StoryStalking: Thickening the Plot

Plot: the events that move a story toward some particular effect

I’ve been preoccupied with understanding plot lately, and what I mean by that is the storytelling element of my writing. I’m convinced that writing a good novel requires two separate, albeit interrelated, skills. You have to be able to write a good sentence, but you also have to be able to spin a good yarn, to tell a story and tell it well.

There's an old axiom that says, writing "the king died and then the queen died," does not a plot make, but writing, "the king died and then the queen died of grief," does. 

Like journalism, it's the who, what, when, where and why that matters, and the how, in fact the how might be the kicker. How did the king die? How is it grief killed the queen? And do I, your reader, believe you?  If I stop and say, "Wait a minute, how can that be?" —then Houston, we have a problem.

Implausible? Impossible? Inconsistent?

From my teenager years, I wanted to write a novel. My biggest problem was I didn’t know what to write about… And then, to my shock, when I discovered something to write about, I still couldn’t figure out how to frame it, how to shape it into a good story.

So, here's the point: when a writer sees a still life, instead of studying how it looks, they're thinking about what it means: "Hmmm, snake… hmmm, apple…  hmmmm, books… how do these things fit together?" Off the top of my head, I say, let's start with Eve and idea of Eden. Let's talk about the danger of biting into that apple, of being beguiled by that snake. That's one way to make meaning out the image. And what about the books? Well, it could be religion, or could be the woman is an author...

So tell me the story about this still life. When is this? Where is this? Who smokes those pipes? Who drinks from that silver goblet? Who set the wine carafe on the table? How did it get there? And why was it left there? What happened before, during and after this meal? Was it a meal?

It sounds simplistic to say that in order to keep the plot moving forward, there has to be something core to resolve, but that is the bottom line. There has to be something that the reader and the characters can actually become involved in caring about. That's why if the king and queen simply die, we don't really care, but if the queen dies of grief, we might. We might want to know how that came to happen, what that grief is about. We smell a love story, and truth is, most stories are about finding love or staying alive—or something of that magnitude.

Still, the overarching story will fall flat unless it is refined into something much more specific. And it's trouble that will make it interesting. The love story in The Appassionata, the novel I’m writing,  is essentially over in the ordinary sense of the word early on because one of the characters involved is dead—but then it takes a turn, like Heathcliff and Kathy. This is interesting to me because a few years ago I was in a workshop where we were asked to name of the book we most wished we had written and without hesitation, I said Wuthering Heights. I guess The Appassionata is my Wuthering Heights.

One of elements that drives my story forward is the question of whether the dead man’s letter to his lover will be delivered into her hands, a rather simple thing, but surrounded in complexity.

This is the story between Géricault and Alexandra. Their affair was illicit (she was married to another man), their love insatiable and unresolved. They were forced apart. Alexandra was incarcerated by her husband, an action the Napoleonic Code allowed. Alexandra was guarded, her mail not just read, but controlled. Getting the letter to her takes stealth and will, and before it's ever delivered Géricault dies.

The letter is in the hands of composer, Louise Farrenc. She is not unsympathetic, but she doesn’t feel any particular drive to deliver the letter, either. She has fears and obligations that keep her from taking action. She doesn’t really know the lover's story, feels no particular sympathy. As the reader learns Alexandra and Géricault’s story, it becomes increasingly clear to them that the letter must be delivered. The tension builds.

The most interesting thing for me has been finding the logic of it… I started by closing down all obvious avenues for delivering the letter. Alexandra is locked up. No one connected to Géricault, indeed no one who might be sympathetic, is allowed access to her. Her husband wants to isolate her from all possible contact and knowledge of her lover, wants to make sure she knows absolutely nothing.

Plot is an architectural undertaking. If you’ve seen the film, Inception, you’ll remember that one of the pieces the dream team had to put into place was the maze that underpinned the "scenes" in the dream. (You'll also remember that Ariadne was the maze-builder. I liked that synchronicity.) The dream team then had to find their way through the maze in order to accomplish their goals. The better the maze, if I remember rightly, the more time they had. The maze wasn't apparent, it was beneath the surface. That's important.

Shaping a good plot is similar. The trick is to design a clever maze and watch your characters find their way through it. I walked in one of those garden mazes in France, built with hedges you can’t quite see over—at least if you're short like me. I was surprised by the dead ends. It looked like it would be a snap to walk it, but in fact it not only wasn't a snap, there weren't any clues, really to make it easier. It felt like luck played a role because you could make the same mistake over and over without knowing it. It seemed there was no way to judge whether you were making the same mistake a second time.

A good plot structure is the same, I think, full of tricky dead ends, places where you, the author, have to back up and try another approach. Rule of thumb: if the maze is too simple, your plot will be too. What I'm saying is that as a writer, the best possible outcome is to get baffled by you own story now and then, by how to get from Point A to Point B, because life is that way. When a good plot thickens well, it becomes an imbroglio—an intricate and perplexing state of affairs that's in need of resolution. You don't want the resolution of your story to be predictable, you want it to be intriguing.