Here is the third chapter in Writing Fiction. It focuses on plot and how to find it. I particularly liked this one. It helped me not worry about finding plot; it will just emerge over time. Enjoy!
CHAPTER 3
PLOT: A QUESTION OF FOCUS
By David Harris Ebenbach
PLOT VERSUS REAL LIFE
Life may be interesting. Life is often moving and eventful. But rarely does life actually contain plot. Plot is one of the elements of craft that clearly separates the real world from the world of fiction.
Successful fiction does have a point, does have a fascination and meaningful sequence of events.
Think of a novel you couldn’t put down. Chances are this story had a magnificent plot. One event set into motion another one, more captivating than the last; the situation became more and more tense, with you wondering all the while how everything would turn out. This is the most tangible benefit that plot brings to fiction. Page-turners have plots that pull the reader irresistibly along, from beginning to end. We care about what’s happening, and we’re concerned about what might happen next.
At the heart of most great fiction is the excitement created when we really feel that the work is after something specific‒when it has plot.
Plot makes fiction coherent by drawing together all the characters, settings, voice, and everything else around a single organizing force. Works of fiction are not, and cannot be, about a million things‒they are usually about just one thing.
Works of fiction are not, and cannot be about a million things--they are usually just one thing. And that thing, the force that draws everything together in a successful piece of fiction, is a single, pressing question.
THE MAJOR DRAMATIC QUESTION
This question--often known as the major dramatic question--is generally a straightforward yes/no question, one that can be answered by the end of the story.
The single major dramatic question remains the central organizing force even in the relatively complex world of novels. In Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, the question is whether Elizabeth Bennet will end up with Mr. Darcy.
One of the major reasons why we keep reading is because of the suspense the major dramatic question creates. We need to find out what the answer will turn out to be.
It's obvious enough that you'll have to provide an answer, given that you've raised a question, but it's worth nothing that your choice of possible answers is diverse--yes, no, and maybe are each fair game.
The most important rule, however is that your answer has to match your question. If you spend the whole story asking whether Brian will find a job, you can't end by concluding Yes he will learn to love again. You must conclude with a decision about his employment future.
Most fundamentally, the question arises from the relationship among three elements: the protagonist, his or her goal, and the conflict blocking that goal.
YOUR TURN:
Think about one of your favorite works of fiction. Try to figure out what the major dramatic question might be. Remember, this is a question that can be answered with a yes, no, or maybe. Sometimes this question takes a little fishing around to find. You may even want to leaf through or reread the story you've picked.
PROTAGONIST:
The protagonist is, simply enough, the main character in your work. He or she will be the most complex and dimensional character in the piece, the one illuminated most fully and followed most closely.
Writers often uses the added length of a novel not to explore a bunch of characters but to even more thoroughly explore one.
GOAL:
Desire lies at the heart of all character. Protagonists desire is the key to the story's plot. Just as the story will be driven by one question, that question will come into play in the first place because of the one thing that the protagonist wants most. Call it the goal.
This goal may be conscious or it may be unconscious. Either way, it pushes the question further into the open for the reader. Further, this goal may be concrete or abstract. Generally, abstract goals need to be represent by something concrete in a story, or else the whole story is going to feel, well, abstract, and it will be harder to formulate the events of the plot.
YOUR TURN:
Imagine a protagonist who seems to have it all--a home, financial security, a loving spouse. Give this person a name and flesh out some details. Then figure out an abstract goal for this person. Then attach that abstract goal to a concrete goal that might work in a story. For example, if this person abstractly desires adventure, then perhaps make his or her concrete goal to sail around the world. Hint: the goal should probably stem from something that's missing in this person's seemingly perfect life.
CONFLICT:
The protagonist's goal may fly in the fe of what other characters want, and the goal may even fly in the face of physical and social reality.. There are obstacles in our main character's path. These obstacles create conflict. No, we can't make it easy for our characters, no matter how much we'd like to; making it easy makes for bad fiction Plot depends on conflict. And to keep things really interesting, the conflict should keep escalating.
Some obstacles are external and others are internal. Stories that truly move us, stores with real depth, generally require that at least some of the conflict be internal. Often there are many sources of conflict, both internal and external, within a given piece. Yet while all these obstacles are painful for the protagonist, they're good news for the story, and the reader.
YOUR TURN:
Return to the protagonist you created for the previous exercise, the one with the concrete goal. Make a list of obstacles--internal and external--that might block the achievement of the goal. List as many obstacles as you can think of, more than you could possibly use in a story. Last, in one sentence, create a major dramatic question that you could employ for a story about this character. Remember, this is a question that can be answered with a yes, no, or maybe.
THE STRUCTURE OF PLOT
Structure, in fact, is inseparable from plot. Plot is the sequence of events in a piece that draws toward answering the major dramatic question; structure is the overarching shape that keeps the sequence of events in good order.
The model is certainly a tried-and-true one, having existed for more than twenty-three hundred years, coming from Aristotle's Poetics, a discourse on how drama works. It says that fictional works have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Well, maybe that's a duh--but more importantly it tells us that those sections have distinct roles in the successful telling of a story.
THE BEGINNING
The beginning of a story has to get three things done: it has to drop the reader right into the middle of the action, it has to provide all the necessary background information to get the reader up to speed, and it has to establish the major dramatic question.
The first job of a story's beginning is to start at the right time. It should not start when things are quiet, when nothing's happening, when things are much the same as they have always been. The whole reason we tell the story is because something about life is new and different, something's happening that stands out--and your responsibility, as the writer, is to begin the work at that point of change.
The beginning of the story therefore also has to provide sufficient exposition so that readers will know what's going on and why. Strike the right balance. Exposition will certainly keep coming throughout the work. The key is to supply all the background needed for the time being--and not any more. Finding this balance, of course is a matter of trial and error at first, but in the long run it will become a matter of instinct.
The protagonist's goal is a strange one, especially if we're used to considering goal and ambition synonymous (which we shouldn't, in fiction).
The reader simply doesn't want to spend much time getting caught up, so the exposition has to be limited. The reader wants to get to the interesting stuff, to the action--in other words, to the middle of the work.
THE MIDDLE
First of all, the middle typically takes up the ast majority of space in the piece, more pages by far than the beginning or the end. The story's middle usually contains additional exposition, further developing the characters and situations we've learned about in the beginning.
The middle section is, most importantly, where the protagonist's path toward his or her goal is blocked again and again by increasingly daunting obstacles, and where the forces arrayed against him or her become ever more powerful.
Of course, the events in the middle section are not by any means random happenings. In the fictional universe, things happen as a result of the actions of characters, and the actions of characters are a response to things that happen. Your story's middle shouldn't contain a jumbled pile of events in some arbitrary order--it should contain a chain of events, each one tightly linked to the event before.
Remember that it's crucial that your story answers not just any question but the question it's been pursuing all along.
THE END
The end of the work is likely to be the shortest part of the piece, particularly in contemporary fiction. This section of the story may be the shortest, but it's also the place where everything comes together.
The end generally follows a pattern that could be called "the three C's"--crisis, climax, and consequences. The crisis is the point where tension hits its maximum, and the climax is where the tension breaks, and where we get the answer to our major dramatic question. Then, the consequences, however briefly handled, are alluded to at the very end of the piece.
As in most contemporary stories, we are more likely to feel the consequences than to read them. It's been said that an ending should be inevitable but unexpected--that looking back, it is the only ending that really would have made sense, but that it still felt striking and surprising when it happened.
APPLYING STRUCTURE TO NOVELS
Novels too need a beginning, middle, and end, and the three sections serve the same functions here as they do in shorter work.
First of all, although the novel follows the same plot structure as a short story, the great increase in size with the novel can bring some change to the relative size and content of the three sections. For example, the beginning of a novel might take up the entire opening chapter, or possibly a bit longer, giving us the opportunity to take in more background information, as long as it's integrated with important action.
That leaves hundreds of pages to develop your characters, raise and intensify your obstacles, relate numerous events. As with a short story, none of those pages should be wasted. Each page should move us farther along a linked chain of events, farther along that rising conflict and tension toward the book's climax. If the release offered after ten pages can be powerful, imagine how much impact we can experience when it comes after 350 pages or so.
SUBPLOTS
Another difference between short stories and novels is that the length of a novel allows the plot to be more complex, containing more twists and turns and the ike. Subplot is a plot line that runs alongside the main plotline of the book. Subplot exists only because it's relevant to the main plot, commenting on it, exploring it. In other cases, the subplot is designed as a contrast with the main plot.
One of the natural consequences of subplot is that novels often have multiple climaxes rather than just one.
Subplot is not, of course necessary to a novel.
HOW PLOT EMERGES
For most writers, the first draft is the one where the inspiration runs wild, venting itself in thrilling and undisciplined fashion, and for most of us, there's no room for such careful plotting in that first explosion. Plot is instead something that emerges over time, over the course of a number of drafts.
Plot is almost inseparable from character. In fact, they are so tightly intertwined that it often raises the chicken-or-the-egg question.
Whether plot or character comes first, the point is that they both need to be compelling and they both should inform one another. And if you're the kind of person who writes brilliant character, but can't seem to get plot jump-started, take a closer look at those characters of yours; they may know what the story is before you do.
Whatever your major dramatic question is, it's probably already there to be found in your first draft, even it it's hidden so deep that you didn't notice writing it into the story.
YOUR TURN:
Take one of the characters you worked with in the exercises from chapter 2. Find a major dramatic question for that person. For clues, study whatever it is you wrote about that person. He or she is probably secretly holding the answer...or, we should say, the question.
One likely spot to look for the major dramatic question is the climax, the place where you'll often find your question is answered, even if you didn't know you had one. Read the work as many times as it takes until you can see the question. It's the key to everything.
YOUR TURN:
Imagine this as a story climax: a person is rushing through a chaotic place--Times Square, Pamplona while the bulls are running, Mecca during a pilgrimage...Decide where this character is going and why, bearing in mind that this is the story's climactic moment. Now start writing a story that is headed toward this climax. Feel free to steal a character from one of the previous exercises. Write as little or as much of the story as you like, but even if you write only one sentence, make sure it's approaching this peak.
Once you've unearthed a workable major dramatic question, you might want to think about the possibility of an outline. Yes, an outline. As much as it might seem like a potential killjoy, many writers at some point--before a first draft or after a draft or two--find outlines absolutely indispensable. Outlines work because they allow writers to distill their amorphous creations into their crucial parts, to find the places where tension will need to be increased and the place, or places, where crisis will set in and climax will result.
If the idea appeals to you, you might start by taking down some notes on how your story or novel could divide into beginning, middle, and end, and think in detail about each section.
Another way to start is to write down all the events you want to include in your work, making sure each one offers some conflict between the protagonist and his or her goal, and then outline an order for those events, one that ensures that the conflict will with each step, increase.
YOUR TURN:
Create an outline for a short story, novella, or novel that is structured as follows: the story should open with the protagonist setting out on a trip. The destination could be as close as the corner store r as far away as the other side of the universe, but the story should end when the character either arrives at the destination or returns to the starting point. You outline should have a clear beginning, middle and end, as well as crisis, climax, and consequences. Don't feel the need to make everything perfect, though. You can make different choices if and when you write the piece. On a journey, we don't always stick to the planned route.
FORM VERSUS FORMULA
Although writing fiction is nothing whatsoever like plugging numbers into a formula, there is a great deal to be said for understanding the basic requirements of form.
Understanding that plot requires a protagonist, a central question, conflict, and a beginning, middle, and end doesn't limit us at all. Rather, it gives us something concrete to work with as we follow the urges of our imagination.
Writers are continually experimenting with story structure. Yet while all of these are nontraditional in terms of specific form, all of them follow the general demands of structure, plot, and beginnings, middles, and ends.
In regard to plot, while the specifics change, the general rules, for the most part, hold. Even if we try to avoid plot, in telling a story we often end up creating it anyway. And that's probably a very good thing.
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