20 Master Plots

by Ronald B Tobias

  This same rule applies for conversations and characters. By making the causal world appear casual, the reader accepts the convention that fiction is very much like life.

  Only writers know it just ain't so.

  LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR SEVEN: MAKE SURE YOU LEAVE LADY LUCK AND CHANCE TO THE LOTTERY

  From time to time I hear a writer crowing, "I love being a writer. It's like being God. You create a world and you can do anything you want in it."

  Here's where life and art stop imitating each other.

  Life is chaos punctuated by short periods of order. From day to day we don't have the vaguest notion of what will happen. We may have plans, we may have schedules that say we should be at lunch at 12:30 with our sister-in-law at the Western Cafe, but, to paraphrase Robert Burns, there's many a slip between the cup and the lip. These are our guesses about how our day will go, but the truth is, as anyone can attest, life is always a gamble. Anything can intrude at any time. "Expect the Unexpected" should be our motto. If there is a chain of cause-and-effect relationships in our lives, it's under constant modification to consider current circumstances. And Lord only knows what current circumstances are from moment to moment. We live our lives provisionally, always adapting to what comes at us. Life is filled with long shots and unbelievable coincidences. The chances of anyone winning Lotto

  America are about a zillion to one, but someone does win it. In life we expect things to happen out of the blue.

  In fiction, we won't tolerate it.

  This is the "hand of God" paradox. If you're God, you can do anything, at least in the world you create, right? Well ... not exactly. You must work under a load of restrictions. The first restriction states that you must create a world that has its own set of rules. Call it the rules of the game, if you want, but those rules must be consistent from beginning to end. Even the world Alice enters through the looking glass has its rules, and once we understand how they work, they make sense in their own way.

  The second restriction states that when something happens in this world, it must happen for a reason. You can argue, of course, that everything in our own world happens for a reason, but if we can't make out what that reason is, we attribute it to chance, luck, coincidence. But fiction leaves no room for chance. The reason something happens must always be evident at some point in the story. Readers won't tolerate the unknown in fiction.

  So you're not much of a god, after all. You still must play by the rules, even if they are your own rules. You've set up the game, so you're stuck with it. No out-of-the-blue solutions. (Remember Mark Twain's admonition to leave miracles alone?) Your readers won't let you concoct what they will perceive as ridiculous solutions. Avoid the easy way out, where the character just happens to be in the right spot at the right time.

  The well-read person jumps out at this point and says, "Ha! What about Shakespeare! And Dickens, he's the worst offender of them all! How come they get away with it and we can't?"

  It's true, the characters in both Shakespeare and Dickens are always in the right spot at the right time. They overhear conversations; they find evidence; they see things either at the most opportune or inopportune times. That's okay, because we understand these are devices to make the plot work, and we're more interested in the characters than in the plots themselves. After all, these are works about human character (note the titles: Othello, King Lear, Hamlet, David Copperfield and Martin Chuzzel-wit). Such conventions were accepted at the time anyway, and

  that's not the case now. We demand more from fiction. We don't want plot contrivances.

  LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR EIGHT: MAKE SURE YOUR CENTRAL CHARACTER PERFORMS THE CENTRAL ACTION OF THE CLIMAX

  It is the essence of plot to ask a question. In Hamlet, for instance, the question is whether Hamlet will kill the king once he knows Claudius is responsible for his father's death. In Othello, the question is whether the Moor will regain his lost love for Desdemona. In Cyrano de Bergerac—whether the original version or Steve Martin's—the question is the same: Will he ever succeed in telling Roxane he loves her? In Romeo and Juliet, we wonder if Romeo can find happiness in his marriage to Juliet. And so on. Plot asks a question, and the climax answers it—oftentimes simply with a yes or no. In the case of Hamlet and Cyrano: Yes. In the case of Othello and Romeo: No.

  Climax is the point of no return. The question is posed in Act I, and everything that happens between Acts I and III leads to the resulting action, the climax.

  When you write the climax, however, don't forget the first rule: Your main character must perform the central action. Keep the main character in center stage of the action, and don't let her be overwhelmed by events to the extent that the events themselves act on her. Too often main characters disappear at the end, caught up in circumstances and events that diminish the purpose of the plot.

  And don't let your antagonist or a secondary character perform the main action of the climax, either. Your main character should act, not be acted upon. Romeo kills Tybalt; Hamlet kills Polonius; Othello believes that Desdemona really gave Iago his handkerchief; and Cyrano checkmates de Guiche. These events lead directly to the final events: the deaths of Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet and Desdemona; and the winning of Roxane.

  These, then, are some of the basic common denominators of plot. Now let's get down to the types of plots themselves—all two of them.

  In the course of researching this book, I read anyone who had anything to say about plot. After a while, I felt like I was reading cookbooks, with each author offering a recipe for success.

  I'm not knocking other writers, because the best often have something valuable to say. In fact you'll find many of their comments scattered through this book.

  What all writers have in common is a method. Once they get the method down, some of them then write a book about it. Those books should be titled "This Is What Works for Me," because readers who respect certain writers too often take their methods as gospel. These methods may be tried and true for those writers, but there's the mistaken assumption floating around that if it works for one person, it must work for everyone else, too.

  Not so.

  There's a method for each of us. The writer must know how he works and thinks in order to discover which method works best. Somebody like Vladimir Nabokov, who was meticulous and structured, laid out his work on index cards from beginning to end before writing the first word. Other writers, such as Toni Morrison and Katherine Anne Porter, began at the end. "If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin," wrote Porter. "I always write my last line, my last paragraphs, my last page first."

  Other writers think that's a terrible idea. But then Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, probably said it best when he described his method: "I start at the beginning, go on to the end, and then stop."

  I don't bring this up to confuse you, but to make you think about your own work habits and the value of what other writers have to offer by way of advice. But remember what Somerset Maugham said the next time you come across something some great writer said: "There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are."

  The trick for any author is to find out what works for him, and then do it. The same is true when it comes to plot.

  How many plots are there? The real question is, "Does it really matter how many plots there are?"

  Not really.

  What matters is your understanding of the story and how to create a pattern of plot that works for it.

  TO HELL AND BACK

  The best place to start a discussion about plots is to trace their bloodlines to the beginning. By doing this, you should be able to understand the evolutionary tree from which all plots developed. It's not like studying some fossilized prehistoric ancestor that no longer walks the earth; on the contrary, the two basic plots from which all other plots flow are still the foundation of all literature. If you understand the essence of your plot, you will understand better how to go about writing it.

/>   In Dante's Inferno there are only two basic sins in all the levels of Hell. One is called forza, crimes of violence and force. The other basic sin is called forda, which is Italian for fraud. Force and fraud. The damned who have been sent to Hell for crimes of violence weren't at the lowest circles of Hell; those were reserved for people who committed fraud, or sins of the mind. In Dante's mind, anyway, crimes of the mind were far worse than crimes of physical violence.

  Dante understood human character. These two sins come from two basic functions of human beings. Force is power, strength, physicality. Fraud comes from wit, cleverness, mentality. The

  Body and The Mind. If we look at plots, then, we should divide them into these two categories: plots of the body, and plots of the mind.

  A clear representation of this duality is in Aesop's fables. The lion, a universal symbol of strength, represents force, power, physical strength. No one ever portrayed the lion as being particularly bright. Being strong was enough.

  The fox, on the other hand, is portrayed as clever, witty and devious. His strength isn't physical, it's mental. We seem to take particular delight in those fables in which the physically weaker animal outwits the physically superior animal. In fairy tales, we take equal delight when the harmless child outwits the threatening ogre. We put a lot of stock in mental skills—more than we put in physical skills.

  The Greek masks of tragedy and comedy embody the same idea. The frowning mask represents tragedy, which is the theater of force. The laughing mask represents comedy, which is the theater of fraud. The foundation of comedy is deception: mistaken identities, double meanings, confusion. Federico Garcia Lorca confirmed this when he said life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.

  Shakespeare's comedies verify this. Comedy often depends on language to be understood, so it is a form of forda. This was the genius of the Marx Brothers; they brought anarchy to language and turned the world of logic upside down.

  Chico: "Pick a number between one and ten."

  Groucho: "Eleven."

  Chico (dismayed): "Right."

  It makes no sense. But in the world of the Marx Brothers, somehow the number eleven can be found between one and ten. (Notice how jokes are never funny when you try to explain them?) This kind of shtick is completely mental—as were many of the Marx Brothers' funniest routines. Of course, they performed physical comedy brilliantly too, but there is a mentality operating even at the physical level. That was the genius of Charlie Chaplin, too. We understood the deeper pathos, the intellectual implications of his comedy, and understanding that made it sadly funny.

  We have two plots then: forza, plots of the body, and forda, plots of the mind.

  THE ACTION PLOT

  You're at the beginning of the awesome task of starting your work. You have nothing but blank pages in front of you. You have an idea that may be completely sketched out in your head in what Nabokov called "a clear preview," or you may have a vague feeling of what you want to write and start with what Isak Dinesen called "a tingle." Aldous Huxley said he only had a dim idea of what he was going to write, and William Faulkner said all he had to start with was a memory or mental picture. Fine. Either you know everything or you know nothing. No help there.

  What you should do based on your "clear preview" or your "tingle" is ask yourself which of the two plots most closely fits your idea. Is it an action story, an adventure that relies on doing? Or does your story deal more with the inner workings of character and human nature?

  Most novels and films for the mass market fall into the first category. The public has a ravenous appetite for adventure stories, whether they're about Matt Helm and James Bond or Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker. The racks of B. Dalton and Walden-books sag with these books. We love a good thriller for airports and the beach, whether it be by Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, Michael Crichton or any of a hundred others. We're addicted to movies series like Alien, Lethal Weapon and Terminator because of the sheer physical energy they exude. The motion is fast and furious, and we love the roller coaster ride. The primary focus of these books and films is action. Our main concern as readers or viewers is "What happens next?" The role of character and thought in these works is reduced pretty much to the bare necessities — enough so they can advance the action. That doesn't mean there can't be any character development at all; it just means that if you had to describe the book as either an action story or a character story, you would choose action because it dominates character by some degree.

  With the action plot we don't really get involved with any great moral or intellectual questions. And at the end, the main character probably doesn't change all that much, which is convenient for a sequel. The action plot is a puzzle plot; we're challenged to solve some sort of mystery. Our rewards are suspense, surprise and expectation. Science fiction, Westerns, romances and detective novels usually—but not always—fall into this category. The great writers in these forms—Stanislaw Lem, Ray Bradbury, Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson, for instance—write more for the mind than for the gut.

  PLOTS OF THE MIND

  The author who is more concerned in plots of the mind delves inward, into human nature and the relationships between people (and the events that surround them). These are interior journeys that examine beliefs and attitudes. The plot of the mind is about ideas. The characters are almost always searching for some kind of meaning.

  Obviously, serious literature favors this kind of plot over action plots. The plot of the mind examines life instead of just portraying it in some unrealistic way. Again, this doesn't mean that you can't include action in a plot of the mind. But in weighing the mental against the physical, interior against exterior, the mental and interior will dominate to some degree.

  THE MEANING OF LIFE AND THE THREE STOOGES

  Earlier I made the distinction between tragedy and comedy by saying tragedy is a plot of the body and comedy is a plot of the mind. Those were the original Greek distinctions, but things have changed in the last three thousand years. Now tragedy can be either plot. Comedy, however, seems firmly rooted in the Greek tradition.

  A great comedic writer once said "Dying is easy; comedy is hard." Writing high drama is easy by comparison. No doubt about it, being funny is tough. The funniest line in the world can come off totally flat if told incorrectly. Timing, we've heard a thousand times, is everything.

  Freud made the mistake of trying to analyze humor, and I won't make the same mistake here. But the reason comedy is so tough is that it appeals so much to the mind. Comedy is anarchy; it takes the existing order and stands it on its head. The whole concept of a double entendre is that it plays on another concept that the reader/viewer must already know to understand the humor.

  Sure there's slapstick, a purely physical humor. The Three Stooges, for instance, seem anything but intellectual. But their comedy, however physical, lampoons society and its institutions. It's not just that they're throwing pies; it's whom they're throwing pies at: the prim and proper matron, the mortgage banker, all those stiff-shirted characters we live with daily. Their routines let us act out our own fantasies. A good comedic writer must make all these connections for us and give us emotional release, because we really want to throw those pies, too. However physical comedy gets, it has a strong undercurrent of the mind.

  The true comic novel, Anthony Burgess pointed out, was the one that had to do with people's recognition of their unimportance in the universe.

  Heady stuff for the Three Stooges.

  DECIDING ON A PLOT

  Once you've made the decision to write a novel or a screenplay, your next decision should be to decide which of the two plots your story will follow, because that shapes everything else you do.

  Will your story be plot driven? If so, the mechanism of the story is more important than the specific characters themselves. The characters are there to make the plot happen. The novels of Agatha Christie are plot driven. So are the novels of Mickey Spillane and Dashiell Hammet
t, although their styles are entirely different. Each of those authors knew going in what kind of book they would write.

  If your story is character driven, the mechanism of the plot is less important than the people themselves. Films such as Driving Miss Daisy and Fried Green Tomatoes are about people, and while they certainly have plots, those plots aren't center stage front. We're more intrigued by the characters. We're more intrigued by Kafka's Gregor Samsa than the unexplained reason he turns into a noxious bug. We're more interested in Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary and Huckleberry Finn and Jay Gatsby than we are in the plots behind them.

  Know from the beginning where your focus will be. Will it be on the action? Or the people? Once you decide, you'll know what the strong force in your book will be. You'll eventually form a balance between the action and character, but you'll have a focus that will keep you from flip-flopping around. If you choose a plot of action, that will be your strong force; the aspects of your work that fall under the category of the mind will be your weak force. And vice versa: A plot of the mind can be the strong force, and its subsidiary qualities that deal with action will be the weak force. It can work either way, in any proportion you see fit, with one force dominating.

  By choosing your strong and weak forces, your story will have proportion and consistency. You'll achieve proportion by establishing the relationship of one force to the other, and you'll achieve consistency by maintaining that relationship through the entire work.

  Decide, and you'll have a starting place.

  You have made two major decisions to this point. You have an idea (sort of), and you've picked the strong force of your plot. What do you do next?

  Before you try to figure out which plot pattern best suits your story, you must develop the idea for your story so that you can develop the deep structure.