Dynamic Characters (38 page)

Your material might lend itself to this treatment if it's either satirical and funny
(Starting Over
is), or else so brilliantly despairing that it will shock us into a new awareness of the futility of trying to change. Without one of those two virtues, this plot structure could end up just being dreary. Tread cautiously.

HARRY WINS BY LOSING

The fifth plot form is the desire plot turned inside-out, like a sock. Harry doesn't want something to happen. He fights determinedly against it. It happens anyway—and slowly he discovers that the new situation is turning out far better than he thought. Sometimes it's even wonderful.

Georgette Heyer used this structure in her Regency romance
A Civil Contract.
Adam Deveril, newly returned from war after his father's death, finds the estate heavily in debt and his true love married to someone else. Adam tries every way he can think of to hang onto his family property, but the only way to do it is one that at first he fights against: marriage to a plain, unappealing heiress. Finally, Adam gives in and marries Jenny Chawleigh. The rest of the book relates how Adam and Jenny reach a strong partnership and build a happy life for themselves—happier than his first love would have made Adam, despite the intensity of his feelings for her compared to what he feels for Jenny.

Not only romances use the winning-by-losing plot. Anne Tyler's
Saint Maybe
features Ian Bedloe, who tries to bury his guilt over contributing to his brother Danny's death. (Ian had told Danny that Danny's wife was unfaithful, after which Danny crashed his car into a stone wall, either deliberately or in his rush to confront his wife.) Ian can't attain the absolution he so desperately desires. No matter what he does, he feels guilty. Finally he gives up his search for absolution and settles into raising Danny's children as atonement (the wife, who may not have been unfaithful after all, has killed herself). Decades later, he realizes that the raising of these three kids has made him happy—
and
brought him the absolution he had given up on. Ian, the pitied and unappreciated, ends up a winner.

The winning-by-losing plot is an appealing one, because we all like to believe in hope. To adapt it to your material, you need to decide:

^•
 What does my character want?

^•
 What insuperable obstacles make it impossible for him to get it? (Dramatize these enough so we believe there really is no way for the protagonist to attain what he wants.)

• What does he choose, or settle for, instead? What are the big drawbacks of this substitute? (There must be drawbacks. At this point, the character must appear to be losing.)

• What are the hidden advantages of this substitute? How can you dramatize them so that both character and reader slowly see that this is a good deal after all?

Basic, premade plots aren't for everyone. If nothing in this entire chapter has started your mind churning, maybe you'd better abandon the tried-and-true plot and custom-build your own. Go back to chapter three and start again to think about your characters. That, too, can be a rich source of plot incidents. It doesn't really matter where you start. It only matters where you are when you type
The End.

Plus, of course, where your characters are.

SUMMARY: USING PREMADE PLOTS

• A premade plot doesn't have to lead to hackneyed work. The basic structure may be tried-and-true, but the novel will stand or fall on the freshness, depth and truth of your particular version with your particular characters.

^•
 Basic plots lend themselves to a huge range of interpretations, moods and worldviews.

• There are many different ways to devise categories of basic plots.

• To spark a flagging imagination, consider the categories offered in this chapter, with the aim of seeing whether one fits well with the ideas incubating in your mind.

Theme.

The most fraught word in literature. Even if you rename it
central concern
or
reader resonance
or some such thing, it still conjures memories of ninth-grade English:
What is the book's theme? Concisely state the theme, and be sure to support your statement with specific examples in a well-written essay with topic sentence and—

No wonder so many writers go out of their way to announce that their fiction has no theme. They don't want students forced to reduce their works to twenty-five-words-or-less platitudes.

Nonetheless, every work of fiction does indeed have a theme. It's the third leg of the basic literary tripod: character, plot, theme. And, as a writer, you often benefit from knowing what yours is.

Three paragraphs into this chapter, and I know I'm already in trouble with hordes of would-be dissenters. Yes, I know that writers often

are not particularly articulate about the larger implications of their own work. Yes, I know that the text itself is what matters. Yes, I know that a story can ''mean'' different things to different people. But I'm going to discuss theme anyway, because knowing your theme can help clarify your view of both characters and plot.

But if it defuses the controversy, let's not call it
theme.
Let's call it
worldview,
for reasons that I hope come clear as we go along. And let's see why you need to think about it—if not during the first draft, then later—in order to make your work successful.

YES, VIRGINIA, THERE IS A PATTERN

First, it's impossible to write a story—or even a few significant para-graphs—without implying a world view. This is because the writer has
always
chosen to include some events and some details, and to leave others out. Furthermore, the writer has—wittingly or not—chosen a
tone
in which to present those details, and that tone, too, implies a worldview.

Here, for example, are two descriptions of the same person. The first is from a police report. The second is from Eudora Welty's story ''Old Mr. Marblehall'':

Caucasian female, 38,5' 1", 175 pounds. Mole on left cheek, near eye. Described by neighbors as possessing thick shoulders, small round head. Last seen by neighbor, on own front porch, wearing sleeveless loose brown cotton dress, green bedroom slippers size 4.

There's his other wife, standing on the night-stained porch by a potted fern, screaming things to a neighbor. This wife is really worse than the other one. She is more solid, fatter, shorter, and while not so ugly, funnier looking. She looks like funny furniture—an unornamented stair post in one of these funny houses, with her small monotonous round stupid head—or sometimes like a woodcut of a Bavarian witch, forefinger pointing, with scratches in the air all around her. But she's so static she scarcely moves, from her thick shoulders down past her cylindered brown dress to her short, stubby house slippers. She stands still and screams to the neighbors.

The police report, through its tone and choice of details, says these things about the world: Reality can be objectively observed and numerically described. The physical world is our common ground in interacting with each other. Missing persons are sometimes able to be located and therefore it is rational to devise paperwork and procedures to do so.

On the other hand, the Welty description—like the story from which it's taken—implies a different view of the world: The best way to understand something is through subjective contrast and metaphor (''like funny furniture,'' ''like a woodcut of a Bavarian witch,'' ''so static'' even while screaming). Ways of interacting are grounded in some unseen judgment (''This wife is really worse than the other one'') that carries with it a tone of both contempt and mystery. A factual account of what the wife is shouting at the neighbors is never explained; it's the overall subjective impression that counts.

It's not hard to imagine a third way of describing the second Mrs. Marblehall that would be different from both of these. Her view of herself as a wronged woman, perhaps. Or the view of her through the eyes of her six-year-old son, as ''Mama,'' warm and loving and dependable. Each of these would imply yet another view of the world by choosing different aspects of reality to emphasize.

What does all this have to do with character and plot in
your
writing? Hang on; we're getting there.

It's not only description that implies a view of the world. So does the choice of story events, and the way they work out in your work.

Detective stories, for example, almost always end with the murderer being identified. If they did not, most readers would get quite upset. The choice of events—investigation, deduction, resolution— carries the metaview that the world is rational, and the further theme that crime doesn't pay. Romances, on the other hand, all offer the reassuring theme that although the road to winning love may be rocky, love is possible and also is worth it. This is true even when the lovers end up losing each other, as in Robert James Waller's best-selling
The Bridges of Madison County.

It's possible, however, to visualize a different choice of ending for the Waller novel. Suppose his two lovers had still ended up parting, but after Robert leaves, Francesca's husband discovers their affair. Shocked and betrayed, he divorces her. Francesca then hunts down

Robert who, nomad that he is, has meanwhile taken himself to Argentina and fallen in love with a Spanish girl named Rosaria. There is a confrontation, and Rosaria shoots Francesca. In
that
book, the view of love—the theme—would be much different than in what Waller actually wrote.

So, on a macrolevel, the events you choose to include in your story form an overall pattern that implies a worldview. If you know what worldview you're actually creating, it can help you invent plot events that support it, descriptions with telling details and evocative tone, and characters who bear out your beliefs. All this gives your fiction a wholeness, a consistency born as much of patterned emotion as of rationality, that can vastly improve the end result.

But there's more. Pattern operates in a story on a microlevel as well as a macrolevel, and there, too, you have more control than you may think.

CHEKHOV'S GUN AND TYLER'S CASSEROLES

A famous writing maxim attributed to Anton Chekhov says that if you have a gun going off in the third act of a play, it had better sit on the mantelpiece during the first two acts. Conversely, if a gun is clearly visible on the mantelpiece for two acts, it had better go off during the third. In other words, critical plot developments and critical characters must be clearly foreshadowed, not dragged in from left field at the end of your novel. And if you spend time and verbiage on something early on, we can reasonably expect that thing to figure in the climax or denouement.

Suppose, for instance, you give an entire early chapter of your novel to Aunt Mary shoplifting at Macy's. She stole a candy dish and a bath towel, with enough advance planning and elaborate cover-ups to carry out D day. The chapter is amusing, well written and characterizing. Is that enough? No. You're letting us know that this incident will be part of the overall pattern of your story, and so it had better turn out to be just that. You'd better use that candy dish, that towel or some other aspect of the escapade at Macy's as an important element of your overall plot. A book, like an Oriental carpet, is a pattern, and everything in it is supposed to contribute to the design. Although that's especially true of a short story, it also holds true for a novel.

Threads are supposed to be woven the whole length of warp or woof, not just abruptly unravel halfway.

However
—and here's the critical point—not all patterns are equally tightly woven. Your theme gains or loses credibility partly on the basis of the weave you create.

Let me explain. In commercial fiction, especially,
everything
in the book usually contributes directly to the plot. Objects that receive more than a mention or two, secondary characters, symbols, events—all eventually relate to the main plot, in a clear pattern that can be satisfying because it imposes order on life. Such fiction pleases us at least partly because it says to us that life contains patterns, order, design. It all adds up.