Jacob M. Appel
MORE THAN TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO, THE AUTHORS of the Book of Ecclesiastes warned that “there is no new thing under the sun”—and yet somehow, year after year, the American publishing industry manages to produce tens of thousands of seemingly original novels and short stories. Does this mean we're being duped? That we're reading the same adventure, in disguised form, over and over again? Of course it does. The basic plotlines of nearly all contemporary fiction can be found in A Thousand and One Nights, of medieval Persia, and the one hundred tales of Boccaccio's fourteenth-century Decameron and Georges Polti's The Thirty-six Dramatic Questions. Sometimes it is claimed that there are only two plots: in one, a stranger comes to town; in the other, a person goes on a journey. Or even only one fundamental story line: somebody wants something. The task of the literary author is to transform “somebody wants something” into Anna Karenina or Watership Down. How is this done? By harnessing the power of “combination.”
Consider the simple act of flipping a coin while pretending that the outcome of each flip is a potential plot. If you flip only once, you have two stories to choose from: heads and tails. But a second flip, combined with the first, gives you four potential plots. A third flip offers eight distinct stories. If you flip merely a dozen times, you have nearly five thousand different narratives at your disposal. Alternatively, think about a man missing one arm and one leg. A man missing an arm raises one immediate question: How did he lose his arm? That same is true for a man missing a leg. But a man missing an arm and a leg opens up so many more avenues of inquiry: Did he lose both limbs at the same time? Which one does he miss more? Are the lost limbs on the same or opposite sides of his body? This last question may at first appear trivial—but it is essential for determining whether he can walk with a crutch. Much as hybridization breeds hardier crops, combination builds more robust stories.
Creating an effective plot is often compared to assembling a jigsaw puzzle, but I think that analogy is rather incomplete. It is better to imagine that you have several million jigsaw puzzles jumbled together haphazardly. The first step in plot construction is to choose which puzzle pieces belong in the specific story you are writing. The second step is to assemble those chosen pieces into eloquence.
In selecting the pieces of your story—the individual conflicts, the background details, the particular turns of events—I urge you to explore the unfamiliar. Imagine yourself standing on the shoreline of a very large lake. The puzzle pieces of your story lie on the floor of that lake, the most precious and exotic ones farthest from dry land. Your responsibility as a writer is to gather these pieces. Doing so, of course, involves a complex assessment of risk. How far can you wade into the water before you drown? Nobody wants to read a story that clings to the safety of the coast. However, if you wade too far into unknown territory, you risk losing the moorings of your narrative.
Once you've gathered your pieces, your next step is to put them together. Here, obviously, the analogy to building a puzzle doesn't fit so neatly. The difference is that in writing a story, you have no template—there isn't one correct combination; many different combinations might work in different degrees and to varied effects. Much of the art of storytelling involves drawing the connections between these different elements. What is the link between a missing leg and a great white whale? Between tea-dipped pastries and childhood in a small French village? Between the green light at the end of a Long Island pier, an oculist's billboard, and an Oxford-educated veteran named Gatsby? Drawing these connections may seem like an overwhelming burden at first, but it's actually a tremendous opportunity. The trick is to keep combining—through trial, error, and instinct—until you have the makings of a story.
Find a small group of people. This could be your classmates in a writing seminar, members of a local senior citizens' group, or participants in an Internet chat room. More or less anybody will do. Ask these people to briefly describe the strangest thing that has ever happened to them. Or the oddest thing they have ever seen. Or the most unusual person they have ever encountered. The purpose of this simple research is to amass a collection of intriguing puzzle pieces as building blocks for your story.
Select three of the people or events described above and try to write a short paragraph about what they have in common. You can consider appearance, location, theme—any factor that seems to connect the parts. What you are trying to do is to uncover the latent bonds among these seemingly unrelated tidbits. The connections certainly exist—no episode is an island. It is just a matter of finding them.
Keeping in mind these similarities, try to write a short story incorporating each of these elements. If you “hit a wall” as you go along, discard one of the items and replace it with another of the strange people or events you have previously amassed. If you keep combining and recombining, eventually you are bound to hit upon a story line that works.
An ongoing philosophical inquiry asks whether a chimpanzee, typing indiscriminately for a long enough period of time, will eventually type Hamlet. At first, combining random, peculiar episodes may feel similarly futile. But be assured that we humans have an advantage over chimps: an uncanny knack for subconscious brilliance. From seemingly unrelated episodes, professional writers manage to cobble together coherent and compelling wholes. You can too. All that is required is a little bit of luck and a lot of resolute practice.