LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR THREE: MAKE TENSION GROW AS OPPOSITION INCREASES
In our simple story you've seen how the chain of cause and effect builds and how it relates to conflict, which produces the tension you need to keep the story going. But a story requires constant tension. You must increase the tension as you build toward a climax. That means you can't rely on local tension alone; you need a larger conflict that can support the story. Back to our story:
The boy decides to give up drinking. But it's not that easy. (If it were, the story wouldn't be very interesting.) Now we're getting down to fundamental questions of character. Who is this person? What causes him to drink? Will he overcome his dependency? These are the questions the reader will ask and your job as writer is to address them in an interesting and creative way. Notice we've focused on the boy as the main character. His intention is clear: Give up drinking and get the girl. The girl's refusal created local tension and set up the story. The important conflict lies within the boy and whether he can deal with his own demons.
We want to keep our readers engaged in the action—another way of saying that we don't want the story to get stale — so we have the main character encounter along the way a series of barriers, which deepen the opposition. Each conflict gains intensity. Readers feel themselves being thrust toward the cataclysm, the climax, when all hell will break loose and the story will get resolved (for better or for worse). Local tension can't do this by itself, because local tension doesn't build intensity. All local tension does is create a series of equal roadblocks along the way that, after a while, can get boring. The serious conflicts, the ones that are the foundation of plot, are the ones that deal with the characters in fundamental ways.
Our story won't have made much progress if we revise it just to include local tension:
Boy meets girl.
Boy asks girl to marry him.
Girl refuses so long as he's an alcoholic.
Boy goes to Alcoholics Anonymous and gets cured.
Girl agrees to marry boy.
Well, there's a germ of something here. We have a story, but we still don't have a plot. The main character has an intention and it is denied, and he must do something to fulfill his intention— but his task doesn't seem all that tough the way it's presented here. He goes to A.A. and boom, he's cured. Anyone who's gone through anything like A.A. knows that isn't true. But at least you can now see the structure of beginning, middle and end:
Beginning: Boy meets girl and he asks her to marry him. Girl turns him down because he's an alcoholic.
Middle: Boy goes to A.A. and is cured.
End: The boy and girl get married and live happily ever after.
So what's the problem? How do you go about fleshing out this story so that you can deepen the opposition?
The conflict in the beginning is local: The girl turns down the boy. But where is the tension in the middle? Where is the tension in the end? There is none. The boy simply solves the problem. The crisis doesn't deepen.
To write a plot that will work here, you must develop the tension not just locally but at the deeper level as you investigate the character of the hero in crisis. It's not enough to have motivating action that gets the story going; you must continually test the character through each phase of dramatic action.
A simple example to study is the film Fatal Attraction, directed by Adrian Lyne and starring Michael Douglas and Glenn Close. It's a boy-meets-girl story with a twist. The story is simple enough: Michael Douglas's character has an extramarital one-night stand with a woman who is abnormally fixated on their relationship, and although he does everything he can to distance himself from this unbalanced woman, she reaches into his family with catastrophic effect.
Act I (Setup)
Boy meets girl. Boy is already married (local tension). Boy and girl go to bed together over a weekend while wife is out of town. When boy tries to go home, girl cuts her wrists.
Act II (Complications)
What is interesting about this film in terms of its complications is that they represent a series of escalations. The Glenn Close character begins to interfere with Michael Douglas's life in small ways, such as telephone calls and surprise visits. As Michael Douglas continues to push her away, her actions become increasingly more hostile and desperate. The Michael Douglas character realizes the threat to his marriage and begins to do what he can to cover up. But as the escalation increases and the woman's actions become more and more violent—climaxing in the grotesque killing of the family rabbit—he realizes the threat isn't just to his marriage, but to his family. The color and shape of survival have changed dramatically. The deranged woman then kidnaps their child, and the wife, in a panic, has a bad car accident. Watch the film analytically and notice that every time something happens, the stakes grow larger. The effect of action is to snowball, increasing tension and conflict from the mundane story of a man who's cheated on his wife to one who's battling a psychotic woman who's willing to kill to get her man.
Act III (Resolution)
In the last act the psychotic woman invades their house and tries to kill the wife. They battle it out in a terrifying sequence that includes all the members in this character triangle: wife, husband, mistress. What's interesting is that this film has three different endings, depending on which version you see. The standard ending shows the psychotic woman getting killed, but in the so-called "Director's Edit," which is available for rental, the ending is quite different. In it, the mistress kills herself in such a way that it looks like the husband is guilty of murder. (Reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, in which the wife does the same thing to her husband.) The husband is then arrested for murder. There is a third ending in which the wife finds evidence to show that the mistress was indeed suicidal, which she takes to the police who are holding her husband.
If we were to look at the structure in the third act, we would find a progression of events in each of the endings shown here:
Step I: The death of the mistress.
Step II: The arrest of the husband for her "murder."
Step III: The wife finds evidence to free her husband from the charge of murder.
Cause and effect. The ending released in theaters, however, only includes the first step. That might have been the best decision, or it might not. My only point here is to show how tension and conflict are carried through the entire story, regenerating in each act and constantly increasing the stakes.
LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR FOUR: MAKE CHANGE THE POINT OF YOUR STORY
We expect events to affect the main character in such a way that they force a change in his personality. Your main character should be a different person at the end of the book than at the beginning. If not, your character is static. Meaningful events change people in meaningful ways. In Fatal Attraction the change is minimal: We suppose Michael Douglas has learned his lesson and will never cheat on his wife again. The character is flat and static. The story could've been better if we could see the effects of the action as it changes his character. Instead, we must rely on the roller-coaster effect of events to keep us interested. The producers of the movie were more interested in cheap thrills than in exploring how such events affect a family, for the short and the long term.
Let's go back to the basic "Boy Meets Girl." Where are the meaningful events in the story?
There are none. We're supposed to believe that the boy's simple motivation to marry the girl is enough for him to overcome a deep-seated emotional problem. Well, you say, don't you know that love can conquer all? Of course it can, but there's no hint here that the girl does anything to help him through his crisis. We believe in the power of love, but we also know how the real world works, and we want to see opposition—love stacked
against, say, his self-destructiveness. That would be a good source of conflict. But our story doesn't give us a clue.
As a result of events in the story, the character should somehow change. The hero of "Boy Meets Girl" may become a better person (
provided he can overcome his obstacles), or he may find out that he's a slave to alcoholism and doesn't have the strength or motivation to overcome his affliction. With either ending, the character learns something about himself. He is different at the end than he was at the beginning of the story. This is the true test of events in your story. Ask yourself not only what should happen next, but how it will affect your hero's character.
LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR FIVE: WHEN SOMETHING HAPPENS, MAKE SURE IT'S IMPORTANT
On the surface this probably seems obvious. But a lot of writers either forget what it means or they don't really understand it.
As we write, we get swept up in the world we've created. The characters speak. They go places and do things. Part of being a convincing writer has to do with our ability to convince ourselves that the characters we write about are real. As a result of our vicarious participation in this fictional world, we often let the characters "go their own way" and say and do what they please. In a first draft I have no problem with giving characters their head. But unless you're a very disciplined writer, they'll end up going in every which direction. Once characters take on lives of their own, they become difficult to control. They may not share your sense of plot. They may have their own agenda and leave you astounded by their impudence. They defy you. They taunt you. You intended for them to be at a board meeting in New York and suddenly they're at a pig farm in Green Sleeve, Mississippi. They go off on tangents and become involved in situations that have nothing to do with your plot. You're tickled that your characters have such energy and that they drag you along with them, but at the same time you're appalled that they seem bent on ignoring you. Finally you realize you must stop everything and ask yourself, "Who's in charge here?"
To make matters worse, you read over what you've written and realize it's really good stuff. In fact, it may be some of the better writing you've ever done. What should you do?
The answer is simple, and too often painful. It's all right to let yourself go when you write, because you're using the best part of your creative self. But be suspicious of what comes out. Plot is your compass. You should have a general idea of the direction you're headed in, and if you write something that doesn't specifically relate to the advancement of the plot, question it. Ask yourself, "Does this scene (or conversation, or description) contribute in a concrete way to my plot?" If the answer is yes, keep it. If the answer is no, chuck it. Fiction is a lot more economical than life. Whereas life allows in anything, fiction is selective. Everything in your writing should relate to your intent. The rest, no matter how brilliantly written, should be taken out.
This is often easier said than done, especially when some of your best writing fails to fulfill the intention of the plot. It's hard, very hard, to muster the courage to say, "This must go."
Novels are more generous than screenplays when it comes to accommodating excesses, and it's true that many master novelists loved their tangents. Laurence Sterne, author of the brilliant novel Tristram Shandy, called digressions the "sunshine" of reading. Take them out of a book and "you might as well take the book along with them;—one cold eternal winter would reign in
every page of it. . . ." Feodor Dostoevsky claimed he couldn't
control his writing. "Whenever I write a novel," he lamented, "I crowd it with a lot of separate stories and episodes; therefore, the
whole lacks proportion and harmony. . . .[H]ow frightfully I have
always suffered from it, for I have always been aware it was so." All right, you argue, if they can do it, why can't I?
First, you're not a nineteenth-century novelist. The shape of literature has changed in the last hundred years. Books are tighter and leaner. This reflects the age we live in. As readers, we don't want to take the time to wander off in all directions. We demand that the writer get to and stick with the point.
Andre Gide pointed out that the first condition of art was that it contain nothing unessential; a tight book walks the straight and narrow. Hemingway said write first and then take out all the good stuff and what's left is story. (By "good stuff" Hemingway meant all the material that the author has fallen in love with—not everything that was proper for the story.) Chekhov had the same idea when he said that if you show a shotgun in the first act, it must go off in the third act. Nothing in fiction exists incidentally. The world you create is much more structured and orderly than your own. So if you feel tempted to keep a passage that has a particularly well-written or moving scene but doesn't relate directly to the plot, ask yourself, "Is the writing so strong that the reader won't mind the side trip?" That's the trade-off: The more you make side trips, the more you dilute the effect of tension you've been trying to create, the more you dilute the drama itself. The novel is expansive and can tolerate many such excursions; the screenplay is intolerant and rarely allows any.
The writer, once trained, is intuitively aware of the need to stay close to plot. But no writer worth her salt doesn't occasionally succumb to the charm of her characters and head south.
LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR SIX: MAKE THE CAUSAL LOOK CASUAL
The point I've been trying to beat home is that everything in your writing has a reason, a cause that leads to an effect, which in turn becomes the next cause. If you accept the premise that good writing is cause and effect, we progress to the next stage, which says that good writing appears to be casual but in truth is causal.
No writer wants his fiction to be so obvious as to flash a neon sign that says PLOT! You don't want your causes to be so obvious that the reader can't fall victim to the charms of the story. You want to write in such a way that what you write about seems just a natural part of the world you've created. In the case of Chekhov's shotgun, we know the gun is important and will prove its importance by the end of the story. We know the shotgun wouldn't be included if it didn't have some relevant purpose to the plot. But that doesn't mean the writer should ram the shotgun down our throat. The writer should be nonchalant, casual, about introducing the shotgun to the reader's view. You would introduce it in such a way that the reader almost doesn't notice. Almost But when the shotgun becomes important in a later act, the reader should remember seeing it in the first act.
Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" illustrates the point on a larger scale. The title of the story cues us well. This is a story about a lottery. As we read the story we learn that a town holds an annual lottery and has been doing so since time immemorial. We focus on the mechanics of the lottery and the people involved. The lottery is the subject of the story, and we have no reason to be suspicious of it until the end of the story when we learn, to our surprise, that the winner of the lottery will be stoned to death by the other townspeople. Jackson's feat as a writer was similar to sleight of hand. She made us look one way when we should have been looking the other. As we read, we're more concerned about the mechanics of the lottery than what that lottery actually represents. We are caught off guard at the end and stunned when we learn the truth.
Ford Madox Ford, author of The Good Soldier, explained the concept clearly. He said the first thing the writer had to consider was the story. If you get away from story you will produce what Ford called a "longeur" which was, he said, "a patch over which the mind will progress heavily." You may have a great scene from your own life that you want to put into the story and, what the heck, the novel is big and forgiving and you figure you can put anything you want into it without really hurting the book. As long as it's good, right? Wrong, said Ford. If it doesn't push the story forward, it doesn't belong. Don't distract the reader with asides. What you are doing is diluting the dramatic effect. "A good novel needs all the attention the reader can give it," said Ford. Focus, focus, focus.
Of course you can appear to digress. What looks like an aside (the casual vs. the causal) is in truth important to the story. "That is," Ford said, "the art which conceals your Art." Ford believed the author insulted the reader by demanding attention, and if you gave your reader an excuse to walk away
from the book, he would. Other delights always beckon us. So you should provide the reader with what appear to be, but aren't really, digressions. All pieces fit, all pieces are important. "Not one single thread must ever escape your purpose," warned Ford.
Ford's key concepts are that you should appear to digress (that is, make the causal seem casual), and in so doing, let the reader relax. But as the writer, you are always building your story, advancing your plot, with the reader unawares.
Let me explain it in cinematic terms. We've placed the props on the set of the first act. The shotgun is on the back wall. Depending on the director's shot, he can make the shotgun obvious, with a close-up of it, or he can camouflage the shotgun among the other objects in the room with a medium shot. The close-up calls attention to the shotgun, and anyone who's ever seen at least one murder mystery knows exactly what's afoot. But if the director is coy and doesn't make the shotgun obvious, it will appear unimportant. Only later, when the shotgun makes its next appearance, will the viewer realize how important it was.
20 Master Plots Page 3
