CHAPTER 6

THE PHILOSOPHY OF PLOT

BY JAMES N. FREY

Fiction writers come up with some interesting metaphors when speaking of plot. Some say the plot is the highway and the characters are the automobiles. Others talk about stories that are “plot-driven,” as if the plot were neither the highway nor the automobile, but the chauffeur. Others seem to have plot phobia and say they never plot. Still others turn up their noses at the very notion, as if there’s something artificial, fraudulent, contrived.

Metaphors aside, readers and critics also say strange things about plot. They’ll say a work of fiction is “tightly plotted,” or “strongly or weakly plotted,” or that a story “has too much plot,” as if plot were the sort of spice that requires just the right amount. How much is too much?

It’s said that some plots stink, and that others are tortured, feeble, confused, boring, or trite.

Fiction writers sometimes speak of character and plot as if they were in opposition to each other. They’ll say that they think of their stories as being “70 percent character and 30 percent plot.” But how can that be, when a plot is really nothing more than a recap of what the characters do? If the characters do nothing, if they’re just sitting there being characters, there isn’t a plot at all.

Talking about plot in the abstract, separated from character, is rather like talking about the pretty separated from the maid. A plot, of course, is not only a recap of what characters do. If it were, then a recap of my day thus far would be a plot:

I got up. I read the San Francisco Chronicle while the water boiled for coffee. I kissed my wife good-bye as she hurried off to work. I ate a bowl of bran cereal. I did twenty minutes on my exercise bike while I watched part of a tape of Damn the Defiant! I took a shower. I wrote a little on “The Philosophy of Plot.” I met a friend for lunch. We both had vegetarian lasagna.

This isn’t a plot because the actions of the characters have no significance. What gives significance to actions is taking them toward the resolution of some kind of predicament the character is facing. The predicaments fictional characters might face are infinite in their variety, from trying to light a lifesaving fire with just a few matches, to finding who killed Roger Axelrod, to coming to terms with some inner devil such as self-hatred, loneliness, or the silence of the gods.

All plotted works of fiction are not born equal. Some are intended to be more entertainments, and others are intended to be serious works of art that attempt to shed some light on the insanity of the human condition—or to point out that there is no light to shed and we might as well stop whining about it. But, in all of these stories, the plot is what the characters do in overcoming obstacles in a progression toward a resolution.

ENTERTAINING PLOTS

In entertainments, the characters tend to face problems that most flesh-and-blood people would never encounter. In an entertainment, a character might find a dead body in the trunk of his car, or be caught in an intergalactic war on Zorgon, or be skewered with Cupid’s arrow.

Entertainment plots are largely determined by the conventions of the genre. A detective must unmask a killer. A detective must care who killed Roger Axelrod. In a Western, the heroic marshal can’t decide to retire to the Bahamas. In a romance, the heroine doesn’t decide to give up on the guy and become a nun.

Furthermore, the characters are engaged in accomplishing specific and concrete goals. The intrepid detective pursues the goal of unmasking the murderer, no matter how many knocks on the head she receives. What the characters do—those actions that constitute the plot—are somewhat predictable. The surprises, the originality, the creativity, come in the way in which the goals are accomplished. When James Bond sets out to stop Dr. No from incinerating all the major metropolitan centers of the world with his diamond laser in the sky, the reader knows what the outcome will be; it’s the clever and inventive way the demise of Dr. No is accomplished that matters.

A fiction writer plotting entertainments, then, is charged with finding a mission for each of the major characters, both heroes and villains, making their motives believable, and seeing to it that they carry out their mission in clever, determined, and resourceful ways. The mission might be to fall in love, to commit a murder, to steal some jewels—virtually anything that’ll result in the appropriate actions.

The opposing missions of the various characters create the plot. The best writers of entertainments think of fresh and original ways for these missions to be carried out. Plot, then, for the author of an entertainment, is a matter of playing a game of chess with an alter ego, always asking what clever and resourceful, surprising, yet believable thing this character will do next. And then asking how the character’s antagonists will react. In the end there’s often a climactic duel—James Bond dumps Dr. No in a fish tank full of sharks, or the like. Something deliciously, poetically just.

PLOTTING THE SERIOUS WORK

Melodramatic derring-do is not remotely related to the plot of a serious work of fiction. In serious fiction, what matters is character development. Take, for example, Zorba the Greek, the story of the free-spirited Zorba, who lives for wine, women, and song, and converts his “Boss,” the narrator of the story, a rather uptight bookworm, to a life of passion. In Zorba the Greek, the Boss’s bookworminess is the predicament he’s in—he’s so trapped he cannot give free rein to his passions. The plot of Zorba the Greek is the progress toward the resolution of that predicament, which is the Boss’s development.

In The Red Badge of Courage, the hero, Henry Fleming, is at first a coward in battle. That is his predicament. He must find his courage. That’s his development.

It has been eighty-four days since he caught a fish, and the other fishermen have started thinking Santiago, the hero of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, is finished. On the eighty-fifth day, Santiago rows out into the deepest part of the Gulf Stream. He’s not only after a fish, he’s after the reclaiming of his manhood. He succeeds, and that’s his development.

In a detective story, the hero often has no development. Hercule Poirot is pretty much the same from beginning to end of a particular novel; he merely changes in the way he perceives things. Popular action heroes such as James Bond, Dirk Pitt, or Captain Kirk don’t develop much either; they’re pretty much the same beginning to end, from book to book. But in a more serious work of dramatic fiction, the characters do change, often profoundly.

Scrooge in A Christmas Carol turns from unrepentant miser to generous celebrant; Charlie Allnut in The African Queen changes from a drunken sot to a responsible husband. Fred C. Dobbs in B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is changed from a rather likable, down-and-out tramp to a greedy paranoiac by his lust for gold.

Well-plotted, serious dramatic fiction is transformational by its very nature. The vicarious experience of this transformation is the most important reason people read serious fiction. A plot isn’t just a matter of one thing happening after another; it’s the progress toward the resolution of a predicament that transforms the character.

Plotting is further complicated by the problem of time.

Say we invent a protagonist, Fred Fix, for a story called “Guess What Happened at the 7-Eleven?” Here’s the plot:

Fred goes to work late one morning and his boss fires him. Because he’s fired, he falls into despair. He drinks. He drags himself home at 3:30 the next morning. His wife is frantic. What will they do without money? She weeps bitterly, threatens to leave him. Fred decides to rob a 7-Eleven. …

This story follows a plot line. In a plot line, everything that happens leads directly to the next. Such plots are often considered to be tightly woven. This is a very powerful way to tell a story because, as the story gains momentum, the tensions are not dissipated through gaps in time. Each event folds into the next.

Most entertainments—romances, thrillers, detective stories, Hollywood films—as well as many classics (The Red Badge of Courage, The Old Man and the Sea, Native Son, Of Mice and Men, and hundreds more) are plot line stories.

But others are not, such as Moby-Dick, which covers many months and has a story line. In a story line, the events of the story are not causally related to one another but, rather, are part of the same chain of events that are progressing toward resolution.

Les Miserables is told in a story line covering decades. So are Gone With the Wind, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and Moll Flanders. In a story line, the character development may be greater because the characters are not only changing as a result of the actions they’re taking, but they’re growing older as well. A story line is more difficult to handle because the emotions of the characters tend to evaporate over time between the events of the plot. It’s difficult to believe, for example, that the flames of passion can still burn after twenty years.

It is possible to combine a story line and plot line in the same work. Usually the story line comes first, serving as a background to the plot line, but not always. In Zorba the Greek, for example, the first 90 percent or so of the story that takes place on Crete has a tightly woven plot line. The last chapter, the remaining 10 percent or so, relates Zorba’s life of many years after he leaves Crete. The plot line becomes a story line.

OVERCOMING PLOT PROBLEMS

At one time or another, all writers—beginners and seasoned professionals, big talents and bad hacks—seem to have problems plotting. The most common problem is that the characters refuse to do what the author has planned for them. Whatever the author does to straighten this out, whatever action she pushes the characters to take, just doesn’t seem right. The old sheriff won’t strap on his gun as he’s supposed to. The heroine won’t go up to the hero’s loft to see his etchings. The knight in shining armor won’t enter the cave and do battle with the dragon.

This problem occurs because the author often identifies too strongly with the protagonist. The author is thinking of how the author would handle the problem, not how the character would handle the problem. The author is plotting her own story, not the character’s story.

Frequently, however, characters lie dead on the page not because the author is pushing them to do what is not in them, but because they aren’t well orchestrated. Plot arises out of opposing forces—forces that come out of the characters. One of the reasons Leave It to Beaver is the butt of so many jokes is that the characters, especially Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver, are badly orchestrated. Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver share the same values, opinions, hopes, and dreams. They’re both perfect embodiments of their sterile, suburban, middle-class background. Since they’re identical in every way, they’re never in conflict with one another. Their bland sameness is stultifying. It’s only the obnoxious sociopathic Eddie Haskell who rescues the TV series from the pit of total boredom.

All good plots come from well-orchestrated characters pitted against one another in a conflict of wills. The “Boss” and Zorba, Santiago and the marlin, Scrooge and Bob Cratchit are all well-orchestrated pairs, which by their natures will push the plot forward toward resolution.

If The African Queen had focused on two old sots in that rickety old boat, it would have been nothing more than a bug-infested adventure yarn. But when the uptight, straitlaced, Bible-thumping Rose is pitted against the old sot Charlie Allnut, you have fireworks in every line.

If, at the earliest stages of a work, the author creates the characters as strikingly different from one another as possible, plotting problems will be minimized. Say you’re writing about a streetwise kid. Why not have him hide out from the law in a retirement home? Maybe you want to write about a high-powered woman lawyer in her forties. Why not have her fall in love with a twenty-six-year-old ski bum? That’s good orchestration.

When you start with well-orchestrated characters, the plot often begins to unfold automatically. Once the characters are pitted against one another, the author needs only to present the predicament to send the characters on their mission. It is in working through the mission that the plot comes alive.

If what the characters do is true to their motivations and personalities and in keeping with their mission, the plot that emerges will not be artificial, fraudulent, or contrived, tortured, feeble, or weak. It will be tight and true to the characters and will have no falsity in it. Creating the plot from a set of well-orchestrated characters is one of the truly creative aspects of the fiction writer’s craft. It is an art in itself, the practice of which is one of the great joys of writing.

  JAMES N. FREY’s nonfiction works include How to Write a Damn Good Novel, How to Write a Damn Good Novel II: Advanced Techniques, The Key: How to Write Damn Good Fiction Using the Power of Myth, and How to Write a Damn Good Mystery: A Practical Step-by-Step Guide From Inspiration to Finished Manuscript. He is an award-winning playwright and the author of nine novels, including The Long Way To Die, which was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America, and Winter of the Wolves, a Literary Guild Selection.