The actions of the second movement depend on the action of the first movement. In "The Three Languages," we understand how Hans happens to know dogspeak. For the first time, Hans thinks and acts on his own, and he uses his education effectively. Notice also the insight into Hans' character: He doesn't keep the treasure for himself. Instead, he turns it over to the lord of the castle, who repays him with adoption. Hans has replaced an ungrateful father with a grateful one.
The focus isn't on Hans, however. The focus is on the adventure. For the sake of summarizing the story I've left out the details of Hans' encounter with the dogs, but it has elements of fear, terror, fascination and revelation (the treasure). It is from these details the adventure takes its color and power. The plot is continuous, and Hans doesn't go off chasing a woman or fighting an ogre guarding a bridge. Such scenes would serve no purpose to the plot. Hans does only what he must to advance the plot.
THE CRYSTAL BALL
But where is this story headed? Two elements should be obvious. Hans learned three things from the celebrated masters: the speech of dogs, frogs and birds. The second act included an episode that dealt with dogs. Therefore, the third act must include episodes that deal with frogs and birds.
Having gotten a taste of the world, Hans decides to visit Rome. He leaves home willingly and with the blessing of his father (as opposed to his violent ejection in Act One).
On his way he passes a marsh where frogs are croaking. Hans listens in "... and when he became aware of what they were saying, he grew very thoughtful and sad."
He continues his journey, and when he gets to Rome he finds out the pope has just died. The cardinals are deadlocked about whom they should appoint as his successor. They decide to wait for a sign from God.
They don't have long to wait. As soon as the young count enters the church, two snow-white doves fly down and land on his shoulders. The cardinals, who know a sign when they see one, ask Hans on the spot if he would be the next pope. Hans doesn't believe he's worthy enough to be pope, but the doves counsel him to accept.
He does and is anointed and consecrated. This is what the frogs in the marsh had told him: that he would be the next pope.
The third act fulfills the promises of the first two acts. Hans moves through successive states of being. He starts out as dumb Hans (Act One), develops into the young adopted count (Act Two) and ends up as the pope (Act Three). Each stage depends on the previous one. He also moves through three fathers. Hans starts out with the irresponsible and intolerant father of Act One, graduates to an understanding and giving father in Act Two, and graduates again to be the figurative son of God.
Heroes in adventures don't usually change much during the course of the story. The reader is basically concerned with the chain of events and with what happens next. Yes, Hans becomes the pope, but we don't see any evidence of a changed Hans. He can't even speak Latin; when he gives Mass, the doves have to prompt him. He's still pretty much the same person, although he's become more self-reliant (which is the point of the story). We don't see a high level of spiritual consciousness or insight that elevates his character. If it weren't for the birds ...
Frequently, an adventure includes a romance. There's no romance in "The Three Languages" because it wouldn't be fitting for a pope-to-be to have a girlfriend, but in many other fairy tales (and adult adventures) the hero encounters a member of the opposite sex along the way. Kings and princes must have their queens and princesses (and vice versa).
What does Act Three accomplish in the adventure plot? As is true with most plots, the question that you raise in your first act is answered in your third. Will Hans make his way in the world? Yes. But it is the journey to the "yes" that intrigues us most. In fact, the "yes" may not even be that important to the reader. The adventure plot is a process plot: We enjoy the journey at least as much as (if not more than) the resolution at the end of the story.
If you decide to use this plot, do your homework. Since a large part of your success depends on sounding convincing —this person really knows what she's talking about—you either should have firsthand knowledge of the events, and the places in which they happen, or you need to spend time in the library gleaning those details that add authenticity. It's details that convince-not just knowing the names of places, but knowing those little details that collectively give a sense of the look, smell and taste of the place. Immerse yourself in the location. Flood yourself in details. You never know what you need until you need it, so take careful notes. Nothing is more frustrating than reading a detail you didn't think was important and then realizing as you write that it's the perfect detail—but you have no idea which book it was in. If you take careful notes (including the name of the book and the author), you can always go back.
You can't take shortcuts around details. Without them, you'll be giving broad sketches, which aren't convincing. The next time you read an adventure book, notice what a large role those details play in creating a time and a place, and notice how naturally a good author weaves the two together so they seem inseparable.
CHECKLIST
As you write, keep these points in mind:
1. The focus of your story should be on the journey more than on the person making the journey.
2. Your story should concern a foray into the world, to new and strange places and events.
3. Your hero goes in search of fortune; it is never found at home.
4. Your hero should be motivated by someone or something to begin the adventure.
5. The events in each of your acts depend on the same chain of cause-and-effect relationships that motivates your hero at the beginning.
6. Your hero doesn't necessarily have to change in any meaningful way by the end of the story.
7. Adventures often include romance.
Two games never seem to fail to capture the imagination of children: hide-and-seek and tag. Try to remember the excitement of being on the hunt and finding where everyone was hiding. Or if you were the hunted, the excitement of eluding capture. It was a test of cleverness (how well you could hide) and nerve.
Tag is like that, too. Chasing and being chased, always trying to outwit the other person. We never lose our appetite for the game. For children as well as adults, there's something fundamentally exciting in finding what has been hidden. As we grow older, we grow more sophisticated about how we play the game, but the thrill at the heart of it never changes. It is pure exhilaration.
The pursuit plot is the literary version of hide-and-seek.
The basic premise of the plot is simple: One person chases another. All you need is a cast of two: the pursuer and the pursued. Since this is a physical plot, the chase is more important than the people who take part in it.
Structurally, this is one of the simplest plots. In the first dramatic phase, the situation is quickly established as the guidelines for the race are set up. Runners on your mark ... We must know who the bad guy is and who the good guy is, and why one will be chasing the other. (The good guy doesn't always chase the bad
guy; it's often the other way around.) It's in this phase that you establish the stakes of the race (death, imprisonment, marriage, etc.). Get set ... You also need a motivating incident to get the chase going. Go!
The second dramatic phase is pure chase. Here we rely on a variety of twists, turns and reversals, perhaps more than in any other plot. Keep your reader involved in the chase by using all the tricks in your bag of surprises.
The third dramatic phase resolves the chase. Either the pursuer escapes permanently or is caught permanently. (Or at least it has the illusion of being permanent. Many movie sequels depend on jump-starting the same chase again and again.)
Hollywood has a long-standing affair with the pursuit plot, probably because it translates well to the screen. Steven Spielberg got his start with this plot. His first film (made for television) was Duel, in which Dennis Weaver is chased mercilessly by —a truck. We never see or find out who's driving the truck, so it takes on a
demonic personality as if motivated out of sheer meanness. There's no rhyme or reason for it, nor does there have to be: We like the excitement of the semi trying to run down Weaver's character, and we like seeing how Weaver escapes his pursuer.
Then there were the Smokey and the Bandit movies with Burt Reynolds and Jackie Gleason. For years the American public delighted in their improbable antics. Even Spielberg's first feature film, Sugarland Express, was a pursuit film. Those films made no pretense at anything serious other than the chase. Speeding (on film anyway) isn't exciting unless there's the prospect of getting caught. Gleason's steadfast character and his dimwit nephew follow the bandits halfway across the country in a vain attempt to bring them to justice. Getting caught accomplishes nothing in these comedies, because with no chase, there's only a vacuum.
Inspector Javert relentlessly pursues Jean Valjean in Les Miser-ables, and Sherlock Holmes relentlessly pursues Dr. Moriarity throughout the tales. If you're the pursuer, you want to catch the pursued; if you're the pursued, you want to elude capture. The task for the writer is to be clever enough to sustain the chase without letting the reader get bored. Both sides live for the chase and are defined by it. As readers, we expect a great deal of physical action, a variety of clever dodges and ruses that come into play just when it seems the pursuer has cornered the pursued.
The pursued can't get too far ahead of the pursuer, either, because the tension of the chase comes from the proximity of the two characters. Think back to the game of tag. You're running down someone who's doing everything she can to get away from you. You close in. The tension increases as you get closer. She tries to give you the slip; you stay with her. The tension is greatest at the moment just before it seems capture is inevitable. Then wham, something happens, and the inevitable is foiled, either by the cleverness of the pursued or by some interference.
The classic example of this is the relationship between Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. Both live for the chase. It is obvious to everyone except Wile E. Coyote that the Roadrunner can outwit and outrun him at any given moment. Yet Wile E. Coyote keeps trying, hoping in his heart that sooner or later Providence will side with him. The Roadrunner taunts his opponent and lets him get so close, but at the last possible second, he jets off in a cloud of dust. This is the basic relationship between pursuer and pursued.
Think of some of the other pursuit films you've seen: Jaws (man vs. beast), The French Connection, Night of the Living Dead, Terminator, Alien, Midnight Run, Narrow Margin, Romancing the Stone, and just about any of the slasher flicks, such as Friday the Thirteenth, Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street. Then there are the cartoon characters (of both page and screen) who exist solely for the chase: Batman and Superman, in particular.
There are also classic films in this category, such as Bonnie and Clyde and Moby Dick. I include the film version of Moby Dick in this category because it's concerned mostly with Ahab's obsession with chasing the whale. That obsession overshadows everything else. Unlike the book, which delves into the psychologies of the crew members, the film is more concerned with the chase.
Then there's one of the best pursuit films ever made, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. From the start of the story, Butch and Sundance are on the run. Known as "The Hole in the Wall Gang," the pair have made a career of holding up the Union Pacific Railroad. They've become so good at it, in fact, that the railroad president has personally made it his business to have the two men hunted down. Butch and Sundance have come up with the clever idea of robbing a single train twice: once on its way in and again on its way out. Who would anticipate that the robbers would be so daring?
They hold up the incoming train. Butch celebrates in a whorehouse, while Sundance visits his renegade schoolteacher girlfriend. Then they hold up the outgoing train.
The plan backfires. A posse is waiting for them in a back-up train, and the chase begins and doesn't stop until the end of the story.
PURSUING THE PURSUIT PLOT
The elements of a pursuit plot are fairly standard: Someone runs, someone chases. It is a simple (but powerful) physical motion that evokes simple (and equally powerful) emotions. It doesn't matter if the pursuit is a standard chase by a posse or a submarine chase, as in The Hunt for Red October. What distinguishes one story from another is the quality of the chase itself. If you resort to standard cliches, the chase won't have the excitement your reader demands. If the territory is too familiar, you'll have a harder time getting the reader involved.
Your key to keeping the chase exciting is to make it unpredictable. If you recall our earlier discussion about patterns, you will remember how important they are in developing plot. But in a plot like this one, you don't want the patterns to be obvious. You want to develop exciting series of twists and turns so that the reader stays off balance. Don't cater to expectation. If you lure the reader into thinking a certain event is going to happen, play off that expectation. The event should fit the pattern you've been building but still be something of a surprise. It's a case of the reader being right and wrong at the same time. He expected a certain event to occur (and it did) but not in the way he expected. This means originality, which is the greatest task of the writer. Find a new way of doing it, or put a new twist on an old way. Freshen up your ideas. Every hand should have a wild card in it.
Of course, the pure physicality of the chase can draw us in. The car chase scene in Bullitt is one of the best ever filmed: You can feel yourself lurch in your seat as the cars fly over the streets of San Francisco. Equally powerful is the car chase scene in Ben-sonhurst, Brooklyn, in The French Connection, in which "Popeye" Doyle chases a train under the El. These scenes draw us in physically, not mentally.
But a car chase is a car chase. It's a stock in trade device now. So what must you do to make your pursuit plot unique? If you're familiar with the works of Ed McBain or Elmore Leonard, you know how taut writing can make simple movement suspenseful. They make any movement unpredictable because the reader isn't sure what the consequences of that movement will be. Their characters can't do anything without something threatening the precarious balance of sanity or the law. Leonard's Fifty-two Pickup is a fine example of this kind of writing.
Aristotle said action defined character. True. What a person does reflects who she is. But Aristotle didn't know about Hollywood.
There comes a point where action no longer defines character, where action is solely for the sake of action. For all the action in a Steven Spielberg or George Lucas film, very little of it reveals anything important about the principal characters. Nor do we care. What we do care is that the action be stimulating, engaging and unique. This means trying to avoid the standard cliches. It means tension must hum like a taut wire through your story. This isn't just for movie scripts; it's true for writing pursuit novels, too. In many ways this plot relies on old cliches, so it's important for you to find the new spin to put on old stories to make them engaging for us again.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid works because it turns the traditional Western inside out. The bad guys are good guys; they're fun-loving and likeable. They don't have a five-day beard, stink, spit, and stomp on defenseless men, women and children. They go against type. (The same is true for the lead characters in Bonnie and Clyde.) Butch is a romantic, an optimist, who puts a positive spin on everything; Sundance is more practical, a realist, but nonetheless engaging and appealing. The two men are well-meaning social misfits. Their action stimulates us, their comic notions engage us, and the situations they get involved in are unique. Remember the scene in which the pair are chased to the top of a bluff and there's no escape except by jumping off a cliff into the raging torrent below? In its basic form we've seen this scene before. The desperadoes, living up to their name, make the desperate leap.
But William Goldman brings a twist to the scene that makes it unforgettable: Sundance, we find out at the last possible moment, can't swim. The scene is tense but funny. We don't learn anything important about the character, for his
inability to swim is a device that suits the scene only. But it works because the dialogue is funny and the situation has an angle that we haven't seen before.
Which brings up a final trademark of the pursuit plot: confinement. To heighten tension during the chase, it is inevitable at some point that the pursued become trapped or confined. As in the scene with Butch and Sundance at the top of the bluff, they've got their backs to the cliff and their fronts to the posse. The closer the quarters, the greater the tension. Some films, such as the Alien series, have done spectacularly well using this principle. The main character, Ripley, is always at close quarters, whether it's on a spaceship or on a hostile planet. She's given no place to run. The same is true with Outland, which takes place on a space station, and Narrow Margin, which takes place on a train. Confine your action, even to the point of claustrophobia, and you will increase the tension of your story.
A final word about using confined spaces: While it is true that limiting the characters' range of movement raises tension, it is also true that too much confinement sometimes makes movement and action difficult. For example, Agatha Christie uses the train in Murder on the Orient Express to its fullest advantage. The characters can't leave the train, yet they have enough places to move and hide and perform the action. If you were to try to confine the action even further to, say, one car on the train, you might deny your characters the freedom they need to move around. Other good examples come from film. Die Hard uses an entire office building and Steven Seagall's Under Siege uses a battleship, both of which work well. But Passenger 57, with Wesley Snipes, uses a hijacked airplane, which proves to be too small to contain the story. There just aren't enough places to go or things to do on an airplane.
20 Master Plots Page 9
