20 Master Plots Read online

  CHECKLIST

  As you write, keep the following points in mind:

  1. Forbidden love is any love that goes against the conventions of society, so there is usually either an explicit or implicit force exerted against the lovers.

  2. The lovers ignore social convention and pursue their hearts, usually with disastrous results.

  3. Adultery is the most common form of forbidden love. The adulterer may either be the protagonist or antagonist, depending on the nature of the story. The same is true for the offended spouse.

  4. The first dramatic phase should define the relationship between partners and phrase it in its social context. What are the taboos that they have broken? How do they handle it themselves?

  How do the people around them handle it? Are the lovers moonstruck, or do they deal with the realities of their affair head-on?

  5. The second dramatic phase should take the lovers into the heart of their relationship. The lovers may start out in an idyllic phase, but as the social and psychological realities of their affair become clear, the affair may start to dissolve or come under great pressure to dissolve.

  6. The third dramatic phase should take the lovers to the end point of their relationship and settle all the moral scores. The lovers are usually separated, either by death, force or desertion.

  Originally the concept of sacrifice meant to offer an object to a god to establish a relationship between yourself and that god. The days of blood offerings are pretty much gone. But the days of divine offerings are still with us, in forms such as the Eucharist, in which bread and wine taken during Holy Communion are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ.

  We know the story about the patriarch Abraham, whose faith God tested by commanding him to sacrifice his son Isaac. The tension mounts when Abraham raises a knife to kill his son. (Genesis 11-25)

  The Greeks also put great stock in sacrifice. Stories like Euripides' Alcestis were common: When Admetus offends the gods and is sentenced to death, Apollo gives him an out: Find someone to die in your place, and you can live.

  Admetus goes to his elderly parents and asks if either of them would die in his place. They decline. But Admetus's devoted wife, Alcestis, pledges herself to die in his place—a model of a wife, at least as far as Greek men were concerned. She sacrifices herself out of love. (Hercules later rescues Alcestis when he challenges Death to a wrestling match and wins.)

  Modern day literature, as I noted earlier, pretty much took the gods out of the equation. If a person made a sacrifice, it wasn't to

  or for a god, but to or for a concept such as love, honor, charity or the sake of humanity. When Sydney Carton takes the place of Darnay on the guillotine in Dickens' Tale of Two Cities, he does so because of his great love for Darnay's wife. When Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront breaks the code of silence of the docks and informs on the union racketeers, he does so because of his belief that he must do the right thing, no matter what the personal cost. When Norma Rae (in the film by the same name) takes her stand against management and for unionism in the cloth mill where she works, she too is motivated by a higher purpose. The characters sacrifice themselves for an ideal. They subscribe to the belief that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the individual.

  One of the best Westerns ever made, Stanley Kramer's High Noon, deals dramatically with the issue of sacrifice in a particularly moving way. The story is simple. Will Kane (played by Gary Cooper) is the marshall of a small western town in 1870. He's just retired and is waiting for the new marshall to get into town. He's also getting married to Amy (played by Grace Kelly). Together they plan to move to another town, open a small store and have a family. In the middle of their wedding party, word comes that a killer Will Kane sent to jail has been pardoned and is due to arrive on the train at noon.

  It's 10:40 a.m. The train platform is deserted except for some of the killer's cohorts, who are waiting for him to arrive. Together they plan to gun down Kane.

  Amy is a Quaker. She hates violence. She wants her husband to leave town with her before the killer arrives. She tries to convince her husband it's the new marshall's problem. Even his friends urge him to leave. No one else takes any chances either: Even the judge who had sentenced the killer leaves town. Clearly there would be no shame in leaving. After all, Will has already turned in his badge.

  But Will Kane is a moral man. The showdown is a challenge he can't walk away from, even if it means his death.

  The train arrives at noon. The killer joins up with his gang, and they walk into the deserted town to confront Kane. The clock ticks off the minutes after twelve.

  The climax is famous and many Westerns have copied it since.

  It's the classic showdown, four against one. Will Kane has no chance, and there's no one left in town to help him.

  In the face of such odds, Kane's wife takes up a rifle to protect her husband even though it goes against her beliefs. Although feminists would object that the wife must give up her beliefs to support her husband's, the story takes place more than a century ago, when attitudes were less than enlightened (by our point of view). The film portray's Amy's decision as a surprise, rather than show us her internal struggle to overturn a lifetime of belief and resort to violence. Her love for her husband was stronger than her beliefs against violence, and she knew if she wanted to see him alive again, she must be the one to make it happen. Will Kane was ready to sacrifice himself for his code of honor. By doing so, he forces his wife to sacrifice her own code of honor instead. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place! It's a no-win situation that seems to come out all right: The last scene of the film shows them riding off together to their new life. But at what cost to her? Or their marriage? We're only left to wonder.

  That may be the point of sacrifice: It always comes at a great personal cost. It may cost your character her life, or it may cost in profound psychological ways. Your character should undergo a major transformation.

  Your protagonist may begin this transformation from a lower psychological state, in which she's unaware of the nature and complexity of the problem that confronts her. But circumstances (or Fate, if you prefer) suddenly propel your character into a dilemma that demands action. She must make a decision. She can take the low road, which is the easy way out (run, play it safe, etc.), or she can take the high road, which is the hard way and comes at a great personal cost (Terry Malloy's brother is killed and he's temporarily ostracized by the dockworkers; Norma Rae is fired; and Sydney Carton has his head chopped off). Generally, your character will balk at doing the right thing. Sacrificing yourself is never easy.

  Of course, we've all read books and seen movies in which the hero valiantly gives his life to save another person's (he steps in front of her to take a fatal bullet, and vice versa), but those kinds of sacrifices are instantaneous and intuitive. They may make a nice dramatic twist, but we're more intrigued by the profound internal struggle of a person who must make a decision that will either result in shame (for taking the easy way out) or honor (even though it may cost him his life). And, as in the case of Amy Kane, sometimes you must sacrifice honor for love.

  In the early 1940s there was a play called Everybody Comes to Rick's by Murray Burnett and Jean Alison. The play is filled with improbable situations and bad dialogue, and it would've been buried and forgotten in the dung hill of literature if it weren't for Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch, who adapted the play to the screen.

  The production was just as big a mess. The script was constantly being revised, and the director and cast didn't know from minute to minute what the story was about or what the motivations of the main characters were supposed to be. Because of delays and script troubles, the film was actually shot in story sequence (whereas most films are not). The film was cast with Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan and then changed to Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid and Humphrey Bogart.

  Somehow the resulting film—Casablanca—not only took home three Academy Awards (for best pictu
re, best director and best screenplay) but has become one of the all-time American movie classics. How did they do it?

  In spite of all the confusion, the writers concocted a story that works. The story is about love, but more important, it's a story that climbs to a higher plane, sacrifice for the sake of love, the same sacrifice that Amy Kane makes for her husband in High Noon. But where High Noon doesn't explore the characters that make these difficult decisions, Casablanca does.

  The foundation of sacrifice as a plot is character; the act of sacrifice itself is a manifestation of character, and so it's secondary to it. Casablanca is about four people and the dynamics among them. The events that surround them are reflections of their characters, and when Rick Blaine makes his sacrifice at the end, everything that has happened before, during and after both shapes and is shaped by his sacrifice.

  RICK'S CAFE AMERICAINE

  The story takes place in the North African city of Casablanca during World War II. Refugees from Europe choke the city as they search anxiously for exit visas to Lisbon while Nazi agents plot their capture. Some of the refugees pass their time drinking at Rick's Cafe Americaine. We don't range all over the city grabbing glimpses of the refugees and their plight; it all takes place in Rick's cafe. We get the full flavor of the backdrop of the war and its tensions without going out into the street. Rick's bar, in effect, is a microcosm of the world outside. As mentioned earlier, if you want to increase tension, limit the geographical space available to your characters. Make the setting claustrophobic. Block all the exits. Put the protagonist and the antagonist within arm's length of each other. By separating them across town, you dilute the tension. One of the reasons for limiting the action to Rick's bar may have been financial—it was cheaper to shoot than going on location-but the effect is what's important. You don't have to circle the globe. You can still capture the feeling of the exotic and strange without including seventeen different cities in eight different countries.

  THE FIRST DRAMATIC PHASE

  We meet Rick. He's definitely not the sort of person we would suspect of having any higher ideals. He's stubborn and out for himself. That makes his transition—from a person with all the morals of a slug to a person who makes a decision of real conscience — truly worth following. If your character already has high ideals, sacrifice would come easily (unless, as with Amy Kane in High Noon the sacrifice goes against those ideals). What makes Rick interesting is that he's so selfish, withdrawn and hard—and yet vulnerable.

  Flashback: Paris. Rick is now Richard, and he's desperately in love with Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman). He's so flushed with love that he wants to get married and flee Paris before the Nazis move in. But Rick doesn't notice Ilsa's hesitation, so he's stunned when he finds out that she's gone. She leaves a farewell note. Parting shot: a crushed Rick holding the note in his hand as the rain symbolically blurs the ink on Ilsa's note.

  Back to scene: Rick's Cafe Americaine, 1941. We know something about his secret life. He's been badly hurt in love. We understand him a little better.

  Even though Rick says, "I stick my neck out for no one," we learn otherwise during the course of the story. We learn he's fought against the fascists in Spain. We know he left Paris to avoid the Germans who would've been after him. Even after his bitter experience in love, Rick still hates Germans. He orders one away from his gambling tables, and in a particularly rousing scene, he orders the band to play "La Marseillaise" to drown out some Germans who are singing "Wacht am Rhein." And he helps out Ugarte (played by Peter Lorre) after he kills two Germans and steals their signed visas. Rick hides the visas for Ugarte, in spite of the danger of being caught with them. Thus we have a deeper insight into Rick's character. He is a man of principles, even if time and circumstances have muted them.

  By setting the foundations of character, you will make believable the transition from a selfish state to a selfless state. You can't just turn a character around 180 degrees and reverse her attitudes and actions by a simple event. You must show convincingly how the character could get from point A to point Z. Rick claims he won't help anyone; but we also know why he says that (he's tried in the past and been hurt), and we know at least he has the potential to help someone. The plot question is, Who will he help? And how? What will make him change his mind and come out of his shell?

  A woman, of course.

  Which brings us back to being caught between a rock and a hard place. If you have established your character properly, we should understand these underlying tensions as real expressions of character, not just some gimmick you've tried to paste onto your character. To do that, we must know the character's past. That's why the flashback in Casablanca is so important. If you take it out, we wouldn't understand Rick's internal conflict. In a plot like this one, you can't get away with cardboard characters. They must be convincing. We must understand their motivations for acting. We don't know anything about Usa or her husband yet, other than what we know through Rick, so we have that to look forward to in the second dramatic phase. Why did Ilsa leave Rick in Paris? How will it affect him? How much of a grudge does he hold? He literally controls their destinies.

  THE SECOND DRAMATIC PHASE

  As you develop a character, keep in mind your character's motivation. People always do things for a reason, and as much as we would like to think of the world as a place in which people give for no reason other than to give, with no expectation of return, we know from personal experience this is rarely the case. (Although there is the rare exception, and stories about these people, which are often inspirational, fascinate us.) We all have our motives. Sometimes those motives are high-minded and sometimes they're not. If you have a character make a sacrifice as the pivoting point in your plot, you commit yourself to that character. That means we should understand the basic nature of the character and why she would make that kind of sacrifice. Don't pull rabbits out of your hat. Show the line of action through your character's line of thought.

  In the second dramatic phase the character should be confronted with a moral dilemma that has no easy solution. Your character may try to find that easy solution at first—he may avoid doing the right thing—but eventually the truth and the choices become obvious. That doesn't mean you should be obvious, because that will make your story predictable and uninteresting. We shouldn't ever be entirely sure what your protagonist will do. There may be a real chance that he won't do the right thing. People do rationalize. They do find easy ways out that salve their conscience. In this plot, doing the right thing often comes at a high price.

  Have your character play for big stakes. Otherwise you won't capture the interest of the reader. You don't have to go overboard and have life as we know it hang in the balance, but you should focus the stakes at a level that is meaningful both for your protagonist and for the other characters nearby. Trivial events and trivial people usually make for trivial stories. Certainly the fate of at least one person should hang in the balance. That fate may be literal in the sense that it's a life-or-death proposition, or it may be figurative in the sense of your protagonist's self-esteem or any psychological change that will affect him in the future.

  Sacrifice usually entails a clash between what Freud called the id and the superego. In a caricatured way, the id stands for that part of the personality that wants to do what it wants to do; it's selfish and always puts itself first. Popular depictions of the id usually show it as a devil perched on your shoulder. The superego is the other side of the psyche. It's the part of us that knows the right thing to do. It's the angel sitting on your other shoulder. And you're the poor character in the middle with a voice in one ear saying, "do this, do this," and a voice in the other ear saying, "don't do that, it's not right." Somehow, whether we're guided by one voice or the other, we do make a decision about how to act. The character that makes a true sacrifice is guided by the superego, because the whole idea of sacrifice is to give up something about yourself. In a story about sacrifice, that something should come at a substantial cost. Maybe
it's personal safety, maybe it's love, maybe it's life itself. Sacrifice entails our higher selves, so it's a good place to show the human spirit at its best. Even outwardly selfish, greedy and hurtful people sometimes become saints when it comes down to that all-or-nothing moment, when either you put yourself or others first. Self-preservation is a strong impulse in all of us, and sacrifice goes against that instinct.

  These are powerful forces at play. In stories about sacrifice, we usually see a character who seems totally incapable of any kind of meaningful sacrifice make that sacrifice when the chips are down. The story gives us confidence in the essential rightness of people.

  THE THIRD DRAMATIC PHASE

  The idea of sacrifice is to give up something in return for accomplishing a higher ideal. We attain a higher state of being when we put others before ourselves. This plot has the ability to show people at their best.

  But, as I already pointed out, the meaningful sacrifice is the costly sacrifice. If the sacrifice is made at leisure and at no real expense to the giver, it is of less value than the sacrifice made at great personal cost. For a millionaire to write a check to a charity for a thousand dollars is no great sacrifice (it's probably not a sacrifice at all, since it's tax deductible). But for a poor person to give everything he owns to help someone else is a much greater sacrifice.

  Sacrifice shouldn't be judged only in financial terms. More important are the sacrifices people make of their lives. We consider giving your life the greatest sacrifice of all if it's given for the sake of your country or your family. There are hundreds of other sacrifices a person can make, material and spiritual.

  As you develop your third dramatic phase, focus on the payment your character must make to make his sacrifice. Most stories about sacrifice build up to this point: It is the moment of truth for your character. Will he or won't he do the best thing? (Sacrifice often means doing more than the right thing, it means doing the "best" thing.) In this phase you should concentrate on two major aspects: