The Plot Thins

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I have problems with plot.

I guess I’m what you’d call a “character-driven” writer. What interests me most in a book — whether one I’m reading or one I’m writing — are the people involved, and how they grow and change through the things that happen to them. Those actual things that happen are important, of course, but they’re secondary to the way I see the story. And that’s a problem, because in order to write a story, you need to make things happen. You need, in other words, to have a plot.

I have told people, only half in jest, that as a writer I only know one theme — grace — and I only know one plot: person is born, lives, dies. While I’m quite happy to go through my career with “grace” as the theme of everything I write, I realize I need to become a bit more proficient in the plotting department.

A couple of recent experiences have helped me think about this: a conversation with Katrina, writing my 14-hour Interactive SprintNovel, and editing my nine-year-old son’s first complete book.

Christopher has started many books in his time and even written a few short ones; in fact I am pretty sure he’s the only child I’ve ever encountered who learned to write before he could read (and would still rather write than read). He’s a surprisingly good writer for nine: he has a wonderful facility with words, and his dialogue and descriptions are better than a lot of what I’ve read from high-school students. This book, Silverwood and the Tower of Azzakan, owes a little to some of the children’s fantasy he’s read, but it also shows quite a bit of originality. At about 18,000 words, he considers it a substantial enough piece of writing to be considered his first “real” book.

By rights, it should have fewer than 18,000 words, because the plot actually wrapped up several chapters before the end. But Christopher felt the book needed to be longer, so he just kept it going, throwing in minor characters and random incidents one after another. He grasps the idea that a plot needs to be filled with exciting twists and turns, but what he lacks at this point (I’m sure he’ll work it out soon) is the sense of causality that a plot requires. One thing happens after another, but if they’re not linked by cause-and-effect you don’t really have a plot. Christopher has not yet read E.M. Forster: he is still at the stage of “The king died and then the queen died,” which, as Forster points out, is only a story. “The king died and then the queen died of grief” — now that’s a plot, Forster says, and I’m sure Christopher will work that out soon.

As I was editing this early work, I occasionally had to call the author in for clarification — I tried to restrict myself to copy-editing and avoid substantive editing, but once in awhile I just had to ask, “Why is your character doing this? Does this have anything to do with what happens later?” It occurred to me that I would probably do well to ask myself the same question.

Writing a novella in public, in 14 hours, using suggestions from other people, also forced me to examine my approach to plot. If I’m going to jam events as diverse as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a marathon, an emergency tracheotomy, and a murder by a jealous woman, into a novel, I somehow have to fit those events into a larger plot — otherwise they’ll just read like a random catalogue of “stuff happens.” So as I approached each chapter of the novella, I had to look at the suggestions in front of me and think, “Which of these can I use now? How is each of these going to move the story closer to where it needs to be? How can they be linked by cause and effect to other things that have happened?” In other words, I was being forced to analyze my plot structure in a much more deliberate way than I’d ever done before.

The conversation with Katrina in Seattle concerned a writer’s workshop she had attended, where the workshop leader had said that in every scene you should ask yourself what the character’s goal is. It made me realize that a lot of times my characters don’t have much in the way of goal, and neither do I as the author. Stuff is just … happening. The king dies, and then the queen dies, but nobody really has much of a goal.

A lot of the books I’ve written in recent years have been helpful because, being based on historical or Biblical events, they came with plots already installed, as it were. Queen Esther: saves the Jewish nation. Prophetess Deborah: ditto, though by different means. Esther Johnson — well, actually that’s a bit of a born-lives-dies plot, being more of a fictional biography than anything. As for my two Great Unpublished Works, By the Rivers of Brooklyn and Prone to Wander, I did have to think up those plots on my own, but to a large extent they do fall into the born-lives-dies category. (Actually, it just occurred to me that in my Queen Esther novel, the king dies and then the queen dies. But not of grief. Oh dear).

The current Biblical novel is a bit more tricky. With the previous two, the Bible gave me a complete plot, though it needed a lot of detail to flesh it out. With this one I’m stringing together a story from a bunch of scattered Biblical references, but most of the plot work is up to me. It’s the story of the early Christian church at Philippi. The beginning of the story (Acts 16) is rich with intriguing characters — a wealthy merchant named Lydia, a demon-possessed slave girl who annoys the apostle Paul so much he casts a demon out of her, a jailer who gets converted in the middle of the night after a surprise earthquake frees Paul and Silas. Great story. But that’s all we get. The book of Acts suggests one or possibly two more visits by Paul to Philippi in the following years. Then the epistle to the Philippians, probably written as much as twelve years after that initial visit, gives us the following information: Paul is awfully fond of his friends in Philippi; a fellow named Epaphroditus came from Philippi to visit Paul in prison and got very sick and almost died, but he’s feeling much better now; and two women named Euodia and Syntyche, who are leaders in the church, are quarreling with each other so badly they have split the church and Paul wishes they would make up.

That’s it. That’s all I got, folks. It’s nearly as bad as the suggestions I was pulling out of ice-cream buckets at the marathon event — a bunch of seemingly random, unconnected things that I have to pull together into some kind of plot, creating cause and effect where none now appears to exist.

Maybe I need to go back and read E.M. Forster.

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