Introduction to Plot: Deborah Poe s Aluminum and An Unspoken Hunger, by Terry Tempest Williams Jordan Hartt To me, the story is where the language is working. ~Aimee Bender Let us define plot. With apologies to E.M. Forster: we have defined a story as the overall effect of the artistic rendering of some or all of these inextricable craft elements: sensory detail; setting(s): natural; setting(s): time/place; central or viewpoint characters; peripheral characters; point(s) of view; first-person; thirdperson omniscient; third-person limited; third-person observational/objective; second-person; verb tense movement (present, past, future, modal, etc.); plot; tension/conflict; moment of (non)decision(s); result of (non)decision(s)/ character (non)change(s); ending(s); structure; pacing; visual arrangement; tone/language/style; dialogue; titles; and thought/theme. A plot is simply one of these twenty-four story elements: a plot is the overall arc of character emotion in a story, incited by a character wanting something, and what they are willing or unwilling to do in their attempts to get it. Janet Burroway describes it as follows: A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance. The dictionary, of course, gives us the story definition 1., The main events of a play, novel, movie, or similar work, devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence as well as a twirling-mustache definition, 2., a plan made in secret by a group of people to do something illegal or harmful. We ll confine our discussion to the first of those two definitions! Some writers put too much into plot; some writers too little. Your belief in the importance of plot on this spectrum helps define your personal taste and personal aesthetic in the stories you choose to read and to write. But plot must be in a story, in whatever form it takes: a plot is a story s human engine: without it, our stories won t move. Plot is therefore part of the story, but not the story itself. This human engine is often the action or introspection that keeps us reading. In poetry, it often takes on intellectual form, in which a narrative I compares realworld features peaches in a tree, a birthday cake (or what poet and translator John Balaban calls the ocean of the actual ) to a human emotion or intellectual problem (what Balaban calls the pearl : the poem itself.) This can also be a feature of prose, but prose stories tend to give a character something more to
pursue than an intellectual problem, and put obstacles in their path to prevent them from getting it, as opposed to lyrical introspection. However, this is not always the case: consider Stephen s wanderings along the beach in Ulysses, or the philosophical musings of Levin in Anna Karenina, among many others. In other words, plot can be the flimsiest of gossamer threads, or massive scenes taking place over many years or anything on the spectrum of scale. In Virginia Woolf s Mrs Dalloway, for example, the character Clarissa Dalloway goes to buy flowers in London, in June. A seemingly small plot, yet this simple beginning plot drives an entire novel of memories and feelings and spins off her emotions about Peter Walsh, her emotions about Lady Bruton, the internal struggles of the veteran Septimus Warren Smith, and dozens of other emotional journeys within these characters. On the other hand, plots can also be maximalist. In Leo Tolstoy s War and Peace, for instance, Napoleon invades Russia, covering a massive canvas. In Ann Patchett s Bel Canto, terrorists take over an embassy. The Grapes of Wrath covers mass migrations of people, represented through the Joad family. Novels and even short stories by Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, James Michener, and hundreds of other writers can span centuries, multiple landscapes, dozens of characters. Going the other way, consider Jamaica Kincaid s Girl, which is a (one-sided) conversation between mother and daughter. Not something that would appear on the evening news, but to the characters themselves, it is the entire world. And this is what is important. Going back to Burroway: plot is a series of events fueled by character emotion. It isn t the size or grandeur of our plots that matter: what matters is that, whatever the plot, that the human emotion be real, and important, to the characters who are feeling it. That naturally causes what we call in creativewritingese: something must be at stake. That there be real fear, or real joy, or real threat, or real promise, or real love, or real jealousy, or real hope, or real opportunity. Our characters feel something, which translates to what readers will feel. What keeps us writing? What keeps readers reading? Plot arises naturally, if it is to be real emotion. Sometimes, we attempt to cheat, and create artificial plots, in order to build our stories around something that we think is compelling. But these plots run the risk of feeling artificial, with no corresponding human emotion.
We ve all read stories or novels in which we simply couldn t bring ourselves to care about the characters, their issues, or the story itself. We ve all said, at some point, who cares, and put the story down. Sometimes it s the fault of language but more often it s the false note of false emotion: that the characters are simply puppets or actors, without anything really at stake. As John Gardner writes, This is perhaps the chief offense in bad fiction: we sense that characters are being manipulated, forced to do things they would really not do. On the other hand, we ve all read stories that felt so real that we felt the emotions deeply within ourselves. These stories touch us and stay with us. Deborah Poe s story Aluminum and Terry Tempest Williams story An Unspoken Hunger both show how plot arises from character. First, the 301-word story Aluminum : http://www.kahini.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/02281801.pdf The story is divided into two voices, helpfully presented in both standard text (the voice of the first character) and italicized text (the voice of the second character.) This visual arrangement, in a story that creates its own grammatical rules, asks the reader to read the story on the story s own terms; this visual arrangement allows each voice to fully stand out. Notice what the first character wants, and what they are willing to do to try to get it. Notice what the second character wants, and how they attempt to get it. Notice the gaps in space, and time, in how the event(s) is/are related. And notice how in the first voice, we are hearing the external voice oh brittany baby and in the second, we are overhearing internal thoughts: i laid real still. These juxtapositions, this awareness that it is character that is important, not necessarily the inciting events themselves, is what creates the human engine, the human feelings, that make up the plot which lead to the events that happen. Plot following, and being closely tied, to character. What can you determine about the character of the first speaker, through the words that are spoken? What can you determine about the character of the second character, based on her thoughts? How do these conflicting characters lead to the events that occur?
In the 77-word short nonfiction essay An Unspoken Hunger, by Terry Tempest Williams, we continue to see how plot arises from character. Here is the essay in its entirety: It is an unspoken hunger we deflect with knives one avocado between us, cut neatly in half, twisted then separated from the large wooden pit. With the green fleshy boats in hand we slice vertical strips from one end to the other. Vegetable planks. We smother the avocado with salsa, hot chiles at noon in the desert. We look at one another and smile, eating avocados with sharp silver blades, risking the blood of our tongues repeatedly. In this subtle first-person narrative, we re presented with two characters. The want of each is given immediately, both in the title, and in the very first five lines of the story. There is an unspoken hunger. The obstacle to this hunger what? We don t know. We don t know why they can t satisfy this hunger, and we don t know whether it s literal or metaphorical. We can guess, and this unknown, and this guessing, pulls us through the story. Plot is the human engine of the story, fueled by characters wanting something, not being able to get it, and how they go about trying to get it. It is important to our stories that these wants, and obstacles, arise naturally out of character. These plots can be a slim or as large as necessary to serve as our story s engine. It s not the scale that matters: what matters is the presence of real human emotion. Eleven Writing Exercises a) Write a 300-word short story that creates its own grammatical rules. Teach the reader how to read the story. What can you do with punctuation, non-capitalization, visual spacing on the page? Can this create a story that was previously inaccessible through standard prose? b) Write 300 words in which the plot is that two characters feel very differently about a shared experience. Access both voices in some way. c) A six-word story often (erroneously) ascribed to Ernest Hemingway: For sale, baby shoes: never worn. Write a six-word story. Then expand to twenty words only. Add a title. d) Ezra Pound s fourteen-word story (with the line break removed): The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet black bough. With the plot being the beauty, transience, and fragility of humans. Try a fourteen-word story, making whatever abstraction (the humility, arrogance, frustration, joy, suffering, loss, successes) of humans concrete, in some fashion.
e) In his books on writing, John Gardner discusses how very often writers will simply steal a plot, in order to build their language around some kind of human engine. Steal the plot of Romeo and Juliet two people in love, but in two opposing families but change the characters and setting. What kind of opposing groups can you use? f) Novelist Curtis Sittenfield updates the plot of Pride and Prejudice in her novel Eligible. Do the same: perhaps a character views the another character as arrogant and obnoxious, only to slowly fall in love. Try it in 101 words. Or what if a character falls slowly out of love? Try that in 300 words. g) Steal the plot of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A black man and a white boy are both on the run. But why? What are they running from? Where are they safe? Where are they unsafe? Set it in 2018, in the contemporary United States. Try it in 300 words. h) If we think of plot as an equation: [Character Want] + [Obstacle] = [Conflict] and [Conflict] = [Plot], write 101 words that turns this equation on its head: subvert it. Have a character not want anything, for 101 words. What do you notice? Does it work? Does it not work? How can lyrical language keep the reader interested, even if the character refuses to want anything. Or can it? i) In 300 words, have a character try to get approval from a parent, or an employer, or a teacher. Have the other character refuse to give this approval. What methods does each employ? j) In An Unspoken Hunger, both food and setting play a large role. In 77 words, reveal characters through both the food they re eating and the setting they re in. k) Open the table of contents of a Shakespeare anthology and pick a play at random. Read the play or simply Google the plot (if you don t happen to know it.) Then write a 300-word story using the exact plot, but set in 1989, say, or 1998, or 2006 some contemporary year. Title the story with a lyrical line randomly selected from the play itself. Note on all of these: while these general plots perhaps may be good starting places to get us going, often our characters will should do and feel something different than what we consciously thought they would. This is a good thing: it means that they are becoming real, and not remaining as puppets. Let them do whatever it is that they do. This is where the writing begins. Follow them.