That Golden Gate: Structuring Plot

I took a Writers Digest “webeminar” a few days ago. The visuals were terrible. One silly clip art piece up for almost the whole of the talk. The workshop itself was on structuring story. I chose the topic because it’s an area I find challenging in my own writing.

I tend toward the “episodic,” which means there’s a certain repetition and lack of forward momentum in my fiction. For some readers, Requiem bogs down in the middle. I also find the ending less than satisfying. These are things I’m working hard to avoid in my current novel. So, I welcomed the focus on plot development and structure. The instructor, James Scott Bell, had some good ideas. His primary metaphor was a suspension bridge—that's why we looked at a clip art sketch of one for most of the hour and a half he talked.

I say, think about the Golden Gate bridge: now there’s a suspension bridge worth looking at for an hour or more. Like all suspension bridge’s it’s divided into three parts. The approach, the main span, and the egress. Bell’s first point was that these three sections are predictable lengths: the approach and egress are together about the same distance as the middle.

First of all, Belle spoke of the approach. One begins a good story with a disturbance. This does not have to be a crisis, rather it's a disturbance. Bell used The Wizard of Oz as an example. In the opening, Dorothy is running away from Mrs. Gultch who threatened to take Toto. When he asked us to recall The Wizard of Oz, I imagined the disturbance to be the tornado. But the “disturbance,” is not necessarily huge. Rather it’s something that suggests the complications and complexity the main character will face.

The approach, then, develops this disturbance and basically tells the reader three things about the story:

1. It introduces the lead characters.
2. It introduces the story world and gives the reader a sense of the “rules” by which that world plays.
3. It introduces the tone of the story, letting the reader know whether they’re in for humor or suspense or savior faire.

Bell next spoke of the pylons that support the middle span. He saw these as specific moments in the plot structure, doorways, essentially, that the main character passes through in such a way that there's no turning back. I immediately thought of the opening of Herman’s Hesse’s, Demian. Demian made such an impression on me in my early twenties, that I wanted to burn the book in a ritual and ingest the ashes so as to completely absorb what I had read. Really. It was the sixties; what can I say?

In any event, its main character, Emil Sinclair, passes through just such a doorway. He lives in a bourgeois home where everything unfolds “perfectly,” as society expects. He is an adolescent when we meet him, and has always been the “perfect” son. Through a series of events that aren’t fair, a school bully convinces him to steal—the bully is extorting money in exchange for leaving Sinclair alone. Of course the situation only gets darker as the bully demands more. Sinclair can tell no one what’s happening because of his shame.

In Hesse’s story, the first theft may be the moment of no return, or perhaps the moment stretches over the broader set of actions. There is a point when Sinclair realizes what has happened to him. He sees that everything has shifted. He’s now alone, isolated by his secret and unable to resolve the crisis he’s fallen into. He feels desperate. In my mind, that is the moment he passes through the first pylon. There is no way to go back to life the way it was; he can only press on.

Another thing Bell said was that the opposition has to be stronger. Bell prefers that the opposition be personified in a character. In the case of Demian, Hesse’s bully is older, bigger, more wily and street wise, meaner, and less moral. He has all the power. It’s difficult to see how Sinclair can escape his grasp.

As the book moves into the main span, the part of the bridge that actually crosses the channel from one side to the other, Hesse introduces the character for whom the book is named, Demian. Demain is going to play the role of Sinclair’s savior, but he’s not an ordinary savior—or perhaps he is, perhaps all real saviors are demanding. Demian leads Sinclair down the path of self-discovery. He does not have any intention of delivering the boy back to the innocence of his bourgeois family life. He intends to draw Sinclair into the deeper spiritual truths of life. Hesse at the time was working with Carl Jung. The novel was a response.

Bell calls the middle “the muddle” where complications and complexities unfold, and cross-currents develop. He sums this entire span up in the idea that the character is “trying to avoid death,” whether it’s external, in some kind of Bruce-Willis-scenario, or a more subtle, inner death. Pride and Prejudice comes to mind. Lizzy’s attempt to “avoid death,” is to save herself from a meaningless marriage and find love while around her she’s being pushed to marry for practical and social reasons. Not only that, she’s choosing poorly herself, seeing her sister jilted, and feeling disillusioned about love—tempted perhaps to give up on her ideals.

Bell suggests there should be a “pet-the-dog” moment early on, a moment where the character risks something to assist another, and may get into deeper trouble because of it. I’m not sure if there is such a moment in Demian. It doesn’t stand out in my mind, what I do remember is Demian beating up the bully, basically intervening in the circumstances in a way that puts himself at risk and gives Sinclair relief. That could be considered a pet-the-dog moment; it’s simply been passed on to the another important character. In Pride and Prejudice, Lizzy’s pet-the-dog moment must be found in her attempts to assist her sister, Jane, to marry Mr. Bingley. But in both cases, it’s not a tight fit, which leaves me thinking there are many ways to deepen our affection for the main character, which is what Bell says this moment is about.

As the character approaches the second pylon, the one that actually delivers us into the resolution of the story, Bell says there should be a “clue” or a “discovery” that gives the character a deeper understanding of what’s at risk, of who they are—something that will compel them into battling their way to resolution. I suspect the moment when Lizzy passes through the final pylon, is when she reads the letter from Mr. Darcy and sees that she has misjudged him. In that moment she changes, and starts to seek what we’ve wanted for her all along—Mr. Darcy. If that is the moment when she passes onto the egress, the final movement toward resolution, it reflects a new clarity, where things that used to look one way, now look another. New information, new understanding.

Bell says the moment often manifests as a set-back, when the main character has to decide anew that the battle is worth the effort. He says the transition should contain the “Hugh Factor.” He’s named this after James Bond. At the opening of every James Bond film, Hugh shows Bond some high-tech gadgets he can use to save himself. Now the time has come; he has to use those tools to survive. Bell’s point is that the tools, whatever they are, were introduced early on, at opening of the story. Otherwise, we won’t believe it when they’re suddenly there to assist our character through this final crisis.

What comes to mind here is my own life, which isn’t a story, of course. But life does present the curious capacity for synchronicity—where the “tools” one needs come from subtle and sometimes mysterious sources, and aren’t so obvious as Hugh’s meeting with James Bond. When I was about four, I started taking swimming lessons. I was so short, even the shallow end of the YMCA pool was over my head. I learned how to be in water over my head, and specifically, how to “bob,” which was falling straight down to the bottom and pushing off with one’s feet to come back to the top, blowing bubbles on the way up.

Not long after, that winter, I tried to take a short cut across the pond to catch up with my older brother and his friend who were walking too fast for me to keep up. I ran out on the ice and fell through. It was about nine feet of water. I remember going down in the murky cold, touching the bottom with my feet and pushing off like I’d learned at the Y. As I came up I blew all the air out of my lungs, pushing for the surface, just like I’d learned. I came up where I went down. My brother and his friend managed to rescue me and I’m here to tell my story. The swimming lessons—learning to bob—seems like the “Hugh Factor” at work. If it had been written into a story, it would have been as casual and arbitrary in my busy four-year-old life as it was, just one thing that happened “way over there someplace.”

Bringing a story to a satisfying end is not easy. I’m sure that’s why Hemingway rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms so many times. “I had rewritten the ending thirty-nine times in manuscript," he tells us, "and now I worked it thirty times in proof, trying to get it right. I finally got it right.” Bell says there are essentially three ways to end a story:

1. The lead wins, overcoming the obstacles.
2. The lead neither wins nor loses, the outcome is ambiguous.
3. The lead loses, usually because of tragic flaw or wrong objective.

He says that what distinguishes a literary novel is usually its ambiguous ending. He uses Catcher in the Rye as an example. In the end Holden Caulfield is in a mental institution. We’ve no idea if he’s going to be okay or destroyed. Another example Bell gave is the film, Casablanca. In spite of his plan to run off with Elsa, Rick helps her escape with her husband. We don’t know whether his choice means happiness or despair for either Rick and Elsa. We’re not even sure if Rick’s choice is the sacrifice it seems to be.

The rule of thumb: the approach and the egress take up half the book, the main span takes up the other half. A thought about it all: When we approach the Golden Gate and cross it, there are a range of emotional and aesthetic experiences that carry us, depending on the weather, the time of day, the last time there was an earthquake, our mode of transportation—or whether we're feeling suicidal. Seems to me, a good novel would be the same.