Plot – Just Three Tools?

(The Unified Writing Field Theory — searchings and findings on what makes stories work)

Greetings and welcome to the first post of my evolving Theory. I could take a moment to introduce myself and plug my novel… or I could dive right in to what’s been the most useful principle for me to look at a story.

I mean the broad process of fitting everything together, building a forest so you know where each of those trees belong, and if that makes you ready to line up their branches too.

The plot.

Plot’s the kind of thing where we find either simple advice (“rising and falling action”) or so many people’s different toolboxes I used to make myself crazy wishing I could compare more than a few tricks at a time. People even give us different ideas for what’s most important about plot:

• it’s conflict…
• it’s keeping events logical…
• it’s the character following a goal…
• it’s him making choices…

Or people say plot matters but never as much as presenting a vividly-detailed world, or a memorable character, or revealing a theme or inspiring an emotion in the reader.

–Never mind forests and trees, describing writing can turn us all into blind people examining the proverbial elephant! Most of it must be the good times we’ve all had digging trenches with the tusks or clearing roads with the trunk, but still, is there a whole picture of the animal that we can see or not?

I think there is.

To take that wish list –conflict, logical, goal, choices, world, character, theme, reader emotion– I’d say you could line them all up to say:

• plot is “how a Character and his Goals come in Conflict with the World, especially creating Themes and Reader Emotions through how Logical his Choices are.”

In other words:

• someone’s Choices.

Doesn’t everything else fit around that? Choice is how the character (and her most active part, her goals) deals with the world; conflict and its lack are how the two mesh. And most ways to bring the reader to the right emotion that are just following what the character learns will and won’t blow up in her face, and why.

I think choice is the root of it all. We hate villains for their bad choices, struggle alongside a detective to choose which tool to crack the case, and savor a book that puts us so deep in the world we start to intuit what’s behind how someone handles his day.

So, if it comes down to choice, how do we writers use that?

Well, so many stories focus on problem-solving: how do you get the girl, or track the terrorist, and so all the classic forms of “what helps/hurts it next”? In other words, the chance that a goal will simply fail, its Difficulty.

But if you think of that a moment, you’ll probably add “or the times he finds the goal’s price is too high.” True enough, especially since Cost is an easy other way to complicate a goal in progress. (If I can’t see what a character’s giving up for his goal or how it hurts someone else, I know I’m just not trying.)

And then there’s the third side, the Reward of the goal itself, that he hopes makes the Cost and Difficulty worth it. In many ways this might be the deepest level of internal conflict–or at least the hardest one to mess with without reconsidering everything else. It’s also the easiest to cover in adventures (the reward is you don’t get killed), and all too easy to leave it fuzzy in lower-stakes tales.

Again: Difficulty, Cost, and Reward. If a plot just establishes those three, then everything else relates to the balance of those, in two ways:

• Alternatives, and
• Changes

A choice isn’t much of a choice without an Alternative, some different way to change the Difficulty or adjust the Cost or try a different goal with a different Reward and its other factors–known as “taking a longshot” or “taking the bullet for your friend” or “settling” or whatever it may be. And of course, a story is always “what comes next” so you’re presenting these by having them Change, the whole process of building suspense or maybe revealing a new option to tempt the hero or slowly raising the cost he’ll have to pay.

Really, is there anything that doesn’t come from some combination of these?

• Tales of courage? just show how high the Cost is and that there is no alternative to its Difficulty.
• A mystery? work through all the Alternatives about what might solve its Difficulty.
• Learning one lesson? it might be the same plan as a mystery: only one option works.
• Theme? isn’t that showing how one factor or one pattern within them keeps coming back? (Betrayal, betrayal by one guy, coping with betrayal with forgiveness…)
• Making one shocking point? keep the reader busy with one set of choices and then spring the real one, so they’ll never forget how you’re saying that in this situation, This Just Happens.
• Or you can lay out a progression through all of these sides of choosing, to really capture how wide this slice of the world is and how your hero grows in dealing with it all.

Try it. Look a story’s plot: how much of it is pushing the Difficulty up and down with changes and alternatives there? When does it tear at the hero by bringing in a Cost, or make the heroine grow by seeking a more mature Reward?

See how much of your story it pulls together.

Next time:

Conflict — or, How many sides to the Dark Side?

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