20 Master Plots (6 page)

These, then, are some of the basic common denominators of plot. Now let's get down to the types of plots themselves—all two of them.

I
n the course of researching this book, I read anyone who had anything to say about plot. After a while, I felt like I was reading cookbooks, with each author offering a recipe for success.

I'm not knocking other writers, because the best often have something valuable to say. In fact you'll find many of their comments scattered through this book.

What all writers have in common is a method. Once they get the method down, some of them then write a book about it. Those books should be titled "This Is What Works for Me," because readers who respect certain writers too often take their methods as gospel. These methods may be tried and true for those writers, but there's the mistaken assumption floating around that if it works for one person, it must work for everyone else, too.

Not so.

There's a method for each of us. The writer must know how he works
and
thinks in order to discover which method works best. Somebody like Vladimir Nabokov, who was meticulous and structured, laid out his work on index cards from beginning to end before writing the first word. Other writers, such as Toni Morrison and Katherine Anne Porter, began at the end. "If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin," wrote Porter. "I always write my last line, my last paragraphs, my last page first."

Other writers think that's a terrible idea. But then Anthony Burgess, the author of
A Clockwork Orange,
probably said it best when he described his method: "I start at the beginning, go on to the end, and then stop."

I don't bring this up to confuse you, but to make you think about your own work habits and the value of what other writers have to offer by way of advice. But remember what Somerset Maugham said the next time you come across something some great writer said: "There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are."

The trick for any author is to find out what works for him, and then do it. The same is true when it comes to plot.

How many plots are there? The real question is, "Does it really matter how many plots there are?"

Not really.

What matters is your understanding of the story and how to create a pattern of plot that works for it.

TO HELL AND BACK

The best place to start a discussion about plots is to trace their bloodlines to the beginning. By doing this, you should be able to understand the evolutionary tree from which all plots developed. It's not like studying some fossilized prehistoric ancestor that no longer walks the earth; on the contrary, the two basic plots from which all other plots flow are still the foundation of all literature. If you understand the essence of your plot, you will understand better how to go about writing it.

In Dante's
Inferno
there are only two basic sins in all the levels of Hell. One is called
forza,
crimes of violence and force. The other basic sin is called
forda,
which is Italian for fraud. Force and fraud. The damned who have been sent to Hell for crimes of violence weren't at the lowest circles of Hell; those were reserved for people who committed fraud, or sins of the mind. In Dante's mind, anyway, crimes of the mind were far worse than crimes of physical violence.

Dante understood human character. These two sins come from two basic functions of human beings. Force is power, strength, physicality. Fraud comes from wit, cleverness, mentality. The

Body and The Mind. If we look at plots, then, we should divide them into these two categories: plots of the body, and plots of the mind.

A clear representation of this duality is in Aesop's fables. The lion, a universal symbol of strength, represents force, power, physical strength. No one ever portrayed the lion as being particularly bright. Being strong was enough.

The fox, on the other hand, is portrayed as clever, witty and devious. His strength isn't physical, it's mental. We seem to take particular delight in those fables in which the physically weaker animal outwits the physically superior animal. In fairy tales, we take equal delight when the harmless child outwits the threatening ogre. We put a lot of stock in mental skills—more than we put in physical skills.

The Greek masks of tragedy and comedy embody the same idea. The frowning mask represents tragedy, which is the theater of force. The laughing mask represents comedy, which is the theater of fraud. The foundation of comedy is deception: mistaken identities, double meanings, confusion. Federico Garcia Lorca confirmed this when he said life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.

Shakespeare's comedies verify this. Comedy often depends on language to be understood, so it is a form of
forda.
This was the genius of the Marx Brothers; they brought anarchy to language and turned the world of logic upside down.

Chico: "Pick a number between one and ten."

Groucho: "Eleven."

Chico (dismayed): "Right."

It makes no sense. But in the world of the Marx Brothers, somehow the number eleven can be found between one and ten. (Notice how jokes are never funny when you try to explain them?) This kind of shtick is completely mental—as were many of the Marx Brothers' funniest routines. Of course, they performed physical comedy brilliantly too, but there is a mentality operating even at the physical level. That was the genius of Charlie Chaplin, too. We understood the deeper pathos, the intellectual implications of his comedy, and understanding that made it sadly funny.

We have two plots then:
forza,
plots of the body, and
forda,
plots of the mind.

THE ACTION PLOT

You're at the beginning of the awesome task of starting your work. You have nothing but blank pages in front of you. You have an idea that may be completely sketched out in your head in what Nabokov called "a clear preview," or you may have a vague feeling of what you want to write and start with what Isak Dinesen called "a tingle." Aldous Huxley said he only had a dim idea of what he was going to write, and William Faulkner said all he had to start with was a memory or mental picture. Fine. Either you know everything or you know nothing. No help there.

What you should do based on your "clear preview" or your "tingle" is ask yourself which of the two plots most closely fits your idea. Is it an action story, an adventure that relies on doing? Or does your story deal more with the inner workings of character and human nature?

Most novels and films for the mass market fall into the first category. The public has a ravenous appetite for adventure stories, whether they're about Matt Helm and James Bond or Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker. The racks of B. Dalton and Walden-books sag with these books. We love a good thriller for airports and the beach, whether it be by Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, Michael Crichton or any of a hundred others. We're addicted to movies series like
Alien, Lethal Weapon
and
Terminator
because of the sheer physical energy they exude. The motion is fast and furious, and we love the roller coaster ride. The primary focus of these books and films is
action.
Our main concern as readers or viewers is "What happens next?" The role of character and thought in these works is reduced pretty much to the bare necessities — enough so they can advance the action. That doesn't mean there can't be any character development at all; it just means that if you had to describe the book as either an action story or a character story, you would choose action because it dominates character by some degree.

With the action plot we don't really get involved with any great moral or intellectual questions. And at the end, the main character probably doesn't change all that much, which is convenient for a sequel. The action plot is a puzzle plot; we're challenged to solve some sort of mystery. Our rewards are suspense, surprise and expectation. Science fiction, Westerns, romances and detective novels usually—but not always—fall into this category. The great writers in these forms—Stanislaw Lem, Ray Bradbury, Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson, for instance—write more for the mind than for the gut.

PLOTS OF THE MIND

The author who is more concerned in plots of the mind delves inward, into human nature and the relationships between people (and the events that surround them). These are interior journeys that examine beliefs and attitudes. The plot of the mind is about ideas. The characters are almost always searching for some kind of meaning.

Obviously, serious literature favors this kind of plot over action plots. The plot of the mind examines life instead of just portraying it in some unrealistic way. Again, this doesn't mean that you can't include action in a plot of the mind. But in weighing the mental against the physical, interior against exterior, the mental and interior will dominate to some degree.

THE MEANING OF LIFE AND THE THREE STOOGES

Earlier I made the distinction between tragedy and comedy by saying tragedy is a plot of the body and comedy is a plot of the mind. Those were the original Greek distinctions, but things have changed in the last three thousand years. Now tragedy can be either plot. Comedy, however, seems firmly rooted in the Greek tradition.

A great comedic writer once said "Dying is easy; comedy is hard." Writing high drama is easy by comparison. No doubt about it, being funny is tough. The funniest line in the world can come off totally flat if told incorrectly.
Timing,
we've heard a thousand times,
is everything.

Freud made the mistake of trying to analyze humor, and I won't make the same mistake here. But the reason comedy is so tough is that it appeals so much to the mind. Comedy is anarchy; it takes the existing order and stands it on its head. The whole concept of a double entendre is that it plays on another concept that the reader/viewer must already know to understand the humor.

Sure there's slapstick, a purely physical humor. The Three Stooges, for instance, seem anything but intellectual. But their comedy, however physical, lampoons society and its institutions. It's not just that they're throwing pies; it's whom they're throwing pies at: the prim and proper matron, the mortgage banker, all those stiff-shirted characters we live with daily. Their routines let us act out our own fantasies. A good comedic writer must make all these connections for us and give us emotional release, because we really want to throw those pies, too. However physical comedy gets, it has a strong undercurrent of the mind.

The true comic novel, Anthony Burgess pointed out, was the one that had to do with people's recognition of their unimportance in the universe.

Heady stuff for the Three Stooges.

DECIDING ON A PLOT

Once you've made the decision to write a novel or a screenplay, your next decision should be to decide which of the two plots your story will follow, because that shapes everything else you do.

Will your story be plot driven? If so, the mechanism of the story is more important than the specific characters themselves. The characters are there to make the plot happen. The novels of Agatha Christie are plot driven. So are the novels of Mickey Spillane and Dashiell Hammett, although their styles are entirely different. Each of those authors knew
going in
what kind of book they would write.

If your story is character driven, the mechanism of the plot is less important than the people themselves. Films such as
Driving Miss Daisy
and
Fried Green Tomatoes
are about people, and while they certainly have plots, those plots aren't center stage front. We're more intrigued by the characters. We're more intrigued by Kafka's Gregor Samsa than the unexplained reason he turns into a noxious bug. We're more interested in Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary and Huckleberry Finn and Jay Gatsby than we are in the plots behind them.

Know from the beginning where your focus will be. Will it be on the action? Or the people? Once you decide, you'll know what the
strong force
in your book will be. You'll eventually form a balance between the action and character, but you'll have a focus that will keep you from flip-flopping around. If you choose a plot of action, that will be your strong force; the aspects of your work that fall under the category of the mind will be your
weak force.
And vice versa: A plot of the mind can be the strong force, and its subsidiary qualities that deal with action will be the weak force. It can work either way, in any proportion you see fit, with one force dominating.