20 Master Plots (7 page)

By choosing your strong and weak forces, your story will have proportion and consistency. You'll achieve
proportion
by establishing the relationship of one force to the other, and you'll achieve
consistency
by maintaining that relationship through the entire work.

Decide, and you'll have a starting place.

Y
ou have made two major decisions to this point. You have an idea (sort of), and you've picked the strong force of your plot. What do you do next?

Before you try to figure out which plot pattern best suits your story, you must develop the idea for your story so that you can develop the deep structure.

Deep structure,
like the strong force, guides development of your idea.

The central concept of deep structure is morality. Now don't freak out and think I'm saying that writing should somehow reflect the Ten Commandments or the precepts of Jesus or good, clean living. My use of the word
morality
here is much more basic than the meanings that first come to mind in our society.

Every piece of literature and every film ever made carries within it a moral system. It doesn't matter how artistic or rotten that work is, it contains a moral structure that gives us a sense of the world and how it ought to be. Either directly or indirectly, fiction tells us how to behave and how not to behave, what is right and what is wrong. It tells us what is acceptable behavior and what is unacceptable. This moral system holds only for the world created within that fiction. A work of fiction may reflect the same moral standards most of us share, or it may suggest that it's all right and maybe even desirable to cheat, lie, steal and sleep with

your neighbor. The criminal isn't punished; in fact, she's rewarded.

It may be that the author is sloppy or lazy and doesn't understand or develop that moral system. It gets included by default and may be muddled, but it's there nonetheless. In bad works of writing we don't take these moral systems seriously; we dismiss them at face. In more serious works, in which the author is concerned with the implications of his moral system, it becomes serious food for thought; it becomes part of the message of the work itself. It doesn't matter if you're writing a romance, a mystery or the sequel to
Finnegan's Wake.
There's a world of difference between Albert Camus, whose works include a sophisticated system of morality, and a romance from Harlequin or Silhouette, which includes a simplistic moral system.

Your work, at least by implication, asks the question, "How should I act in these given circumstances?" Since every writer takes sides (a point of view), you tell your readers what's correct and incorrect behavior.

Take the book and film
Shane.

Shane
is a morality play. At the beginning, Shane comes out of the hills from nowhere (and back to nowhere at the end), which has had critics compare him to a frontier Jesus Christ, the Greek god Apollo, Hercules and a knight errant. Shane is a mysterious man, but he has a strong code of behavior. He brings his strength to the homesteaders, which gives them strength to fight the greedy, cruel cattlemen. Even when Shane is tempted by the homesteader's wife, Marion, he remains at all times dedicated to his moral system. We are left with nuances, moments of electricity between her and Shane, but he doesn't waver. Shane is a moral standard. He brings faith to the valley and the wicked are destroyed.

The morality of
Shane
parallels our Judeo-Christian ethics. We recognize proper behavior. Other works might suggest behavior that runs contrary to what we've been taught. The wicked aren't always destroyed. Sometimes they come out on top. Crime
does
pay.

As writers, we have the right to choose whatever moral system we want to portray and draw whatever conclusions we want from that system. But if we really want to reach someone, we must be
convincing.

Easier said than done.

Most of what we read isn't very convincing when it gets down to the core morality of the work. If you write a serious book, you want to create an argument for this kind of behavior that is so powerful it will affect the reader in her own life. A tough task. If you write a book for entertainment only, however, your goal is simpler: You want to create an argument that works in the world of the book. It doesn't have to carry over into the world and change lives. Only the greatest of works and most talented of writers have the genius to affect our lives in large ways. I suspect good works (as opposed to great works) affect us in small ways. Even bad works affect us.

What is this argument? How do you make it convincing? The argument is the heart of your deep structure, and you must know how to fashion that argument so it's convincing.

A WORD ABOUT TWO-TIMING

Our way of dealing with the complications of the world is to simplify them into either/or arguments. We divide the world into opposites. We try, in vain, to make everything black and white.

We know the world isn't that simple, that most of life is in the gray range. But our way of thinking is so dedicated to opposites that it's impossible to escape them. Everything is good or bad, ugly or beautiful, light or dark, up or down, rich or poor, weak or strong, happy or sad, protagonist or antagonist. We divide -the world to better comprehend it. We divide to simplify. Instead of an infinite number of states, we pretend there are only two.

It doesn't take much to realize this perception won't do if we're trying to get serious about the true nature of love, happiness or whatever. You must give up black-and-white thinking and examine the grays. The trouble with grays, however, is that there are no easy solutions.

Therein lies the key.

Easy solutions are ... easy. They represent cliched thinking. Good vs. bad. One character is kind-hearted, brave, sincere and on a mission, but the other character is dark-hearted, cowardly, insincere and intent on stopping the good character from reaching his goal. We know this pattern inside out—so well, in fact that we don't have to read the rest of the story. We know who's supposed to win and who's supposed to lose, and we know
why.
There won't be many surprises here. White hats vs. black hats. And because the readers know they're supposed to root for the good guy and despise the bad guy, the writer really can't put any twists in the story. Unless the reader is in a really perverse mood, she's been pulling for the good guy all along—and then he doesn't make it? Definitely a Hollywood taboo.

There's no challenge here. As a writer, you may dazzle us with your fancy footwork (the action), but underneath it all is nothing. Sure, no one cares about the moral universe of Indiana Jones or James Bond. They're good guys, and good guys fight evil, period. Strip away the action, and there's nothing left.

The author's task is to move into the world of grays, where there are no obvious or even right answers. Into a world where decisions are always risky because you aren't sure if they're the right decisions. The author who takes a simplistic point of view isn't interested in understanding the complex human dynamics of life or the difficulty of decisions we must make.

The deep tension (as opposed to local tension) I talked about in the earlier chapter comes from impossible situations, situations where there is no clear right or wrong, no clear winner or loser, no clear yes or no.
Put your main character between a rock and a hard place.
That's the true source of tension in fiction.

HOW TO GET BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

We each have our prejudices, rooted in our own moral system. If you were a god and could fashion any world you wanted, your fiction would reflect that world. In your world, crime would never go unpunished. Or ex-wives or husbands. Or politicians. In your world, the Chicago Cubs might win the World Series; the Indianapolis Colts might win the Super Bowl. The mind boggles at the opportunities for you to set things straight—at least on paper. You're a god, remember? You can do what you want.

If you still entertain any delusions of grandeur about being all-

powerful, this is the time to lose them. The writer is a slave, not a god. You're a slave to your characters and to the premise of your story. If you must find a model to represent the status of the author, it would be not as a god but as a referee.

Conflict depends on conflicting forces. In the one corner you have a force (let's say the protagonist), and the force has an objective: to win, to solve, to free ... always an infinitive. In the other corner you have an opposing force (the antagonist), and this force has an objective too: to block the protagonist. That's important to plot, and it's been drilled into you since you were old enough to read. Little Red Riding Hood's objective is to reach Grandmother's house. The wolf's objective is to eat Little Red Riding Hood. And so on.

The same concept of opposing forces applies to ideas as well.
Writing a story without presenting a meaningful opposing force is propaganda.

Let me explain. As a writer you have your point of view—your prejudices, if you will. Let's say you were a battered wife for twelve years, the victim of a controlling and abusive husband. When you go to write about it, the story unfolds as it happened:

He storms in from work at night, throws his jacket down on the sofa and demands, "What's for dinner?"

"I made you a lovely duck a l'orange, dear." The table is set with their best china and crystal; the candles are lit. She's obviously gone to a lot of trouble for him.

"Duck! You know I hate duck.
Can't you ever do anything right?
Make me a sandwich."

A tear collects in the corner of her eye, but she accepts his abuse stoically. "What kind of sandwich?"

"I don't care," he says abruptly. "And get me a beer."

He turns on the television and is gone.

Enough.

I don't have to go on. You know the score and you know the story. The characters are already defined as types. She is the silent-suffering, kind-hearted, devoted wife; he is the loud, obnoxious, cruel husband. You can't wait for him to get his comeuppance. You hope he suffers.

But this is propaganda.

Propaganda?

The author's point of view here is obvious and one-sided. I've sided with the wife and have exaggerated her just as I've exaggerated the husband beyond belief. They're
types.
"Begin with an individual and you find that you have created a type," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, "begin with a type and you find that you have created—nothing." The author is trying to settle a personal score. The fiction may be therapeutic and help the writer work out hostility, but that's not the purpose of fiction if you intend to show it to someone else. The purpose of fiction is to tell a story, not to get even or to work out your own personal problems.

You can always tell propaganda because the writer has a cause. The writer is on a soapbox lecturing, telling us who is good and who is bad and what is right and what is wrong. Lord knows we get lectured to enough in the real world; we don't read or go to the movies so someone else can lecture to us some more. If you use your characters to say what
you
want them to say, you're writing propaganda. If your characters say what
they
want to say, you're writing fiction. Isaac Bashevis Singer claimed characters had their own lives and their own logic, and that the writer had to act accordingly. You manipulate characters in the sense that you make them conform to the basic requirements of your plot. You don't let them run roughshod over you. In a sense, you build a corral for your characters to run around in. The fence keeps them confined to the limitations of the plot. But where they run
inside
the corral is a function of each character's freedom to be what or who he/she wants
within the confines of the plot itself.

Jorge Luis Borges said it best: "Many of my characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on me and treating me badly."

More of a slave than a god.

How, then, do you avoid writing propaganda? First start with your attitude. If you have a score to settle or a point to make, or if you're intent on making the world see things
your
way, go write an essay. If you're interested in telling a story, a story that grabs us and fascinates us, a story that captures the paradoxes of living in this upside-down world, write fiction.