Creative Writing with Sarah Bower
OK, it’s a hint on the imperial side, but Rudyard Kipling inscribed a little ditty to define plot. Plot, he said, was a band of ‘six honest serving men’ and
Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where
and Who.
I dare say most readers of
this magazine live perfectly adequately without any serving men (serving women,
on the other hand, raising a whole new argument which has no place here). There
are contemporary writers and theorists of the novel who would contend that the
novel can live equally well without a plot. David Markson, for example,
famously wrote non-linear, discontinuous narratives which are classified as
‘postmodern novels’. However, he entitled one of these This Is Not A Novel,
thus begging the question, however ironically, whether or not a plotless
narrative can be defined as a novel.
That said, however, the popular novel remains a
predominantly plot driven form. The extraordinary success of a novelist like
Dan Brown illustrates the pre-eminence of plot over skilful characterisation,
atmospheric scene-setting or plausible dialogue. Plot, therefore, you must, if
you wish to sell books. Kipling would have found it difficult to conceive of
civilised living without servants. The novelist who wants to make any kind of
living at all must learn to plot.
Plot is Janus-faced. On the one hand, it is something we
do almost intuitively. We are hard-wired for storytelling. From the point in
our distant past when we first learned to make fires and gather round them to
cook and keep warm, we have passed the time by telling stories. The hunter
arrives home as darkness falls and what he narrates, while the meat is
roasting, is not that which is mundane or reflects badly on his prowess but the
exciting, the dangerous, the heroic. It’s not the humble creatures he caught
and killed that count, but the battle he had with the sabre-tooth to get them
or the big fish that got away. From the outset, we have reordered and edited
the facts to improve the story.
On the other hand, as Guy Saville, a recent interviewee
in this magazine, has written, ‘writing is as much to do with logical deduction
as it is with inspiration’ . New students frequently come to my novel writing
classes saying they have a great idea for a novel, they have written maybe ten
or twenty pages and then run out of steam. This is almost always because they
have failed to appreciate the importance of planning. Unlike a short story,
which tends to be an examination of a single theme or situation, a novel is a
complex structure involving many characters, multiple storylines, an extended
chronology and a range of different settings. It is absolutely impossible for
the writer to hold all this in her mind without mapping the novel out so she
knows where she is going.
This is the process we know as plotting, and, as it is
the least conventionally ‘artistic’ part of the creative work, it often
frustrates the beginning novelist. The conventional novel is constructed around
a spine of Aristotelian causality. As E. M. Forster puts it in Aspects of the
Novel , ‘the king dies, then the queen dies’ is a story; ‘the king dies, then
the queen dies of grief’ is a plot – the king’s death causes the queen’s death.
This is where you need to begin when devising a plot. Its spine will consist of
a series of causally linked events which carry the principal characters on
their journey of discovery and self-revelation.
On its own, however, this kind of structure would quickly
become boring. The next phase of the plan must be to set up obstacles which
will throw the characters off-course and delay, inhibit, or even reverse, their
progress. Now you are beginning to introduce narrative tension to your work.
You have shown what your characters have to achieve, and then blocked their
path so readers become anxious as to whether or not they will succeed. As long
as you have created engaging characters, this uncertainty will be a major
factor in hooking your readers and keeping them interested.
At this stage, we are still working with a linear
chronology. One event leads to another in a conventionally logical way, and the
only disruption is a series of hurdles you have erected around the track to
provide a bit of excitement. But the novel is more than this, surely. The novel
is an illusion, a sleight of hand whereby the reader is duped into believing
mere words on the page constitute a concrete world. To succeed in creating this
illusion, we must add a depth of perspective to the narrative. We achieve this
by devising minor characters and giving each of them a storyline which feeds
into the main spine of the story. Imagine a fish skeleton, with the fish’s
spine being your main plotline and all the smaller bones feeding into it being
the sub-plots which you build around the minor characters, gradually bringing
all these together as you approach the novel’s climax.
According to Robert McKee , a plot consists of five
parts:
• The inciting
incident
• Progressive
complications
• Crisis (the
DECISION which brings about the climax)
• Climax
(brings about IRREVERSIBLE CHANGE)
• Resolution
To a greater or lesser extent, you can break down each
chapter and even each scene in the same way – as if your plot was a verbal
cauliflower! The inciting incident is that which radically upsets the balance
of the protagonist’s life. The rest of the novel charts her/his struggles to
regain that balance. The climax is the major turning point, induced by the
crisis. The resolution can involve either the balance being restored or the
protagonist coming to terms with a changed environment. Whatever the
resolution, the protagonist must have gone on a journey. This may be physical
as well as intellectual and emotional, but need not necessarily be so.
How you plan your novel is your choice. There are writers
whose plans are so detailed they are virtually précis’ of the finished work,
with only the creative ‘gaps’ (dialogue, scene-setting, description etc.) to be
filled in when they begin to write ‘properly’. Others use timelines,
spreadsheets, index cards or brainstorms, all tools we tend to associate with
activities such as manufacturing or accountancy rather than creative writing.
Whatever approach suits you, once you have made a plan, it is a good exercise
to test it against McKee’s analysis. If any scene doesn’t contain these
elements, you need to ask yourself if you really need it. Will it hold the
reader’s interest and carry the action forward? If not, cut it – and you will
find this a lot easier to do at the planning stage than when it is a complete
and polished miniature masterpiece.
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