20 Master Plots (2 page)

Plot is a process, not an object.

We tend to talk about plots as if they were objects. All of our plot metaphors describe plot as if it were some tangible thing that came in a box. We categorize plots like items in a story inventory. We talk about plot as if it were a dead thing, something static.

This may be the hardest obstacle for you to overcome: thinking of plot as a force, a process, rather than as an object. Once you realize that plot reaches down to the atomic level in your writing, and that every choice you make ultimately affects plot, you will realize its dynamic quality.

Plot is dynamic, not static.

Let's say you'd written "The Choking Doberman." Someone asks you, "What's your story about?" How do you answer?

You answer, "It's about a dog."

Obviously that won't work. Too specific. Anyway, the dog is the subject matter (and then only half of it). So you try something else.

"It's about terror."

Nope. Too vague.

You try another tack. "It's about this woman who comes home and finds her dog choking on something, only to find out it's human fingers!"

Great gory detail, but is it plot?

No.

Your patience is wearing thin. All right, what
is
the plot?

The plot is as old as literature itself. "The Choking Doberman" is a riddle.

The point of a riddle is to solve a puzzle. It comes from the same tradition as Oedipus, who must solve the riddle presented to him by the Sphinx, and the same tradition of Hercules, who had the unenviable task of having to solve twelve tasks, the famous labors, each of which was a riddle to be solved. Fairy tales are chock full of riddles to be solved—children delight in them. So do adults. The riddle is the basis of the mystery, which to this day is arguably the most popular form of literature in the world. Today we think of a riddle as a simple question that has a trick

answer. "What has ... and ... ?" But a riddle really is any mystifying, misleading or puzzling question that is posed as a problem to be solved or guessed. And that fits "The Choking Doberman."

The story is designed to give you two basic clues. The first clue appears in the first movement: The dog is choking on something. What?

The second clue comes in the second movement, when the vet tells the woman to get out of her house. Why?

To solve the riddle (who?), we must combine clues (what? and why?). We must try to establish a link between the two (cause and effect) and provide the missing piece
before
the end of the story, when the vet and the police explain everything to us. A riddle is a game played between audience and writer. The writer gives clues (preferably clues that make the riddle challenging and therefore fun), and the audience makes a go of it before time is up (in the third movement, when all the explanations come). Take away plot, and all that's left is a jumble of details that add up to nothing.

So before we talk about all the different master plots and how to build them, you should feel comfortable with the concept that plot is a force. It is a force that attracts all the atoms of language (words, sentences, paragraphs) and organizes them according to a certain sense (character, action, location). It is the cumulative effect of plot and character that creates the whole.

So the point of this book isn't so much to give you a rundown of twenty master plots, but to show you how to develop plot in fiction. The book also will show you how to apply whatever plot you choose to your subject matter so you develop plot evenly and effectively.

YOUR PLOT, THE FORCE AND YOU

There's that moment when you begin your work and that huge void of empty pages lies ahead of you. You hesitate. The Chinese proverb that says the longest journey begins with the first step is a little help, but what the proverb doesn't tell you is
which road to take.
The fear always is that you may strike out in the wrong direction, only to have to come back and start all over again. Nothing is more frustrating than to start on something—especially something as ambitious as a novel or a screenplay—and realize halfway through that it isn't right.

What can you do to protect yourself from going off in the wrong direction? The answer is a combination of good news and bad news.

First the bad news.

The bad news is that there are no guarantees. Nothing you can do will guarantee that what you do is right. That shouldn't come as a surprise, but it is a reality.

Now for the good news.

The longest journey begins with the first step, but it helps to know where your journey will take you. This doesn't mean you will know every step of the way, because writing is always full of surprises—twists and turns that the author doesn't expect. That's part of the fun of writing. But most writers I know have a destination in mind. They know where they want to head even if they can't tell you exactly how they intend to get there.

I'm not talking about knowing the ending of the story. That's a different issue. What I'm talking about is understanding the nature of the materials you'll deal with—specifically plot. If you strike out without any idea of destination, you'll wander aimlessly. But if you understand something about the kind of plot you're trying to write, you'll have supplied yourself with a compass that will know when you're wandering and warn you to get back on track.

Even when you get to the end of the work, this compass will guide you through the rewriting, that stage of work that really
makes
what you've written. By having a clear understanding of what your plot is and how the force works in your fiction, you'll have a reliable compass to guide you through the work.

What explorer ever struck out without a direction in mind?

ON DEFINING PLOT

I once heard a Nobel-Prize winning scientist talk about randomness, and something he said has stuck with me: What is randomness? he asked. The chances of something specifically happening at a certain time and place are astronomical, and yet every second of every day is filled with these unlikely events. You drop a dime on the floor. It rolls in a spiral, then twirls to a standstill. What are the odds that could happen exactly the same way again? Millions, maybe trillions, to one. And yet it happened as naturally as if there were no odds against it. Every event in our lives happens as if there were no odds against it.

The scientist argued that randomness does not exist. We have operational definitions, he asserted, definitions that work for a certain series of circumstances and conditions, but we don't have an absolute definition that works in all cases.

The same is true about plot. We have operational definitions of plot, but no grand, irrefutable definition that is absolute. We have only definitions that work for a certain series of circumstances and conditions. Your work is that series of circumstances and conditions, and your work ultimately will provide the proper definition of plot.

It sounds like I'm saying, "Hey, you figure it out, I can't do it for you." That's not what I mean. What I am saying is that each plot is different, but each has its roots in pattern, and this book can help you with those patterns. You will choose a pattern of plot and adapt it to your own specific plot, which is unique for your story.

APPLYING PATTERNS TO YOUR WORK

If you've written much, you know the value of pattern. There's the work pattern: If you sit down every day for so many hours and write, you will produce a lot more than if you write when the fancy strikes you. We rely on patterns as structures.

The same is true inside your own work. By building patterns, you construct a scaffolding for your work. You can build two major patterns in fiction, both of which depend on each other: the pattern of plot and the pattern of character. Once you establish a pattern of plot, you have a dynamic force that will guide you through the action; and once you establish a pattern of character (who acts in the pattern of plot), you have a dynamic force of behavior that will guide you through your character's intent and motivation.

THE EXACT NUMBER OF PLOTS IN THE WORLD

Question: "How many plots are there?"

Answer A: "Who knows? Thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even millions."

Answer B: "Sixty-nine."

Answer C: "There are only thirty-six known plots in the universe."

Answer D: "Two plots, period."

Answer A (Who knows?) is commonly heard in classrooms and found in writing textbooks. Plots have endless possibilities, so there must be endless plots. It is also consistent with what I said about adapting patterns to specific stories.

Answer B (Sixty-nine) was Rudyard Kipling's idea. He felt that only sixty-nine of the countless variations of Answer A were plots. He was talking about patterns.

Answer C (Thirty-six) was the invention of Carlo Gozzi, who catalogued them in a book about plot. He too, was counting patterns. Today when we read that book, about half of the plots are no longer used (because they seem hopelessly out of date), so a revised version of Gozzi might say there are only eighteen plots.

Answer D (Two!) has found favor from Aristotle to modern days, and I'll talk about those two plots in chapter three, because they are so basic that all other stories stem from them. This approach goes one step further than the others in that it categorizes the patterns into two groups. (More on that later.)

All of these answers are right to some degree. Be suspicious of any magic number of plots, because I doubt anyone can completely catalogue the range of human feeling and action in tidy little packages numbered from one to whatever. These people really say the same thing, but in different ways.

Another way to put it might be to say that you can package plot any number of ways, and the way you package it decides what number you'll end up with. There is no magic number, one or one million. This book deals with twenty, but these aren't the only ones in the world. They're twenty of the most basic plots, but any enterprising person can find more, or find another way to package the concept and come out with a different number. Plot is a slippery thing, and no one can hold onto it for long.

In its most basic sense, a plot is a blueprint of human behavior. Thousands of years of human behavior has developed patterns of action and feeling. These patterns are so basic to being human that they haven't changed in the last five thousand years and probably won't change in the next five thousand. On a cosmic scale, five thousand years is a drop in the bucket, but for us mere mortals who eke out lifetimes of about eighty years, five thousand years is a very long time.

In the history of human events it's a long time, too. Some of these patterns of behavior go back even further, to the beginning of humanity and before. We call these behaviors "instincts": the maternal instinct, the instinct to survive, the instinct to defend yourself, and so on. They are primal behaviors, and they are a large part of our own behavior. Remember the story about the mother whose child was trapped beneath an automobile? She was so desperate to save her child she lifted the car with superhuman strength and freed it. We want to protect the ones we love, and sometimes we must go to extremes to do it. This is a basic pattern of behavior that is common to all peoples around the globe, city and jungle alike, at all times in history.

You can probably think of a dozen other such patterns of behavior off the top of your head. But behavior doesn't make plot; it's just the first step toward plot.

First, you must understand the difference between a story and a plot.

THE WHALE HUSBAND MEETS THE CHOKING DOBERMAN

Before plot there was story. In the days when people lived in makeshift homes that they abandoned daily in search of game, or seasonally as they moved their herds of sheep or yaks, they sat around the fire at night and told stories. Stories about the prowess of the hunter, stories about the swiftness of the gazelle or the slyness of the coyote or the brute strength of the walrus. Story was a narration of events in the sequence that they happened.

Plot was something that grew out of the religious rituals that predated Christ, which developed into the classic drama as we know it. Plot is story that has a pattern of action and reaction.

Among the Indians of the Pacific Northwest, the story of the Whale Husband was once popular:

A fisherman caught a strange fish, which he gave to his wife to clean. When she finished her task, the wife washed her hands in the sea. Suddenly a Killer Whale rose out of the water and pulled the woman in. The Killer Whale took the fisherman's wife to his home at the bottom of the sea, where she worked as a slave in his house.

With the help of his friend, Shark, the fisherman followed the Killer Whale to his house at the bottom of the sea. Using trickery, Shark snuffed the light in the Killer Whale's house and rescued the wife for the fisherman.

Compare "The Choking Doberman" to "The Whale Husband." The story about the Doberman arouses and directs our expectations, whereas the tale about the Whale Husband does not. "The Choking Doberman" creates a unity of narration so that each event in its sequence connects along the way to make a unified whole. "The Choking Doberman" integrates the questions of who, what and, most important, why. In "The Whale Husband," we have the who and the what, but not the why.