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By Mark Orrin
Chuck Hellman, other combined sources

 

 

To plan a good fiction-structured plot (effective non-fiction memoirs will usually rest on these structures, too), you need elements working together that are seldom found in ideal form in short or long narrative, but that you ought to strive to achieve.  One name for this structure is the “plot skeleton,” which features five “bones”:

• A believable and sympathetic or “relatable” central character;
• Her/his urgent and difficult problem;
• This central character’s attempts to resolve the problem, which all not only fail, but make his/her situation ever more desperate;
• The crisis – the central character’s last chance to “win” or resolve his/her problem;
• The plot’s successful resolution, <i>brought about by actions directly springing from the central character’s own strongest character traits: courage, ingenuity, passionate love, sense of duty, etc.

You’ll find such bones solidly grown under the skin of just about any suspense/thriller/mystery best-seller (and most “literary fiction” that works well, too) on the bookshelves.

The reverse of this plot skeleton would be a story in which the central character is the villain, whose problem involves attempting successful perpetration of his/her villainy, and whose story ends, rather than with his/her victory, with defeat, “sowed” by the very character traits that have almost enabled him/her to “get away with it.”  For an almost perfect pattern of such a story (in this case engaging two villains, one the protagonist, who oppose each other), consider, in the noirish film classic, “The Sweet Smell of Success.”  This tale recounts the progress/regress toward personal destruction of both slimy New York City press agent-protagonist, Sydney Falco, portrayed by actor Tony Curtis, and his nemesis, powerful gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker, played by Burt Lancaster.  (Earlier, classic playwright William Shakespeare also built his “Macbeth” and “Richard III” plots using such dynamics.)

Sometimes an unconventional central character who’s a strong admixture of what’s traditionally considered good and evil allows a novelist to let a hero or heroine of less-than-sterling character succeed.  If you take Miss Thompson as its central character, “Rain,” by W. Somerset Maugham, has this type of complete plot skeleton.  Miss Thompson is a raucous prostitute, forced by quarantine to stay over at Pago Pago on her way home from Honolulu to Apia.  Here a missionary, Mr. Davidson, threatens to make trouble for the governor unless he deports Miss Thompson to the mainland, where a prison sentence awaits her.  Her problem is thus serious and urgent.  She tries to solve it first by appealing to the governor and to Dr. MacPhail.  These attempts failing, she gives in to Mr. Davidson and allows him “to save her soul.”  She becomes a changed woman, utterly crushed and transformed.  Then she seduces Davidson, who afterwards cuts his throat in remorse and horror.  The following day we find Miss Thompson again dressed and made up in her old manner, her raucous laughter ringing again in triumph.

If the protagonist’s chief problem is in fact another person and that person’s actions, overt or surreptitious, in opposition to the protagonist’s aims, the writer had better make this “antagonist” a truly formidable individual and the clear and dominant locus, even of a cluster of the difficulties the protagonist faces.

Some writing manuals insist this kind of skeleton be the only structure of successful popular fiction; but in fact, though many short stories and books begin this way, nearly all of them lack the third element (the successive failing attempts) and the fifth (the central character’s victory by his own efforts or defeat as he’s trapped by the consequences of his very strongest character traits).  The third element gets left out because it’s too hard to cram into a short story or because a novelist doesn’t exercise enough imagination; and the fifth is neglected because too “pat” resolution would make the plot trite.  When a story has only two possible endings, <span style=”font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;”>it’s hard to surprise the reader with either; when the story has only one conventional ending (the triumph of the hero), surprise is even harder to achieve.

Nevertheless, most plotted stories are built around some kind of conflict or competition whose outcome is in doubt from the start.  The beginning of the story sets out the terms of the conflict; the middle is the contest itself; the ending is the outcome.  If this were all there was to fiction writing, most plotted stories would be unbearably predictable.  In practice, what usually happens is that the author uses the conflict structure to <i>misdirect</i> the reader – and the story’s real meaning turns out to be something altogether different from what’s initially expected.  Yet it’s vitally important that the writer establish three story elements as soon as possible: Character (most crucially, the central one’s), Conflict (again, most crucially, the central character’s dilemma), and Context (the essence of the “landscape” or “stage” on which the central character wrestles with and resolves his/her conflict).

Conflict can be a useful way to expose character – we learn things about people when they are under stress that we’d never find out otherwise.  Aside from this, conflict is a convenient and simple way of keeping the reader interested until you can lead her to whatever it is that you want to reveal.

Next: Common Plotting Faults and What to Do About Them

 

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Book Editing Associates