20 Master Plots (33 page)

The possibilities of this plot are endless, but all the stories share a certain focus. It is a plot of character, and to this effect perhaps it's among the most character-oriented plots in this collection. Discovery is about people and their quest to understand who they are.

As we discussed earlier, the human condition constantly

changes and yet never changes. The fears, hopes and desires of a Babylonian five thousand years ago probably match closely our fears, hopes and desires. Times change, but people don't.

This sameness allows us to share human experience and seek the meaning for ourselves through the experiences of others. Literature is one of the great sources of examining other people's lives.

Discovery isn't just about characters. It's about characters in search of understanding something fundamental about themselves. In the normal course of events it takes seventy or eighty years for life to present itself fully to us, and if we're really lucky we have insights about the value of our life somewhere along the way. But literature has this great ability to condense a complete life into five hundred pages. It presents to us the scan of a generation—or generations — in the time it takes to read that many pages. And if the writer understands something about the nature of his characters and the effect of certain circumstances on those characters, she will share with us what may be valuable insights.

LEARNING THROUGH DISCOVERY

The lure of literature is discovery. Sure, we read to enjoy because we don't want to think; we want to escape the crushing reality of everyday life as it closes in on us. But we also read to learn, not only to discover about the characters in a book but to understand something about ourselves. Life's lessons can come from life as we live it or from books. Reading is a form of vicarious experience, and in some ways it's just as valid an experience as if we'd actually gone through it.

Your task as a writer is to make that world and the people in it so real that the reader can bridge the fantasy of words with the reality of belief. You've heard so many times that good characters come to life; they inhabit the imagination; they have a power of their own. You have also probably experienced a time when a character you were writing about seemed to take on a will of his own, directing you rather than your directing him. Something is fundamentally honest and real about such characters. They aren't momentary inventions; they are projections of life.

The discovery plot can take many forms. It's an important children's plot, because children are more involved in the process of discovery about themselves than adults are. They constantly go through major upheavals in their lives and must learn to readjust. If you write children's literature, keep in mind that a good writer doesn't preach ("This, dears, is what you should know and how you should behave"). A good writer allows the reader to extract meaning from her own consideration of the circumstances. You should allow the child to
discover
for herself the effect of life on your characters. No one wants to be force fed. Children, like adults, want to turn over the rocks for themselves to discover what lies beneath. If you write well, your intention will be clear.

The same is true for writing for adults. Readers won't tolerate a writer on a crusade to tell the world the
real
meaning of life. What we will tolerate, however, is your sincere attempt to present a character struggling through the difficulties of life.

We need to make a distinction between the maturation plot and the discovery plot here. The maturation plot focuses on the process of becoming an adult. The protagonist of a maturity plot will probably make a discovery about himself or the world, but the point is not the discovery itself but the
effect
of the discovery on growing up. The maturation plot is about the journey from innocence to experience. The discovery plot, however, doesn't deal so specifically with that process; it deals with the process of interpreting and dealing with life.

Take Eudora Welty's
Death of a Traveling Salesman
(not to be confused with Arthur Miller's play,
Death of a Salesman).
Set in rural Mississippi in the 1930s, the plot is about a shoe salesman in the last hours of his life. Stricken with influenza, R J. Bowman seeks shelter in the home of a country couple who live in the middle of nowhere. He realizes, as he gets sicker and closer to death, that these simple people possess virtues he never had. As a man who'd spent his life on the road, he begins to realize that his life has never been emotionally whole. He had never regretted not settling down and raising a family, but as he watches this young couple go about their personal lives, he begins to understand what he's missed. But it is too late; death is at hand.

YOU WERE, YOU ARE, YOU WILL BE

The process of discovery generally goes through three movements. To understand what a character is to become, we should understand what she was before the unique circumstances propel her on her journey. You don't want to delay the catalyst that initiates the plot of your story, but you also want to give a strong sense of what life was like for your character before events start to move her toward revelation. Typical of many plots, we generally meet the main character moments before she loses equilibrium.

A common mistake many beginning writers make is to dwell too much on this "pre-catalyst" phase of the character's life. The rule about beginning the story as late as possible (up to the point when things are going to change) is a good one to remember. Don't overwhelm the reader with tons of detail about what the character's life is like before events start to change him. Don't spend too much time setting the stage, because you'll lose the interest of the reader. The early action of your story is critical, not only because you must involve the reader, but because you have only a short time to give the reader a sense of your character's entire life.

As
Death of a Traveling Salesman
begins, Bowman has recently recovered from influenza (or so he thinks). We find him on the road, anxious to get back to work selling shoes to country bumpkins. Note that Welty doesn't dwell on the scenes with the hotel doctor. She gets Bowman on the road very quickly and lets us know through flashback what has happened. But Bowman is weak and he drives his car to the edge of a ditch. Fortunately, he gets out before the car topples over.

In these opening scenes we learn a lot about Bowman's character: who he is, what's important to him, what he wants to accomplish.

This first movement gives way to the second movement, which initiates change. Very often the main character is satisfied with his life and isn't looking to change it. But then life happens. Events force change. The character may be forced to look at his life closely for the first time and learn that everything wasn't as good as it was cracked up to be.

Bowman stops at the first farm down the road in search of help and meets the farm couple who try to help him get his car out of the ditch. Perhaps because he's approaching death (although he doesn't know it), he starts to notice things he'd never noticed before. He begins to envy the young couple's strength and pur-posefulness. The wife is pregnant and radiates calm and comfort. Bowman finds himself wanting to return to a totally different life, but "his heart began to give
off tremendous explosions like
a
rifle,
bang, bang, bang." Death is at hand.

The third movement of the story begins when Bowman starts to understand the nature of his revelation. Although he doesn't know he's dying yet, he has begun to understand that he hasn't lived life the way he really wanted. He realizes that he has missed love. And yet his final experience with the farm couple brings him a measure of peace before he dies. He doesn't go to the grave totally bankrupt.

MOVING AROUND THE MIDDLE

Of the three movements, the most complicated is the middle because it requires that you examine the character in depth. Oftentimes the character will resist change because it brings uncertainty and pain. After losing balance, the character struggles to regain equilibrium, but events force her to confront aspects about herself that she may have always avoided. The process for the character can be healthy or unhealthy. She may end up a better person (as in the case of Bowman) or a worse person. The struggle is the important thing.

Make sure you develop a struggle for your character that is meaningful. Don't make it trivial. No one will care about your character if the turmoil is over some little domestic tragedy. You would hardly expect someone to reevaluate her life as a result of the death of her goldfish.

Nor do you want to make the revelation trivial. If the character goes through a monumental struggle, then realizes that she needs to go to church more regularly, your audience won't buy it. There should be a sense of proportion between the degree of the upheaval and the depth of the revelation. It takes the advent of death to get Bowman there.

Henrik Ibsen's play
Ghosts
is about a similar realization. The main character, Mrs. Alving, must learn the painful lessons about her dead husband's past. By the end of the play, Mrs. Alving realizes that by basing her actions on duty rather than love, she has been indirectly responsible for her family's tragedies. Bitter medicine.

If you start to get the drift of this plot, you can see that its focus is self-realization. The characters move from a state of unaware-ness (Bowman and Mrs. Alving don't understand what has happened to them during their lives) to a state of revelation in which they begin to understand the truth of their lives. This process of revelation often takes a painful toll: They learn things about themselves they might not want to know. Bowman still has a chance to reconcile himself to his lost past before he dies, but Mrs. Alving is left at the end of the play contemplating a gigantic mess: a son about to go insane from syphilis, an illegitimate daughter, and a tarnished image of a husband.

In this sense
Oedipus Rex
by Sophocles is a classic discovery plot. Even though an oracle has warned Oedipus that he will kill his father and marry his mother, he tempts fate with the somewhat arrogant attitude (for a Greek anyway) that he can change fate. The point of the story is that it's not nice to fool Father Fate, and Oedipus becomes the unwitting victim in spite of all his efforts to avoid his fate.

An absolute master at this kind of plot was Henry James. As a writer he was concerned with people learning about themselves, exploring their nature. For readers with a taste for lots of action and intrigue, James isn't your man. But for readers who are interested in the human condition, for readers who don't mind taking time to explore the psyche of people, few writers can top Henry James.

The Portrait of a Lady
is about Isabel Archer, a young, romantic New England woman who inherits an English fortune. She turns down several suitors for Gilbert Osmond, an impoverished dilettante living in retirement in Italy with his daughter Pansy. Osmond is scornful of what he considers the crudities of the modern struggle for survival. He is a selfish, uncaring man who cares more for himself than for anyone else.

Isabel must learn about herself the hard way, through revelation, about the real nature of Osmond's character and her own circumstances. After she makes the mistake of marrying Osmond, she finds out she has been duped by Madame Merle, Osmond's mistress (and the mother of Pansy), who brought Osmond and her together so she could get her hands on Isabel's money. Older, poorer, but more important wiser, Isabel must deal with the undisguised reality of life and her own character.

The novel contains the same basic three movements as Eudora Welty's story. In the first movement we find out who Isabel is and we understand her flaw, which is her romantic nature. She is a woman in search of ideal love. But the world is not an ideal place. The catalyst comes in the guise of her inheritance. Now she has the means to move out into the world and meet other people; she has the means to start her search for love. But that which frees her also enslaves her. It's one of those paradoxes that makes for great tension and irony. Money can free or it can enslave.

Isabel is cruelly manipulated by Osmond and Madame Merle, and when she finally gets to the point at which she is ready to understand what is happening to her—once she is willing to lift the veil of romanticism—she must learn cruel lessons about life, other people and herself.

These stories tend to be dramatic, even melodramatic. That may be because they deal with such extremes of emotion: love, hate, death. Try to imagine writing a story today about a young man who kills his father and marries his mother (although we're still fascinated with those so-called Freudian twists). It would be easy for a writer to fall into the trap of melodrama.

When does a story become melodramatic? When the emotion being expressed is exaggerated beyond the subject matter's ability to sustain that level of emotion.

We're back to the idea of proportion.

Once the plot (action) takes over character, you lose proportion. If you want to be sincere and deal with complicated emotions, you must spend the time it takes to develop a character who is strong enough to carry those emotions. Otherwise, all you're trying to do is glue feelings onto a cardboard cutout of a character.