The Anatomy of Story (44 page)

As a result, with the three unities plot, you typically have the time, opponents, and complexity of action for one big reveal. For example, Oedipus (in the world's first detective story) learns that he has killed his father and slept with his mother. That's a very big reveal, no doubt. But if you want a lot of plot, you have to have reveals peppered throughout the story.

The Reveals Plot

The third major plot type is what we might call the reveals plot. In this technique, the hero generally stays in one place, though it is not nearly so narrow an area as unity of place requires. For example, the story may take place in a town or a city. Also, the reveals plot almost always covers a longer time period than unity of time allows, even up to a few years. (When the story covers decades, you are probably writing a saga, which tends more toward the journey plot.)

The key technique of the reveals plot is that the hero is familiar with his opponents, but a great deal about them is hidden from the hero and the audience. In addition, these opponents are very skilled at scheming to get what they want. This combination produces a plot that is filled with revelations, or surprises, for the hero and the audience.

Notice the basic difference between the journey plot and reveals plot : in the journey plot, surprise is limited because the hero dispatches a large number of opponents quickly. The reveals plot takes few opponents and hides as much about them as possible. Revelations magnify the plot by going under the surface.

When done properly, the reveals plot is organic because the opponent is the character best able to attack the weakness of the hero, and the surprises come at the moments when the hero and the audience learn how those attacks have occurred. The hero must then overcome his weakness and change or be destroyed.

The reveals plot is very popular with audiences because it maximizes surprise, which is a source of delight in any story. Another name for this is the big plot, not just because there are so many surprises but also because they tend to be shocking. Although still immensely popular today especially in detective stories and thrillers—the heyday of the reveals plot was the nineteenth century, with writers like Dumas (
The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers
) and Dickens. Not surprisingly, this was also the height of stories like
The Portrait of a Lady
in which extremely powerful villains use negative plots to win.

Dickens was the master of the reveals plot, perhaps unequaled in storytelling history. But Dickens's reputation as one of the great storytellers of all time comes partly from the fact that he often expanded the reveals plot by combining it with the journey plot. Needless to say, this required tremendous plotting ability, since these two plot approaches are in many ways opposites. In the journey plot, the hero meets a vast cross section of society but quickly leaves each character behind. In the reveals plot, the hero meets a handful of people but gets to know them very well.

Antiplot

If nineteenth-century storytelling was about superplot, twentieth-century storytelling, at least in serious fiction, was about antiplot. In stories as wildly different as
Ulysses, Last Year at Marienbad, L'Avventura, Waiting for Godot, The Cherry Orchard,
and
The Catcher in the Rye,
you see almost a disdain for plot, as if it were the magic act you have to perform for the audience so you can do the more important work of character. As Northrop Frye says, "We may keep reading a novel or attending a play 'to see how it turns out.' But once we know how it turns out, and the spell ceases to bind us, we tend to forget the continuity, the very element in the play or novel that enabled us to participate in it."
⁴

If you were to sum up the plot of some of these stories, it might go something like this:
The Catcher in the Rye
involves a teenage boy walking around New York City for a couple of days. In
The Cherry Orchard,
a family arrives at the old homestead, waits around for it to be sold at auction, and leaves.
L'Avventura
is a detective story in which no crime may have occurred and none is solved.

I suspect that many twentieth-century writers were not rebelling against plot per se but big plot, those sensational revelations that so shock the reader, they knock over everything else in their path. What I am calling antiplot, then, is really a range of techniques that these storytellers devised that would make the plot organic by making it express the
subtleties
of character. Point of view, shifting narrators, branching story structure, and nonchronological time are all techniques that play with plot by changing how the story is told, with the deeper aim of presenting a more complex view of human character.

These techniques might make stories feel fragmented, but they're not necessarily inorganic. Multiple points of view can express collage, montage, and character dislocation but also a sense of vitality and a flood of sensations. If these experiences contribute to the development of the character and the audience's sense of who that character is, they are organic and ultimately satisfying.

Plot digressions—which are common in antiplot—are a form of simultaneous action and sometimes backward action. They are organic if and only if they come out of who the character is. For example,
Tristram Shandy,
the ultimate antiplot novel, has often been criticized for its never-ending digressions. But what these readers fail to realize is that
Tristram Shandy
isn't a story with a main plotline interrupted by digressions. It is a story of digressions interrupted by what appears to be a main plotline.

The main character, Tristram, is essentially a man who digresses, so the way the story is told is a perfectly organic expression of who the hero is.

A version of antiplot is backward storytelling, like Harold Pinter's
Betrayal,
in which the scenes are laid out in reverse chronological order. Backward storytelling actually highlights the organic unfolding of the story by highlighting the causal thread between scenes. This thread is normally buried under the surface; one scene seems to naturally follow another. But by going backward, the audience is forced to become conscious of the connecting thread between scenes. They can see that what just happened
bad
to evolve from the event that came before it and the event that came before that.

Genre Plot

While serious storytellers were making plot smaller, their popular counterparts, especially in movies and novels, were making it even bigger through genre. Genres are types of stories, with predetermined characters, themes, worlds, symbols, and plots. Genre plots are usually big, emphasizing revelations that are so stunning they sometimes flip the story upside down. Of course, these big plots lose some of their power by the fact that they are predetermined. The audience knows generally what is going to happen in any genre story, so only the particulars surprise them.

These various genre plots seem organically connected to their main characters simply because they have been written so many times. All padding is gone. But these genre plots lack a huge requirement of an organic plot: they are not unique to their particular main character. They are literally generic, which means they are mechanical. In certain genres like farce and caper (heist stories), this mechanical quality is taken to such an extreme that the plots have the complexity and timing of a Swiss watch—and no character at all.

Multistrand Plot

The newest plot strategy is the multistrand plot, which was originally devised by novelists and screenwriters but has really flowered in dramatic television, beginning with the seminal show
Hill Street Blues.
In this strategy, each story, or weekly episode, is comprised of three to live major plot strands. Each strand is driven by a separate character within a single group, usually within an organization like a police precinct, hospital, or law firm. The storyteller crosscuts between these strands. When this plot strategy is executed poorly, the strands have nothing to do with each other, and the crosscut is simply used to goose the audience's attention and increase the speed. When the plot strategy is executed well, each strand is a variation on a theme, and the crosscut from one strand to another creates a shock of recognition at the moment two scenes are juxtaposed.

The multistrand plot is clearly a much more simultaneous form of storytelling, emphasizing the group, or the minisociety, and how the characters compare. But that doesn't mean this plot strategy can never be organic. The multistrand approach simply changes the developing unit from the single hero to the group. When the many strands are variations on one theme, the audience more readily experiences who we are as humans, and that can be just as insightful and moving as seeing the growth of a single person.

CREATING AN ORGANIC PLOT

Now that you are well armed with knowledge of some of the major plot strategies, the big question arises, How do you create an organic plot for your particular characters? Here is the sequence for writing an organic plot:

4. Decide whether you wish to use a storyteller. This can have a big effect on how you tell the audience what happens and thus how you design the plot.

5. Figure out the structure in detail, using the twenty-two structure steps of every great story (which we'll discuss in a moment). This will give you most of your plot beats (major actions or events), and it will guarantee, as much as any technique can, that your plot is organic.

6. Decide if you want your story to use one or more genres. If so, you must add the plot beats unique to those genres at the appropriate places and twist them in some way so that your plot is not predictable.

Although you should decide if you want a storyteller before using t he twenty-two building blocks to figure out your plot, I am going to explain these powerful and advanced tools in reverse chronology, since this is the easiest way to understand them.

1. Sell-revelation, need, and desire

2. Ghost and story world

3. Weakness and need

4. Inciting event

5. Desire

6. Ally or allies

7. Opponent and/or mystery

8. Fake-ally opponent

9. First revelation and decision: Changed desire and motive

10. Plan

11. Opponent's plan and main counterattack

12. Drive

13. Attack by ally

14. Apparent defeat

15. Second revelation and decision: Obsessive drive, changed desire and motive

16. Audience revelation

17. Third revelation and decision

18. Gate, gauntlet, visit to death

19. Battle

20. Self-revelation

21. Moral decision

22. New equilibrium

At first glance, using the twenty-two steps may appear to stunt your creativity, to give you a mechanical story rather than an organic one. This is part of a deeper fear that many writers have of too much planning. But the result is that they try to make the story up as they go and end up with a mess. Using the twenty-two steps avoids either of these extremes and actually increases your creativity. The twenty-two steps are not a formula for writing. Instead they provide the scaffolding you need to do something really creative and know that it will work as your story unfolds organically.

Similarly, don't get hung up on the number twenty-two. A story may have more or fewer than twenty-two steps, depending on its type and length. Think of a story as an accordion. It is limited only in how much it can contract. It must have no fewer than the seven steps, because that is the least number of steps in an organic story. Even a thirty-second commercial, if it's good, will follow the seven steps.

But the longer a story gets, the more structure steps it will need. For example, a short story or a situation comedy can only hit the seven major steps in the limited time the story has to unfold. A movie, a short novel, or a one-hour drama for television will usually have at least twenty-two steps (unless the drama is multistrand, in which case each strand hits the seven steps). A longer novel, with its added twists and surprises, has fat-more than twenty-two structure steps. For example,
David Copperfield
has more than sixty revelations.

If you were to study the twenty-two steps in depth, you would see that they are really a combination of many systems of the story body woven into a single plotline. They combine the character web, the moral argument, the story world, and the series of actual events that comprise the plot. The twenty-two steps represent a detailed choreography of hero versus opponents as the hero tries to reach a goal and solve a much deeper life problem. In effect, the twenty-two steps guarantee that your main character drives your plot.

The table on page 270 shows the twenty-two steps broken down into four major threads, or story subsystems. Keep in mind that each step can be an expression of more than one subsystem. For example, drive, which is the set of actions the hero takes to reach the goal, is primarily a plot step. But it is also a step where the hero may take immoral action to win, which is part of the moral argument.