20 Master Plots (14 page)

The second dramatic phase is pure chase. Here we rely on a variety of twists, turns and reversals, perhaps more than in any other plot. Keep your reader involved in the chase by using all the tricks in your bag of surprises.

The third dramatic phase resolves the chase. Either the pursuer escapes permanently or is caught permanently. (Or at least it has the illusion of being permanent. Many movie sequels depend on jump-starting the same chase again and again.)

Hollywood has a long-standing affair with the pursuit plot, probably because it translates well to the screen. Steven Spielberg got his start with this plot. His first film (made for television) was
Duel,
in which Dennis Weaver is chased mercilessly by —a truck. We never see or find out who's driving the truck, so it takes on a demonic personality as if motivated out of sheer meanness. There's no rhyme or reason for it, nor does there have to be: We like the excitement of the semi trying to run down Weaver's character, and we like seeing how Weaver escapes his pursuer.

Then there were the
Smokey and the Bandit
movies with Burt Reynolds and Jackie Gleason. For years the American public delighted in their improbable antics. Even Spielberg's first feature film,
Sugarland Express,
was a pursuit film. Those films made no pretense at anything serious other than the chase. Speeding (on film anyway) isn't exciting unless there's the prospect of getting caught. Gleason's steadfast character and his dimwit nephew follow the bandits halfway across the country in a vain attempt to bring them to justice. Getting caught accomplishes nothing in these comedies, because with no chase, there's only a vacuum.

Inspector Javert relentlessly pursues Jean Valjean in
Les Miser-ables,
and Sherlock Holmes relentlessly pursues Dr. Moriarity throughout the tales. If you're the pursuer, you want to catch the pursued; if you're the pursued, you want to elude capture. The task for the writer is to be clever enough to sustain the chase without letting the reader get bored. Both sides live for the chase and are defined by it. As readers, we expect a great deal of physical action, a variety of clever dodges and ruses that come into play just when it seems the pursuer has cornered the pursued.

The pursued can't get too far ahead of the pursuer, either, because the tension of the chase comes from the proximity of the two characters. Think back to the game of tag. You're running down someone who's doing everything she can to get away from you. You close in. The tension increases as you get closer. She tries to give you the slip; you stay with her.
The tension is greatest at the moment just before it seems capture is inevitable.
Then
wham,
something happens, and the inevitable is foiled, either by the cleverness of the pursued or by some interference.

The classic example of this is the relationship between Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. Both live for the chase. It is obvious to everyone except Wile E. Coyote that the Roadrunner can outwit and outrun him at any given moment. Yet Wile E. Coyote keeps trying, hoping in his heart that sooner or later Providence will side with him. The Roadrunner taunts his opponent and lets him get
so close,
but at the last possible second, he jets off in a cloud of dust. This is the basic relationship between pursuer and pursued.

Think of some of the other pursuit films you've seen:
Jaws
(man vs. beast),
The French Connection, Night of the Living Dead, Terminator, Alien, Midnight Run, Narrow Margin, Romancing the Stone,
and just about any of the slasher flicks, such as
Friday the Thirteenth, Halloween
and
Nightmare on Elm Street.
Then there are the cartoon characters (of both page and screen) who exist solely for the chase: Batman and Superman, in particular.

There are also classic films in this category, such as
Bonnie and Clyde
and
Moby Dick.
I include the film version of
Moby Dick
in this category because it's concerned mostly with Ahab's obsession with chasing the whale. That obsession overshadows everything else. Unlike the book, which delves into the psychologies of the crew members, the film is more concerned with the chase.

Then there's one of the best pursuit films ever made,
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
From the start of the story, Butch and Sundance are on the run. Known as "The Hole in the Wall Gang," the pair have made a career of holding up the Union Pacific Railroad. They've become so good at it, in fact, that the railroad president has personally made it his business to have the two men hunted down. Butch and Sundance have come up with the clever idea of robbing a single train twice: once on its way in and again on its way out. Who would anticipate that the robbers would be so daring?

They hold up the incoming train. Butch celebrates in a whorehouse, while Sundance visits his renegade schoolteacher girlfriend. Then they hold up the outgoing train.

The plan backfires. A posse is waiting for them in a back-up train, and the chase begins and doesn't stop until the end of the story.

PURSUING THE PURSUIT PLOT

The elements of a pursuit plot are fairly standard: Someone runs, someone chases. It is a simple (but powerful) physical motion that evokes simple (and equally powerful) emotions. It doesn't matter if the pursuit is a standard chase by a posse or a submarine chase, as in
The Hunt for Red October
. What distinguishes one story from another is the quality of the chase itself. If you resort to standard cliches, the chase won't have the excitement your reader demands. If the territory is too familiar, you'll have a harder time getting the reader involved.

Your key to keeping the chase exciting is to make it unpredictable. If you recall our earlier discussion about patterns, you will remember how important they are in developing plot. But in a plot like this one, you don't want the patterns to be obvious. You want to develop exciting series of twists and turns so that the reader stays off balance. Don't cater to expectation. If you lure the reader into thinking a certain event is going to happen, play off that expectation. The event should fit the pattern you've been building but still be something of a surprise. It's a case of the reader being right and wrong at the same time. He expected a certain event to occur (and it did) but not in the way he expected. This means originality, which is the greatest task of the writer. Find a new way of doing it, or put a new twist on an old way. Freshen up your ideas. Every hand should have a wild card in it.

Of course, the pure physicality of the chase can draw us in. The car chase scene in
Bullitt
is one of the best ever filmed: You can feel yourself lurch in your seat as the cars fly over the streets of San Francisco. Equally powerful is the car chase scene in Ben-sonhurst, Brooklyn, in
The French Connection,
in which "Popeye" Doyle chases a train under the El. These scenes draw us in physically, not mentally.

But a car chase is a car chase. It's a stock in trade device now. So what must you do to make your pursuit plot unique? If you're familiar with the works of Ed McBain or Elmore Leonard, you know how taut writing can make simple movement suspenseful. They make any movement unpredictable because the reader isn't sure what the consequences of that movement will be. Their characters can't do anything without something threatening the precarious balance of sanity or the law. Leonard's
Fifty-two Pickup
is a fine example of this kind of writing.

Aristotle said action defined character. True. What a person does reflects who she is. But Aristotle didn't know about Hollywood.

There comes a point where action no longer defines character, where action is solely for the sake of action. For all the action in a Steven Spielberg or George Lucas film, very little of it reveals anything important about the principal characters. Nor do we care. What we
do
care is that the action be
stimulating, engaging and unique.
This means trying to avoid the standard cliches. It means tension must hum like a taut wire through your story. This isn't just for movie scripts; it's true for writing pursuit novels, too. In many ways this plot relies on old cliches, so it's important for you to find the new spin to put on old stories to make them engaging for us again.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
works because it turns the traditional Western inside out. The bad guys are good guys; they're fun-loving and likeable. They don't have a five-day beard, stink, spit, and stomp on defenseless men, women and children.
They go against type.
(The same is true for the lead characters in
Bonnie and Clyde.)
Butch is a romantic, an optimist, who puts a positive spin on everything; Sundance is more practical, a realist, but nonetheless engaging and appealing. The two men are well-meaning social misfits. Their action stimulates us, their comic notions engage us, and the situations they get involved in are unique. Remember the scene in which the pair are chased to the top of a bluff and there's no escape except by jumping off a cliff into the raging torrent below? In its basic form we've seen this scene before. The desperadoes, living up to their name, make the desperate leap.

But William Goldman brings a twist to the scene that makes it unforgettable: Sundance, we find out at the last possible moment, can't swim. The scene is tense but funny. We don't learn anything important about the character, for his inability to swim is a device that suits the scene only. But it works because the dialogue is funny and the situation has an angle that we haven't seen before.

Which brings up a final trademark of the pursuit plot:
confinement.
To heighten tension during the chase, it is inevitable at some point that the pursued become trapped or confined. As in the scene with Butch and Sundance at the top of the bluff, they've got their backs to the cliff and their fronts to the posse.
The closer the quarters, the greater the tension.
Some films, such as the
Alien
series, have done spectacularly well using this principle. The main character, Ripley, is always at close quarters, whether it's on a spaceship or on a hostile planet. She's given
no place to run.
The same is true with
Outland,
which takes place on a space station, and
Narrow Margin,
which takes place on a train. Confine your action, even to the point of claustrophobia, and you will increase the tension of your story.

A final word about using confined spaces: While it is true that limiting the characters' range of movement raises tension, it is also true that too much confinement sometimes makes movement and action difficult. For example, Agatha Christie uses the train in
Murder on the Orient Express
to its fullest advantage. The characters can't leave the train, yet they have enough places to move and hide and perform the action. If you were to try to confine the action even further to, say, one car on the train, you might deny your characters the freedom they need to move around. Other good examples come from film.
Die Hard
uses an entire office building and Steven Seagall's
Under Siege
uses a battleship, both of which work well. But
Passenger 57,
with Wesley Snipes, uses a hijacked airplane, which proves to be too small to contain the story. There just aren't enough places to go or things to do on an airplane.

CHECKLIST

As you write, keep these points in mind:

1. In the pursuit plot, the chase is more important than the people who take part in it.

2. Make sure there's a real danger of the pursued getting caught.

3. Your pursuer should have a reasonable chance of catching the pursued; he may even capture the pursued momentarily.

4. Rely heavily on physical action.

5. Your story and your characters should be stimulating, engaging and unique.

6. Develop your characters and situations against type in order to avoid cliches.

7. Keep your situations as geographically confined as possible; the smaller the area for the chase, the greater the tension.

8. The first dramatic phase should have three stages: a) establish the ground rules for the chase, b) establish the stakes and c) start the race with a motivating incident.