Thickening the plot
February 2, 2004 | 12:00am
One of the most common failings I encounter in poorly written stories is the undue haste with which novice writers want to tell their stories. By this I mean that the writers hop, skip, and jump from one incident to the next, providing generous if arbitrary explanations for complicated situations. Even in the omniscient mode, the writer is very much in the picture, manipulating events and connecting the dots for the reader, whose only job is to turn the pages and accept everything as it comes.
I often encounter paragraphs like this:
"Cynthia was mad at Ricky, who had been avoiding her all summer, despite every effort she made to catch his attention. Ricky was 23 and was now working as a stockbroker in Makati. He was bright and he came from a good family, and Cynthia had had a terrible crush on him since high school. So she hatched a plan to ‘accidentally’ appear at a party she knew he would be attending that weekend in Alabang. When the day came, Cynthia paid a visit to the host – who happened to be an old family friend – and timed it so that she was still there when the first party guests came. Since she knew many of them, her host asked her to stay, and she happily consented. Tonight, she swore, she was going to make Ricky feel sorry for all the times he ignored her. It was dark outside in the yard and it was easy to be mistaken for someone else. Cynthia was unremarkable as far as looks, size, and shape were concerned – and maybe that was the problem – but she was determined to use this to her advantage, with a little help from her make-up kit and Lady Luck." And so on.
My first reaction to submissions like this is, "Who cares?" The job of fiction – and its acid test – is to make the indifferent or even the hostile reader care about people and situations to which, in the reader’s own life, he or she wouldn’t give a second’s thought. One suggestion I give my students to improve their writing is to set the bar higher and to write for this "indifferent" or difficult reader (at the minimum, the reasonably intelligent reader) rather than the easy one, the captive one – family, friend, subordinate, admirer.
It isn’t the material I have a problem with in this example; Lord knows this kind of romantic subterfuge happens all the time and may even have resulted in the earthly existence of quite a few of us. But even juvenile readers are entitled to fresher situations and smarter prose – and a sharper insight than "She finally got him."
I’ll deal with choice of story material in another piece, so I can focus on the treatment of material this time. Let me propose some general principles before returning to the example at hand.
First, stories are much more than plots. (A plot, to refresh your memory, is usually defined as "a causal sequence of events," incidents or scenes arranged in such a way that they cumulatively make sense.) We sometimes confuse the plot for the story itself, but the plot is really no more than the backbone of the story on which so much else must hang. The real substance of the story consists of the characters, the theme, the description, the dialogue – in other words, the thousand-and-one details that distinguish a story and make it a unique experience.
Much of popular fiction is plot-driven, producing and thriving on increasingly more fanciful versions of "what happened." The thriller genre works on this principle, with the thrills being provided by surface effects – more dazzling gadgets, more exotic locales, more whiz-bang acrobatics – instead of slow-burning, penetrating studies of the human condition. This is fun, and I like a well-written thriller as much as the next Joe; but ultimately the best thrillers and genre stories and movies are those that do more than satisfy our craving for a five-minute rush. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Planet of the Apes and Alien are superior and memorable works of science fiction because they resonate on more than the level of technological wizardry – although they provide enough surprises as well in that department.
The most difficult plots to work with are actually the simplest ones – along the lines of "boys gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl again" – simply because they have been used over and over again, with just the names changing from one version to the next, and very little room left for freshness. Indeed, some of the greatest stories involve plots we already know or can predict. The ancient Greeks, for example, watched the same plays over and over again – so that we can imagine that the surprise or reward of the play was no longer in finding out what happened, but in the performance itself.
In fiction, the "performance" is the seamless orchestration of all the elements of a good narrative – the plot being merely one of them, enabling the development or the unraveling of character, which is the true gift of the story.
Second, plots aren’t just told; they unfold. The events taking place on the surface of the story should provide no more than hints of the real action taking place on a deeper level, of decisions taking shape in the hearts and minds of the characters. Remember that dramatic action is more than physical, like the act of stabbing a sleeping figure or folding a letter and slipping it into one’s pocket. Actions have symbolic significance, emotionally and philosophically, such that a simple gesture like opening an umbrella in the pouring rain and closing it again can be imbued with much more meaning than the act itself suggests. Actions can take place in many dimensions simultaneously – in foreground and background, upstairs and downstairs, left and right – and the smart writer knows how to employ seemingly unrelated or disparate actions as a choreographed, composite whole.
That’s how plots thicken – not just in volume, but in dramatic intensity. Next time I’ll talk about description and dialogue, and how stories turn from five-page sketches to fully realized novels.
A cold wet finger up the behind may not be everyone’s idea of a good way to mark one’s first half-century, but I stoically endured the unpleasantness of a proctosigmoidoscopy a few days ago to complete my 50th birthday celebrations, after throwing the party and buying the wristwatch. Once the hangover wore off, I realized that I was long overdue for a complete medical check-up. So I bit the bullet and checked myself into the Philippine General Hospital for an overnight stay.
Let me say that, like most men, I can stare down a roaring lion and bite off the heads of live chickens, but can barely abide the prick of a hypodermic needle. (This probably has to do with the fact that we don’t give birth, and therefore can go merrily through life – making babies along the way with wild abandon – without so much as seeing a speculum.)
On the other hand, I have a layman’s reverence for physicians and the science of medicine. I never thought of becoming a doctor myself, knowing early on that I was much too carefree and too easily distracted to be trusted with a knife. And so I quite willingly submit myself to the ministrations of doctors and nurses, beside whose no-nonsense understanding of the human body my own PhD feels like a piece of scrap paper. (I’m aware that there are also doctors and nurses from hell, but thankfully I’ve yet to meet them – leaving open the ghastly possibility that the last face I’ll see in this lifetime will be one of these characters.)
The 96-year-old PGH is a place in transition from the dark, crumbling, extended charity ward that it remains in many people’s minds to the modern, well-equipped 21st century medical center it deserves to be. Even now the PGH has a 400-bed pay section (and about 1,500 charity beds) – bigger than many other hospitals – but it is working even harder to build new facilities and put new systems in place to meet the needs of all kinds of clients without losing sight of its basic mission of public service. A recent and very sizeable donation of state-of-the-art equipment from the Spanish government will expand and strengthen the hospital’s emergency services considerably. But more than the equipment, it’s the people of PGH – headed by its new director, pediatrician Dr. Mike Alfiler – who have continued to make the difference, forsaking ample opportunities to go elsewhere and make money hand over fist to help the poorest of the poor and to instruct a new generation of bright young doctors and nurses.
The doctors and staff of the PGH accorded me every courtesy – which the cynical can ascribe to my being an official of the university – but I had no reason to doubt that the dedication and the talent of these workers was anything but genuine. While access to adequate and responsive health services admittedly remains a problem for many in this country, the frailty and the finitude of our bodies is a great democratizer, and when that camera-tipped tube was inserted into my naked bottom and my throbbing innards turned up onscreen in living color – it didn’t matter one whit whether I was a VP or a janitor. In fact, the peripatetic janitor was probably better off in that department, afflicted as I turned out to be with the bane of the couch potato, the big H.
My eyeballs got poked (very gently), I ran on a treadmill like a chicken on the loose from KFC, I found a new object of fear in a tongue depressor, I giggled when the ultrasound probe nuzzled my rib, I forgot to turn off my cell phone when they took my ECG. It was a lively couple of days, at the end of which I was told – to the great disappointment, I’m sure, of those who hate my guts – that my guts were fine, except for the usual warnings about cholesterol, uric acid, and the need to lose some 40 pounds, preferably by exercise.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Alfiler and his team – especially my doctor-in charge Dr. Agnes Mejia, pay patient services chairperson Vangie Rafael, and head nurse Noemi Cortes – for a pleasant, educational, and humbling experience, and for the clean bill of health, which anyone at 50 can only be one lucky sonofagun to receive.
Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.
I often encounter paragraphs like this:
"Cynthia was mad at Ricky, who had been avoiding her all summer, despite every effort she made to catch his attention. Ricky was 23 and was now working as a stockbroker in Makati. He was bright and he came from a good family, and Cynthia had had a terrible crush on him since high school. So she hatched a plan to ‘accidentally’ appear at a party she knew he would be attending that weekend in Alabang. When the day came, Cynthia paid a visit to the host – who happened to be an old family friend – and timed it so that she was still there when the first party guests came. Since she knew many of them, her host asked her to stay, and she happily consented. Tonight, she swore, she was going to make Ricky feel sorry for all the times he ignored her. It was dark outside in the yard and it was easy to be mistaken for someone else. Cynthia was unremarkable as far as looks, size, and shape were concerned – and maybe that was the problem – but she was determined to use this to her advantage, with a little help from her make-up kit and Lady Luck." And so on.
My first reaction to submissions like this is, "Who cares?" The job of fiction – and its acid test – is to make the indifferent or even the hostile reader care about people and situations to which, in the reader’s own life, he or she wouldn’t give a second’s thought. One suggestion I give my students to improve their writing is to set the bar higher and to write for this "indifferent" or difficult reader (at the minimum, the reasonably intelligent reader) rather than the easy one, the captive one – family, friend, subordinate, admirer.
It isn’t the material I have a problem with in this example; Lord knows this kind of romantic subterfuge happens all the time and may even have resulted in the earthly existence of quite a few of us. But even juvenile readers are entitled to fresher situations and smarter prose – and a sharper insight than "She finally got him."
I’ll deal with choice of story material in another piece, so I can focus on the treatment of material this time. Let me propose some general principles before returning to the example at hand.
First, stories are much more than plots. (A plot, to refresh your memory, is usually defined as "a causal sequence of events," incidents or scenes arranged in such a way that they cumulatively make sense.) We sometimes confuse the plot for the story itself, but the plot is really no more than the backbone of the story on which so much else must hang. The real substance of the story consists of the characters, the theme, the description, the dialogue – in other words, the thousand-and-one details that distinguish a story and make it a unique experience.
Much of popular fiction is plot-driven, producing and thriving on increasingly more fanciful versions of "what happened." The thriller genre works on this principle, with the thrills being provided by surface effects – more dazzling gadgets, more exotic locales, more whiz-bang acrobatics – instead of slow-burning, penetrating studies of the human condition. This is fun, and I like a well-written thriller as much as the next Joe; but ultimately the best thrillers and genre stories and movies are those that do more than satisfy our craving for a five-minute rush. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Planet of the Apes and Alien are superior and memorable works of science fiction because they resonate on more than the level of technological wizardry – although they provide enough surprises as well in that department.
The most difficult plots to work with are actually the simplest ones – along the lines of "boys gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl again" – simply because they have been used over and over again, with just the names changing from one version to the next, and very little room left for freshness. Indeed, some of the greatest stories involve plots we already know or can predict. The ancient Greeks, for example, watched the same plays over and over again – so that we can imagine that the surprise or reward of the play was no longer in finding out what happened, but in the performance itself.
In fiction, the "performance" is the seamless orchestration of all the elements of a good narrative – the plot being merely one of them, enabling the development or the unraveling of character, which is the true gift of the story.
Second, plots aren’t just told; they unfold. The events taking place on the surface of the story should provide no more than hints of the real action taking place on a deeper level, of decisions taking shape in the hearts and minds of the characters. Remember that dramatic action is more than physical, like the act of stabbing a sleeping figure or folding a letter and slipping it into one’s pocket. Actions have symbolic significance, emotionally and philosophically, such that a simple gesture like opening an umbrella in the pouring rain and closing it again can be imbued with much more meaning than the act itself suggests. Actions can take place in many dimensions simultaneously – in foreground and background, upstairs and downstairs, left and right – and the smart writer knows how to employ seemingly unrelated or disparate actions as a choreographed, composite whole.
That’s how plots thicken – not just in volume, but in dramatic intensity. Next time I’ll talk about description and dialogue, and how stories turn from five-page sketches to fully realized novels.
Let me say that, like most men, I can stare down a roaring lion and bite off the heads of live chickens, but can barely abide the prick of a hypodermic needle. (This probably has to do with the fact that we don’t give birth, and therefore can go merrily through life – making babies along the way with wild abandon – without so much as seeing a speculum.)
On the other hand, I have a layman’s reverence for physicians and the science of medicine. I never thought of becoming a doctor myself, knowing early on that I was much too carefree and too easily distracted to be trusted with a knife. And so I quite willingly submit myself to the ministrations of doctors and nurses, beside whose no-nonsense understanding of the human body my own PhD feels like a piece of scrap paper. (I’m aware that there are also doctors and nurses from hell, but thankfully I’ve yet to meet them – leaving open the ghastly possibility that the last face I’ll see in this lifetime will be one of these characters.)
The 96-year-old PGH is a place in transition from the dark, crumbling, extended charity ward that it remains in many people’s minds to the modern, well-equipped 21st century medical center it deserves to be. Even now the PGH has a 400-bed pay section (and about 1,500 charity beds) – bigger than many other hospitals – but it is working even harder to build new facilities and put new systems in place to meet the needs of all kinds of clients without losing sight of its basic mission of public service. A recent and very sizeable donation of state-of-the-art equipment from the Spanish government will expand and strengthen the hospital’s emergency services considerably. But more than the equipment, it’s the people of PGH – headed by its new director, pediatrician Dr. Mike Alfiler – who have continued to make the difference, forsaking ample opportunities to go elsewhere and make money hand over fist to help the poorest of the poor and to instruct a new generation of bright young doctors and nurses.
The doctors and staff of the PGH accorded me every courtesy – which the cynical can ascribe to my being an official of the university – but I had no reason to doubt that the dedication and the talent of these workers was anything but genuine. While access to adequate and responsive health services admittedly remains a problem for many in this country, the frailty and the finitude of our bodies is a great democratizer, and when that camera-tipped tube was inserted into my naked bottom and my throbbing innards turned up onscreen in living color – it didn’t matter one whit whether I was a VP or a janitor. In fact, the peripatetic janitor was probably better off in that department, afflicted as I turned out to be with the bane of the couch potato, the big H.
My eyeballs got poked (very gently), I ran on a treadmill like a chicken on the loose from KFC, I found a new object of fear in a tongue depressor, I giggled when the ultrasound probe nuzzled my rib, I forgot to turn off my cell phone when they took my ECG. It was a lively couple of days, at the end of which I was told – to the great disappointment, I’m sure, of those who hate my guts – that my guts were fine, except for the usual warnings about cholesterol, uric acid, and the need to lose some 40 pounds, preferably by exercise.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Alfiler and his team – especially my doctor-in charge Dr. Agnes Mejia, pay patient services chairperson Vangie Rafael, and head nurse Noemi Cortes – for a pleasant, educational, and humbling experience, and for the clean bill of health, which anyone at 50 can only be one lucky sonofagun to receive.
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