HOMEWORK

Good news! My entire novel as it exists has been placed in outline form. Part of it was written out, part of it typed. But now, it exists in one (too long!) outline. So my work at rewrites officially begins with a study of plot. I've done POV and the SHOWING and TELLING. Now it's about understanding Plot.

Here's a few notes about the issue of PLOT excerpted from one of the best books on the subject: Plot by Ansen Dibell.

What is Plot?

Plot is built of significant events in a given story—significant because they have important consequences. Taking a shower isn’t necessarily plot, or braiding one’s hair, or opening a door. Let’s call them incidents. They happen, but they don’t lead to anything much. No important consequences. But if the character is Rapunzel, and the hair is what’s going to let the prince climb to her window, braiding her hair is a crucial action. Taking a shower is, in Psycho, considerably more dramatic and shocking that the left of a large sum of money, both in itself and in terms of its later repercussions.
It’s a cause that has significant effects. Cause and effect: that’s what makes plot.

Plot is the things characters do, feel, think, or say, that make a difference to what comes afterward. Thought or emotion crosses the line into plot when it becomes action and causes reaction.

Plotting is a way of looking at things. It’s a way of deciding what’s important and then showing it to be important through the way you construct and connect the major events of your story. It’s the way you show things mattering.

For a reader to care about your story, there has to be something at stake—something of value to gain, something of value to be lost. Paul Boles, in his book, Storycrafting, called it “wrestling.” One of the forces may be external to the main character or both forces may be within the protagonist (inner struggles).

Showing, in fiction, means creating scenes. You have to be able to cast your ideas in terms of something happening, people talking and doing, an event going on while the reader reads. If you’re not writing scenes, you may be writing fine essays, or speeches, or sermons—but you’re not writing fiction.

Definition: A scene is one connected and sequential action, together with its embedded description and background material. It’s dramatized, shown, rather than being summarized or talked about.

VERY IMPORTANT: A scene can convey many things: moods, attitudes, a sense of place and time, an anticipation of what’s to come, a reflection of what’s past. But first and foremost, a scene must advance the plot and demonstrate the characters. You may not fully know what a given scene’s job is, whether simple or complex, until you’ve written it. You may need to go back and cut away the things that would mislead a reader, and add things to support, lead into, and highlight that scene’s special chores in the context of the whole story. But when the story is finished, no matter how many rewrites it takes, you ought to be able to name to yourself what each scene brought out, how it developed the characters, how it showed action or led toward consequences.

Any story needs to be founded on an effective and strongly-felt conflict, in which the opposing forces—people, ideas, attitudes, or a mix—are at least fairly evenly matched, enough so that the final outcome is in doubt.
Struggle, conflict, dissatisfaction, aspiration, choice: these are the basis of effective plots.



HOW TO TEST A STORY IDEA

Is it your story to tell?

Is it something you really care about, something you partly understand, something that seems to want working out?


Is it too personal for readers to become involved with?

Ask yourself about any story idea, whether it’s something that’s too personal, something that’s very important to you but would justifiably bore a stranger sitting next to you on a cross-country bus. That’s the problem with autobiographical or fact-based fiction. You have to be able to distance yourself. You have to be, in some meaningful sense, free of it before you’re ready to write about it. You have to be willing to look at it through a stranger’s eyes—the eyes of your potential readers.

Is it going somewhere?

Ask yourself: is this an idea with a dynamic? A motor-powered bathtub is still a bathtub. Does you r idea divide itself into a vivid opening, one or more specific developments, and a solid ending? Can you block out in your mind a beginning scene, intermediate scenes, a final confrontation or resolution of some kind?
Make a poster and put it up where you write: PLOT IS A VERB.

What’s at stake?

Finally, ask yourself: Is there something quite specific and vital at stake—not just to me, but to one or more of the characters involved? Any fiction, however literary, still has to possess some dynamic tension, even it it’s one of irony or a surprising contrast. Somehting has to be seen to matter, and to change—even in a mood piece. The story has to move. If you choose not to have a traditional plot, you may have to work twice as hard to make your chosen alternate work as compellingly.
Ideally, you should be able to express the core plot in a sentence or two, in about the same space and style as a program listings in the TV Guide. Example: The police chief of a New England vacation community, although terrified of the ocean, sets out to destroy a huge killer shark—Jaws.

Excerpt from: Chapter One of PLOT by Ansen Dibell.

More to follow.

ANGEL