2 CHAPTER TWO

Plotting

In the previous chapter I mentioned how the Nyberg model can provide us with a scaffolding (exposition/crisis with a deflection/and a resolution) to hang our story on.

Scenes also have scaffolding. Good scene work answers a question while also asking a new question for our protagonist to lean into. We string together enough scenes and we have a causal narrative chain of events that makes sense. We don’t necessarily know what’s going to happen in the scenes we’re composing but we know the answer/question pattern has to be in play to survive the hard work of writing the story and sustaining its narrative arc.

Similarly there are classic plot shapes that announce themselves to us as the story unfolds. They’re ingrained into our western storytelling DNA. Jerome Stern explored several of these plot archetypes in his fine book, Making Shapely Fiction. Here are my takes, slight re-workings, of seven of them.

The Quest

This is perhaps the oldest of storytelling shapes. Northrop Frye in The Secular Scripture connected it to a master Biblical narrative: the garden/the desert/the garden; Paradise; Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained. Characters begin in a kind of Eden; something disrupts their world, and they are sent into the wilderness on a quest. They complete the quest and return home, fundamentally changed. This is the plot shape to John Ford’s The Searchers. A massacre takes place. Ethan and Marty (Jeffrey Hunter) go on a seven-year exile in search of Debbie (Ethan’s niece) who is now held in captivity by the Comanche. Ethan, a racist, wants to kill as many Indians as possible; Marty wants to find and protect Debbie from Ethan. They all return. Marty’s perspective on whiteness has changed. He’s aware of his outsider status while also having a greater sense of belonging and kinship that isn’t tied into blood lines. Ethan returns, but doesn’t really belong in the new, more inclusive society, and thus in the film’s final image the door shuts on him, and he’s left adrift, to wander the earth. Debbie, married briefly to Chief Scar, literally crosses the threshold into the homestead, left to wonder how she’ll be accepted by her white neighbors.

In crime stories of the American hard-boiled tradition, the detective’s journey is often pyrrhic. What he uncovers on his quest is dark, disturbing, and the results of discovery cause him to die a little (figuratively) in solving the mystery.

Overall these stories are goal-oriented and lend themselves to action and volatile, often violent encounters. What these characters want is relatively clear. What are they willing to do to get it?

The Epiphany

James Joyce is most known for this form, the insight narrative. These are character-driven stories, firmly rooted in quotidian naturalism, that end with the protagonist suddenly realizing something. The plot can be somewhat episodic, a series of apparently discordant events, or it can be a well-orchestrated narrative that leads to a single resonating effect. The radiance felt at the end can be bright and resounding or a dim glow. The character can be significantly changed or taking baby steps in a new direction.

I had a creative writing teacher who once said all narratives are about coming to knowledge. That may be over simplifying things, but the epiphany narrative often focuses on lifting the veil off innocence, and revealing the corruption below the surface. There’s a sense of the powerless gaining power through hard-fought life experiences.

The Peripheral Narrator

This is one of my favorite plot lines: a peripheral narrator tells the story of a much more flashy character. It’s as if the flashy “specimen” character is being observed under a microscope. The peripheral narrator watches, empathizes, and comments on the actions of the “main” character. Many of us writers are observers in life, and this narrative lends itself to a position many of us are comfortable with, this outside-looking-in perspective. The point of view can be loving, critical, endearing, admiring, or a combination of any of these.

The point-of-view gives the story an element of restraint. We can create a wild character, but the peripheral narrator keeps things in check. William Wordsworth once said about poetry that form and meter controls the emotion, giving poetry that necessary quality of being reflected in tranquility. I see a peripheral narrator functioning in a similar way.

However, Rust Hills, a long-time Fiction Editor at Esquire, had what he referred to as Hills’s Law: a story with a peripheral narrator is about two characters, two people are changed by the events in the story, the flashy character and the peripheral voice telling the story. Hills’s model: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The story is as much about the very private and quiet Nick Carraway as it is about the flashy playboy who associates with gangsters, Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is murdered by the end of the story, and Nick needs to get away from it all and the people of the leisure class.

Collage

I’ll talk more about the iceberg story in the fourth chapter that focuses on the inner/outer components to narrative showing and telling, but this technique relies on photographic realism. We stay on the surface of things and rely on our readers drawing inferences from what they see in a scene and across scenes.

The art of subtext is doubled: inside scenes and across scenes.

Very much in the spirit of Soviet Cinema of the 1920s, a juxtaposition of images creates a series of meanings. The Kuleshov effect: a man looks to his left; cut to a bowl of soup; back to the man. We connect the images: oh, he must be hungry.

In this plot line, from the collision of short photographic scenes, emerges a narrative thread. Scenes should be evocative, attention grabbing, a series of haunting tableaux.

What to be wary of: make sure the story doesn’t become over-determined. Good scenes in a narrative chain should close off a prior question while opening up a new one to be explored. The danger with a collage narrative is that the scenes can get stuck in a replicating sameness: a father with his son at a restaurant makes fun of a waitress’s lisp, and imitates her voice in a falsetto Elmer Fudd pitch; later, on the subway ride home he comments on a stranger’s body odor, saying something sure is gamey in here; once he’s back at his apartment he tells his wife about the “bad rug” his boss wore at work and “honey don’t you think it’s time you started your diet? You could be in the Macy’s Day Parade—on a string.” In each scene he makes offensive shaming comments and the boy witnesses it all, feeling more and more distant from his dad. Yes, the insults escalate, but the story appears to be announcing itself too soon. Dad or the boy needs a counter-movement, something to re-route the story’s trajectory.

Slice of Life

Stories are about change, but slice of life stories really lean into the fictional world’s dirty realism setting: a night shift at a diner in which the wait staff is slammed because of an all-city band concert; a few hours for a weekly poker game; a thirty-minute guitar lesson. The strength of this story is in the details. That customer at the diner who complains that the pancakes are undercooked; the manager who checks the garbage for unused jellies; the waitress who flirts with the male customers and pays little attention to their wives or partners. In slice of life plots, the writer focuses on both routine and non-routine incidents. What makes the telling of this particular day different from any other day? What makes the ordinary experience suddenly extraordinary? How is the protagonist, placed under duress, changed? Readers will feel like they’re understanding things from the inside, what it means to be a waiter, a cab driver, a contract worker installing new windows, a teacher who works with the deaf.

The Visit and A Gathering of Strangers

Raymond Chandler once wrote that whenever you’re stuck and don’t know what to do next in a crime story, have two characters carrying guns crash through the door. He’s being a little bit facetious but the tenant still holds: a collision with another character creates all kinds of possibilities for a writer to survive the act of writing the story.

Both of these plot shapes revolve around what happens when a person or persons are placed in the same space with differing frames of reference.

The Visit often involves some sense of returning as a protagonist is confronted with the past or seeks to escape into an irretrievable past. Your protagonist is a former criminal who has moved to an upstate New York town. He now works as an auto mechanic when an unexpected car pulls up at the station. A figure smiles menacingly behind the windshield. “Hi, Tom. Or what name are you going by now?” The stranger’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. “Boss Gettys says hi. You remember Gettys?” Our protagonist is about to be forced back into a world of crime.

Family dynamics often make for good drama in stories of this type: the always popular sister in high school, now in her early thirties, shows up at your door one morning and asks you to drive her and her daughter to Canada to escape her abusive husband.

In A Gathering of Strangers a group of disparate people are forced together through abject circumstances: a bus breaks down in a snowstorm. People who don’t know each other are sheltered in a local church basement. The situation draws people together and through counterpointed characterization tensions can arise, stories told.

Of course all of these plot shapes can be mixed and matched, pulled out of our big pot of storytelling gumbo.

Scaffolding

Guitarists borrow licks from other guitarists; filmmakers pay homage to films they admire (when Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver looks into a glass of fizzing alka-seltzer director Martin Scorsese is doing a shout out to a meditative moment in Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her).

And writers, if you ask them, and they’re totally truthful, will give several instances of where the work of others has inspired creative choices they’ve made.

These creative choices can involve plotting.

Let’s say you’re writing a realistic slightly cruelly absurdist story that features a couch and two couples (one older; one younger) and it’s an after party party in which the couples are arguing departmental politics (the wives are English professors; the husbands are underemployed: one’s an adjunct instructor; the other a part-time librarian). Hmm. Where have I seen this before? Here the narrative is playing with and inverting some of the structures of Edward Albee’s classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I borrow and mix the scaffolding from other plots all the time.

And the example above I borrowed from “A Man in the Water,” an essay Robert Boswell wrote for our Feed the Lake collection of craft essays (NAR Press, 2016).

Full confession: I love film noir. When I was a graduate student I purchased Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward’s The Film Noir Encyclopedia and during the six years I pursued my PhD I tracked down and watched over 80% of the films listed in their hefty tome. So is it any wonder that some of this scaffolding found its way into my literary fiction?

In my short story “Essentials” I borrowed from the classic noir Laura and Bernard Malamud’s coming-of-age story “A Summer’s Reading.” In Laura, detective Mark McPherson investigates a murder and falls in love with the alleged decedent (he’s read her diaries) and fetishizes her through a painting of her he admires in the living room. The film explores obsession. One night, McPherson after falling asleep in front of the painting is awakened by the smell of perfume and the presence of Laura. She isn’t dead. Diane Redfern, decimated by a shotgun blast to the face, was the victim, not Laura Hunt.

I’ve always loved this moment. It’s pure cinematic magic.

My story centers around an estranged father who died of a heart attack and a young son who goes to his father’s apartment in search of some lost connection. One night while looking through his father’s things, he falls asleep and is awakened by the smell of perfume. A young woman, Melanie, a University of Toronto English major, is in the apartment, her hair wet with rain. The protagonist discovers not only were she and his father lovers but she was also tutoring him, teaching him some of the classics of literature. The father, an immigrant, had always wanted to appreciate some of the “essentials.”

This latter plot wrinkle was inspired by Bernard Malamud. In “A Summer’s Reading,” George Stoyonovich, unemployed and feeling disrespected, tells the neighborhood that he’s going to read 100 books over the summer. This gives him dignity and the respect of his community, but soon it’s discovered by his sister and his neighbor Mr. Cattanzara that George has been doing nothing toward this goal. Shamed and seeking redemption the story ends with George heading to the library: “There were books all over the place, wherever he looked, and though he was struggling to control an inward trembling, he easily counted off a hundred, then sat down at a table to read.”

In my story, Stan seeks a father’s legacy, what is he passing down to the son, if anything? He finds it. An overdue library book, one of the essentials, his father was reading with his tutor. Melanie had a key to the apartment and was there to find the book and return it to the library. Stan promises to do so, but he wants to read it first. In a clear echo of Malamud, “Essentials” ends: “She smiled and walked to the upholstered chair. When he looked up she was gone. He started reading.”

The father’s legacy is secure: the son will inherit a father’s love for literature.

Scaffolding gives writers ways to enhance a story’s trajectory, to shape where a plot might go. It’s a dialogic practice that enhances an appreciation for the past work and your own.