E.M. Forster famously distinguished between the way a story works and the way a plot works. For Forster a story is a ‘narrative of events
arranged in their time-sequence’ (1976 [1927], p. 87). His example:
‘The king died and then the queen died.’
For Forster a plot is similar; it retains the time sequence, but with the addition of causality. So this is a plot:
‘The king died and then the queen died of grief.’
Forster offers one further example:
‘The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.’
This, according to Forster, is a plot with mystery and therefore has great potential.
Plot is a relative element of any fiction – it can be negligible or it can be most prominent, depending on the story you wish to write. As Ursula Le Guin suggests:
A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair; and some great stories have neither. To my mind, plot is merely one way of telling a story, by connecting the happenings tightly, usually through causal chains. [...] As for action, indeed a story must move, something must happen; but the action can be nothing more than a letter sent that doesn’t arrive, a thought unspoken, the passage of a summer day. Unceasingly violent action is usually a sign that there is, in fact, no story being told.
(Le Guin, 1998, p.117)
Whatever your regard for, or use of plot, what you need to remember is that there will always be at least two perspectives on the material you are working on:
n the whole story – the history of all the events found, imagined and
researched – about which you might be writing;
n your version of the story – your eventual plotted representation of
those events.
The first of these will have a certain sequential order and include all possible details. The second might have a different order and will almost certainly omit details. If you imagine the writing of a story to be like carving a figure out of wood, the ‘whole story’ is the lump of tree trunk
that you cut from the forest, whereas ‘your version’ is the final shape of the carving once you’ve whittled away the wood you don’t need.
For instance, the story might be about a woman who has reached a crisis in her life – perhaps her marriage has failed, perhaps she has always wanted to have a lot of children but her husband only ever wanted one, his precious daughter whom he idolises. Perhaps the woman is jealous of her daughter and doesn’t realise it. As you can see from this rough scenario there is an enormous amount of usable conflict, material which raises structural questions. It appears to be the woman’s story, so should the tale begin with the woman’s birth and childhood and details of her own parents? Should it detail how the man and woman became husband and wife? These are the sorts of things that you might collect in your notebook, via your imagination and research, under the heading ‘whole story’. This is the tree trunk you’ve cut down. But eventually you will have to choose the shape of your carving, to pick and choose which events and details you include in ‘your version’.
Write a story (up to 300 words) using any or all of the details from the ‘woman in crisis’ scenario just described. If you find it difficult keeping within the word limit, try using one paragraph for the beginning, one for the middle and one for the end. Write in first person or third person and in whichever tense you wish, but write from one point of view, so it is one character’s story. This character doesn’t have to be the woman though – it can be the husband, or the daughter.
DISCUSSION
One of the decisions you will in effect have made (possibly without realising it) concerns the dramatic action. For instance, one possible action could be how the woman comes to realise that the relationship she has with her own daughter has been shaped by the resentment she feels toward her husband. This is a version of the story that has to do with her moment of crisis and realisation, therefore details of her own childhood might seem less relevant. Such an action would start halfway through her life story and finish before the end, before her death – you wouldn’t bother including details about the piano lessons she used to have at school or her first boyfriend, though you might mention how she herself was an only child and always wished for siblings.
In trying to establish ‘your version’ of any story you will have to make many decisions about what to include and what to leave out; be aware that in many first drafts elements from the ‘whole story’ get included in
ACTIVITY 10.1
‘your version’, elements that you may later deem to be irrelevant. This is to be expected, but something always to be watched for in editing.
Time
One of the major decisions to make when arriving at ‘your version’ is about where to start and where to finish – marking out the parameters of the action. In making those decisions you are dealing with one of the main building blocks of structure – time.
Time works in many different ways within a narrative. It is used to establish a present in a story, and subsequently to establish a past and the possibility of time passing and moving towards a future. This is an obvious aid in establishing movement or action, but it is also a great aid in establishing what might be termed ‘depth structure’ – the richness of the text conveying a world which existed before the reader engaged with it and which will carry on existing after the reader leaves it. It is often this richness and depth that convinces readers that they are engaged with a believable world.
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1982 [1847]) begins when Lockwood, a visitor from the South, arrives at the bleak, northern farm. He is disturbed in the night by the apparition of Cathy knocking on the window, calling ‘Let me in’ (p.67). He also finds the names Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff and Catherine Linton scratched on the window ledge (p.61) These things are obviously connected to the
backstory and events that happened long before the arrival of Lockwood, who is subsequently informed of those events by Nelly, the housekeeper. In effect the novel has begun nine-tenths of the way through the story’s time-frame, yet Lockwood’s arrival establishes a dramatic present
immediately in the mind of the reader. It is one they can identify with as fellow newcomers into this world, and other time-frames can be
organised around this arrival.
Similarly, when choosing the time-scheme for a particular story, you will need to establish a dramatic present, a fulcrum around which your backstory and any forward movement can be organised. For instance, with the scenario of the ‘woman in crisis’, you might have the woman looking out of the window at 8.30 am, watching the younger children going to school that particular morning is your dramatic present, though the woman may regularly look out of the window in this way. The
establishment of repeated ‘habitual time’ is easily achieved in fiction, compared to film or stage plays where the emphasis is always on the dramatic present. In fiction events can happen daily, monthly or annually; habitual behaviour can be written in a line.
Look back over ‘I could see the smallest things’ and ‘The Dying Room’, which you read in Chapter 9, Readings 25 and 26 (p.501 and p.505). Also read Anita Desai’s ‘Pigeons at Daybreak’, Reading 27 (p.515). In each story identify:
n the elements that are establishing the dramatic present; n the elements that are establishing habitual time.
DISCUSSION
As you can see from these tales, a story can be many things; it is impossible to put a prescription on form or structure. There are common elements though. All three stories have a dramatic present, a ‘now’. They all contain repeated behaviour that creates a sense of habitual time. The three stories establish a dramatic present fairly quickly – in the middle of a restless night; in a kitchen during a conversation; in cramped living quarters during the course of a hot, airless day and night. The dramatic present is all to do with the
establishment of time and place, and is often achieved through showing. The habitual time elements of a story are often related in a more telling fashion. So, as suggested in the last chapter, the ‘The Dying Room’ has an early summary of habitual behaviour – ‘She cooks for her family [...]. She also supplies, on a regular basis, her local delicatessen with pâtés and terrines and tarts and quiches.’ This gives backstory to the
character of the mother. Yet not all these sorts of elements are revealed through telling. In ‘I could see the smallest things’, for instance, the habitual behaviour gets detailed in the lines of conversation, as Sam says ‘I put bait out, and then every chance I get I come out here with this stuff’.
‘Pigeons at Daybreak’ proceeds from lunch-time on a certain day to dawn the next day. The story begins both with habitual behaviour and a dramatic present. Mr Basu is seen to hate his wife reading the
newspaper to him, an action in the present but one which immediately suggests it has happened regularly before and that we are entering a pre- existing world. The reader hears the news stories, sees vistas of the city, catches descriptions of climate and types of food, getting a detailed
ACTIVITY 10.2
indication of lifestyle and living arrangements, so getting a vivid impression of the habitual elements of such a life.
Either look through your notebook and find a character that you have noted and want to work on more, or write down in your notebook a sentence about a new character.
List five habitual things about the character in your notebook. So they might go to Scotland every year to visit family; they might have a tendency to scratch their head every few minutes. But it doesn’t have to be something that the character does; it could be something that is just connected to the character’s life. For instance, a delivery man might call at the shop across the road from your character’s house once a week or a plane might fly overhead every day at the same time.
Taking your character and the five habitual elements, write the start of a story (up to 250 words). Establish a dramatic present in which your character is situated in a particular place at a particular time, but include the five habitual elements of your character’s life. Try not to clump them all together – integrate them into the other elements of your story.