Wednesday, February 3: Tune It Or Die!
PLOTTING OUT LOUD
by Rob Lopresti
I have a predicament which is unusual, for me.
As I’ve said before (and after two and a half years of blogging I suspect I have said everything before) I generally find characters easy and plots hard. I sometimes think my head is a little waiting room full of detectives and criminals irritably waiting for me to give them something to do.
But this time I have a plot. Pretty good one, I think. All I need is someone to put in it.
You see, it is a police procedural, and what seems right is to hand the case to two generic cops; detectives Jones and Smith (or Friday and Smith, for those of us who are old enough to remember Dragnet.) And I could do that, but it seems lazy. I can add another layer to the story if the cops are effected by it in some way.
Of course, that can get awfully tiresome. Hey, what a surprise! The cop knew the victim. Or his brother died at the same street corner. The reduction-to-absurdity is the detectives on TV whose every friend and relative have been murdered over the year.
I should tell you my story involves a suicide, but I want to avoid the obvious tack of giving one of the cop’s tortuous memories of a suicide in his family or the like. That seems easy and obvious. So I’m thinking, thinking. My characters are still blank slates. What should I write on them?
Mystery guests, sign in here
I’ve got a few possibilities roaming around in my head.
One of the cops is a rookie, and this is his first case.
The older cop, disgusted of being assigned to suicide, a “victimless crime,” considers retirement.
The case causes newly-partnered cops to bond together.
The case causes an old partnership to be altered or severed.
If you don’t know where you are headed, does it matter where you go?
People who don’t like mysteries often complain that the field is plot driven while mainstream fiction is character driven. For myself I find that the plot usually gives me a character, but then further plots (if any) come from the character.
Having written this all out I think I know what choice I’m going to make. If the story ever gets published I’ll link back to this blog and you can see how it turned out.
So, what about you? Which comes first: the chicken or the egg? And how do you get them into the frying pan?
Characters. I have a feeling all these wonderful characters float around in the ether, waiting to find a writer who can tell their story! Weird thing is, if I don’t get their names right, they balk. You know?
In short stories, the plot kernel has usually (not always) come first. But in general I agree with you that characters are much easier than plot. Most of my unfinished stories and novels (and I sometimes come back to them after years) are hung up on plot problems.
For serial characters, I try to come up with plots that are appropriate to them; in that sense, the characters come first. For stand alone stories, I design the characters around the plot and give them such characteristics as to imbue the story with interesting conflicts.
But almost every story, series or not, is borne of a simple idea first. “Shanghaied”, for example, was born because I couldn’t help but notice that Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped was largely informed by the failed rebellion of the Scots against the English in 1745, and it struck me that there was a clear parallel in the failure of the Confederacy to secede from the Union—what would the story have been like if it had taken place in America c. 1866 instead of in Scotland c. 1751? Because it was obviously going to be a blatant theft of plot, I decided to turn it on its head and make it a comedy instead of a drama, doing so by the simple expedient of turning Stevenson’s educated and uncompromisingly moral Presbyterian hero into an ignorant ragamuffin completely devoid of any religious scruples whatsoever, a boy whose only ethical standard was survival.
That species of idea is what they call “High Concept” here in L.A., usually amenable to being expressed in a single phrase, which in my case would have been, “Davy Balfour as Huckleberry Finn.”
About everything I’ve written that was any good (none published) starts with an idea that grabs me. Then I figure out the ending. Write it up, send it off and wait for the rejection letters to pour in!
James-
I’d like to hear more about “high concept.” Maybe you could write about it some Monday.
Rob