Lars Eighner's Lavender Green

5. Techniques of Fiction

Plotting

Adolescent writers, in the old days, sacrificed many trees to self-indulgence measured by the ream. Things have changed in this modern world. Now they use electrons.

My purpose here is not to make fun of children in general or of child writers in particular, however satisfying ridiculing and humiliating children may be as a pastime. I aim to knock over adolescent writing, which is a serious impediment to adults who want to write, and if some adolescents get in my line of fire, I can hardly be blamed for that. The problem is not that adolescent life lacks drama: world's depend upon what the snotty girls thinks, whether Josh and Sendi break up, and what may happen if one is grounded on the most crucial night of one's life. No, the problem is that very little of that drama has ever got onto paper or hard drives.

What we get are landscape poems dripping with the pathetic fallacy, extensive ramblings about the meaninglessness and tragedy of it all, sappy love letters, dutiful diaries of dreck, and perhaps worst of all, the adolescent story. The flaw of the adolescent story is that it is not a story, but we really can hardly blame the kids for that. Friends and mothers are notoriously credulous critics, and English teachers are starved to see something with two consecutive words spelled correctly. English teachers, if they do not themselves live in a fog of adolescent delusion, know most of their charges are meant to be cannon fodder or else to attend a prison until they are hanged, and if any write something other than a confession it will almost certainly be a business letter, a sick excuse for its own child, or if everything goes better than expected, a college essay.

In classes for those with the curse of giftedness, cadavers of very dead literature are presented on a slab for students to dissect. Students may gather that "To His Coy Mistress" has something to do with sex, that Mrs. Haversham is weird, and that every rose means something. Very seldom does the lecturer demonstrate the story line, and the result when this is attempted seldom provides the stuff to encourage any young Frankenstein to sew the pieces back together. You might think this would change if one of the little tads evades the hangman and the recruiting sergeant, goes to university, and after serving time as an undergraduate gets admitted to a writing program. But in the main it does not.

The number of great novels that have come from graduate writing programs is not entirely overwhelming. Now it is true enough that many good writers and even some great ones have taken creative writing courses. But I wonder sometimes if this is not a bit like the observation that many junkies started on mother's milk. I believe that writing can be taught to a willing and intelligence student, or I would not be wasting my time on the present writing, but it is really rather astonishing how bad a piece can be and still be held up in a creative writing class as fine work which sets a standard to which other students should aspire.

Now grow up and hear this: stories have plots.

Stories have plots.

If you want to write a story, you must have a plot. You may write many words before you know what the plot is or you may know what the plot is before you write a word of the story. That is right. You can plan a story instead of just waiting for one to happen.

(I will have to admit that there are natural story tellers. They create stories that have plots, apparently without ever having thought of plot. They cannot tell you in so many words what the plot of their story is, but their stories have plots, nonetheless. They seem to have learned by trial and error that just wandering around emoting does not make much of a story and that rescue by omnipotent superhero friends tends to get a little threadbare after a while.)

When you think you have a finished work, whether it is a five-page story or a five-hundred-page novel, sooner or later you will manage to get someone to ask you "What is it about?" Once you have cultivated so much interest, if you find you do not have an answer to "What is it about?" or if the answer is a dressed up noun, probably an abstraction ("It's about love." "It's about justice." "It's about my hometown." "It's about young love and justice in my hometown.") you do not have a story or a novel. You have an adolescent ramble.

Elements of Plot

Plot is conflict. Stories and novels often have many conflicts, but the plot is the conflict. The conflict or the struggle of the piece has been know from ancient times as the agon. Conflict is most easily developed when it is viewed as involving two parties. That is conflicts have a hero and a villain. Of in other words, the agon has two parties: the proagonist and the antagonist.

In sophisticated literature these elements are often disguised in various ways, but for the moment, my purpose is to make the elements as clear as possible. A plot is a fight between a good guy and a bad guy.

   good guy    <-  *fight*  ->    bad guy
             
   protagonist  <-  *agon*  ->    antagonist
   subject       active verb      object   

Yes, there is a little more to it than that, but if you don't have that, you won't get to the little more. What I am aiming at here is a one-sentence plot synopsis. This not merely a theoretical exercise. That one-sentence plot synopsis is the answer to the question: "What is your novel about?" (Or story, or screenplay.) Some writers write hundreds of pages before they try to find a plot in what they have written. Some have plotted a series of seven novels before they start the first draft of the first volume. Some time before it goes to market every work of fiction must face up to the one-sentence plot synopsis.

Two things are known about the one-sentence plot synopsis as soon as a plot exists: the subject of the sentence is the protagonist and the verb (predicate) of the sentence is an active verb. Often the active verb is very active: battles, struggles, smashes, pursues, fights, crushes, escapes, and so forth. In other cases the active verb is less bruising: develops, considers, regrets, decides, and so forth. The antagonist has to come into it somewhere, usually as one sort of object or another.

What we have now is something like: Batman battles the Riddler. That is a plot. If you have ever been a bit queasy when questions of plot arise, you should see plot is in no way difficult, complicated, mysterious, or intimidating: "Batman battles the Riddler" is a plot.

Now we have an embarrassment of riches, for "Batman battles the Riddler" is the plot of hundreds of stories which have been or could be written. It requires just a little more restrictive detail: "Batman battles the Riddler to free Robin from a death chamber." I have nothing else up my sleeve. That is a complete one-sentence plot synopsis, ready for a cover letter. (Pity you don't have the rights to Batman.)

Conflict vs. Situation

While it is a tad simplistic to say a conflict can be expressed in an active verb, perhaps aided by a phrase like "to free Robin from a death chamber," you will not go far wrong if your one-sentence plot synopsis looks very much like the one given. What is not true is that any combination of active verb and contributing phrase add up to a conflict.

Most stories, novels, and screenplays you have ever come across begin with a situation. There is a dead body in the living room. A cheap detective works in a grubby office over a store front. A well-to-do detective counsels a woman who wants evidence her husband is cheating. A robot with a holographic message is launched from a spaceship before the ship is overrun by Empire storm troopers. These situations often can be expressed in active verbs, and some of them involve some conflict: that is, some fight occurs, although it is not the conflict of the story.

You may see the victim struggling as he is garroted. You may see the fancy detective suck in his female client by insisting that she probably does not really want to know for sure whether her husband is cheating. There is a violent battle on the spaceship between the valiant defenders and the storm troopers. These things may be final conflict for the bit-players who die in them, but they are not the conflict of the story. They are situations. Even Robin is capture by the Riddler's inescapable death machine is a situation.

I will not try to be Socratic here: situation is not conflict until the protagonist enters the fray. And by "the fray," here I mean the conflict of the story, not just some fist fight in a bar. Again, this may be sometime after the protagonist first appears. The protagonist may appear before the situation. The criterion is not when the protagonist first enters the page. It is when he enters the fray.

So far most of the conflicts and situations I have mention have been clichés. I did this in order to remind you of stories you have read or motion pictures you have seen which were based on those elements (although I have to admit I do not remember the Riddler's death machine).

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