20 Master Plots (3 page)

Too many important questions are never answered in "The Whale Husband":

• What does the strange fish have to do with the appearance of the Killer Whale? (We want the events to connect somehow.) We suspect that the Killer Whale took the woman because of the strange fish, but we never find out if that's the case. We can guess that maybe the strange fish was the Killer Whale's wife, so the Killer Whale took revenge. We want the second movement (the Killer Whale stealing the fisherman's wife) to happen
because
of the first movement (the fisherman steals the Killer Whale's wife). But there are no clues, no connections, no apparent
causal relationships.

• Why does the Killer Whale kidnap the fisherman's wife? Was it for revenge? Or was it just because he was lonely or mean

or perhaps he needed a new housekeeper?

• What was the alliance between Shark and the fisherman? Did Shark have something against the Killer Whale? Where did Shark come from? Why does she help? No answers, no clues.

In all fairness, the story probably has many hidden connotations that are available to the original tellers and listeners, but as it is here it seems to fail our expectations of what a story should be.

Those expectations are what plot is about.

STORY VS. PLOT

Novelist E.M. Forster spent a lot of time thinking about writing. He tried to explain the difference between story and plot in his book
Aspects of the Novel.
"The king died and the queen died." Two events. A simple narration. This is story.

But if you connect the first movement (the death of the king) with the second movement (the death of the queen) and make one action
the result of
the other, we would have a plot. "The king died and then the queen died
of grief."

Add a touch of suspense: "The queen died and no one knew why until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king."

Story, then, is a chronicle of events. The listener wants to know what comes next.

Plot is more than just a chronicle of events. The listener asks a different question:
"Why
does this happen?"

Story is a series of events strung like beads on a string. (This happened and then this happened and the. . . .)

Plot is a chain of cause-and-effect relationships that constantly create a pattern of unified action and behavior. Plot involves the reader in the game of "Why?"

Story requires only curiosity to know what will happen next.

Plot requires the ability to remember what has already happened, to figure out the relationships between events and people, and to try to project the outcome.

TWO ENGLISH GENTLEMEN

The following story is from Maugham's notebooks on writing. Maugham said he liked the story but could never figure out how to use it in his own work:

Two young Englishmen were working on an isolated tea plantation in India. One of the men—we'll call him Clive — got a handful of letters in every post, but the other man — we'll call him Geoffrey—never got any mail.

One day Geoffrey offered five pounds to his friend for one of his letters. (In those days that was lot of money.)

"Of course," Clive replied, and he spread out his mail on a table in front of Geoffrey. "Take your pick."

Geoffrey looked over the mail and then chose a letter. At dinner that night, Clive casually asked his friend what was in the letter he'd bought.

"None of your business," Geoffrey replied. "At least tell me who it was from," asked Clive. Geoffrey refused to tell him.

The two men argued, but Geoffrey wouldn't back down. A week later, Clive offered to buy the letter back for twice the amount. "Not on your life," said Geoffrey and he walked away.

Maugham's observation about what he saw as the deficiency of this story is interesting:

"I suppose that if I belonged to the modern school of story writers, I should write it just as it is and leave it. It goes against the grain with me. I want a story to have form, and I don't see how you can give it that unless you can bring it to a conclusion that leaves no legitimate room for questioning."
So what happened?

Nobody knows. You invent an ending: Clive sneaks into Geoffrey's room to steal the letter back, but Geoffrey walks in and surprises Clive going through his things. The men fight, and Clive accidentally kills Geoffrey. He later finds the letter in Geoffrey's effects and reads it...
What does it say?

Let's try a couple of different endings.

Ending One

You want to add an ironic twist, the way 0. Henry and Guy de Maupassant did in their stories. So you decide the letter is from Clive's haberdasher in London, informing him that his new suits have been finished and are on the way. . . .

The letter turns out to be trivial, hardly worth Geoffrey's death or Clive's torture. Clive became a victim of his own imagination and Geoffrey a victim to his own stubbornness.

But this ending doesn't satisfy us. Why not? We expect more from the letter than a bit of trivial news; we expect the letter to go deeper into the personal lives of the two men. We expect the letter to contain some kind of secret.

Ending Two

The letter is from Geoffrey's girlfriend in London saying that she's making a surprise visit to the plantation, and since Clive was such a good friend, could he please help arrange a surprise reception?

This ending is more ironic because the girlfriend will indeed get a surprise reception, but not the one she anticipates. We also can't help wonder how Clive will explain her boyfriend's death.

This ending also explains why Geoffrey would choose that particular letter (since he would've seen his girlfriend's name and return address on the envelope). And it would explain why Geoffrey would refuse to show the letter to Clive. The letter contains a secret.

Perhaps this version of an ending better fits Maugham's "conclusion that leaves no legitimate room for questioning." Everything's been explained, and we are satisfied.

The difference between "Two English Gentlemen" and "The Whale Husband" is that "Two English Gentlemen" is a story on the verge of a plot. All it needs is a finish to make the story whole.

PAPA ARISTOTLE

Our lives are stories, not plots. Life is often a series of tenuously connected events, coincidences and chance. Real life is too ragged and rarely comes to the kind of conclusion that Maugham preferred, with "no legitimate room for questioning." No wonder life is stranger than fiction.

We prefer order to disorder in fiction. We prefer logic to chaos. Most of all, we prefer unity of purpose, which creates a
whole.
Wouldn't life be great if it contained nothing extraneous or coincidental, if everything that happened to us related to a main purpose? (Or would it? I have grave doubts.) "Two English Gentlemen" fell short of our expectations because the story didn't go "the distance." In other words, the story doesn't seem
whole.
It is a fragment begging a conclusion.

Aristotle, the grandpappy of dramatic theory, proposed some basic common denominators for drama that haven't changed all that much in nearly three thousand years. His concept of
unified action
lies at the heart of plot. Cause and effect. This happens
because
that happened, and so on.

What I'm about to repeat (via Aristotle) may sound so basic to you that it verges on the absurd, but bear with me. It's scary how many people have never grasped this fundamental principle:

A unified action creates a whole made up of a beginning, middle and an end.

We talked about the three movements in each of the three stories so far. The first movement constitutes the beginning, the second constitutes the middle, and the third, of course, constitutes the end.

In the Beginning

The beginning, commonly called the
setup,
is the initial action of the situation, presented to us as a problem that must be solved.

In "The Choking Doberman" it is when the woman comes home and finds her dog choking.

In "The Whale Husband" it is when the husband loses his wife to the Killer Whale (and, we assume, wants her back).

In "Two English Gentlemen" the beginning sets up the situation of two men, one of whom gets mail, while the other doesn't.

The beginning defines your characters and the wants of your major character (or characters). Aristotle says a character wants either happiness or misery. When you ask yourself "What does my character
want?"
you've begun the journey of plot. This want (or need) is called
intent.
In the stories we've looked at, the woman in "The Choking Doberman" wants to save her dog; the fisherman in "The Whale Husband" wants his wife back; and Geoffrey in "Two English Gentlemen" wants mail. Wanting something leads to motivation—why a character does what he does.

In the Middle

Once you've established the intent of your character(s), the story goes into the second phase, which Aristotle called the
rising action.
The character pursues her goal. The woman takes her dog to the vet; the fisherman, with mysterious help from Shark, goes to the Killer Whale's house; and Geoffrey offers to buy a letter from Clive. These actions come directly from intent.

The action clearly grows out of what happened in the beginning. Cause, now effect.

But the protagonist runs into problems that keep her from successfully completing intention. Aristotle called these barriers
reversals.
Reversals cause tension and conflict because they alter the path the protagonist must take to get to her intended goal. In "The Choking Doberman" the reversal comes as the telephone call from the vet. In "Two English Gentlemen" the reversal comes when Clive offers to buy back the letter and Geoffrey refuses. "The Whale Husband," however, doesn't have a reversal in it, and that's where it fails as a plot. The fisherman and the Shark simply complete their intention without resistances. Nothing stops them. No conflict, no tension.

After the reversal, Aristotle suggested something he called
recognition,
which is the point in the story where the relationships between major characters change as a result of the reversal. In "The Choking Doberman" recognition comes when the woman flees her house; in "Two English Gentlemen" it comes when the men fight over the letter.

A reversal is an event, but recognition is the irreversible emotional change within the characters brought about by that event.

Note that both reversal and recognition come from the story being told, not from out of the blue. In "The Whale Husband," help, in the form of Shark, comes from nowhere. In ancient days this was called
Deus ex Machina,
which is Latin for "God From the Machine." In the old dramas, the playwright solved the problems of plot by having the gods take care of it. You'd watch characters suffer through their dilemmas, then suddenly some angel or god would float out of a hole in the ceiling (attached to a rope that the audience could see even from the back row), wave his magic wand, and either solve everyone's problems or put them to death. We no longer have patience for this kind of contrived ending. Anything too convenient or too coincidental (sometimes called
idiot plot)
turns us off. Mark Twain said it best: "The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibility and
let miracles alone."

In "The Choking Doberman," help comes from the veterinarian, who has already been established in the story.

In screenplays, Hollywood plot structure tends to be formulaic. The protagonist usually goes through two major reversals (sometimes called
plot points).
Only "Two English Gentlemen" has a second reversal, one that builds on the heels of the first: when Clive kills Geoffrey.

In the End

The final stage is the end, which contains the climax, the falling action and the denouement. The ending is the logical outcome of all the events in the first two phases. Everything that has happened to this point inevitably leads to a final resolution in which all is exposed and clarified. We learn about the burglar with the missing fingers; we discover the contents of the letter. Everything—who, what and where —is explained, and everything makes sense.