My Search for Plot

My work has been described as voice driven. As opposed to plot driven. Literary agents say they want propulsive plots, so I suppose that must be what editors want and what the marketing teams that have their finger on the pulse of the reading public believe the readers want. Which is to say that a voice-driven narrative must still have a plot. Things must happen, and characters must be changed by the things that happen.

Early in my writing life I was very much challenged by plot. I should say that my writing life began when I was almost 40. I’m 73 now. I like to believe that over 33 years I have become better at making things happen in my fiction. In the last 15 years I have had four books of fiction published and before that many stories. But I still at times go back to the notes I took in the classes and workshops in those early years when I was first trying to figure out how to make a story. I look back not just to refresh my learning, but to remember the journey I was on as a new writer.

When I first tried to write stories, I spent paragraphs and paragraphs on exposition. I did this for two reasons. One, it came easy for me. Two, I had little clue how to move from exposition to actual story.

I enrolled in my first writing class in the University of Washington Extension Program in the early 90s. Jack Remick was my teacher. Most of us in the class were new to writing stories. Our goal: to be original. So, when Jack drew a diagram on the board that illustrated a protagonist and the insertion of an intruder, it looked like a formula. We nodded our heads in understanding, copied the diagram in our notebooks and proceeded to continue on our own merry way of writing, which for me was exposition. I, along with several of my classmates, was resisting plot out of a narcissistic notion that to follow a diagram was to give up our originality.

Later, of course, I realized that Jack’s method was how one arrived at plot—by introducing a character into the situation to set off a series of events and consequences. An intruder makes things happen in a story. When things happen, you have plot. Yet, even as I finished a draft of my first novel, I had failed to effectively bring in an intruder to activate a chain of consequences. Sensing that my draft was flat and underdeveloped, I signed up for a one-day workshop on structure. I hardly remember the content of that workshop, because it was what happened just before the workshop that was most helpful to me in revising my novel. The woman sitting next to me had asked what my novel was about. “Well,” I said, “it starts out with a man returning to his Filipino homeland after 25 years and –”

“And he has an affair!” the woman interjected.

“Well, no,” I said, because my character did no such thing. But then I thought, Maybe he should. And so, he did.

I never saw that woman again, but I hope that she has kept writing and kept asking others what their book is about and kept interjecting plot ideas. Thanks to her, not just one, but two intruders were introduced into the mix of characters in that first novel. From their wants and needs ensued events, consequences, causes and effects—the things that constitute plot. What I learned is that adultery will always contribute to plotline. As will murder and mayhem and natural disaster. Because these things present obstacles or conflicts that need to be overcome.

But what if your character really isn’t an adulterer or a murderer, or is not affected by a bombing, an earthquake, or an asteroid?

Some years ago, I attended the writers’ conference now called The Community of Writers and in addition to the regular workshop in which you have a manuscript critiqued, you could sign up for an early morning session taught by screenwriter Gill Dennis called “Finding the Story.” Who could resist that? It was exactly what I needed. Dennis, who taught this workshop for many years, died in 2015. I recall how all of us in that class were in awe of Dennis that summer, and how summer after summer he must have inspired that same sense of discovery among new writers looking for a path to the emotional crux of the story.

When he was writing a script, Dennis explained that he asked himself a series of questions and then used the answers to create character arcs for the main characters. He put us through this exercise with questions such as 

He called this last question “the touchstone of everything,” because it gets at a deep emotion and a profoundly regrettable act upon which a person’s behavior can turn. What all these questions have in common is that they uncover or elicit moments of lost control. Each represents a time when life was inexplicable or strange or triumphant.

Dennis had us do about a dozen of these, though in his own practice he would do hundreds. We wrote each memory on a separate card or piece of paper and then labeled it joy or shame or fear—whatever it was that represented the memory. Then he had us select and order three to five memories. These three to five memories would form the arc of a character’s journey. The object was to do this for each of the characters in your story and then “turn the characters loose on each other.”

Dennis said that the most terrifying thing often acts as the backstory. This leads to the most shameful thing. That is, you inflict on someone else the thing that terrified you. You know the damage it can cause and yet you perpetrate it on another. The character’s arc and the story end with the most joyous or the proudest moment when the character acts on a second chance to behave morally or correctly.

Dennis believed that stories are made memorable by the depth of emotion felt. I would add that these deep emotions stem from sources of conflict that lie at the heart of plot. I can’t say that I have followed this method exactly in own writing, though I think I must use some abbreviated version of it, thinking of a moment of anger or embarrassment or loss of my own when assembling a series of character events that will eventually coalesce into an arc.

I was revising that first novel, that one where I had inserted an affair, when I took a three-day workshop by Tom Jenks who said, “Consider each character as the main character in his or her own story. Each character has its own arc.” This is essentially what Gill Dennis was asking us to do with his exercise of writing down memories of terror, shame, joy, and other emotions. Jenks’s suggestion was to use three sentences to state the conflict, action, and resolution for each character. It should make visible and palpable the visceral impact of the drama. For instance, here’s an example he gave for David Quammen’s story “Walking Out”: A young boy is taken hunting against his will by his estranged father. They get lost in the woods and the boy accidentally shoots and kills his father. The boy is able to find his way out of the woods.

Here’s one he gave for “The Progress of Love,” by Alice Munro: A girl is raised in a loveless home. She escapes into the world, but everywhere she turns she encounters the past and the present. Unable to find a solution and forgiveness, she ultimately settles for isolation.

Here’s mine for my most recent novel Ofelia and Norma: Ofelia and Norma are identical large-bodied sisters, who, disaffected by their twinness, go their separate ways. One sister toys with disordered eating and the other is a victim of a frat prank. The sisters reunite, stronger as individuals as well as in their sisterhood, and take it upon themselves to settle a score.

The idea is to also write a three-form statement for the sub-characters to understand their trajectories as well. Jenks also says to “take the reader across a story in steps that are highly concentrated, focused and short, and in discrete movements of conflict-action-resolution.”

Another piece of advice I got from Tom Jenks was this: Don’t let description, reflection, or back story (in other words, often exposition) take the place of action.

These were teachers I had in my first 10 years of learning how to write a story. They formed my foundation without which my voice-driven narratives would flap in the wind or wobble weak-kneed without purpose.

I haven’t stopped looking (or listening) for advice on writing. Lately I’ve been listening to the podcast On Good Writing, by Bret Lott. I took a workshop from him when I was still working on that first novel. I remember how his love for writing and for story lived in his whole being, and I remember the kindness and care he showed in critiquing our work. That kindness and care and that deep regard for story are manifest in his podcast, each one based on a quote from a noted writer. Here’s the quote from the episode on Annie Dillard: Writing a book presents two problems. Can it be done? Can I do it?

Thanks to these early teachers, I’ve been able to answer yes four times.

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