Plot: The Marriage of
Substance & Structure

46} PLOT & A BOTTOMLESS COFFEE CUP

I’ve included plot here, as an element of structure, even though it belongs properly to the tension that results from combining substance and structure. That tension is what creates plot.

Given a fictional situation—an old man, having decided for various reasons to commit suicide, goes to have one last breakfast at the local diner—we must then make some structural decisions: When will we enter his situation, and from what viewpoint will we convey his experience?

Let’s assume that we decide to enter the old man’s life on the rainy morning when, having topped his Plymouth’s gas tank and sealed all the cracks in his garage door, he steps out into the rain and heads down the hill into town for a last breakfast before returning to do the deed. We might then introduce a flashback or two. We might even decide to tell the story backwards, with the first scene showing the old man as he heads back up the hill toward his home, or as he sits in his Plymouth with the engine idling.

We decide to tell the story in the third person, from the old man’s point of view, but we still have to decide how deeply we want to enter his psyche: how to strike a balance between our character’s subjective thoughts and feelings and the narrator’s objective descriptions of setting and action? There’s no one-size-fits-all formula to apply; as when mixing gin and vermouth to make a martini, the choice is largely a matter of taste and disposition, and also enforced by the demands made by the story’s unique material.

What does all this have to do with plot? Everything, for once we have answered these questions and set off with our characters on their physical and emotional journeys, “plot” pretty much takes care of itself. Plot is what happens next in a story, plus that which makes you wonder what will happen next.

I can tell you what happens to the old man, since his story is one of my own. He goes to the diner and orders what he assumes will be his last breakfast—and notices, near the bottom of the menu, the words, “OUR CUPS ARE BOTTOMLESS.” Having vowed to re-climb the hill and kill himself after breakfast, it now strikes him that, in theory, anyway, given the bottomless nature of his coffee cup, this “last breakfast” might last forever. He decides to test his theory, ordering cup after cup of coffee until at last the owner of the diner cuts him off and sends him on his way. But the passion with which he has defended his right to a “bottomless” cup has awakened in our protagonist a renewed sense of vigor. When he climbs back up the hill, it is with the resolve to go on living. The plot hangs on the old man’s discovery of the claim at the bottom of the menu—a discovery that I, the author, made with him while writing his story.

When written from outside, mechanically, schematically, plots and old staircases have two things in common: They’re wooden and creaky. That’s why I don’t recommend formulas for plot, and why I don’t even bother to talk about it all that much.

In talking about characters and situations and point of view, I am ultimately talking about plot, about the things that will determine and create our plots so we don’t have to.

47}I AM BUT MAD NORTH BY NORTHWEST:
GOOD PLOTS, FOOLISH CHOICES

Most plots, especially those that are most active, depend upon characters doing foolish things. In movies with especially kinetic plots one sees this all the time. Without characters doing dumb things, most movie plots would spontaneously evaporate.

Just last night I stayed up late watching North by Northwest, one of my favorite movies. The plot turns on a case of mistaken identity: Advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill²³ (Cary Grant) is mistaken for a government counterespionage agent by the suave villain, Philip Vandamm (James Mason), who plots to have him murdered.

In one of the film’s most famous scenes, Grant/Thornhill is attacked in a barren Midwestern prairie by a machine-gun out-fitted crop-duster plane, a dramatic but highly impractical murder weapon that, indeed, proves ineffective. This particular foolish choice has been made by Vandamm/Mason; other plot points in the film depend on Thornhill’s own foolishness, as when he decides to pursue the man for whom he has been mistaken. None of this detracts in any way from the pleasures of North by Northwest; but we realize that, absent the foolish choices made by its central characters, its plot would boil down to an easily cleared-up misunderstanding.

Hamlet (from which Hitchcock borrowed his title) happens to furnish an opposing example: a plot that is entirely dependent upon a character not doing foolish things. Hamlet’s hesitations and vacillations (about which much fuss is made) are really what we might expect from a man faced with deciding whether or not to murder his uncle. Who wouldn’t vacillate under the circumstances? Yet, given the nature of drama, we expect characters not to ruminate or reflect, but to act—which is why the character of Hamlet is considered such an anomaly. To have characters ruminate (“To be or not to be?”) was considered antithetical to drama— antithetical to the very notion of plot, as it had been defined since Homer sent Ulysses home from Troy—when murder and suicide represented the perfectly logical, indeed mandatory, response to jealousy, threats, slights, or a broken heart.

Think of all the stories that would end before they begin if their characters gave careful consideration to the consequences of their actions.

48}THE QUEST FOR HAPPINESS & OTHER
IRRITANTS: TWO PLOTS—ONLY

Really, there are only two essential plots. In Plot A, a character who is unhappy with his lot in life takes action to change it (or, he’s happy enough but seizes an opportunity to be happier). In Plot B, an irritant is introduced into a character’s otherwise satisfactory existence. In Plot A, a character complicates his own situation; in Plot B, the situation complicates the character.

I can think of few plots that don’t fit into one of these two formulas. Here are a few examples that do.

Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”: Plot B. The “irritant” is the protagonist’s overnight transformation into a giant beetle.

T.C. Boyle’s “After the Plague”: Plot B. The “irritant” is the plague that has spared the protagonist while killing nearly everyone else in California.

Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”: Plot B. The irritant is the news of the death of the heroine’s husband. She finds herself rejoicing in her new freedom, only to learn that her husband has not died after all (a new Plot B).

Joyce’s “Araby”: Plot A. To win his beloved’s heart and bring light into his dark existence, the protagonist sets out to buy her a gift, and fails.

Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: Plot A. All five of Mrs. Bennett’s daughters seek happiness and security, through marriage to an appropriate (that is, appropriately wealthy) suitor.

Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea: Plot A. An aging fisherman attempts the biggest catch of his life, tempting failure and challenging his own courage.

Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: Plot A. Frustrated by boarding school, Holden Caulfield spends a dissolute weekend in New York. (Practically everything about Holden’s life irritates him.)

There are of course exceptions to the Two Plot Plan, but these tend to be stories and novels in which plots are scarcely discernible, like Stuart Dybek’s short story “Pet Milk”—a tale of a pair of Chicago lovers who dine regularly at a Czech restaurant and kiss on the subway home. What holds such a thin “plot” together is the story’s atmosphere, the Chicago milieu that the author so richly and lovingly evokes, along with a quality of nostalgia that seals the young lovers like fossils in amber.

Should you find your own stories a bit lacking in plot, look for the “irritant.” If there is none, introduce one. Or find a less happy protagonist.

49}DRAFTING IN THE DARK:
WHAT LIES AHEAD

My students ask me: “When plotting my work, how far ahead should I be looking?”

I’m uncomfortable with the question, which implies that “plotting” is a separate process, an independent act of volition—a verb that we force into our stories, rather than a noun that grows out of the process of writing them. But if the question is, “In writing a story, how much do I need to know about what’s going to happen next?” my answer would be, “Probably not all that much.”

As with life, the present moment in fiction counts far more than the past or the future. It is where all decisions are made—by the characters, of course, but also through them, by the author. We don’t live there, tomorrow, or yesterday; we live here, now, today. If we’re living our stories, the same rule applies to writing fiction. To second-guess our characters’ futures is to leave their present lives behind, to remove us—and our readers—from their stories.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have any ideas about the future of your plots. It’s good to have a direction and even a destination. How we get there, and whether we get there or not, are other matters.

What I tell my students is this: When drafting a short story (which, by the way, is best done in one sitting), look to the middle, to an imaginary point midway between a vaguely perceived ending— that dim light on the distant shore—and the story’s starting point. Imagine some event or occurrence near or at that middle point: the job interview, the Friday night dinner date, the doctor calling with the test results, the reversal where Mrs. Slocum decides to turn her son over to the police after all. Aim for that event or occurrence. Think of that point as a bell buoy with a red light flashing on it. Imagine that you have tied a rope to that bell buoy. Pull your story toward the bell buoy using that rope. If the rope breaks—fine, let it break: And let the currents carry you and your story where they will.

That’s one way of doing things. Frank O’Connor, for one, did things differently. Planning his stories, O’Connor was far more systematic, even mathematical, reducing plots to an algebraic formula of usually four lines: “X marries Y abroad. After Y’s death, X returns home to Y’s parents, but does not tell them Y is dead.” Based on his algebraic formula, O’Connor would “block in the general outlines [of the story] and see how many sections it falls into, which scenes are necessary and which are not, and which characters it lights up most strongly.” He called this blocked-in outline “a treatment,” and imposed this method of plotting on his students—who hated it:

They always want to begin right away with ‘It was a spring evening, and under ice-cold skies the crowds were hurrying homeward along Third Avenue where the signs on the bars were beginning to be reflected in the exhausted eyes of office workers.’ This is the sort of thing that makes me tear my hair out, because I know it is ten to one that the story should not begin on Third Avenue at all. …[But by then the student] has already surrendered his liberty for the sake of a pretty paragraph.

For O’Connor, the time for “fine writing” comes only when:

… everything else is correct; when you know exactly how the story should be told and whom the characters are that you want to tell it about. …[E]ven then, when you have taken every precaution against wasting your time, when everything is organized and, according to the rules, there is nothing left for you to do but produce a perfect story, you often produce nothing of the kind.²⁴

Somewhere between these two antithetical modes of working, mine and Mr. O’Connor’s, you will (I hope) find your own way to plot a short story.

50}PLANTING STAKES IN THE ROAD:
PLOTTING NOVELS

If you’re drafting a novel, things work differently. Nature never intended for novels to be written in a day, let alone in one sitting. Novels typically take six months to several years.²⁵ And the huge investment in time and labor precludes or anyway discourages the “seat of the pants” approach.

Unlike stories, which surprisingly often seem to generate themselves spontaneously, novels tend to require far more germination. The same three or four hours it takes a short story writer to rip through a first draft, a novelist might devote to staring out his window, or to a long aimless walk (along which he discovers that his heroine will drive to work rather than take the bus).

But novels, too, can be written in a fast, reckless way. Except in rare cases, the result is a “rough” or exploratory draft, a mere preview of the first or “working” draft that will emerge after we’ve discerned what it is we’re really up to. That exploratory draft may then function as a sort of outline, or it may be jettisoned entirely.

All novelists have their own ways of writing stories. Some write an outline before proceeding, slowly and carefully, with a first working draft. “It’s like driving a few stakes in the ground,” is the way Lawrence Durrell described his process; “you haven’t got to that point in the construction yet, so you run ahead fifty yards and you plant a stake to show roughly the direction your road is going, which helps to give you your orientation. But [my novels] are very far from planned in the exact sense.”

Then there are novelists like Michael Ondaatje, who composes his novels like poems: carefully, line by line, section by section—in one draft, without looking forward or back. That’s how he wrote The English Patient, which works, and how he wrote Divisadero, which doesn’t.²⁶ The blame for the ear-popping descent from the first novel’s brilliance to the second’s failure can be laid squarely on the author’s technique, which relies heavily on the hope that the sum of skillfully wrought parts will add up to a worthy whole. Sometimes it does.

In other words, Ondaatje’s method can work—if you get lucky. Otherwise, do drafts and/or work from an outline.