20 Master Plots (28 page)

In the case of "Orpheus and Eurydice," fate seems to conspire against the lovers from day one. Orpheus, the tale goes, was such a good musician that not only did the wild animals come out of the forest to hear him play, but so did the rocks and trees.

Orpheus meets Eurydice and falls for her in a big way. He woos her with his music, which is obviously irresistible. He pops the question and she says yes. A good start.

They get married but before they can set up house, a shepherd tries to rape Eurydice. Eurydice fights him off (or, as they said in the old days, "she resisted his advances"). While trying to escape the shepherd, Eurydice steps on a poisonous snake that kills her.

End of love story, right? You can't have a love story if one of the lovers is dead. (Except maybe in stories like William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" or Robert Bloch's
Psycho.)

Orpheus is heartbroken. He mopes around playing sad songs and wrenching everybody's heart. He decides life isn't worth living without Eurydice, so what does he do? No, he doesn't kill himself. Instead, he decides to go to Hades and bring Eurydice back himself.

A neat trick if you can pull it off. We've always been fascinated by the idea of bringing loved ones back from the dead, and I don't know of a single story where it works, including the outrageous
Frankenhooker.

Orpheus uses his music to charm his way past the security guards to Hades. All Hades stops to listen. Even the ghosts shed tears when they hear him sing. Orpheus makes it to the head honcho, Pluto, and with the power of his lyre convinces the ruler of Hades that he should give back Eurydice.

But on one condition: Orpheus must promise not to turn around and look at her until they get out of Hell.

Orpheus agrees. The two journey back to the Upper World, past the Furies, past the great doors of Hades, climbing out of the darkness. Orpheus knows Eurydice must be right behind him, but he longs to see her for himself. Unlike Lot's wife, who didn't heed God's admonition not to turn around to look or she would turn into a pillar of salt, Orpheus resists the temptation until the moment he steps in the sunlight of the Upper World.

Too soon. Eurydice is still in the shadow of the cavern, and as he holds out his arms to embrace her, she disappears with only a faint "Farewell."

Orpheus desperately tries to follow her back into Hades, but everybody is wise to him and won't let him in a second time.

Obstacles compounded.

If Orpheus was unhappy before, he's impossible now. He must go home alone, in utter desolation. He tortures everybody with his melancholic songs until no one can take it anymore. Some gorgeous Greek maidens try to get him to forget Eurydice, but he rather rudely tells them to go away. In classical Greek fashion, the scorned maidens avenge themselves by ripping off Orpheus' head and tossing it into the river.

As the story begins, we learn the basics: Orpheus loves Eurydice, and Eurydice loves Orpheus. We witness the quality of their love for each other and give them a taste of happiness. But only a taste. Before the wedding cake can get stale, disaster strikes. That disaster could be anything from an automobile crash, to a disease, to the I.R.S. (mistakenly) deciding she owes a zillion dollars in back taxes or the I.N.S. (mistakenly) deciding he's a former guard in a Nazi death camp. It doesn't matter what the obstacle is; what matters is if the lovers can jump the hurdles and make it to the finish line.

The first attempt to solve the obstacle is almost always thwarted. Don't forget the Rule of Three. The first two attempts fail, the third time's the charm. One love is the protagonist (in this case Orpheus), who does all the "doing" while the victim (in this case Eurydice) waits passively for something to happen. Sometimes the victim lover is more active in her own rescue, but her action is secondary to the protagonist's. There may be an antagonist/villain who creates the obstacle; but then again, as in the case of Orpheus, it may just be what we conveniently call Fate conspiring against happiness.

The lesson of fairy tales is the basic lesson of all love stories: Love that hasn't been tested isn't true love. Love must be proved, generally through hardship.

The leap from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to C.S. Forester's
The African Queen
isn't that far. The characters in
The African Queen
don't start out as lovers but as opposites. She's a missionary's sister; he's a timid cockney engineer. Together they travel downriver to Lake Victoria on a rickety steam launch called
The African Queen
with the purpose of blowing up a German gunboat. Along the way this unlikely couple falls in love, only to be married as their last request before being hung. (Yes, they live happily ever after.)

A lot of love stories don't have happy endings.
Adam Bede
by George Eliot (a.k.a. Mary Ann Evans) tells the story of Adam, who falls in love with a pretty but shallow woman named Hetty. Hetty doesn't want Adam, who's the absolute picture of propriety. She'd rather marry the local young squire.

The squire seduces Hetty (as squires are wont to do) and then leaves her. Hetty agrees to marry Adam on the rebound but finds out she's pregnant. She tries to find the squire, who's taken off for parts unknown. By the end, Hetty is found guilty of killing her child. Adam finally marries the woman he should've married in the first place, a young Methodist preacher.

Definitely not a happy ending.

It seems the higher up you go in the hierarchy of literature, the more unhappy love stories get. If it's a drama, one of the lovers always seems to die. If it's a comedy, the lovers can ride off into the sunset together. Federico Garcia Lorca was right when he said life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.

Italian tragic operas are real hanky-wringers. In Puccini's
La Boheme,
Rodolfo falls in love with Mimi; Mimi dies. In Verdi's
La Traviata,
Violetta falls in love with Alfred; Violetta dies. The list seems endless:
Il Trovatore, Rigoletto, Madame Butterfly, I Pagli-acci
... More women died in Italian opera, it seems, than in the Black Plague.

A LITTLE ROMANCE

What makes a good love story? The answer lies more with the characters than with the actions. That's why the love plot is a character plot. A better way of putting it is by saying that successful love stories work because of the "chemistry" between the lovers. You can create a plot that has plenty of clever turns and gimmicks, but if the lovers aren't convincing in a special way, it will fall flat on its face. We all know what chemistry is, but few of us know how to create it. Chemistry is the special attraction that characters have for each other that lifts them out of the coal bin of the ordinary. Too often, romances are generic: In a formulaic plot, one general-issue man meets one general-issue woman as they pursue their fantasies and desires in the most pedestrian way. This isn't to say that these kinds of plots don't work within their own limited range. The writing and selling of romance novels is big business. The plots are so specific that the publishers insist on certain guidelines, which they coyly call "do's" and "don't's." The publishers have tight perimeters about what a writer can and can't do, and if you're intent on writing for that market, know the rules. But you'll find them confining. The characters must conform to type.

The publishers have their reasons, and the millions of dollars of sales they rack up every year attests to those reasons, at least economically. They know
what
sells and they may even know
why
it sells. It's the same reason fairy tales work for children.

Fairy tale characters, you may remember, also revert to type. The little boy and girl who venture out into the dark forest are like everyboy or everygirl. When they have names, their names are generic, like Dick and Jane. They never have distinguishing marks or characteristics such as tattoos or scars; they're fresh from the mold. They don't come from Buffalo or Biloxi or Boze-man; they come from places like The Kingdom or The Forest. Their parents are defined by what they do for a living rather than by their names ("A woodcutter/fisherman/farmer and his wife").

A child identifies closely with the characters in fairy tales. He casts himself in the role of the poor, abused, unfortunate child, and he takes strength in the fact that he can go out into the world and kill giants (adults) and make his own way by being clever and thoughtful and honest. If Little Hans had been developed so that we knew his father was a stockbroker in Maine and his mother was a pharmacist and his sister was in training as a decathlete, we would lose the chance to identify with him. The more a reader knows about the character, the less the character is a part of the reader's world and more a part of his own world. Since identification is so important in fairy tales (as far as the young are concerned), the tale must conform to the mind and imagination of Everychild.

The same holds true for romance writing. If you as a writer intend to appeal to all readers, you must rely on types that will allow the reader to identify situations and project herself into them. It's like having two blank faces for your main characters, and the reader fills them in according to her own needs.

Literature (with a capital "L") doesn't cater to this crowd. If you want to break away from Everylover and write about two (or more) characters who are unique, you must delve into the psychology of people and love.
A love story is a story about love denied and either recaptured or lost.
Its plan is simple; executing the plan is not. It all depends on your ability to find two people who are remarkable in either a tragic or comic way as they pursue love.

There is a world of difference between the immensely popular but shallow love story of Erich Segal's
Love Story
and the less popular but more enduring stories about the search for love in Eliot's
Adam Bede
or Thomas Hardy's
Jude the Obscure.
All three books are meant to be tragic: They share the same theme of love lost. But
Love Story,
a runaway best-seller and box office hit in its time, was a surface exploration of love denied involving a proto-yuppie couple in ivy league New England. (She gets sick and dies.) They never reach the depth of character and examination of the human soul that Eliot or Hardy's characters do.

But let's face it. The public has a powerful drive for fairy tale (that is, happy) endings. You already know that audiences have universally refused to accept George Bernard Shaw's unhappy ending to
Pygmalion
and turned it into their own version called
My Fair Lady,
which got the Academy Award for best picture. Rudyard Kipling's
The Light That Failed
is about Dick's love for Maisie. But Maisie is shallow and insensitive. Even when Dick starts to go blind (hold on to your handkerchief) and devotes his last days of sight to finishing his masterpiece painting (appropriately entitled
Melancholia),
Maisie ruthlessly rejects him. Brokenhearted, Dick kills himself. Not a very happy ending. But audiences, who cherish Kipling almost as much as they cherish Dickens, refused to stand for it. Kipling buckled under the pressure and rewrote the story with a happy ending, which was published in a later edition. Hollywood demands happy endings
de rigueur
(see Robert Altaian's
The Player
for a scathing satire on happy endings).

Thomas Hardy was under no such pressure, and even if he had been, it was unlikely he would've caved in to it
. Jude the Obscure
was his last work, and it's dark and cruel. It doesn't reaffirm the power of love to save or cure all. It is about the tragedy of love. It's a downer all the way. The reader who wants positive, bouncy, "love is wonderful" stories would never get through the first ten pages. But if the reader is interested in an examination of the conflict between carnal and spiritual life, the life of Jude Fawley will deliver. But you must remember, a lot of readers just aren't interested in that kind of close examination of love, especially if it has an unhappy ending. They'll always demand a fairy tale ending, and as long as there's a buck to be made, publishers and film producers will cater to that taste.

Don't get me wrong; there's a place for both kinds of stories. Each fills a distinctive need. The question is, Which story do you want to write?

SOFT RAIN, KITTENS AND MAKING LOVE BY THE FIRE

If you decide to write about love, you are at the slight disadvantage of being in a line that's five thousand years long. Thousands of writers have written about love, and now
you
want to do it? The competition is enough to make anyone pale. What can you hope to say that hasn't already been said?

You can't take that attitude, because it can be applied to any subject you might write about, not just love. But it is true that love can be difficult to write about without relying on the same old, tired cliches. Remember, it's not so much what you say as how you say it. Arguably it's all been said before. But the number of ways it can be said are inexhaustible. We are as much intrigued with the mysteries of love today as some Babylonian was five thousand years ago.