Let’s Talk About Plot

By: Steven Tutino

“...in lieu of plot you may find that you have a sort of temporary destination, perhaps a scene that you envision as the climax. So you write toward this scene, but when you get there, or close, you see that because of all you’ve learned about your characters along the way, it no longer works.”

                                                                                                                          Ann Lamott Bird by Bird

            Whenever, it comes to writing, plot has always been my one true weakness.  I rather think that detail is quite easy to achieve, like in a painting or a sketch; the nose or the eyes, the eyelashes, and the red lips are something any one can do with minor difficulty. Rather, the most important thing is to first complete the painting or work of art and then focus on the peculiarities. I think a good well developed story that consists of not too much detail has more success than a story that has plenty of detail, but the plot is not as effective and clear.

            In elementary school, whenever I(my classmates) had creative writing classes and we were discussing effective strategies in order to write a story, our instructor  told to draw a spider; the body with all its eight stick legs with large circles at the end of them. We could have used multiple spiders, some strictly for characters or just for plot.  I always looked forward to creative writing with great enthusiasm, yet and up to this day, whenever I start to write my piece, a pure and simple mess occurs! I remember writing a story about a couple of friends and myself on some kind of quest and as soon as I began to read it out loud, I realized my story made absolutely no sense, the characters were everywhere, some disappeared, while some new ones magically appeared. Of course, I think my skills as a writer have improved since then but the way I go about developing my plot has not changed one bit. I usually have this very strong idea and then I base my entire story around that plot/idea, the beginning to the end, which my mind is always able to conjure up without thinking things through. I think it comes down to a general problem that my plot carries the characters and the entire story, rather than the other way around. For example, I like the idea of suicide endings and I base my entire story on how everything will culminate and lead up to that. Then, once in the stage of writing my story I realize that the connection between the ending and the characters I have put on the page is implausible.  

            In plot, and I know I am probably repeating what other writers have insisted on for the past thousands of years, desires and goals are crucial. If your story is about some girl for instance, who seems to walk through life as though she were a zombie or in a dream, perhaps she is being controlled by forces she cannot comprehend such as her unconscious. But you as the writer must provide us with clues, hints, obstacles she encounters that begin to give us a sense of what her conflict consists of.

            Always write down your ideas! Please! Unless you have another method that is beneficial to how you go about writing, you should always carry a portable notebook and writing utensil around you.  Ever since I have been a student in a creative writing class, I have written almost if not all of my ideas down, and although I now realize that those ideas and pieces of dialogue will not serve as utile in my current endeavours, I am simply content with the fact that I expressed myself on paper and threw up all that junk lying in my system. I am someone who reflects and thinks about a lot of different scenarios and dialogue. I tell myself that I will remember to write them down, then I got to work and halfway during my shift, I will have forgotten everything; only a vague distorted glimmer of light remains in the far back of my mind.  Neither will I throw out any of those writings because they can serve as a guide to embark on another creative project.

           While I think that plot and character are inseparable, I also believe in compromise, in the sense that if I want to make that suicide the ultimate moment in my piece, then I might have to change something about the characters or the entire story itself and re-start from scratch. On the other hand, if I truly feel within my body and soul that my characters are staying with me on this one, then I would scrape out the plot, hands down. I think this latter point of view is more effective because if the climax or denouement you have created does not fit in or make logical sense with the progression and characterisation of your characters, then it will simply not be believable. I would rather preserve and help bring to life those characters that I created, that I conjured up, in times of sadness, stress and despair, which are a foil for my inner turmoil, my personality and my take on the world. I am currently in the midst of writing a major project for my creative writing class and I recently came to the realization that all those notes, writings and ideas for an ending just do not make sense, simply because I was too stubborn to admit to myself that the characterizations and motifs do not one hundred percent match up to my desired ending. They are incompatible. Now I have decided to erase the plot and my ending while still preserving the same sense of conflicts found within my previous characters.  Novelist John Gardner describes the purpose off not just plot but fiction as“...creating a dream in the reader’s mind. We may observe, first, that if the effect of the dream is to be powerful, the dream must probably be vivid and continuous-vivid because if we are not clear about what it is that we’re dreaming, who and where the characters are, what it is that they’re doing or trying to do and why, our emotions and judgement must be confused, dissipated, or blocked; and continuous because a repeatedly interrupted flow of action must necessarily have less force than action directly carried through from its beginning to its conclusion.” This I think is something to be cherished and preserved as one of the true marks of being an authentic effective writer. I believe we writers simply know and feel when we have accomplished the ‘dream’ in our works. The reward is simply priceless.

            My big point: always make your characters guide and create your story. I think we have to embody the role of a parent in relation to our characters. They are like our children, innocent, learning something new along the way, encountering obstacles, and yet it is our job as a parent/guardian to simply hold their hand along the way, even though we have no clue where they are taking us.  Once your character achieves what he wants or your story is about to reach its end, I do think that something totally out of the blues can occur, but your entire story, from the beginning should build up to that crucial scene, when everything is about to come to an end; when she tells him that their relationship will not work out, where the protagonist leaves with knowledge that no one else possesses, yet with some little ember of dignity and respect hiding beneath that veil of darkness.

            I believe many struggling writers like myself are like little embers trapped and lost in darkness, but with the potential to grow and radiate through the dark into a fiery burning sun in order to create some of the best plots and pieces of writing the world has ever seen. We just have to avoid the sprinklers!