seems to plague every writer contemplating a memoir: Is my story interesting enough to tell?
Let’s take a look at three lives:
One was a World War II combat photographer. The second, a New York City homicide detective. The third, an elderly woman who lived with her cats in Maine. All three were writers. But, although the combat photographer arrived at Hitler’s bunker the day after Hitler blew his brains out, then went on to witness the liberation of the concentration camps, his memoirs were returned by every publisher who saw his manuscript.
Although the homicide detective had worked deep undercover, infiltrating a fanatic terrorist group and rising through its ranks until he reached the leadership of the organization, he had been unable to place his memoir in any venue he tried.
The old woman died at eighty-two years-old. Her personal writings, largely about illness and solitude and things as mundane as her garden, her cats, and her friends—few of whom were famous—have been international best sellers, translated into many languages and still in print long after her death.
As you may have guessed, her name was May Sarton. She was the author of some forty-eight books and took the trouble to learn what the two men who lived lives full of suspense and excitement did not: how to write about a situation and make it interesting to a reader.
So what makes interesting writing? I can tell you that in the case of the homicide detective, none of the characters in his original manuscript were well drawn. They were described as tall or short, brash or submissive, but he had failed to infuse his characters with life, to make them real by illustrating the nuances of their behavior, or describing what they longed for, or contradictions that made them capable of bombing a building near a school at the same time as they were caring fathers to their children.
The life may be yours, but there are other people in it. If the story is going to hold a reader�
�s attention, the most important of those people must be created with more depth than mere walk-ons.
I can tell you that in the writings of the combat photographer, he listed one fact after another. Montgomery crossed the Rhine on the night of March 23. The U.S. 17th Airborne landed in the enemy rear areas. The air column was two hours and thirty-two minutes long. Every fact was correct—and devastatingly dull. The writer was crushed; he didn’t believe it. He was writing about World War II: the most fascinating conflict of the century. But there were no descriptions of the personal toll of battle on people’s lives. The narrator’s voice was a constant drone of facts, less compelling than a good newspaper article.
May Sarton’s personal narratives, however, take mundane experiences and squeeze from them insights into the writer’s own inner life and truths about the world. A subject does not have to be glamorous to be interesting, not if it is treated interestingly; that is, investigated by a curious mind for the human truths that the facts imply.