20 Master Plots (23 page)

The focus at the end of the story is
not
on the prince and princess' living happily every afterward, but on the comeuppance of the two false sisters. The rivalry is over; Cinderella has triumphed over wickedness and falsehood.

AGAINST ALL ODDS

The underdog is a fascinating character. The underdog really wants to succeed. As you develop your character, ask yourself what motivates him to want to achieve his goal. Again, the intent of the character—to win—is clear. But at what cost to himself or others? Don't just concentrate on the competition that pits the underdog against the superior. Give your reader an understanding of what forces propel him.

In some ways this plot is predictable. We identify strongly with the underdog, just as we identify with the protagonist in the rivalry plot. Readers love it when the odds are stacked against the good guy and the good guy wins anyway. But don't make a cartoon out of your characters by creating odds so lopsided and unrealistic that the underdog has no reasonable chance of winning. The final competition should be a real competition, head to head, and as much as the antagonist cheats, the underdog always maintains the true course: courage, honor, strength. (It is permissible, however, to use the antagonist's dirty tricks against him.)

Keep your audience in mind every step of the way. Your underdog has a rooting section. Stay in touch with what your reader is feeling (frustration, anger, exhilaration) and play toward those feelings. At the end, when your hero finally overcomes all obstacles, your audience should feel the same triumph. Don't disappoint your audience by not including it at the finish line.

CHECKLIST

The summary for the rivalry plot also applies for the underdog plot, with the following exceptions:

1. The underdog plot is similar to the rivalry plot except that the protagonist is not matched equally against the antagonist. The antagonist, which may be a person, place or thing (such as a bureaucracy), clearly has much greater power than the protagonist,

2. The dramatic phases are similar to the rivalry plot as it follows the power curves of the characters.

3. The underdog usually (but not always) overcomes his opposition.

T
o be tempted is to be induced or persuaded to do something that is either unwise, wrong or immoral. Happily or unhappily, depending on your point of view, life presents daily opportunities for us to be stupid, wrong and

immoral.

No one's ever managed to get through life without being tempted by someone or something. Our examples start in the Garden of Eden (we know what price Adam and Eve paid for not resisting temptation) and continue forward to today, without exception, from the rich and powerful to the lowly and powerless. Not even Christ was immune.

We consider it a sign of strength and self-discipline to be able to resist temptation. But temptation isn't something that comes along once or twice in a lifetime and is dealt with; we must fight against it daily. Who hasn't fought off the temptation to do something you knew you shouldn't? Maybe it was something minor, like trying to resist a decadent dessert the day you started your diet. Or maybe it was something more substantially immoral, such as trying to resist having an affair with a married person. Or maybe it was illegal, such as the desire to embezzle money from your company.

The story of temptation is the story of the frailty of human nature. If to sin is human, it is human to give in to temptation. But our codes of behavior have established a price for yielding to

temptation. The penalties range from one's own personal guilt to a lifetime without parole in the state penitentiary.

Forces rage within us when tempted. Part of us wants to take the risk for whatever we see as the gain. We convince ourselves we won't be caught. Another part of us is horrified. That part knows what we intend to do is wrong, and it resists the powerful impulse to act incautiously by dragging out every paragraph, sentence, comma and period of the moral code that we have learned through our society. The battle rages: yes and no, pro and con, why and why not. This is conflict, and the tension between oppo-sites creates the tension.
Knowing
what to do and actually
doing
it are sometimes oceans apart.

It's not hard to see how fundamental this plot is to human nature. It may be harder to see that temptation is perhaps the most religiously oriented of all the plots.

Literature has plenty of examples. Temptation is a common theme in fairy tales. Bruno Bettelheim points out that most fairy tales were created at a time when religion was the most important element in life; therefore, many of the tales have religious themes. A particularly beautiful but almost unknown tale by the Brothers Grimm is "Our Lady's Child," a cautionary tale about temptation. "Hard by a great forest dwelt a woodcutter with his wife, who had an only child, a little girl three years old ..." the story begins. Times are so hard the woodcutter can't feed his wife and daughter. Taking pity on them, the Virgin Mary appears before the father wearing a crown of shining stars and offers to take care of his daughter. The father sees no alternative if his daughter is to survive and agrees.

STRUCTURE

In the first dramatic phase, the nature of temptation is established and the protagonist succumbs to it. As with this tale, the protagonist fights to resist but eventually gives in. She may also rationalize her behavior as if trying to find an easy way to reconcile the forces tearing at her. Oftentimes a period of denial follows the act.

In "Our Lady's Child," Mary then takes the little girl to Heaven, where she grows up in the Virgin's great house eating sugar cakes and drinking sweet milk. One day, when the girl is fourteen, the Virgin takes a long trip and gives the girl a set of keys to the thirteen doors of Heaven. She tells her she may open any door she chooses except for the thirteenth: That one she may not open.

The girl promises to obey.

We don't have to project far to know what will happen. At first, the girl is good. She takes a tour of each of the twelve dwellings of the kingdom of Heaven. "In each one of them sat one of the Apostles in the midst of a great light, and she rejoiced in all the magnificence and splendor...."

But there was that thirteenth door, the forbidden one.

A great hunger to know consumes her. "I will not open it
entirely
," she rationalizes her behavior to the angels, "and I will not go inside, but I will unlock it so that we can see just a little through the opening."

Oh, no, counsel the angels, that would be a sin. That would cause such unhappiness.

The desire grows into an obsession, and when the girl is alone she figures no one will ever know if she just
peeks
inside.

And peek she does. Behind the door she sees the Trinity sitting in fire and splendor. She stares at it in amazement and reaches out to touch the light. As her finger touches it, the finger turns golden.

She is overwhelmed by a great and sudden fear. She tries to wash her golden finger but to no avail.

The Virgin returns home and immediately suspects the girl has violated her promise. She asks the girl, but she compounds her crime by lying. The Virgin asks again, and again she lies. Finally she asks a third time and still the girl denies it. The Virgin ejects the girl from Heaven and sends her back to earth a mute.

In the second dramatic phase, the protagonist must undergo the effects of her decision. She may continue her denial, trying to find a way out of the punishments that are certain to follow. The girl of "Our Lady's Child" has compounded her sin. She not only disobeyed the Virgin, but then she steadfastly lied about it even though the Virgin gave her several chances to recant.

The girl is back on earth, naked and speechless in the desert.

She lives like an animal, eating roots and berries and sleeping in a hollow tree.

After several years a king finds the wild girl and falls in love with her, even though she can't speak. He takes her back to his castle and marries her. She bears him a son. Suddenly the Virgin appears before her and offers to take her back to Heaven if she will confess. If she continues to deny her sin, however, she will take away her child.

The Queen refuses to confess.

The Virgin takes away her child. A rumor travels around the kingdom that the Queen is a cannibal and has eaten her child. But the King loves her so much he won't believe it.

She bears him another child, and the Virgin shows up again and makes the same proposition. Still the Queen refuses to confess. She takes the second child. The people of the kingdom accuse the Queen of cannibalism; the King's councillors demand she be brought to justice, but still he refuses to believe his wife could do such a thing.

Finally she bears the King a third child. The Virgin shows up but this time takes the Queen to Heaven, where she sees her two other children. "Is your heart not yet softened?" she asks. "If you will own that you opened the forbidden door, I will give you back your two little sons."

The Queen refuses, and the Virgin confiscates her third child.

This is more than even the King can take.

The effects of the temptation in the first dramatic phase reverberate through the second dramatic phase. The protagonist tries to deal with the effects of her behavior, but as is typical of moral stories, the more she tries to wriggle free from the burden of her sin, the more it oppresses her. Finally it reaches the point at which it is no longer bearable.

The third dramatic phase resolves these internal conflicts. Everything now comes to a head; the crisis has been forced. In "Our Lady's Child," the protagonist must now not only face her expulsion from Heaven and bear the punishment of being cast down and struck dumb, but because she continues to refuse to acknowledge her sin, she must confront losing the man who loves her and

deal with the fury of the people who believe she's been murdering her children. Talk about a snowball effect.

In the third dramatic phase, the people rise up against the Queen, demanding that she be judged for devouring her children. The King can no longer contain his councillors, who condemn his wife to be burned at the stake.

The Queen is bound to the stake and wood gathered around her. The fire is lit. As it begins to burn, the hard ice of the Queen's pride melts, and her heart is moved by repentance. "If I could but confess before my death that I opened the door," she laments.

Her voice suddenly returns to her, and she shouts, "Yes, Mary, I did it!"

A rain falls from the skies to put out the fire, and a brilliant light breaks above her. The Virgin descends with the Queen's children and forgives her. "Then she gave her the three children, untied her tongue, and granted her happiness for her whole life." In this case, the resolution is happy. The Queen is forgiven for her sin.

The temptation plot isn't about action as much as it's about character. It is an examination of motives, needs and impulse. The action supports the development of character, and as such, it's a plot of the mind rather than of the body.

You may notice in "Our Lady's Child" there is no antagonist unless it's the girl herself wavering between two moral states, one representing the protagonist (the "good girl") and the other representing the antagonist (the "bad girl"). But many stories have a more concrete antagonist, such as
Fatal Attraction,
in which the other woman is the temptress and the creator of havoc. In the Garden of Eden the serpent is the antagonist; in many other stories it is Satan himself, in any one of his thousand guises.

Perhaps literature's greatest temptation story is that of Doctor Faustus, a legendary figure and subject of many literary works, not the least of which are a play by Johann von Goethe, a novel by Thomas Mann, and operas by Boito, Busoni and Gounod.

Faustus is actually the subject of a bet between God and the devil, Mephistopheles. God believes his servant Faustus is above temptation, but Mephistopheles bets that Faustus can in fact "be tempted from his faithful service to God. Mephistopheles, an eternal student of human nature, knows exactly how to tempt Faustus. Mephistopheles proposes to strike a bargain with Faustus to learn the full meaning of existence. Faustus agrees, but only if he experiences something in life that is so profound that he would wish it would never end.