Authors: Jerry Cleaver
The universal plot is a character's struggle to overcome a threatening problem—within himself, without, or both. Every one of Aristotle's plots follows this form. He changes the subject, the problem, what the character is struggling against, but not the plot itself. Whether the character is struggling against a man, society, the gods, himself, nature, or machine doesn't alter the plot in any way. It's still
someone against someone or something—always.
Life is a series of struggles. We're born. We have to learn to walk, talk, separate from our mother, get along with others, develop a sexual identity, get an education, find a mate and an occupation, rear a family, manage old age, die. It's
want, obstacle, action, resolution
over and over and over— one struggle after another. It's the human condition, the universal plot. The only one. That's all you need. That's plenty.
In using this plot (these elements), you need to be aware that your story and your characters do not live in the concepts of want, obstacle, action, etc. In putting together your story, you're working with your character, his actions, his words, his emotions. The word
want,
for example, may not be in your head at all. You'll be in a different region of your mind. You will have a character acting, talking, thinking, feeling, struggling on the page and in your imagination.
Sooner or later, depending on how you work, you need to go back and ask, "Who wants what?" Doing that requires a shift from the warm, real, living experience on the page to a colder, more analytical and objective frame of mind. That, in itself, can be irritating. Plus, this is new to you, so you may not be sure exactly what
want
is. You may remember there is
false
want as well as
dramatic
want. One works, and one doesn't, but you may not be sure of the difference. So, you may have to go back and review. All of this pulls you away from your story and may feel so irritating or intimidating that you won't bother.
Uncomfortable as it may be,
you must do it.
Step-by-step, check every scene and your overall story for want, obstacle, action, resolution, and emotion. At first, you won't be sure. It'll be hard to tell if you have dramatic want or not, but with practice it gets easier and easier, and eventually you will do it automatically without having to make a special effort. Whatever you do, don't blame yourself or start thinking that you don't have what it takes, just because it's tricky. Just remember this is the learning cycle. The learning cycle is: You start at
uncon
scious ineptitude.
You don't know what you don't know. Then as you develop, you progress to
conscious ineptitude.
You know what you don't know—what you need to work on. Next is
conscious mastery.
You can do it, but you have to pay a lot of attention and it's not natural. Last is
unconscious mastery.
It happens in you as reflex and doesn't require conscious thought or control.
A good way to practice is to analyze someone else's story for these elements. A good novel to do this on is
Lonesome Dove
by Larry Mc-Murtry.
This Boy's Life
by Tobias Wolfe and
Gone With the Wind
are also excellent for this purpose. Some short stories that are excellent for this are "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" by Ernest Hemingway, and "The Outstation" and "Macintosh," both by Somerset Maugham. The stories of Flannery O'Connor are also excellent. Go over a few pages a day doing this if you have time. Eventually you'll close the gap between seeing these elements in other people's work and seeing them in your own.
The thing to remember is that, for a while and off and on even after you've mastered it, it's going to feel uncomfortable or irritating to switch from the creative flow of your mind into the analytical and conceptual frame of mind. That's fine. It's no reflection on you. Don't let it sidetrack you. Go there, and do it. If you master these few elements, if you can put a story together in this way, no matter what other mistakes you make, you will succeed.
Speaking of doing it, it's time to put something on the page again. If you have something you want to go back to from previous writing, do that. If you're doing the full-story exercise, you'll be doing the next part.
EXERCISES
Thought exercise (Larry scene): You still have to put the thoughts in for one more character in the infidelity scene. You did the wife in the
last chapter. This time, go through and play the part of Larry, putting in his thoughts and emotions (worries, fears, hopes). Remember, he has no idea what's going on in the other character's mind.
SECOND FULL STORY, PART FOUR:
This is the resolution of the late date story. He's alone licking his wounds, trying to make sense of what happened and to come to some understanding of it. "Licking his wounds" means he's in pain. You need to ask yourself exactly what bothers him about losing her. What are his worries, doubts, regrets? He might find his way to some hope, eventually. He needs to see that he's the problem or consider that he might be. This is the moment of truth (longer than a moment), where either he has a painful realization that he's as screwy or screwier than she is,
or
he realizes it, but rationalizes his way out of it (distorting things even worse) by blaming it on her the way he has been doing all along. If he's back to blaming her at the end, it's a circular story in which he changes by becoming even more entrenched (even worse) at the end as a result of struggling with the dilemma. So, we know more about him than he does. We see his folly, but he can't stand to see it. Now, it's also possible to write it with a similar but different ending in which he has a true realization and feels,
Good Lord, what a fool I am,
as he sits alone staring into his drink.
Here are some scene exercises:
A husband and wife are doing dishes together and talking about winning the lottery. "If we won a million, we could retire," one says. "No, you have to pay taxes, and sometimes they give it to you over twenty years—fifty thousand a year." "Oh, then one of us could quit work." They go on to get into a serious and hurtful argument about which one could retire, which one deserves it more, etc. Remember, what you, the author, are up to, at all times, is revealing the characters and the nature of their relationship. That's what you need to do in this scene. If you do it well and bring it to a resolution (each discovers something awful or painful about how the other feels or about love/life; they both feel undervalued by the other; etc.), it could pass as a full story.
Taking a girlfriend or boyfriend to meet parents when he or she is the wrong class, religion, race, ethnic background, body type, looks. A boyfriend, for example, could be a pencil-necked geek and the father a macho jock.
Behind the scenes at a restaurant.
[11]
Point of View
The term
point of view
can mean several things. There are
person point of view, character point of view,
and
narrator point of view.
Person point of view
refers to which person (not which character) you use to tell the story. (First person = I. Second person =
you.
Third person =
he/she
.) You can tell a story from a
single characters
point of view (experience), but you can tell it in
different persons.
First person
point of view uses "I," and the "I" is a living character telling you the story. When you use first person, the character is automatically the narrator, a first person narrator. (More about narrators later.) "When I opened the package, I found a strange little statue." The "I" character is telling the story. He's the character/narrator.
Third person
point of view uses
"he"
or
"she."
The characters are living out the story before your eyes, but they are not telling it, as with first person. "When
she (he)
opened the package,
she (he)
found a strange little statue." On the simplest level, person is merely a mechanical difference. First person can be changed to third, as in the above example.
Second person
point of view uses
"you."
"When
you
opened the
package,
you
found a strange little statue." One idea is that using
"you"
makes readers feel more a part of the experience since you're telling them that they're doing it by saying
"you."
It can also work in the opposite way by making readers feel that the author is presumptuous and intrusive in telling them what they're doing and feeling. So, it's risky for that reason, but if it feels right and it gets you going, it's worth a try. You can always change it to another person later.
First and third persons are used the most. So, what's the difference? For the writer, and for some readers, using "I" provides a feeling of closer contact with the character. For the writer, that's good,
if it's true.
If you feel a stronger sense of the character because you are actually more in touch with him or her, and
if it comes out on the page,
that's good. The downside is that the
"I"
may make you feel that you're more in touch when you're not. Since you naturally feel closer to this
"I,"
you may develop
a false sense of connection with the character.
Using first person makes no real difference in terms of what you must do to bring your characters to life and make your story move. However, an imagined difference or a felt difference should be respected if it works, if it makes writing easier. Just be sure that you are working your craft—
want, obstacle, action
—regardless of point of view or anything else.
Another issue is that first person allows you to write about the unreliability of the narrator in a way that you couldn't otherwise. First person
can
be objective, which means what the narrator is telling us is fact and not distorted by his perception or his telling of it. As long as the issue isn't raised by the way the character is presenting the story, the "facts," we consider him to be objective, and it's called
first person objective.
Years ago, we were taught to never use first person unless we were also writing about the subjectivity and unreliability of the narrator. A famous story was used as the prime example of this strategy—Ring
Lardner's "Haircut." In it, the narrator is telling a story about a guy he (the narrator) thinks is a cut-up, a great prankster, and one hell of a lot of fun, and he's letting us know how much he liked the guy. In the story he tells, the prankster does a lot of sadistic, vicious things to people. He's so cruel that someone finally kills him "accidentally." The narrator is saddened by the loss of this "fun" guy in town. So, two stories are being told at once—one about the bastard and another about how the narrator interprets/distorts things. Here is some first person narration:
My roommate is such a stingy bitch. She won't share anything. She went nuts, screaming and yelling, just because I wore her best dress on a date I had with this great guy. I didn't ask her because she wasn't home and this fantastic guy had just asked me out. So, I wore her dress, which I happen to look a lot better in than she ever could. Me and my date got really drunk and he wanted to go skinny-dipping. How could I refuse? So her stupid dress got a little wet and muddy and ripped, and now she's freaking out because she thinks it's ruined and can't be cleaned. Plus, she wants me to move out. All because of one lousy dress—and a couple of other things she's trying to blame on me. Doesn't she know people are more important than things? What a bitch!
In this paragraph, we know there's a lot more going on than the character is aware of. When the
"I"
character is being revealed by
the way
she's telling/distorting the story, it's called
first person subjective.
Third person point of view
uses
"he"
or
"she."
Because the character is not telling the story, and he can't be distorting the facts of the story as they are presented, it's called
third person objective.
That doesn't mean the character can't misinterpret or distort things, but because the story is laid out by the author and we have the same objective experience as the character, we know what the facts of the situation are. The character may misinterpret or distort events in his thoughts or when he relates things to someone else (dialogue), but since he is not presenting the experience in the first place, we don't have to read between the lines to figure out what really happened. It's easy to see if he's twisting things or not.