20 Master Plots Read online

  The lesson of fairy tales is the basic lesson of all love stories: Love that hasn't been tested isn't true love. Love must be proved, generally through hardship.

  The leap from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to C.S. Forester's The African Queen isn't that far. The characters in The African Queen don't start out as lovers but as opposites. She's a missionary's sister; he's a timid cockney engineer. Together they travel downriver to Lake Victoria on a rickety steam launch called The African Queen with the purpose of blowing up a German gunboat. Along the way this unlikely couple falls in love, only to be married as their last request before being hung. (Yes, they live happily ever after.)

  A lot of love stories don't have happy endings. Adam Bede by George Eliot (a.k.a. Mary Ann Evans) tells the story of Adam, who falls in love with a pretty but shallow woman named Hetty. Hetty doesn't want Adam, who's the absolute picture of propriety. She'd rather marry the local young squire.

  The squire seduces Hetty (as squires are wont to do) and then leaves her. Hetty agrees to marry Adam on the rebound but finds out she's pregnant. She tries to find the squire, who's taken off for parts unknown. By the end, Hetty is found guilty of killing her child. Adam finally marries the woman he should've married in the first place, a young Methodist preacher.

  Definitely not a happy ending.

  It seems the higher up you go in the hierarchy of literature, the more unhappy love stories get. If it's a drama, one of the lovers always seems to die. If it's a comedy, the lovers can ride off into the sunset together. Federico Garcia Lorca was right when he said life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.

  Italian tragic operas are real hanky-wringers. In Puccini's La Boheme, Rodolfo falls in love with Mimi; Mimi dies. In Verdi's La Traviata, Violetta falls in love with Alfred; Violetta dies. The list seems endless: Il Trovatore, Rigoletto, Madame Butterfly, I Pagli-acci... More women died in Italian opera, it seems, than in the Black Plague.

  A LITTLE ROMANCE

  What makes a good love story? The answer lies more with the characters than with the actions. That's why the love plot is a character plot. A better way of putting it is by saying that successful love stories work because of the "chemistry" between the lovers. You can create a plot that has plenty of clever turns and gimmicks, but if the lovers aren't convincing in a special way, it will fall flat on its face. We all know what chemistry is, but few of us know how to create it. Chemistry is the special attraction that characters have for each other that lifts them out of the coal bin of the ordinary. Too often, romances are generic: In a formulaic plot, one general-issue man meets one general-issue woman as they pursue their fantasies and desires in the most pedestrian way. This isn't to say that these kinds of plots don't work within their own limited range. The writing and selling of romance novels is big business. The plots are so specific that the publishers insist on certain guidelines, which they coyly call "do's" and "don't's." The publishers have tight perimeters about what a writer can and can't do, and if you're intent on writing for that market, know the rules. But you'll find them confining. The characters must conform to type.

  The publishers have their reasons, and the millions of dollars of sales they rack up every year attests to those reasons, at least economically. They know what sells and they may even know why it sells. It's the same reason fairy tales work for children.

  Fairy tale characters, you may remember, also revert to type. The little boy and girl who venture out into the dark forest are like everyboy or everygirl. When they have names, their names are generic, like Dick and Jane. They never have distinguishing marks or characteristics such as tattoos or scars; they're fresh from the mold. They don't come from Buffalo or Biloxi or Boze-man; they come from places like The Kingdom or The Forest. Their parents are defined by what they do for a living rather than by their names ("A woodcutter/fisherman/farmer and his wife").

  A child identifies closely with the characters in fairy tales. He casts himself in the role of the poor, abused, unfortunate child, and he takes strength in the fact that he can go out into the world and kill giants (adults) and make his own way by being clever and thoughtful and honest. If Little Hans had been developed so that we knew his father was a stockbroker in Maine and his mother was a pharmacist and his sister was in training as a decathlete, we would lose the chance to identify with him. The more a reader knows about the character, the less the character is a part of the reader's world and more a part of his own world. Since identification is so important in fairy tales (as far as the young are concerned), the tale must conform to the mind and imagination of Everychild.

  The same holds true for romance writing. If you as a writer intend to appeal to all readers, you must rely on types that will allow the reader to identify situations and project herself into them. It's like having two blank faces for your main characters, and the reader fills them in according to her own needs.

  Literature (with a capital "L") doesn't cater to this crowd. If you want to break away from Everylover and write about two (or more) characters who are unique, you must delve into the psychology of people and love. A love story is a story about love denied and either recaptured or lost. Its plan is simple; executing the plan is not. It all depends on your ability to find two people who are remarkable in either a tragic or comic way as they pursue love.

  There is a world of difference between the immensely popular but shallow love story of Erich Segal's Love Story and the less popular but more enduring stories about the search for love in Eliot's Adam Bede or Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. All three books are meant to be tragic: They share the same theme of love lost. But Love Story, a runaway best-seller and box office hit in its time, was a surface exploration of love denied involving a proto-yuppie couple in ivy league New England. (She gets sick and dies.) They never reach the depth of character and examination of the human soul that Eliot or Hardy's characters do.

  But let's face it. The public has a powerful drive for fairy tale (that is, happy) endings. You already know that audiences have universally refused to accept George Bernard Shaw's unhappy ending to Pygmalion and turned it into their own version called My Fair Lady, which got the Academy Award for best picture. Rudyard Kipling's The Light That Failed is about Dick's love for Maisie. But Maisie is shallow and insensitive. Even when Dick starts to go blind (hold on to your handkerchief) and devotes his last days of sight to finishing his masterpiece painting (appropriately entitled Melancholia), Maisie ruthlessly rejects him. Brokenhearted, Dick kills himself. Not a very happy ending. But audiences, who cherish Kipling almost as much as they cherish Dickens, refused to stand for it. Kipling buckled under the pressure and rewrote the story with a happy ending, which was published in a later edition. Hollywood demands happy endings de rigueur (see Robert Altaian's The Player for a scathing satire on happy endings).

  Thomas Hardy was under no such pressure, and even if he had been, it was unlikely he would've caved in to it. Jude the Obscure was his last work, and it's dark and cruel. It doesn't reaffirm the power of love to save or cure all. It is about the tragedy of love. It's a downer all the way. The reader who wants positive, bouncy, "love is wonderful" stories would never get through the first ten pages. But if the reader is interested in an examination of the conflict between carnal and spiritual life, the life of Jude Fawley will deliver. But you must remember, a lot of readers just aren't interested in that kind of close examination of love, especially if it has an unhappy ending. They'll always demand a fairy tale ending, and as long as there's a buck to be made, publishers and film producers will cater to that taste.

  Don't get me wrong; there's a place for both kinds of stories. Each fills a distinctive need. The question is, Which story do you want to write?

  SOFT RAIN, KITTENS AND MAKING LOVE BY THE FIRE

  If you decide to write about love, you are at the slight disadvantage of being in a line that's five thousand years long. Thousands of writers have written about love, and now you want to do it? The competition
is enough to make anyone pale. What can you hope to say that hasn't already been said?

  You can't take that attitude, because it can be applied to any subject you might write about, not just love. But it is true that love can be difficult to write about without relying on the same old, tired cliches. Remember, it's not so much what you say as how you say it. Arguably it's all been said before. But the number of ways it can be said are inexhaustible. We are as much intrigued with the mysteries of love today as some Babylonian was five thousand years ago.

  But understand that there's a big difference between creating sentiment and creating sentimentality. Both have their place. Romance novels depend on sentimentality; a love story that tries to be unique depends on sentiment.

  What is the difference?

  The difference has to do with honest emotion vs. prepackaged emotion. A sincere work —a work of sentiment —generates its own power; a sentimental work borrows feelings from stock. Rather than create characters or events that generate unique feelings, the sentimentalist merely relies on stock characters and events that already have their emotions built in.

  Edgar Guest is a good example. At one time, Guest was one of America's most popular poets (proving that there's a big market for sentimentality). His poem "Sue's Got a Baby" isn't exactly a monument to American literature, but it's a first-rate example of sentimentality. The topic of love, in this case, is about motherhood.

  Sue's got a baby now, an' she Is like her mother used to be; Her face seems prettier, an' her ways More settled like. In these few days She's changed completely, an' her smile Has taken on the mother-style. Her voice is sweeter, an' her words Are clear as is the song of birds. She still is Sue, but not the same— She's different since the baby came.

  Sentimentality is subject-ive, meaning you write about the subject of love rather than create a story in which the unique relationship between writer and subject evokes genuine sentiment. Take a look at Guest's poem and you'll see what I mean.

  "Sue's got a baby now..." All right, we have a tiny bit of context. We don't know anything about Sue (who she is, where she lives, how she feels about the whole thing) but we know she's just given birth (we assume) to a baby. Because we know so little about Sue and her circumstances, we must reach our own conclusions about how she feels. So we draw on our own feelings. Motherhood is a good thing, therefore Sue must be happy, right?

  "... an' she / Is like her mother used to be;" What exactly does that mean? There's no way to tell, because the author is so vague that we can only guess. Again, based our own experience and the subject of motherhood, we assume that her mother was as happy about having Sue as Sue is about having her own baby. Right?

  "Her face seems prettier, an' her ways / More settled-like." Her face seems prettier than what? And I still have no idea what "more settled-like" is supposed to mean. Did Sue used to run around with bikers?

  What sentimentality does is rely on the reader's experience rather than the fictional experience created by the writer. You fill in the blanks. You remember what it's like. The reader, not the writer, does the work. If you go through the poem line by line, you'll see that Guest never says anything specific about being a mother. He just piles cliche upon cliche and lets you bask in your memories of what it's like. There is no real character and no real situation in the poem.

  Sentiment comes out of context. With sentiment, you have the portrayal of real people and real situations. That makes sentiment object-ive, because it relates to objects (people, places and things) rather than generalized emotions. If you're going to write about love, think about whether you want to be sentimental (which has its place in certain types of writing, such as melodramas and romances) or if you want to go for the real thing and create a world that has its own feelings and doesn't rely on the reader's.

  Stephen Spender wrote a short poem called "To My Daughter," in which he writes about a walk he takes with his little girl. It's a simple poem (five lines), but it packs a lot of feeling. His little girl is grasping his finger with her hand, and the speaker knows that even though they are walking together at this moment, he will someday lose his daughter. So he holds the moment dearly. The personna of the poem realizes that he will always remember how his daughter's hand clasps his finger. Her tiny hand is like a "ring" around his finger. The ring becomes a metaphor for the emotional bond between father and daughter.

  Can you tell the difference between the two poems? Spender works with two people we can see and feel. We see the two of them walk down the road, and we understand the feeling the man has for his daughter, both having her and yet losing her. The ring (the object) is a metaphor, rather like a wedding ring between father and daughter. Spender's poem goes much deeper in five lines than Guest's does in all ten. Guest relies on the feelings I already have toward motherhood and taps into that reservoir. Spender creates a moment and feeling in time.

  We never feel so alive as when we are emotionally aroused. It's not easy to accomplish that in writing, but when we take a short-cut by faking those emotions—by building them up into more than what they are—we're guilty of sentimentality. Sentimentality is the result of exaggerating any emotion beyond what the context of the moment can express.

  I don't want to sound overly critical of sentimentality, because it definitely has its place. Most of us like a good sentimental book or movie now and then. The point is to know the difference between sentiment and sentimental, and to know when to use one and not the other. If you're trying to write standard formula romance, sentimentality (to some degree, anyway) is expected of you. If you're trying to be sincere and authentic as a writer, you need to develop feelings that are in line with the action, and avoid exaggerating them. In other words, don't just talk about love, show it!

  I LOVE YOU SO MUCH I HATE YOUR GUTS

  Since most of us spend much of our lives searching for and fantasizing about love, we forget love has two sides: the up side (falling in love) and the down side (falling out of love).

  For every thousand stories about falling in love, there may be one story about falling out of the love. For obvious reasons, it's not a real popular theme in love stories. Yet it's produced some incredibly dramatic works. I suppose the optimist thinks about the possibilities that lie ahead, whereas the pessimist broods on the realities that lie behind. That's not to say that princes and princesses can't live happily forever after. They do—sometimes.

  Falling out of love is about people, too. It's about the end rather than the beginning of a relationship. The success of your story depends on an understanding of who your characters are and what has happened to them. By the end of your story, the situation is driven to crisis, which results in some kind of resolution: resignation to perpetual warfare, divorce and death being the most common resolutions.

  I can give you three stunning (and depressing) examples to read and study. The first is August Strindberg's The Dance of Death, which is about a love-hate relationship between husband and wife. Alice is a virtual prisoner of her tyrannical husband of twenty-five years, Edgar. As the play opens, Edgar is gravely ill, and yet he continues to try to dominate his wife. They battle it out to the death.

  So do George and Martha in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (which has its roots in Strindberg's play). And finally, on a more psychological level, Georges Simenon's The Cat (also made into a film starring Jean Gabin and Simone Signoret).

  In The Cat, Emile and Marguerite have reached the point of mutual hate at the beginning of the novel. They share nothing else — they don't eat, sleep or even talk together. With consummate skill, Simenon relates the circumstances that led first to their union and, gradually, to its bizarre devastation.

  The emotional focus of these works isn't love so much as it's love/hate. This is the stormy side of love, but it's still every bit as much a part of reality as its sunny side.

  THE STRUCTURE OF THE LOVE PLOT

  In the other plots, I set out what were the commonly used plot phases. But in this plot, maj
or sets of phases depend on the nature of the plot you intend to use. You must adapt accordingly.

  The exception is the plot about two lovers who find each other in the beginning and then are separated by circumstances. In that case the three dramatic phases are:

  1) Lovers found. The two main characters are presented and their love relationship begins. The first phase deals primarily with establishing that relationship. By the end of the first phase they are deeply in love and are committed either by marriage, "troth," or some symbol of connection. Close to the end of the first phase, however, something happens to separate the lovers (as in the case of Eurydice's death). This may come from an antagonist who does something to deny the lovers each other. (She is kidnapped. His parents make him move to Cincinnati with them. Her ex-husband doesn't like the fact that she's taken up with another man.) Or the lovers may be separated as the result of circumstances, or Fate. (He must go off and fight in a war. She gets brain cancer. He has a skiing accident and is crippled.) However it happens, the first phase usually ends with the lovers' separation.

  2) Lovers split. In the second dramatic phase, at least one of the separated lovers makes an attempt to find/rescue/reunite with the other lover. Usually the focus is on one of the lovers who must put forth all the effort while the other either waits patiently to be rescued or actively resists those efforts. For example, Jack has been crippled in a skiing accident. The doctors say he will never walk again. Jack is depressed; he tells Jacqueline he wants to get a divorce so she can find a "real man" (you know the speech). Jacqueline is too much in love with Jack to leave him or to let him drown in his own self-pity, so she fights the battle for him until he comes around and fights the battle for himself.

  But the path to salvation is never clear. There are always setbacks. These setbacks are the guts of the second dramatic phase. One step forward, two steps back. The protagonist, the active lover, may have to fight a battle with the antagonist (if there is one), and for the short term, the protagonist only wins minor victories.