The Creative Writing Coursebook

In a prose or screenplay, a plot is the things that happen. Once you have created your characters, something has to happen to them in some kind of order. A plot is the sequence of events that take place within the narrative.

Plot is also the sequence of questions that the reader will be asking the narrative as they read it. Who dunnit? Why? Did they do it? And what happens next? If the events of the narrative are badly paced, or inadequately foregrounded, the story will be turgid, hard to read, and will lack the tension required to keep the reader turning the pages. Good plotting is about managing events over time. These events need not be monumental – you don’t need lots of action and adventure to have plot – they just need to unravel sequentially, keeping true to the logic of your story.

In teaching, it is useful to get students to look at, and think through, different types of plotting, to consider the kinds of stories they might be writing and the implications of structure on meaning.

The Moral Plot

In his notes on tragedy in Poetics, Aristotle talks of ‘a whole‘ as that which ‘has a beginning, middle and end’. He wants to see the action played out in front of him, so that the protagonist does something at point A which causes the events at point B, which causes the conclusion at point C. For Aristotle, a plot is a history of consequence.

This kind of plotting always has a sense of moral urgency at the end: a lesson has been learned, good has triumphed over evil, we have seen men and women ruined by their own mistakes, the lovers are happy ever after, thus justifying the means by which they got together. This is the most traditional way to tell a story and most narratives conform to this structure.

More challenging plots rely on the interplay between character and events and resist neat conclusions. They ask questions, rather than offer solutions. They resist the moral moment of closure, often leaving resolution to the reader. It is the actions of the characters that are important. How the choices they make affect the events in their lives.

Plots can only be figured out through writing, through testing your characters in action and giving them a world to come up against. Structuring the story will come later, when you have a history to look back on and knock into some kind of shape. Unless you are writing parables or fairy stories, you don’t want to start your narrative with a moral in mind, you want to set your characters off on the racetrack of their lives and watch where they end up. Shaping a narrative is a process that happens later as you uncover meaning, and make links and connections between events.

Bestselling Plots

The books sold in dump bins at airports, supermarkets and newsagents, thick as bricks and smelling of ink and cheap paper, depend on plots. The ‘bestseller’ – black-sheep sibling to the ‘literary’ novel – is a bestseller because it has a strong plot and events unravel in a way that fit a standard formula.

In a typical bestseller list, there will be thrillers, crime and fantasy novels, as well as books by celebrities and TV or film tie-ins. These books aren’t bestsellers by chance. They are generic and conformist. We know when we pick up a thriller or a romance or a detective novel what will happen. Whatever the reasons, the pleasure of the text lies in the repetition of a pattern: we like to know what to expect.

Consider the structure of a horror novel. At what point does the reader expect to feel uneasy? The plot must include something unsettling, or the hint of something unsettling, fairly near the beginning. A few gruesome events and a protagonist trapped and fearing for their life by page 100 and we won’t be able to put it down until we know the outcome.

Mills & Boon will send you, on request, guidelines as to how to write one of their romances. They know, from dominating a successful market for years, what their readers want and expect their writers to adhere to that pattern.

Commercial novels reduce stories to their primary events. They depend on the reader asking ‘What happens next?’ They are easily consumable and digestible so their audience will become attached to and buy more of them. But under the relentless juggernaut of the plot driving towards resolution, the characters become puppets filling the space around which the action can happen. The characters don’t make things happen, the world happens to them.

But these – trashy and somehow illicitly, immorally pleasurable – books do, in fact, conform to the oldest and most moral of structures: they have a beginning, middle and an end.

Courtroom Plots

A courtroom sets out a structure for you. There are only two real choices for the ending: guilty or not guilty. Suspense is built as the story of what happened prior to the trial is unravelled piece by piece, witness by witness. A trial is a story of the unravelling of a story.

The case of Louise Woodward is a good example of a real-life drama that conformed to our expectations of good plotting. Especially in the way it was reported. Louise Woodward, the central character, was the grey area, full of contradiction, caught in a system that could only negotiate in black and white: guilty or not guilty. It was Louise’s struggle against the courtroom machine of the plot that made her case into a true news ‘story’. It felt like we were watching a film. Did she or did she not kill a child in her care? Were Matthew Eapen’s parents telling the truth? Who should we believe?

In the harrowing denouement she broke down, seemed helpless, defenceless, a life sentence for a nineteen-year-old girl from somewhere ordinary like Elton, Cheshire. It could happen to us, to our daughters, to our sisters. We called up people we knew who were nannies and advised anyone who was thinking of becoming an au pair against such a dangerous occupation. The final, truly fictional twist, was Judge Zobel’s release of his judgement reversing the sentence via the internet. Louise came home and though the shadow of doubt still lingered, the story petered out. Who dunnit? Nobody knew. Maybe no one even cared that much in the end. What captivated us was the tragedy – the character struggling against the plot, refusing the hand dealt them by fate – and the fact that, in the end, we had to choose who to believe. It was an interactive narrative. The story didn’t come to a conclusive ending, we had to make one up for ourselves.

I was reading Alias Grace at the time – Margaret Atwood’s novel about the case of Grace Marks, convicted of murder at the age of sixteen in Canada in 1843. Plenty of doubt surrounded the soundness of her conviction, and in the novel Atwood consistently resists the moment where her reader might discover the crucial truth of events. We never know whether Grace did it or not. Like Louise, she doesn’t help her own defence by being shy, surly, frightened, seemingly ‘cold’. As readers we are left to ponder a moral problem, to make a decision for ourselves. The story asks questions, it doesn’t answer them.

Journey Plots

A journey is a popular way to plot a story, as the events of the book can then mirror the emotional journey of the characters. Take this scenario: two characters – two women? A boy and a girl? Mother and daughter? Father and son? Husband and wife? – start out on a journey from Land’s End to John O’Groats in a battered American Chevy that costs a fortune to run. They’ve hardly any money. Eventually, they get there. The story is about all the things that happen to them in between. The ending of the story is then, ironically, at the moment of arrival. We have followed two characters through a series of experiences that have taken place in the limbo of travel. A place where it is easy to sit the characters outside of themselves and have them comment on their lives. This kind of story, like the courtroom drama, provides the writer with a clear structure to follow or to subvert.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a classic example of a story that subverts the reader’s expectations of a plot. We never really go anywhere, though this novel is ostensibly a ‘journey’ narrative. From the start we are only ever passively engaged in the story. We are on a ship, somewhere on the Thames, listening to Marlow’s fractured, frustrating recollections about a series of non-events in the Belgian Congo at the height of Empire. But there’s still a pull, something inexorable that makes us want to read on, despite the fact that the story is second-hand and refuses to answer any of the questions it poses. Subtly, the book plays with our expectations of plot. Conrad introduces details that are never followed through. For example, near the start of the narrative, Marlow tells how he was stuck in the jungle, unable to move because he needed rivets to repair his boat. A long section describes how everybody, including the mysterious Mr Kurtz, is suffering from this shortage of rivets, then suddenly we are in the next chapter and Marlow is back on his boat, travelling down the Congo, and the rivets are never mentioned again. We have to assume Marlow got his rivets and repaired his boat offstage.

Our reading habits teach us to expect that details will be important. If the character is bothering to tell us that there is a terrible shortage of rivets, we anticipate that in some way this will affect the course of events, but Conrad constantly subverts this expectation. The main thrust of the book – Marlow’s curiosity and search for the mysterious Mr Kurtz, which gives the book its narrative power – turns out to be a non-event. The quest for Kurtz is similar to a reader looking for conclusion in a story, to find out, like Marlow, what it all means.

Try this exercise: write the story of a journey in a hundred words from beginning to end. With so few words you have to pick out all the most relevant information. Is it really important to know that they stop for a Big Mac at the service station? Perhaps the car breaks down? They run out of petrol? They argue? Everything counts, so include only the most revealing details. Read back what you’ve written, play around with it, try to re-narrate the story putting the events in a different order. How can you upset the conventions of an A to B journey?

Moments in Time

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway the entire novel happens over one day in the stream of Clarissa Dalloway’s consciousness. There is no plot to speak of. Nothing really happens. Yet the tension comes from the emotional development and revelation of character. The story is entirely internal. The plot that we follow becomes the revelation of character rather than the unravelling of event.

Short stories are especially suited to this type of plot. In Tobias Wolff’s short story ‘Bullet in the Brain’ the narrator is shot by a bank robber. The story is plotted around a single moment, it tells of all the things the narrator thinks as the bullet is passing through his brain. A successful short story is like a pastry cutter, pressing out one shaped moment from a much longer and more complicated narrative. A short story can be about the moment of arrival or departure, an end or a beginning; it has the luxury of not needing to unravel events in the way that a novel does, and at the same time, it must compress a character’s entire history into a single line or paragraph, and in this way it shares the density of poetry.

How to Plot

There is no single way to plot a story, but there are important questions to remember when attempting to give your narrative some shape. What is the internal logic of your story? What kinds of thing can happen in the world of your characters? Think quite carefully about this. Too many twists or events in the story can create more complications than they solve. But don’t go for the obvious. The ‘it was all a dream’ story is one we’ve all heard before. If you’ve chosen a generic plot think about how you can subvert it, either through creating unusual characters or through playing with what you know a reader will expect from the story. A good detective novel, for example, thrives on being just slightly more intelligent than the reader, on masking its plot twists and the answer to the ‘who dunnit’ question until the last page.

Also, don’t be afraid to unpick a plot if it’s not working. If an event or a scenario is falling flat, or seems out of tune with the characters, cut it or rework it. If the characters are strong, the story won’t fall apart. It can be easy to forget once something is written that it’s not set in stone. It is your story after all.

On Narrative Structures

Patricia Duncker

I want to begin with the reader. A piece of writing, whether it be a letter, a work of prose fiction, a lyric, or an epic poem, always constructs an audience, in other words, readers. Some writers like to remind readers of their role – ‘Reader, I married him.’ Others like to woo, persuade and cajole their reader from a safe distance. Some writers only talk to their readers through a series of masks. Here is the narrative chain, the uneasy link between author and reader.

Readers are subtle, difficult people. They have two identities: their living selves – the one that goes shopping, has sex and dies – and their reading selves. Their reading self is infinite, multiple and immortal. This is the implied reader. This multiple identity is the one you offer to the reader for her to inhabit. Some writers/authors have an ideal reader in mind when they write, some write purely to please themselves. But for whoever you write, even if it is for yourself, it is for yourself as a reader. You forget your reader at your peril. Remember where you have positioned your reader in relation to your narrative. Don’t abandon her. Don’t forget to address her. Tell her your story.

I am writing a novel. I decide to interview two of my prospective readers. This is not as mad as it sounds, and proves to be very revealing. You could call it a form of market research. Jo is forty, a mature student, mother of two daughters, intriguingly called Fred and George. She is an original, demanding reader.

I then interview Jason. He is in his early twenties. He describes himself as a ‘footballing poet’ and as a bloke, not a lad. He has a girlfriend and subscribes to Loaded. He also has a wicked sense of humour.

The results of my reader interrogations seemed to me to be very positive. They want to be captivated, entertained, provoked, bewitched. They want to be accompanied. They want magic. Jason wanted something that is easily recognizable, an author who was more than just an anonymous voice, in other words a narrator who may also be a character in the fiction, and he wanted a good story. But what was really fascinating was that Jo, who wanted difficult textual density, still wanted to be ‘swallowed up’, and in her own words, ‘astonished’. In essence, she and Jason wanted the same thing.

The narrative structure of a piece of writing is the spine on which the entire body of the work depends. It is the central nervous system, nourishing the intelligence of the writing, it upholds the bones of character, the muscles of the descriptive passages, it supports the heart and the circulation of the blood that is the tension in the text. A narrative must have tension and emotion if it is to survive and stand the test of being read and reread. Must we always have a plot? No, not always. Plot is causal. It is the rational intelligence ordering the narrative and answering our petulant demands for reasons why. You do not always need a plot. But you must have a narrative. Even the smallest, briefest, most delicate lyric poem has a narrative. The narrative is what happens.

Sometimes the material you choose determines its own narrative. If someone is murdered in your tale then your reader will want to know who did it and why. You may have good reasons not to tell her or for obfuscating the entire issue. But it would be unwise to forget that your reader will want to know the answers to these questions. You must address her desire, even if you wish to puzzle her.

Virginia Woolf famously commented, ‘And as usual, I am bored by narrative.’ (A Writer’s Diary, Thursday, 28 March 1929) Well, how would you summarize the events of To the Lighthouse? Here is a large family and assorted guests on holiday, supposedly on the Isle of Skye. They decide to go to the lighthouse, but put off the expedition. One of them starts a picture. They eat dinner. Time passes, many die. Those that are left return to the house. They go to the lighthouse. The picture is finished. That’s what happens. Apparently very little. So, clearly, the interest, tension and emotion, even the action of the narrative, lies elsewhere. A reader who is baffled and puzzled is not necessarily a reader who is bored. They can be curious and excited. It is not a crime to baffle your reader. It is a crime to bore her.

An American writer once commented to me: ‘There are only two kinds of narrative, either the heroine/hero leaves home, or a stranger comes to town.’ I brooded on this distinction and on the master narratives of our culture and came to the following conclusions.

The paradigm narratives that stand at the source of our Western traditions of writing are the Bible and the Homeric epics. The Bible is the ultimate book. It contains all things: lyric, epic, myth, history, law, song, war stories, love stories, biography, epigrams, parables, elegies, prophecies, apocalypse. It is a sacred text. And therefore better read than pillaged. Homer’s epic narrative poems are secular texts. The Iliad and the Odyssey give us the two giant patterns on which to base our own tales: siege narratives or quest narratives. The Iliad is a war story. The siege of Troy has lasted ten years. Stalemate. Heroic and treacherous deeds form the basis of the narratives. Mortals are at the mercy of the cunning of the gods. The ruse of the Trojan Horse leads to the sack of Troy. And the bloodbath leads to other narratives. The Odyssey is a search for home. Odysseus becomes the wanderer, a voyager searching, moving from land to land. What awaits his return to Ithaca? Both the journey and the arrival matter.

Siege Narratives

This kind of narrative can be thrillingly claustrophobic, and if it is well constructed will give you tension and intensity. Siege narratives in prose fiction work best with a limited cast and not too many subplots. Many war stories are siege narratives. All submarine dramas are. Family sagas are nearly always siege narratives. So are love stories, marriage and divorce narratives. Siege narratives can turn into escape narratives. Make sure that the source of danger, pressure, tension is believable. Even if it is quite fantastic it must be convincing. Life and death matters must be plausible if they are to be harrowing. A siege narrative can intensify your sense of place. Your description or detail can become terrifying, uncanny. Beware of bathos. The most common problem with a siege narrative is that the writing goes flat, the tension goes out of the narrative and the reader is bored. If you are anxious about losing the tension then put a clock on your narrative.

Quest Narratives

Quest narratives are usually driven by desire. The most powerful of these is the desire to go home. Everyone longs to go home. Very few people have homes to which they can return – your endings can therefore be either joyous or horrific. Quest narratives can be lost-and-found narratives. You can extend your cast of characters. It is easier to introduce new characters. It is easy to lose them. You need a strong central character to hold the quest or the multiplying narratives together. Your narrative can travel. You can introduce many changes of place, many startling adventures. Coincidences are easier to fabricate. Beware of writing that is rambling or diffuse. The danger is reader confusion. If your quest narrative contains too many characters, too many events, you may lose the focus and the tension. Beware of open endings with a quest narrative. Readers who love quests also love closure. Please them.

Plotting a Novel

Ashley Stokes

Plot is for readers more than writers. Readers ask ‘What’s the plot?’ meaning, ‘What happens? Will I be interested? Is this for me?’ For a writer the question can only be answered when the novel is finished. The ordering of events, the conflicts, motives, themes and resolutions may not yet be apparent in the draft stages. In this way plot is part of the process of writing. It is something we find in the activity itself. More importantly, it comes to us in the amorphous work of notebooks, long walks, versions, false turns, hard decisions, insomnia and staring out the window. Plotting is the underside of the stone that no one sees. It is the head labour that makes a novel realize itself on its own terms. If this sounds an uncomfortable business, it is worth reminding ourselves that this is what writing is, a triangular process of planning, composing and editing that occurs in no particular order. For plotting read planning.

In my teaching, I tackle the issue of plot between ‘character’ and ‘the beginning’. The first is plot. The second, to a large extent, determines the realization of a plot by triggering it (if we think of plot as the ordering of events through narrative, rather than story). In fact, we are thinking about two types of beginning here, one of practice, the other the result of that practice.

If a novel starts conceptually with what Nabokov called a ‘throb’, or if we are being geeky ‘a primary generator’, we are saying we have an idea that compels us to write. Five people trapped in a lift plan an escape to the moon. A schoolgirl locks herself in her bedroom for twelve years. We start with these glimpses and then power ahead. This is exciting but poses problems for the beginner because it is easy to let this drive rule the roost. It is easy to keep going, stringing events together until they overload the narrative. Everything follows the plotline. In the end only text, not experience, is being made. The writing then seems artificial or unconvincing. Plot begins to govern character. The narrative becomes unwieldy and passionless. In the end it will feel staged and the effects will be deadened. Conceptually, therefore, what we need to do is shift backwards from our idea and work with character first. We work with character always. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, ‘plot is character and character plot’. If we start with character, and keep this in mind, we can avoid our narrative losing focus or the plot gaining the upper hand.

I always start by notebooking my characters. I make lists about them. I make chronologies. I write at random about them. I make sure I know everything they have ever done. I determine the details that imply their entire lives, the landmark decisions, the key experiences, the moments of change or realization. I consider their basic values and loyalties.

I sometimes practise on these proto-characters by writing short stories that involve part of the cast before I start on the novel (writing chronologies often provides tasty predicaments that will not fit into the novel’s schema). This also gives me an idea of whether the characters are interesting enough. Moreover, it lets me test them out and gives me ideas about tone and style. If a character seems too unsympathetic to sustain the reader’s interest over the course of a novel, at least I know that I have to address this issue and find strategies for its alleviation. It also gives me a chance to ditch characters that I can’t get enthusiastic about.

Once this process is over you have a cast. By brooding on this cast you will be able to see how they will interact within the framework of both the fictional situation and how you think a novel should be written theoretically. Sarah will hate Ernie. Jozef will not handle the predicament he is asked to unravel.

You should now have a mosaic of conflicts, motives, dreams, proclivities, dishonesties, vanities, insecurities, desires, cruelties, virtues and mindsets that make up part of the context of a fictional character. I always think a character has a context that they take into any situation. This determines how they will react or impose themselves. Knowing this context, and knowing it more than you know yourself, is what will allow you to write freely and convincingly. Most of this context will remain unseen. It is only implied or imagined by the reader. But it is the gear system of the novel’s progression and a fail-safe to the sort of over-plotting or ‘inappropriateness’ that I mentioned above.

After this we need to think about the central proposition: What is at stake? What makes this important for the reader? What drives the narrative? You may already have an idea of this if you started with a situation or predicament first, or even with a setting or theme. But character matters most. How will the sequence of events allow the character(s) to change? How will it affect them? How many events do I need to address the issues I wish to explore? What relationship does this novel have with time? Remember that, as E. M. Forster tells us, plot is about issues of cause and effect, ‘a sense of causality’. Plot in this sense answers questions of ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ rather than the ‘What happens?’ posed by ‘What’s the plot?’

This requires a different type of plotting, the appropriate ordering of events. If we dwell on the characters we have created we will be able to see situations that dramatize or enliven the conflicts that lay hidden within and between them. Beware of overdoing this, by either continually plumping for the grand or the extreme. Understatement is sometimes more effective than overstatement. Beware also of creating too many situations, of protracting the novel and thereby straining the reader’s attention (there is nothing wrong with short novels).

Use flow charts in your notebook to get an idea of the ordering of events. Plan as far ahead as you can so that when you are composing you have a definite feeling of progressing towards points that lead to new points. Consider each situation before you write. Are the events grounded in character context? If not, rework or scrap. Is this leading to another scene where it has a pay-off? Is it deepening character? Are we learning things that make us want to continue reading? If not, you may not be trusting your reader’s understanding. Are we repeating information that the reader already knows? If so, the scene may be superfluous and slowing things down. Try to maintain a rhythm of active and meditative scenes. Try to maintain momentum in the middle, where there is a tendency to over-complicate. Don’t use a scene that only acts as a precursor to a second scene. This elongates the narrative and drive suffers. Start in the second scene to create tension, then backfold the narrative. They were knocking on the door because G had told S about J. Not a scene where G tells S about J and then they go and knock on the door in a fresh scene. Do you start at the chronological beginning so it takes too long to get to the meat of the issue? An ad ova scheme may work in certain types of Bildungsroman but you may need to start in medias res, in the thick of things. Look for the first moment of confusion or change in the novel and use it as an opening gambit. Then backfeed or break up the background material. See what happens if you cut the first two pages. There’s often too much explanation at the beginning. Don’t be scared of time jumps and don’t invent subplots or material just to pass the time realistically. ‘Get on with it’ is the best advice I have ever been given.

It is possible that once you start composing you will get new ideas that you want to incorporate. This can lead to confusions and the novel can lose focus. Always go back to the plan and see how the new material fits in. If it is more compelling than what you already have, replot and cut the earlier sections in the next draft. Don’t be afraid of cutting. Even fine work may need to be sacrificed for the overall whole. Use your notebook flow charts and scene lists to try out new material beforehand. Think about the implications of your scene structure. Try to think of other combinations or outcomes that could occur. Are they more interesting than what you first intended? If so, you’ve avoided learning this after spending hours writing the scene. Be aware of how other writers have handled similar material so you avoid clichés. Don’t steal in any case. Always be thinking about what is appropriate to fiction. Is this adding to the narrative? What combination of events are possible to progress the novel and deepen our involvement with the characters? Only focus on what we are not likely to expect. Anything that seems familiar or commonplace, cut or rework so the material is made strange. Make sure that the obvious is treated as background. Only use description that punctures expectation. Always keep in mind that in writing about people you are dealing with the unique. If you can’t make a restaurant scene different, treat yourself to a meal and keep your eyes and ears open.

The first draft may be shapeless and fail to meet with your intentions. You may have determined things about your characters that change your original plans. It may not get started until page eighty. The characters’ later actions may seem incongruous with how you have grounded them. They may need more layering. You may have chosen the wrong vantage point from which to tell the story. The conceit may be too protracted. It may not read like the novels you love. This is where many writers hang up their pens and give up. Don’t be afraid of this feeling. It is an intrinsic part of writing and becoming a writer. It is a rite of passage. Use it. Learn from it. You are becoming your own self-editor. Go back to the plan and rework it by referring to what you now have beside you. Always go with your hunches. This will be only the first stage of a novel. It may take many drafts to realize, just like it took Joseph Heller and Günter Grass ten years each to write Catch 22 and The Tin Drum.

The biggest misapprehension about writing is that it is as instant and effortless as its master practitioners would have us believe. It is not for them, and it is not for anyone. It is hard. It is a process. See plotting as a safety mechanism, a system of constant revaluation that goes hand in hand with the compositional, imaginative wordplay that occurs in front of the screen or with pen in hand. A novel never slithers out whole like some clever-eyed prodigy. It is made, not born.

Exercises

Start with a title that implies time and place (My Day with Grandma, An Evening at the Faulkner, Night in Cheam, The Last Year in Kingston-upon-Thames, etc.). On a piece of paper brainstorm this scenario, thinking what it is likely to involve and what could happen. Make lists of both situations and details. Sift through these lists and think of scenarios that look promising as stories. Focus on the items you have listed and think about how they could be used imaginatively as conflict triggers. Discard ideas that seem either obvious or unconvincing. Look at what you have left. If you have nothing left, go back to the list and rework the situations. When you have something that seems appropriate begin to plot it out with flow charts. Do you have a story that involves conflicts and motives? Is it original? Does the end include a pay-off? Is it convincing? If you can’t answer these questions, rework the story so you can.
Take this plot plan and break it up into its constituent parts: person, place, time. Replot the story using the following combinations:

Right person, right place but wrong time.

Right person, right time but wrong place.

Right time, right place but wrong person.

Plot out these combinations and see how the plot changes. Are any of these more intriguing than your original plot? Do any of them provide solutions to the difficulties that you found with the original plot? Does this give you any fresh ideas?

After these two exercises, consider if you have enough material or ideas to trigger a novel.
Use the following situation outline: There is a character waiting for a train. They have a suitcase with an object in it that they wish to conceal. What sort of character would find themselves in this predicament and why? Use the idea of ‘appropriateness’ to plot out a story that avoids cliché or hyperbole.
Think of a day when you came to a realization, when something definitely changed. Write this out, either as a draft or a plan, as faithfully as you can to what you think happened. Does this produce an original and convincing plotline. If not, why? What seems inappropriate and what does not? Can you use the techniques you have learnt in the first three exercises to augment this story? Can you change the setting or the characters? What can you invent yourself to fill in the gaps or replace those parts of the plot that seem commonplace?

Decisions, Decisions

Val Taylor

Close your eyes. Listen to the sounds around you: What do you hear? Don’t worry what is actually making the sounds; let your mind just drift, and focus only on what they sound like. As I’m writing this, I’m hearing the hiss of my laptop running, overlaid with a low, pulsating one-note whine. Soft irregular clicks syncopate this undertow as I tap out ‘soft irregular clicks syncopate this undertow’; deep in the background, at the edge of attention, the central heating pipes thunk intermittently, as the metal breathes and complains.

Eyes closed, and I’m in an old factory, steam pipes hissing, the whine of industrial turbines. Rats’ paws skittering irregularly across the hard floor. Thunk. A door shutting behind me somewhere. Where? Who’s here?

The first question an audience tends to ask is that one: Where are we? Where have we gone to today? It’s the first imaginative leap; as the house lights go down, literally, a leap into the dark. The writer’s answer is always the same, as she turns on the point of light: Here. And then she begins to show them where here is, begins to establish visually and aurally the ‘world’ within which the dramatic story will unfold.

In The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters, Christopher Vogler (following Joseph Campbell) separates the story world into two: the Ordinary World and the Special World. The Ordinary World is the protagonist’s (the central character’s) everyday environment – where she comes from – a mirror that reflects back who and what she is. The Special World is where she goes to, the locus within which the story action follows its course. In plotting your story – that is, in deciding how you are going to tell your audience the story step by step – the first crucial decision is to determine what it is which provokes the protagonist into stepping across from one world into the other. Particularly in drama, the arc of the story is an arc of movement, from and to.

You might begin your initial thinking, therefore, not by imagining a character or a story (‘It’s about this guy who . . .’), but instead by imagining a world. The exercise above is a child’s game; you could just as easily begin, as playwright Stephen Jeffreys once suggested, by thinking of a place where something happens, perhaps something a little unusual. (Using this approach, one student writer came up with a tattoo parlour!) But what is useful about the child’s game is that it invites you to conceive the world from the inside: the way it feels, its associations, its logic, its possibilities and its menaces. It is a first step into your audience’s shoes, beginning to work right away, with both affect and effect.

Understanding how your story world feels to be in is vital; it can, for example, offer you the first glimmers of sympathy with your characters’ psychology and motivation, and thus their subsequent behavioural choices. In my old factory, imagine ‘my’ response to that slamming door if I am at ease in this building, know my way around it. I know where that door is; but I’m curious who’s there. Perhaps I think I know, but I’ll go and look anyway. I’m confident, even proprietorial: What are you still doing here? Go home, I’ll lock up. But if I don’t belong there, don’t know my way around, I’m edgy, ill at ease. The rats give me the willies. The whole place hissing and thumping, and Where was that? Someone’s here. Oh God . . . Experiencing the story world from the inside, like this, gives you ideas about story, genre and character type: in one version I’m an investigator, I take charge; in the other, I’m on the receiving end, potentially a victim. In the first, I’m proactive, in the second I’m reactive.

Similarly, understanding the world in this way can help you determine which is the Ordinary and which the Special World, and whether or not they are two different places at all. It may be that the protagonist does not move physically between the two worlds; instead, she is brought to perceive her own world entirely differently. The arc of movement is not external, in this case, but internal, in her mind and feelings. This is a familiar pattern in drama: in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, for example, Nora Helmer, hitherto a housewife ‘babied’ by her husband, learns that what she once believed to be a place of safety – her marital home – is instead a stultifying prison from which she must escape at any cost. In such psychological dramas, little may change externally; it is the character – often, alone – who turns through 180 degrees.

Martin McDonagh in The Beauty Queen of Leenane effects a different level of transformation. The world is shrunk to the living room/kitchen of a rural cottage in Connemara, County Galway; apart from one short scene, a monologue from a bedsit in London, the action never leaves that tightly circumscribed world. We, as audience, understand this to be the Ordinary World of Maureen Folan, forty, going nowhere, yoked to her seventy-year-old, manipulative, despotic mother, Mag. As we watch Maureen’s one chance of escape – physically, to London; emotionally and sexually, to the arms of Pato Dooley – mislaid by Mag’s sleight of hand with a crucial letter, our sympathies are largely with Maureen, notwithstanding her casual little cruelties towards Mag. But in Scene Seven, McDonagh pulls a stroke on us: discovering Mag’s treachery, Maureen puts on the range a chip pan full of cooking oil and, once it is boiling, holds down Mag’s arm and pours the oil over it. She goes on, one scene later, to beat Mag to death with the fire poker, and ends by taking her place in her rocking chair. McDonagh’s stroke has, however, been laid from the outset: the opening stage direction says of Mag Folan that ‘her left hand is somewhat more shrivelled and red than her right’. Maureen has, in fact, been a habitual torturer of her mother; the violence in Scene Seven is not new, but part of a long, unbearable routine, and we realize that what we had thought to be the Ordinary World has been, all along, a Special World of nightmarish cruelty and mutual torment. It is not Maureen’s perception of her world that changes, it is ours.

Once you have understood the relationship between the two worlds, Ordinary and Special, in your story, and know whether the arc of movement is external – Dorothy goes from Kansas to Oz! – or internal; or whether the movement is ours rather than the characters’, you need to identify what it is that provokes the protagonist into motion. In screenwriting, and in theories of narrative, this provocation is frequently termed the initiating event. It may be small, in itself quite innocuous, even a matter of chance: in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, it is a collision of unrelated circumstances misinterpreted by someone. Roger Thornhill stands up to go to telephone his mother at the exact moment a hotel bellboy is paging a completely different man to answer a phone call; but the call has been set up by the villains, who are trying to identify this ‘mysterious man’. By this quirk of timing, they assume Thornhill to be their target, and pursue him.

The initiating event can be anything, but it needs to happen within the plot. We really need to see it happen in front of us, rather than be told that it has already occurred earlier in the story before your plot begins. There is a nice example of this distinction in Anthony Minghella’s screen adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley. The film opens on Tom Ripley, sitting in his cabin on board a ferry from Venice to Athens; he has just strangled his lover, Peter Smith-Kingsley – ‘his own chance of happiness’. In voice-over, Tom explains, ‘If I could just go back. If I could rub everything out. Starting with myself. Starting with borrowing a jacket [my italics].’ We then flashback to the earlier time, where Tom, in his borrowed Princeton blazer, is playing piano at a private concert and encounters Herbert Greenleaf Sr.

It is easy to see that borrowing the blazer could be taken to be the initiating event; indeed, the protagonist tells us it is so. But we don’t see it happen; it has already happened, it is part of the ‘backstory’, and we don’t flashback quite that far. What we do see is Tom’s response, when Herbert Greenleaf alludes to the jacket: ‘I see you were at Princeton . . . Then you’ll most likely know our son, Dick. Dickie Greenleaf . . .’ Tom hesitates, then lies: ‘How is Dickie?’ – when in fact he was never a student at Princeton, and consequently has never before heard Dickie’s name. From that moment on, Tom’s arc through the story is set: he will reflexively lie himself into situation after situation, with murderous consequences for Dickie, Freddie Miles and Peter.

What we see is a moment of choice occurring on screen before us, a determining moment for the protagonist. Borrowing the jacket could be seen as a practical matter, which need not have led to any such consequences as occur. Tom could, after all, simply have explained that it was borrowed, and the whole course of events would stop there! It is certainly a crucial event, a catalyst, but it doesn’t make the unfolding of the story inevitable; Tom’s decision to lie does. It is an act of will.

The initiating event needs to be the one thing that makes everything else occur. But why does it need to be dramatized for us, ideally, rather than us simply being told about it? We need to see it, onstage or on screen, rather than off, because the event itself is only part of the equation. The other part of the equation is what someone chooses to do as an immediate result of it, that is, a human choice of action. It may be a conscious decision, or it may be a subconscious reflex: both are forms of choice. Here, in Ripley, Tom’s decision to lie is not the immediate result of borrowing the jacket, but of Herbert Greenleaf’s mistake in assuming it means he’s a Princeton alumnus. It is the human choice that makes the subsequent dramatic action inevitable. In North by Northwest, though the collision of timing is chance, the villains’ decision to act on the (mis)identification is not. In this case, the protagonist (Thornhill) is subject to someone else’s choice.

In both films, choice is completely embedded in the psychology of character will and desire, a psychology that is, as I’ve suggested, both constructed by and reflected in the world the character inhabits. The two interact throughout, mutually shaping each other. In my factory scenarios, the door shutting (which we don’t necessarily see, but do hear occurring) is the initiating event. My response is the same in both – I go and investigate: in the first version, with confidence, in the second, with trepidation. It is my action that makes whatever happens next, happen. If the door slams and I ignore it, no story!

Rooting your plot in a series of human choices, which are then acted upon, gives you a spine that carries your story. It allows the arc of your story to develop from character. It encourages you towards a more original series of twists and turns in your story, because you can ratchet up the degree of challenge your character confronts – the rising arc – with each new set of choices. It is easier to avoid stereotypical decisions if you remain rooted in choices and their acting out; it only requires one slightly unusual decision – the character choosing to do B instead of A – to create an element of surprise and freshness. So, if the factory door slams and I do ignore it, the story is poised; sooner or later, in order to move the story on, I’m going to have to go up there and check it out. But there are a whole raft of different ways of plotting me into the decision: It’s the wind, what the heck. I start to leave the building. I stop. There’s a window open, then. Blast. I’ll have to go and shut it. Or I leave the building, lock up, get in the car. Long day. I reach for my cigarettes before I turn on the engine. Empty pack. Fresh pack in my desk drawer. Uuuhhh. Can I be bothered? Yes, I can. I go back, unlock the place, stomp up the stairs to the back office and wham! You could try to work out how many different strategies you can create to get me up to that door.

Creating a causal chain of events, choices, actions and consequences forms the basis of mainstream approaches to plotting your script. There needs to be some form of resistance or opposition for your protagonist to push against. It is resistance that provokes characters into making choices, planning strategies and acting them out. Creating resistance in the form of blocks or obstacles encourages your characters to formulate objectives, which will gradually crystallize into goals. The goal sets the stakes for the character: what he wants, and how badly.

Resistance can be constructed in many forms: it can be another character – an opponent or antagonist, who need not necessarily be a negative character. In The Talented Mr Ripley, Tom, the protagonist, is a psychopath described by his first victim, Dickie, as ‘a leech’ and ‘some third-class mooch’. His ongoing opponent-character is Marge Sherwood, Dickie’s fiancée, who first welcomes Tom but then gradually realizes what he is and what he has done. But she is a weak opponent incapable of defeating Tom; his real opponent – his nemesis – is his own nature, as we gradually discover. In finally killing Peter Smith-Kingsley, whom he loves, Minghella’s Tom defeats himself.

The situation itself can create the resistance. In The Beauty Queen of Leenane, though Mag and Maureen are clearly opponents, it could be argued that it is Maureen’s situation which provokes her. Stuck in a small rural cottage, in a claustrophobic relationship, forty years old – young enough to have prospects, hopes and yearnings, but old enough to understand that they are fast running out – deprived of love and sexual fulfilment: Mag’s treachery is only the final straw. The tremendous pressure imposed by her intolerable situation has Maureen wound up to the point where it will only take one more thing for the lid to blow. In my scenario, the resistance comes from my own curiosity – I don’t know what that door banging means but I’m going to find out. (Or from my nicotine indulgence!)

The best form of resistance is created by constructing mutually exclusive goals for your protagonist and antagonist. That is, if your protagonist gets what she wants, your antagonist cannot get what he wants, and vice versa. Think of both sets of goals and objectives in positive rather than negative terms; make both characters actively want something, rather than simply having your opponent want to prevent the protagonist achieving her goal. It is immensely helpful to your plotting if both characters are simultaneously moving forward: collision therefore becomes inevitable.

Working through character, provoked by desires into making willed choices, which she then acts out, points you inevitably towards the shape of your plot resolution: she gets what she wants or she doesn’t. Or the antagonist does. Or she gets what she wants and finds it isn’t, after all, worth what it’s cost to get it. Or neither is rewarded by achievement, and both are left standing in the wreckage.

The majority of mainstream drama on stage, in cinema and television tends to work through these kinds of patterns, though they are by no means the only ones available. A number of playwrights, in particular, have found the idea of causal structures of action very restrictive: Martin Crimp (Attempts on Her Life) or Sarah Kane, for example. Women writers have raised pertinent objections to the idea of goal-driven character, finding it to be more reflective of male than female behaviour. Frankly, I have problems with all of these areas myself; but they are still dominant patterns, and still powerfully effective. If you find yourself reacting against them, use them to help you clarify the patterns you do want.

In my factory scenario, the door slamming might have no direct bearing at all on what happens next. It might just be a door slamming. Or I might decide I can’t be faffed to go and retrieve my cigarettes after all, turn on the car engine and drive home. However I plot my story, I will have to find some way of ‘hooking’ the audience and drawing them in, some way of making them stay with me for the next couple of hours.

Peaceful Symmetries: An Account of Teaching an Undergraduate Poetry Module at Queen’s University Belfast

Carol Rumens

Students often enrol for the creative writing course with the perception that writing poetry is all about ‘self-expression’. Without crushing their optimism, I try to refocus this expectation. Yes, the creative writing workshop is an arena for the play of individuality and imagination. There will be verbal opportunities unlikely to have been offered elsewhere on the curriculum, perhaps. And, yes, any piece of imaginative work will, ipso facto, express the self. At the same time, self-expression is not poetry. It is a by-product, a side effect. Poets learn, and often have to re-learn, that to concentrate on the self and those emotions for which lyric poetry apparently has a boundless appetite, is counterproductive as technique. This is not to banish the I but to emphasize that it is an ‘I’. It is a construction, and its fables and reports must be re-made, reissued, fashioned in the image of language. Many of the students will come to the class with a sense of urgent things to say: this, after all, is Northern Ireland. They will have tried to get their emotions and ideas across, and they may have seen the emotions and ideas evaporate – or revolt. Fewer will be oppressed by a want of subjects to write about – those who are will probably have been mistaught that poetry has a specialized subject matter. But the issue we will most frequently address is shape. (The subject-matter question invariably looks after itself.) During the course of the poetry module we examine various set forms that have stood the test of ever-evolving linguistic and social contexts (often, in fact, migration and translation) and still retain their appeal for modem poets. These forms include the villanelle, triolet, sestina, sonnet, and haiku. In choosing which forms to present it was necessary to take into account their popularity: the better loved the form, the wider the range of interesting twentieth-century reworkings. We look at these texts in some detail. Reference works such as J. A. Cuddon’s Book of Literary Terms and Literary Theory and Peter Sansom’s Writing Poems will be consulted. Cuddon provides signposts to the historical origins of some of the forms, well worth following up in a longer course. With ten weeks only at our disposal, any deeper exploration a student may wish to make has to be undertaken independently.

Because the art of poetry is the art of speaking metaphorically, and of making linguistic objects that are themselves metaphors as well as metaphor-laden, the first ‘shape’ we look at is that of the riddle. A good metaphorical riddle is like a cross section: it is a single-celled, relatively primitive kind of poem opened up, the organs and connective tissue laid bare. This connective tissue, in its inner and outer reaches, is all important. As the editors, Laurence Sail and Kevin Crossley-Holland, of The New Exeter Book of Riddles declare in their foreword, ‘To say that an apple is not only round and red or green but that it weeps when you bite it; that it is speckled and freckled; that it is a sphere and contains dark secrets: all this suggests and establishes relationships between the apple and a number of other subjects.’ By foregrounding metaphor, the riddle exposes inner form, the interplay of imagery and allusion at poetry’s heart. The best riddles will also involve other subtleties of interplay – between sound, syntax, line, etc. I think it important to have this reminder, early in the course, that poetic form is not simply poetic ‘forms’. Neither are such forms ends in themselves. They are fascinating ways in (not inevitably shortcuts!) to the true form of the interior, the linguistic nerves and musculature, of the poem. Within the strictest form is embedded a multiplicity of possible connections and subsymmetries: here is the core of art, the point where the self submerges in the energy and delight of original creation – or its nearest thing.

The exercise in riddle composition is best done in class. It is informal in every sense. Methods of organizing the work, derived from the (contemporary and Anglo-Saxon) examples handed out, may be suggested, but most writers will be happier letting the content shape the form. It is ideal for the new class: impersonal, stimulating and sociable. Students anxious about reading out their work (most are) suddenly find it’s more fun and more fruitful than they ever imagined. Interesting discussions have centred on what makes a certain riddle stand out as a ‘real’ poem. (There is often a surprising degree of consensus on the quality of the published texts.) It is particularly instructive to try to tease out the ways in which a curiously strong sense of personality and individuality imbues a piece of word spinning done by Anon hundreds of years ago! With luck, the students will leave the class having discovered in themselves perceptions both unique and communicable, and sensing that their endeavour, as poets and critics, will involve huge pleasure as well as hard work.

As early as possible in the course we will also look at the use of refrain, one of the most attractive and accessible formal devices available. Those students who have confided truculently that they ‘really write rock lyrics’ will usually have played with this device and may have work well worth looking at in connection with the songs and ballads of tradition. (An opportunity to bring the alienated into the fold should never be sneezed at!) But the main focus in the handouts will be on literary writers. Louis MacNeice, Edwin Morgan and, of course, Charles Causley yield up fine twentieth-century examples of refrain poems. At this point in the course I make the first of many pleas to the students to read as much as possible – by these authors, specifically, as well as any and every poet that takes their fancy. It is not only for the students’ benefit: I feel I owe it to the poets whose work I’ve cherry-picked for forms. God forbid that I should send anyone away with the impression that, for example, Elizabeth Bishop wrote nothing but villanelles! And, of course, the more widely read the students are in the work of the poet concerned, the better they will see into the translation-like process of the formal piece of writing, the more they will understand of the unique conversation they are overhearing.

It is a short step from the single-refrain poem to the double: i.e. the villanelle. I fell in love with this form at the age of seventeen, while reading Auden’s ‘If I Could Tell You’. I have practised it ever since, with numerous abject failures and the occasional totally unpredicted success, and I pounce on every contemporary example I can find. My current handout consists of Bishop, Muldoon, Mahon, Roethke, Elizabeth Garrett, Dylan Thomas and, of course, Auden. I have had some thrilling villanelles composed by students – and also some very odd ones, which nevertheless contained a pulse of real poetic life. There is an innate sparkle and bounce to the form, rarely completely suppressed by poor technique.

In the dance of the villanelle, the repeated lines may mean something different each time they reappear – like an actor who has rushed offstage and executed a quick change between scenes, or, a better analogy, like a chameleon adapting to a different background. It may be that an image is taking on new colouring from the preceding stanza but it is more likely that syntactical repositioning is effecting the change, as when Thomas turns a simple predicate (‘Do not go gentle into that good night’) into a ringing imperative. The interweaving of the refrain lines can be as complicated as your skills allow: you can twitch out a comma, tweak in a colon, run on across the stanza or cut mid-line; you can even do some minor cheating as to word order and grammatical case. (I have to say I encourage cheating, though usually as a separate formal enterprise: there are discoveries to be made in breaking as well as obeying formal rules.) Yet the best villanelles are usually those in which the author, more or less, leaves the refrains to dance by themselves. The real trick of villanelle composition is to make the form look as if it were organizing the content. Refrain lines of both wonderful independence and wonderful compatibility are the first requirement, and the more throwaway they look, the better. The moment at the end of the poem, when they meet and mate and hint at miraculous progeny, is of course the whole explanation for writing the villanelle in the first place!

Towards the end of the course we turn to the light-verse forms such as the clerihew and limerick. Students usually have a sense of humour and I don’t see why they should leave it at the door. (After all, the troubadours were also court satirists.) Of the ‘serious’ forms, the sonnet is usually found to be the most demanding, and initial results may be disappointing. I am sure this is because echoes of Shakespeare and Milton inextricably cling to A-level or first-year memories of the forms: pastiche is often the result. This is not, of course, to say students shouldn’t read Shakespeare and Milton! But they need to hear examples in which contemporary diction and idiom are acclimatized. I give out samples of work by Berryman, Muldoon, Marilyn Hacker, Tony Harrison, Carol Ann Duffy. Conversely, young writers take to the sestina and haiku often with extraordinary facility – something to do with the flatness of the modern vernacular? It is strange that the longest form as well as the shortest should demand most rigorously that frilliness and fakery be put on hold. The haiku is sheer economy – especially as I urge the writers to aim for a lower syllable count than the traditional (but inauthentic) 5-7-5. But the sestina is tall, of course, and wobbles if it lacks a strong, plain narrative skeleton.

It might be thought that the more organic or free-form writing is squeezed out by the set-form regimen. In fact, half of all workshop sessions will be occupied with the presentation of students’ own work, and most of these pieces will be ‘nonce’ poems (i.e. poems in one-off, original forms of the writer’s own devising). However irregular or improvisatory, these pieces too have ‘shapes’, which are discussed in detail, raising issues of lineation, stanza construction, etc. In particular we discuss the rationale of the line break. It can be more difficult to get a student to listen to his or her own line breaks than to construct a sestina – but the writing of the sestina should teach something about lineation that will benefit all the writing (prose, too, I suspect). The advice to any poet is: know the rhythm of your voice and the rhythm of your language. Know them at every moment. The formal aspect of the course may be said to teach the rhythm of the language. The nonce poems tell the poets about their own pitch, tone and rhythm.

Students submit a minimum of two examples of formal poetry in their final script – many offer more. A new benefit becomes apparent during the finals flurry. Producing creative work to a deadline is tough on the most experienced professional: the very least the formal requirement achieves is a strategy for writing that minimizes the paralysing general anxiety by focusing on a limited number of soluble problems. It maps the points at which you can effectively be self-critical and frontal-lobed, but otherwise leaves the subconscious mind free to play. This is not, of course, true only at exam time, but the benefit is more appreciated then. Formal writing is, in fact, a beautiful device for liberating the essential powerlessness of the artist, Keats’s negative capability. Outsiders may see formal composition as rule-fixated grind: practitioners know it as rule-forgetting delight.

I have heard it said that the least talented writers benefit the most from practising form. This is only partly true. Those students most likely to lose the thread in a nonce poem (usually in agonies of attempted ‘self-expression’), or whose ear for rhythm and cadence lets them down, may discover unsuspected abilities and fluencies when writing formally. The more talented, though, will exploit the forms richly and inventively. Sometimes the less artful writer will get a better result, producing something that looks effortless, whereas the sophisticated writer conjures effects a little too obviously brilliant. In general, though, form urges all degrees of ability to optimum performance.

There is a contemporary stereotype of the well-written ‘literary’ poem, a work that may display a clever but somewhat imitative facility in pulling off certain fashionable tricks of style and diction. The fixed-form poem insists on a more fundamental, candid and perhaps dangerous engagement with language. Year after year I have been impressed, charmed, moved to tears and occasionally to envy as I witness a fresh young risk-taking imagination with a set of newly acquired technical skills, renegotiating its rights to the ancient properties, dispelling in a bold flourish or two every last whiff of dust and mothball. Suddenly, the student becomes a poet (if, so far, only momentarily) and the old heartbeat of the English language is heard as if newborn. How did he or she do it? Wonders, like the forms themselves, will never cease.

Shapes of Things

Paul Magrs

We write things in order to make sense of the world. It cheers me up to put something together, some written object that didn’t exist in the world before. All too often events in the world seem frighteningly random and arbitrary, and I think I use writing to put some kind of order on things. I know it’s an artificial order, of course.

The shape of a poem, a playscript scene, a short story – they’re all my attempt to make sense of the chaotic relations of people, events and objects, and sometimes the illusion of cause, effect and reason can be quite consolingly seductive.

It is why I’ve always been obsessed with novels and have spent much of my time living inside of them. They are a structured space giving an illusion of the world; we feel safe within their programmed chaos. We know that we’re going to come out of the other end intact, even if the characters who have engaged our sympathies don’t.

In writing, we are attempting – in a fairly modest way or perhaps in a sweeping, grandiose way – to impose a pattern on life.

I grew up on a council estate in Newton Aycliffe, a new town in the north-east of England. Living there I heard hundreds of thousands of narratives over the years; lives spilled over and interconnected, becoming ever more complex as time went on. My first three novels, which together form the Phoenix Court Trilogy, were, in a way, an attempt to corral certain of these kinds of narrative that multiply and overlap when many vivid characters live in close proximity. It is extremely difficult to give a shape to the messiness of life and interrelated lives. In my case, I did it through plotting and mapping and drawing diagrams that the writing could follow. I chose social comedy as the model for bringing these characters together.

Narrative is present everywhere, the French critic Roland Barthes tells us. We can never have narrative without language. We seek it out, by our very nature, everywhere we look.

Try this: assemble five inanimate objects – say, an empty wine bottle, a dress, an aerosol can, a scarf, a potted plant. For each of them, write its narrative in any form – dramatic monologue, lyric poem, short story. It is bound to have one. Think about the life that the object will have led. What was its moment of crisis? What was its moment of triumph or bliss? Let these turning points in the object’s biography shape the tale you tell about it.

In any kind of writing we want to stay true to the complexity of real life, but we also want to impose a shape, an artificial structure. You know the world or the experience you hope to relate to the reader; you know it inside out. But you have to take the reader by the hand and lead them through it. You have to coax and seduce and persuade them, as Patricia Duncker says in her essays, and as Ashley Stokes says in his: plot, shape, structure; these are devices for the benefit of the reader. Plot in a novel is the guide rail down into the dark cavern, as the readers inch down the steps cut into slippery rock. They haul themselves along with your guidance, and they’re wanting to see the subterranean grotto where the slumbering dragon guards a treasure trove. They’re waiting for that kind of pay-off.

As writer you have to promise them two things. That you will guide them carefully: you’ll put the guide rail and the steps so they lead in the right direction, with no dangerous gaps. But you also have to promise that you are taking the reader somewhere worthwhile. You have to keep hinting that this is a journey worth going on. That, eventually, they will get to see that dragon and the glittering wealth it protects. You’ve invented a structure that is a safe, negotiable space through which your readers can be led. You keep them moving through it by a dual process of building up their expectations and paying them off, bit by bit.

Shaping in this way is also about what Oscar Wilde called ‘elegant circumlocution’. You can’t deliver everything at once. The reader wants to be teased along. Any piece of writing toys with us and prevaricates before delivering us to the exit. If it didn’t do this, then any poem or short story could be accomplished in just one line and we wouldn’t need any more than that. Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ could be reduced to, ‘This awful man kept following me about,’ or Lolita might become, ‘He ran off with a girl young enough to be his daughter.’ Naturally, readers want more than that.

The shape we impose on writing is an elaborate machine; something that drives the reader on, through all the variations and peregrinations. They want to get to the ending, they want to feel they’ve been through the whole experience – but they want to get caught up in it, too. They want to feel as if the delays and detours have been important to the whole experience. They need to feel enriched by them en route.

The Wizard of Oz would be nothing if Dorothy had simply called a cab in Munchkin Land and zoomed straight off to the Emerald City and demanded to be sent back to Kansas at once.

The reader needs to be treated to exciting detours, delays, encounters and pay-offs. Through chapters of a novel, scenes in a play, stanzas of a poem, they learn a little more through each variation the writer teases out. The reader feels like they’ve lived through something.

To explore the way in which the writer imposes a narrative framework, try this out. Write down two distinct locations and make them quite different: a ski slope, a tropical island. Write down two names plucked from a newspaper and give both these characters random occupations. List four household objects. Write down three abstract nouns, and these will be the moods you hope to convey. Write down in two or three words, at most, a particular kind of accident. This last event will be the motor that will set the whole thing running. Without this trigger, all you have is a list. The event will set these items moving. It puts the whole lot into time.

Now is when you coax your characters into life. You start asking questions. Who has the accident? What caused it? Was the other person involved? Were they responsible? What is the relationship between the two characters? How has the accident forced them to move from one location to the other? How do your abstract nouns come in? Are these the emotions at play? Why is this one person in this particular state (terror, torpor, jealousy) while the other is quite different (ecstatic, betrayed, guilty)?

By taking a whole list of random items and introducing a trigger (a plane crash, a body washed up on a beach, a giraffe in a zoo suddenly savaging its keeper), you are forced to start linking all the items up. We can’t help doing it. Try it now and write it out as a causal list, making sure that all the elements in your original list are used up. There are endless permutations, far more than there are in Cluedo, a game that operates by the same principle (who killed who with what object and where).

This narrative game, of linking up random, juxtaposed items, is our habitual response to the world. We want to make a pattern, a scheme and we seek closure to narratives. This exercise is useful, in that it makes us aware of how we individually set about that. Sometimes, in writing, the possibilities seem limitless and dizzying. We could write about anything – so how do we choose? It’s good to close down your options a little sometimes and to become aware of your own processes of shaping and making sense.

So how does your structured narrative based on the random list work out? Does it conform to either of Patricia Duncker’s models of stories – is it a quest or siege narrative? Is it a revenge tale or a romance? Take a long look at the thumbnail narrative you’ve constructed. What does it need adding in order to make it work? Another character? Further intrigue? More twists and turns in the plot? At this stage you can afford to be wildly inventive. It’s all an experiment in shaping a piece of work. To get a character in your piece of writing from A to Z you can think up the most outrageously improbable means.

The challenge, then, is to take that grid, that map of events, and to make it convincing and real. Using all the other skills at your disposal, you take the abstract shape, that plot machine, and you make your characters and your readers live through it.

PATRICIA:	What do you most desire from a work of prose fiction?
JO:	(pulls hair, looks anguished) I want to be swallowed up. I like the action to be as simple as possible. I want a book that is challenging and evocative.
PATRICIA:	What do you mean?
JO:	(desperate) It’s to do with the language. I want the language to rediscover the taste of words.
PATRICIA:	You like edible words?
JO:	(very rapidly) I want a language that carries multiple levels of meaning and which destabilizes the obvious. I like writing that calls attention to itself as writing.
PATRICIA:	(incredulous) And that swallows you up?
JO:	(sticking to her guns) And I want infinite meanings. I want to be astonished.

PATRICIA:	What do you most desire from a work of prose fiction?
JASON:	I want the author to talk to me, but like Sterne, not like Fielding. (Patricia is dumbfounded by the subtlety of this distinction. Jason seizes control of the interview.) I want to be entertained. I like characters that are engaging. I want a good story, a sense of the familiar, and I want to feel that I’ve achieved something by reading it. And I think it’s good to see yourself represented.
PATRICIA:	(irate) But I thought that you said you liked reading horror and sci-fi?
JASON:	(broad smile, with great charm) Yes, I like to be captivated and provoked.

8 PLOTTING AND SHAPING

Julia Bell