Book Club: Bird by Bird – Plot
Plot follows character.
In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott spends more pages discussing the writing life than addressing the nuts and bolts of actual writing. She talks around what you’ll need to learn to tackle a novel or short story, but rarely offers specific advice. Instead, her focus is what you’ll gain from your writing practice, what you’ll learn, and what you can give back.
She also writes quite a bit about what you won’t get – which for most of us is fame, money, parental approval, and ego fulfillment. However, she – and I – believe that the intangibles, such as exercising our creativity, communicating with others, and finding our secret inner strengths, more than make up for the lack of income. Usually.
In the next chapter we’ll consider, Lamott discusses plot, but without telling you how it’s done. I don’t think she’s figured it out herself. She acknowledges that she is a discovery writer – she begins writing with characters in mind, perhaps some scenarios or a general gist of what she wants to write, but only discovers the nuance of character, their desires, their actions, and their outcomes, as she writes. I’m a similar kind of writer and I know from experience this leads to a lot of dead ends, but also a lot of juicy twists and turns.
I won’t say that my way is the right way, or even a good way. I’m a slow writer. I brainstorm quickly and take months – or years – to figure out what I’m trying to write. I can’t recommend it, but if this sounds like you, you’re not alone.
What Lamott says – and what I’ve learned by making lots of mistakes – is that Plot is Character. Plot is what happens to your character, what they choose, and what actions they take. In the highest instance, if you change your protagonist, you will change everything about your story. That’s how intricately entwined your plot should be with your hero.
Sometimes events happen to your characters – health problems, car accidents, tornadoes – but those events aren’t the core of your plot. Those are things that happen, and the plot is how your character reacts. If you rely too much on “things happening”, that’s what your novel will feel like – a bunch of unconnected events that occurred in a certain order. It won’t feel like a story. Even amidst disaster, your protagonist’s desires and choices should drive the story.
Lamott describes plot – paraphrasing Flannery O’Connor – as “what people will up and do in spite of everything that tells them they shouldn’t.” I’m sure someone suggested to Indiana Jones that traveling to South America, trawling abandoned caverns, dodging skewers, and nearly getting crushed by a giant rolling boulder wasn’t a great idea – he probably had those thoughts himself – but he did it anyway. My protagonists are a bit less adventurous than that, but they still do what common sense says they shouldn’t.
Why? Because they want something. Calling back to the previous book club posts, your characters must want something and they must want it so badly that they will take extraordinary action to get it or keep it. They must care about this object and commit to obtaining it, and the outcome must matter. Obtaining or not obtaining this goal, keeping something or losing it, must be something that will change their lives.
In genre writing, this can be destroying the Deathstar, finding the Ark of the Covenant, solving a murder, or finding a way off a deserted island. In dramatic fiction, your protagonist’s deepest desire is likely intangible – freedom, respect, self-esteem, security – but will reveal itself in the tangible – winning an election, establishing a career, buying a home, running a marathon. And even genre fiction – the good kind – pays attention to the protagonist’s deeper desire. There’s a reason why detectives are driven to solve a murder, and it’s not their paycheck.
No matter what your character wants, he or she should want it as badly as Luke Skywalker wants to destroy the Deathstar or Indiana Jones wants to find the Ark. Failing to achieve this goal should result in life-altering repercussions. Your particular hero’s failure might not literally destroy the planet, but it should risk the destruction of his world, or at least his worldview.
Once you figure out what your hero wants and what will happen if he doesn’t get it, the obstacles to success will start to present themselves. What inner turmoil or outer conflict is preventing your hero from having his cake right now? Who doesn’t want your hero to achieve this outcome? Who else wants what your hero wants?
The juicy parts of your novel will start to emerge as you complete this exercise for the rest of your cast. Every significant character should want something. Everyone should have a desire and face repercussions for failure. At best, your characters will square off in the same arena. Rather than creating disconnected goals – one character wants to win a marathon, another wants to become a police officer - their desires and goals will compete, as well as reflect each other. If Character A desires a family, perhaps Character B desires independence, Character C offers a compromise that satisfies no one, and Character D seeks a smothering intimacy. They are all pulling on the same thematic line, but only one can win.
As your characters act at cross-purposes to your protagonist, conflict and plot will emerge. Sometimes your protagonist will stumble over an obstacle – perhaps when another character wins of their goals – and sometimes she will circumvent the obstacle. When that happens, let your antagonist come back stronger, smarter, or nastier, as they fight to get what they want.
Plan for your novel to have attacks and counterattacks. This doesn’t have to mean violence. An antagonist can get their way through bullying, guilt, shame, or deceit. She can attack your hero’s self-esteem or distract her from her goal with an alternative.
This is not as easy as I’m making it sound. I don’t have as strong a grip on plot and conflict as I’d like, despite how many novels I read. You’d think I’d learn by osmosis, but no. However, I have learned through trial and error (lots of error) that the earlier I focus on character, the more easily plot follows. My conflicts feel less contrived, because they’re based on character desire, not outside forces. My hero acts more, responds less.
I wish I could suggest a formula for plot. There are certainly a lot of them: the hero’s journey, Freitag’s pyramid, three-act structure, Save the Cat, etc. They all feel forced to me. They are fine as a support structure, to get a story moving or to support your first long novel, but none work as a one-size-fits-all solution to plot, no matter how hard some writers push them. The only element they share and the one thing I can recommend is to focus on character first.
Homework
If you wish, check out the following reading material, where you will find a great deal of good advice on plot.
Plot, character arcs, and story stakes are three recurring topics at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University, a blog I follow regularly. Unlike other blog writers, Hardy gets into nuts and bolts detail on how to establish or raise stakes, often using examples of the choices she makes when writing her own novels. Highly recommended.
Writer Unboxed is another blog with helpful advice on many elements of writing. Donald Maass has a regular column in which he examines plot and character from multiple angles. I recommend his column, but there are lots of other good posts on craft elements and the writing business. Kathryn Craft, Barbara Lynn Probst, and David Corbett are aces.
This post on Writers in the Storm examines the four-corner approach to antagonism and conflict, which comes from Robert McKee’s Story. This is a good approach for creating organic, connected antagonism among your cast of characters.
John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story is a $15 master class on character-based organic plotting. While focused on screenplays, his advice on building characters and putting them into action against one another is a must-read for any fiction writer. There are a few parts where his advice ventures into “must-do” territory, but only lightly. Use his advice as building blocks, rather than a formula, and you’ll likely find a lot of good stuff.
Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison examines story structures outside the traditional rising and falling action pyramid and three-act structure. Exploring novels by Nicholson Baker, Anne Carson, Marguerite Duras, Gabriel García Márquez, and others, Alison identifies different patterns and pathways your novel can take, including – as the title suggests – meandering, spiraling, and exploding.