Part VIII: PLOT: John Barth and his Incremental Perturbations

***This post is the last in a series of eight exercises designed to take our short stories from rough draft to finished "masterpiece"(or as close as we can get ;-) with the help of the late John Gardner and a host of other well-known authors and teachers.  Click here for Part I ***


You’re probably scratching your head right now wondering why on earth I saved “plot” for last, and you’re probably right to wonder about that. Maybe back in August (when we began the work of turning the first drafts of our short stories into unforgettable masterpieces) we should have begun our revisions by studying plot before we talked about all those other things-- like dialogue, structure, setting, and emotion, or how to engage readers using authenticating detail.  

Well, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing fiction, it’s that no matter how hopeless or unwieldy the task may seem, it’s never too late to fix a troublesome passage—or even an entire manuscript, if that's what's required.  If we’ve taken the time to introduce our characters and delineate their myriad flaws, fears, and emotions, and to fill their little mouths with crackling, subtextual dialogue… And we’ve gone through all the effort to create vivid, dynamic descriptions of the settings they inhabit, why would we not invest the time necessary to tell our story in the most compelling way we can—no matter how many revisions it takes—until we’re satisfied that the story on paper is as good or better than the one that originally took shape in our heads?

“Though character is the emotional core of great fiction, and though action with no meaning beyond its own brute existence can have no lasting appeal, plot is—or must sooner or later become—the focus of every good writer’s plan.”  Wise words from the late John Gardner, novelist and creative writing teacher, and our mentor for this series of short story exercises.

So what is plot, exactly? And how can we apply it to the draft of a story we’ve already written (and in fact have already been revising for the last three months)?  First, a definition of plot from a few of my favorite mentors:

From The Lie That Tells A Truth by John Dufresne:  “An idea is not a story.  A first draft is not a story.  A moral is not a story.  A character is not a story.  A theme is not a story.  A plot—now, that’s a story! So where do I get me one? you might ask. At your writing desk.  Because plots don’t exist.  They can’t be shopped for or ordered on-line.  They are coaxed into being.  They develop.  They grow in the course of the writing.  A plot begins to form as soon as you begin to ask yourself the appropriate narrative questions: What does my central character want? What is preventing her from getting it? What does she do about the various obstacles in her way? What are the results of what she does? What climax does this all lead to? Does she get what she wants in the end? Plot, then, is the element of fiction that shapes the many other elements—character, theme, point of view, language, and so on—into a story.  It’s the organizing principle of narration, let’s say. […] Plot is the force that holds the universe of your story together.”

From Fiction Writer’s Workshop by Josip Novakovich: “If you don’t write from an outline, once you have finished a story, you still should be able to see its outline, the way after a touchdown it’s easy to draw a chart of what happened in the play.  Something must happen, and in the end, we must know why it has happened.  Plot is partly what you discover in the writing of a story, not what you “insert.” You raise questions and seek answers, connect your sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters, chapters into novels.  This thread of investigation may be a thin one, but you must have it to give yourself and your readers something to look for.”

From Brandi Reissenweber in her lecture on “Plot & Structure”: “Structure and plot are the architecture of storytelling. The façade of a building may be beautiful, brilliant, breathtaking even, but it can only be that way if it is standing, right? That’s where these foundational elements come in. All other aspects of fiction—characterization, description, what distinguishes your voice from others,—hang on the basic structure and plot of the story.”

John Barth, noted novelist, short story writer, and witty professor of creative writing, writes that “Dramatic effect, not linear chronology, is the regnant principle in the selection and arrangement of a story’s action,” that “a story’s order of narration need not be the strict chronological order of the events narrated.”

However we decide to arrange the “action” in our stories, that action traditionally includes the six ingredients below. [Bracketed explanations are capsulated passages from “Incremental Perturbation: How to Know Whether You’ve Got a Plot or Not,” an essay by John Barth. To learn more, and to understand his "systems analysis" theory on the workings of plot, read Barth's classic (and humorous!) essay in Creating Fiction]:

1.  Status Quo: [the less-than-stable “Ground Situation.” An overtly or latently voltaged state of affairs preexisting the story’s present time; one that tends to regulate itself toward equilibrium but is essentially less than stable (otherwise there would be no story). The Montagues and Capulets have been hassling each other in Verona for a long time before the story begins: a taunt here, a street scuffle there, but nothing the two families can’t quite absorb.  No ground situation, no story, however arresting the action to come, for it is its effect upon the ground situation that gives the story’s action meaning.]

2.  The Inciting Incident: [A present-time turn of events that precipitates a story out of the ground situation… “And then one day,” as the narrative formula puts it, the dramatic vehicle rolls into town: Young Romeo Montague falls for young Juliet Capulet, and vice versa.] 

Note: David Harris Ebenbach of Gotham Writers Workshop says it’s the responsibility of the writer to begin the story at the point of change (the inciting incident), when “something’s happening that stands out.” Take Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” for example.  Carver didn’t begin his masterpiece “a few weeks earlier, when nobody was coming to visit.  [He began with] the day that’s the focus of the whole piece.”  In order to “drop the reader right into the middle of the action” and almost simultaneously provide him with the necessary information to set up the ground situation (exposition), you’ll have to work hard to strike just the right balance.

3.  Complications (escalating conflict): [Incremental perturbations of the ground situation; the successive complications of the conflict. (The star-crossed lovers declare their love, but…) In the story’s middle these “perturbations” follow not only upon one another but from one another, each paving the way for the next (as the story’s middle performs its double and contradictory functions of simultaneously fetching us to the climax and strategically delaying our approach thereto)]

4.  Climax: [A comparatively sudden and consequential effect triggered by comparatively small incrementations, like an avalanche, or the click of the thermostat—whether or not it involves the fall of the mighty from the height of fortune to the depths of misery.  Even in the most delicate of epiphanic stories, the little insight vouchsafed to the protagonist (or perhaps only to the reader), the little epiphany that epiphs, does so in a comparative flash—and, for all its apparent slightness, is of magnitudinous consequence]

5.  Denouement: The consequence of the complications and climax. [measured by the net difference it effects in the ground situation.  If nothing of consequence about the ground situation has been altered, no story has been told…. The equilibrium of a story’s denouement is not that of its opening: The surviving Capulets and Montagues are sadder but perhaps at least temporarily wiser in the “glooming peace this morning with it brings.”  It is an equilibrium complexified, qualitatively changed even where things may appear to all hands (except the reader/spectator) to be back to normal.  Otherwise, what we have attended may have its incidental merits, but, for better or worse (usually worse), it’s not a story].

6.  Wrap-up [the little coda, closing fillip, or dolly-back shot often appended to the denouement like a jazz drummer’s “roll-off” at the end of a number, and usually suggestive of what the story’s completed action portends for the principal characters].

John Barth: “Incremental Perturbation: How to Know Whether You’ve Got a Plot or Not,” from the text Creating Fiction, edited by Julie Checkoway

John Dufresne: The Lie That Tells A Truth

John Gardner: The Art of Fiction

Josip Novakovich:  Fiction Writer’s Workshop

Brandi Reissenweber: Instructor, Gotham Writers' Workshop, and author of the "Ask the Writer" column for "The Writer" magazine. Be sure to check out "Letterpress," her wonderful blog on the craft of fiction.

David Harris Ebenbach: The chapter "Plot: A Question of Focus" in Gotham Writers' Workshop: Writing Fiction, The Practical Guide (also contains the full version of "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver)

Write A Short Story:  

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion  

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot

Part IV: Shape Your Story

  ***This post is the fourth in a series of eight.  From now through September I'll be posting weekly exercises designed to take our short stories from rough draft to finished "masterpiece"(or as close as we can get ;-) with the help of the late John Gardner and a host of other well-known authors and teachers.  Click here for Part I ***

Last week we worked on how to convince the reader that there's a good possibility our protagonists might change their ways by the end of our stories--even if they don’t end up changing at all. If nothing else we’ve at least shown that they’re capable of change, thereby keeping the reader in suspense until the end of the story. And for those of us whose protagonists do change, we’ve come up with a list of incidents designed to convince our readers that the character’s change is not only plausible but, in hindsight, inevitable. Surprising, but inevitable… that’s the key.

I don’t know about you, but when I came up with my list of incidents it became apparent that many of them will need to be shown in flashback (or flash-forward), or another way entirely, but in any instance they’ll likely throw my story events out of chronological order.  So figuring out the best way, the smoothest way, to sequence and transition those events will be crucial.  

When American author Lan Samantha Chang wanted to tell stories based on the lives of her parents and the era in which they grew up in China she realized that, though set in the present, she would need to move backward in time to find the heart of the story, to uncover “the mystery of the past.” In her excellent essay, “Time and Order: The Art of Sequencing,” Chang (currently director of the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop) writes that “Every story shapes a pattern in time, and its writer must find that shape…. Manipulating sequence can greatly increase a writer’s range, her flexibility and her authority.  A leap backward can dazzle the reader and develop his understanding of the characters.  A complex story may move back and forth in time, creating a spellbinding pattern.  A subtle, chronological telling can draw the reader smoothly into the author’s world, holding him rapt with an awareness of its possibilities.”

Though certainly not as popular in today’s stories as the flashback, much can be gained from the flash-forward, by taking the reader briefly forward in time. Says Chang: “[The flash-forward] can provide us with a startling and revealing vision of the characters’ futures as their present conflicts unfold, helping us understand the present story in a larger context.”

In the first pages of his novel, Giovanni’s Room, author James Baldwin propels the reader forward to the events of a morning that has yet to take place. We learn that the protagonist’s lover is to be guillotined that day and that the protagonist blames himself for what has brought the two of them to this awful place in their lives. The opening, a flash-forward, sets the mood for the novel, and we feel that sense of destiny and significance as we watch, through flashback, the characters meet and fall in love.  The opening of Giovanni's Room:

In another piece by James Baldwin, the short story “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator (an algebra teacher) wants his younger brother Sonny, a musician and a recovering drug addict, to have a normal, “safe” life, away from his old friends and his nightclub music, the jazz that Sonny loves.  The author employs a series of significant flashbacks, some dramatized, some expository, to show the narrator’s change over time.  The transition that thrusts the reader into the past begins at an awkward (for the narrator) family dinner with his wife and Sonny, (their parents are long dead) and hinges on the narrator’s thoughts, his desire to keep his brother “safe”:

Suddenly, without even realizing it, we find ourselves transported back to the narrator’s young adulthood in Harlem, to the early relationships with his parents, his brother, and others, until eventually we come full circle and return to the present, moving on from there. Each stop along this seamless journey through the past is a significant one.  Each event the author chooses to show us not only propels the story forward, but peels back the layers in those early relationships revealing the narrator’s failed attempts at understanding and helping his troubled brother. Through these past incidents Baldwin convinces us that the narrator’s change when it comes is not only plausible, but genuine.

With any sudden shift in time, be it forward or backward, the key of course is to do it without jarring the reader out of the fictional dream you’ve worked so hard to create. Sol Stein (editor, creative writing instructor, and author of nine novels) says “The reason flashbacks create a problem for readers is that they break the reading experience.  The reader is intent on what happens next.  Flashbacks, unless expertly handled, pull the reader out of the story to tell him what happened earlier.  If the reader is conscious of moving back in time, especially if what happened in the past is told rather than shown, the engrossed reader is reluctant to be pulled out of his reverie to receive information.  If we are enthralled, we don’t want to be interrupted.  Therefore, the art of writing flashbacks is to avoid interrupting the reader’s experience. I’ll show you how it’s done.” … which indeed he goes on to do in Stein on Writing, his fabulous book on craft. Stein gives great practical advice in all areas of craft, with an entire chapter devoted to flashbacks and how and when to use them.  Stein’s books differ from many other books on writing in that his focus is always and foremost on the experience of the reader.

Lan Samantha Chang: "Time and Order: The Art of Sequencing,"from Creating Fiction (edited by Julie Checkoway)

Sol Stein: Stein on Writing
James Baldwin: Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin: "Sonny's Blues" from his collection of short stories titled Going To Meet The Man

Write A Short Story:  

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion  

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot

Writing about Complex Emotion

It's so easy to fall back on those first-thing-that-pops-into-your-mind clichés when presenting the emotions of our characters.  What a laugh it would be to read over the early drafts of some of my old stories--loaded with pounding hearts and sweaty palms, no doubt.  Not to mention single tears rolling down flushed cheeks; clenched fists; and nervously tapping feet.  It's much more difficult--and consequently much more rewarding--to come up with fresh, new ways of depicting character emotions.

In Creating Character Emotion, the one writing book I probably revisit more often than any other, author Ann Hood talks about creating character depth through emotional complexity:

Take a look at this example from Anton Chekhov's short story "The Kiss" in which the main character, an officer named Ryabovitch, suffers all kinds of emotional turmoil when he unexpectedly finds himself invited to tea at the home of General Von Rabbek and his wife.  The man is an emotional mess.  It's not simply nervousness he feels, but also shame, envy, delight, mortification, and anxiety⎯just to name a few:

"…. At first, on going into the room and sitting down to the table, he could not fix his attention on any one face or object. The faces, the dresses, the cut-glass decanters of brandy, the steam from the glasses, the moulded cornices -- all blended in one general impression that inspired in Ryabovitch alarm and a desire to hide his head. Like a lecturer making his first appearance before the public, he saw everything that was before his eyes, but apparently only had a dim understanding of it…. After a little while, growing accustomed to his surroundings, Ryabovitch saw clearly and began to observe. As a shy man, unused to society, what struck him first was that in which he had always been deficient -- namely, the extraordinary boldness of his new acquaintances….

Ryabovitch stood near the door among those who were not dancing and looked on. He had never once danced in his whole life, and he had never once in his life put his arm round the waist of a respectable woman. He was highly delighted that a man should in the sight of all take a girl he did not know round the waist and offer her his shoulder to put her hand on, but he could not imagine himself in the position of such a man. There were times when he envied the boldness and swagger of his companions and was inwardly wretched; the consciousness that he was timid, that he was round-shouldered and uninteresting, that he had a long waist and lynx-like whiskers, had deeply mortified him, but with years he had grown used to this feeling, and now, looking at his comrades dancing or loudly talking, he no longer envied them, but only felt touched and mournful." 

One way to render genuine emotion in our stories is to draw from our own life experiences.  Kim Edwards, author of The Memory Keeper's Daughter, tells how she mined her own experiences as a young woman to discover just the right way to depict her character's complex emotions:

In "The Kiss" Chekhov uses concrete detail and comparison to render the shame and inadequacy that Ryabovich experiences at the party: "the faces, the dresses, the cut-glass decanters of brandy, the steam from the glasses, the moulded cornices […] inspired alarm and the desire to hide his head."  When Ryabovich watches as another officer takes "a girl he did not know round the waist and offer her his shoulder to put her hand on" we see the comparison and understand his feelings of mortification and envy.

Ann Hood: Creating Character Emotions
Kim Edwards: "Icebergs, Glaciers, and Arctic Dreams: Developing Characters," essay in Creating Fiction (edited by Julie Checkoway)
Anton Chekhov: "The Kiss"