Insight, trust, and the dangers of plotting

By Randy Koch

Julian sat in a vinyl-covered office chair, one armrest ripped and leaking small puffs of foam padding and the backrest missing two buttons in the corners where the vinyl was sewn down to form a diamond pattern. Except for his teenage daughter Clarissa, who was still sleeping downstairs, he was alone. He swiveled toward the window and looked out past the power lines at the huge oak that shaded the east side of the house. One limb, broad and dense with glossy green leaves, sprawled over the roof. He watched the tree sway in the late-morning breeze and heard a branch scrape across the tiles overhead. He knew he should cut the branch down before it broke some of the tiles and he’d have to call a carpenter to climb up there and fix it. But he put it off because he hated heights and considered such menial tasks beneath him. He swiveled back to the desk and put his fingers on the keyboard. He lined them up on the middle row of letters, tipped his head back as if expecting help from above, closed his eyes, and grimaced.
He waited as he had yesterday and the day before and the day before that. He chewed on the inside of one cheek with his eyes shut. He thought of the keyboarding exercises that he did in Ms. Gonzalez’s business skills class when he was a junior at Martin High and the rhythm of the keys of the electric typewriter as he rattled out "high" with the right hand and "fears" with the left, "high," "fears," "high," "fears," over and over again to learn the placement of the three most oft-used vowels in English. At night he dreamed of them beneath the black light poster of Che Guevara and woke up sweating with the scream of an Apache -- "Aaaiieeee!" -- ringing in his head. Then he chanted, "Om," something he learned from his mother, who took a meditation class, to wash the scream away.
His fingers sat in the hollows of the keys, nesting like the bald bottoms of small flightless birds. He opened his eyes and looked out the window at the oak. It’s a conspiracy, he thought, of all the details of my life that keep me from writing this novel. That damn tree had to take root right there -- he leaned toward the window, looked down at the base of the oak next to the cinder block fence; then, he looked up at the top of the tree -- and it had to sprout a limb on this side. Now it reminds me, every time it drags itself over those tiles, of all of the things I should be doing instead of sitting here trying to be a writer. The tree conspires with the house and the house with the car and the car with my job and all of it with my memories and with the years of trouble. Even my own body conspires against me. He took a handful of the paunch above his belt, ran his tongue around the molar that had twinged and sparked for the past month, and shifted in his chair as he thought about the appointment he had made with his doctor for a colonoscopy. It’s a conspiracy, collusion, a goddam plot against me. He looked out the window and blinked. A plot, he thought. That’s exactly what it is, and he swiveled back to his desk, put his fingers to the keys, and started to write.

Fiction writers face a variety of troubles, foremost among them misunderstanding or forgetting that what gives a story its structure and momentum is the plot. And then they forget or misunderstand what makes a good plot, what drives the best and most familiar stories around us -- a character who wants something and obstacles, internal or external, that prevent him or her from attaining it. Dorothy wants to get back to Kansas, but the Wicked Witch of the East puts up roadblock after roadblock. Romeo and Juliet want a life together, but their families won’t allow it. Luke wants to become a Jedi, but his impatience, immaturity, and his father, Darth Vader, make it difficult and dangerous. The Joads want a new chance in California, but nature, circumstance, and people stand in their way at every turn. Julian is no exception; he wants to write and to be a writer, and even though he finally made the connection between the "conspiracy" and plot, his troubles have only just begun -- as they should in a good story.

His fingers flew over the keys, words building into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into people and a place that began to come to life in his mind. He set the story in a fictional border town since this was the world that Julian knew, and the people were built from a mixture of memory, imagination, and meanness, drawing on a long life of relationships that had failed or gradually faded away. He described people in painful detail -- their childhoods, their astrological signs and religious beliefs, their fears and foibles, their sexual tendencies and romantic desires. He breathed life into each of them as they appeared on the stage of his story, but each time one arrived, Julian found himself backtracking so that the reader knew as much about them as he did, thinking that without the background their present actions would make no sense. He banged away at the keys, giving his mother’s propensity for exaggeration to the uncle of the main character, hemorrhoids to the character he modeled after his disgusting and obnoxious next door neighbor, and the sexual peculiarities of a girl he knew in high school to a woman character who was born mute. While he thought he was building an incredible story, full of complexity and humanity, he was, in fact, mired in his characters’ pasts, in information that was fascinating to him as it appeared on the screen of his computer but which failed to advance the story. It’s not that time stood still; instead, it moved backwards more often than it moved forward. Julian continued to write through the afternoon, unaware of the darkening sky and the ominous stillness outside his window.

Inexperienced fiction writers are apt to rely too heavily on back-story to give readers the context necessary to understand the present. They create a situation for their characters and suddenly feel that readers won’t understand why the newly-divorced, 30-year-old protagonist won’t get on the Ferris wheel with his date unless we go back to the county fair when he was 15. So the writer halts the present action and shifts to an event that occurred 15 years earlier, spends a page describing that situation, and then returns to the present story. The problem with this is that every flashback not only stops the story’s momentum but also reverses it. Yes, flashbacks can provide important information, but used to excess and at the wrong time they can halt that momentum, interrupt what novelist and author of The Art of Fiction John Gardner calls the "vivid, continuous dream," and frustrate the reader. However, a good story pulls us forward, enticing us to find out what’s going to happen next.

When a deafening crack of thunder rattled his window, Julian jerked upright in his chair, gasped, "My God," and swung away from his desk. He stood up, his eyes round and his mouth hanging open as he watched the storm sweep through the neighborhood and one by one obscure the houses along San José, first in a cloud of brown dust and then in the gray drapery of rain driven by the wind rising out of the monte. A bolt of lightning sizzled down the bruised sky and a boom of thunder echoed in Julian’s chest. The wind rose up out of the yard, as if it blew out of the ground inside the block fence below. It lifted the limbs of the oak like a man opening an umbrella and held them up in the dark, dirt-filled air as the rain approached. Then the wind roared around his house and, with the violence of a cracking whip, banged the limbs down on the roof. Tile shattered, and curved brown shards swept past the window in a sheet of water. The limb swung down violently, wrenched away from the trunk of the tree, and tore free, leaving a long, raw rip in the wood. The free end of the branch, falling through the rain, arced toward the house and caught in the power lines outside the window. Its weight pulled the lines down, and then they slipped together in a tangle of leaves, water, and wood, exploded in a shower of sparks, and hissed and steamed together in the downpour. Julian stumbled back, tripped over the leg of the chair behind him, and fell to the floor. Lightning again lit up the sky outside, thunder on top of the flash, and then the light on his desk went out and the air conditioner wheezed to a stop. The computer screen flickered and went black. Except for the battering of the storm against the walls, the house was silent. Julian put his hands over his eyes, groaned, sprawled flat out on the floor, and swore. He knew he hadn't saved the last two pages.

Victims are people to whom things happen and who then blame their misfortune on circumstances or on others. They complain and want others to feel sorry for them. Victims are not the kind of people that make good characters in a story. Fiction writers need to recognize the importance of creating a character who will not be victimized but who, when things go bad, is driven to act. A character who is willing to take matters into his or her own hands and do something, even if the reader recognizes that the decision made by the character is dangerous or foolish but made out of a sincere desire to help someone, to do the right thing, or to achieve what the character wants, is far more interesting and endearing than a character who waits for things to happen and never acts. Julian can stay on the floor and cry over the loss of his work and concede that the world -- including this storm -- is conspiring to prevent him from writing the novel that he knows he has inside of him. Or he can act.

The wind pummeled the east side of the house and slapped the sheets of rain pouring off the roof against the window. Then, Clarissa, about whom he had forgotten while he was immersed in the story, called up the stairs. "Dad," she yelled, her voice thin and raspy as if from sleep. "What’s wrong with the television?"
Julian slid his hands off his eyes and down his face and flopped them on the floor at his sides. Something struck his forehead, something damp, but he was still thinking about the computer and about Clarissa’s question. "It’s the storm," he called. "It knocked out the electricity."
She sighed, and her footsteps faded away from the stairs and into the rooms below.
Again something struck Julian on the forehead. He reached up and wiped at it with his right hand. It was damp, a drop of water. He looked up and grimaced. A small, dark patch the size of his hand stood out on the white ceiling and sagged slightly in the center. Then, a droplet fell away from it, plummeted toward him, and splattered on his furrowed forehead. He clambered to his feet and rushed to the window.
Outside the limb dangled from above him, most likely having been driven through the tiles and into the roof. That’s why the ceiling is dripping, he thought. The other end of the limb that broke away from the trunk of the oak dangled below the two power lines, which continued to spark and sag under the weight of the branch. Julian didn’t know a lot about electricity, but he could see what was happening, and he didn’t like what he thought it could lead to -- the power lines were still hot, the branch was hung up on them on one end and caught in the roof on the other. If I don’t do something, he thought, we won’t even have a wet ceiling to fix. When the rain stops, it’ll just be a matter of time before that limb -- he didn’t want to think any further. He only knew he had to do something. He ran to the door, galloped down the stairs and through the living room, past Clarissa sitting on the couch with one leg folded under her and staring at the blank TV screen. "Dad," she said, her voice rising at the end, "where are you going?" But he flew through the kitchen without answering and out the back door. The wind ripped the rain across his face and soaked his shirt and pants in the first four leaps through the pools of water in the yard on his way to the garage. He grabbed the knob as he slammed into the door, which shuddered against his weight and swung open. He gasped and shook a halo of water from his head in the dry, dark space of the garage. On the far wall hung the extension ladder. Julian felt his stomach quake when he realized how high the ladder would reach when extended to its full length. But he knew what he had to do.

Fear of the unknown often keeps fiction writers from getting to work. Knowing where a story is going, making decisions about plot, outlining events to gain control over them, and then drafting can eliminate that fear, but good writers know that answers about plot usually aren’t within them but within their characters. Decisions about plot need to be based on what we know about the people in our stories -- what they want, what they fear, what their strengths and weaknesses are -- and on the circumstances under which they must act. If we know enough about them and create situations that require that they make decisions and act, we’ll discover as we go what they’ll do. As Bernard Malamud once said, "Great writing leads constantly into surprises and the writer should be the first one surprised." However, the surprises must arise inevitably out of circumstance and character; they should startle the reader but feel entirely right. It’s in this search for the unexpected that writers feel the fear of creation but also discover the joy of fiction.

Julian crossed the empty garage, reached over Clarissa’s mountain bike, gripped the ladder in the middle, and lifted it off the angle irons fastened to the wall. He set it on the floor, the aluminum ringing against the cement and the rope flapping against the rungs. He stood up and looked back toward the door where the rain fell in sheets. The wind drove the water inside, a puddle formed next to the sill, and a round, silvery snake of water crept in a narrow stream toward the center of the garage. Another flash of lightning scorched the dark afternoon, and a couple of seconds later thunder rumbled across the sky, boomed and echoed around him. He took a deep breath, exhaled, bent over and picked up the ladder. He slid his grip further to one end to balance it, and as it rubbed against the side of his left leg, he carefully swung it around and aimed for the door. He plodded back into the rain, drops streaming down his face and off the end of his nose and chin and pinging against the ladder like small hammers. He looked up at the house, where the limb hung on the power lines and above it where, he realized, the wind drove the top of the tree down so hard that its shear weight was enough to break through the roof. Now the huge mass of green that covered a good share of the east side of the roof rocked in the wind and swayed back and forth; the power lines buzzed and sizzled ominously.
He sloshed through the water and across the yard. He stopped a little to the left of the spot directly below his upstairs window. There he planted the feet of the ladder in the spongy lawn, swung it upright, and leaned it against the house. He pulled the rope and drew the extension up until it clanged against the edge of the roof. As he took hold of the aluminum sides and put his right foot on the first step, he saw -- framed by two rungs -- Clarissa’s face peering at him through the living room window. She frowned and slowly and exaggeratedly mouthed the words, "What are you doing?"

I didn’t realize how important Clarissa’s role would be in this scene until I put Julian’s foot on the first step of the ladder. He had to hesitate because of his fear of heights and because of the obvious risks he’d run by climbing an aluminum ladder in a thunder storm, standing on a tiled roof in a driving rain, and trying to move a limb hung up on electrical lines that still have current running through them. But rather than forcing Julian to do the expected -- climb the ladder and get struck by lightning or freeze three-fourths of the way up the ladder because he fears falling -- I tried to think of something less expected. I didn’t want him to go up the ladder too quickly, and then I realized that Clarissa needed to play a larger role in the action. Why not hold the moment before the ascent up the ladder to build tension, and what better way to do that than to create some exchange between father and daughter? To make this work, however, I’ll have to give her a larger role earlier in the story and more fully develop the relationship between her and her father. Then, whatever happens to Julian will have a greater effect on her and, as a result, on the reader. These were things I had not planned but which revealed themselves during the course of writing this brief scene.

As her eyes turned to the sky and toward the end of the ladder, which Julian knew she couldn’t see from inside the house, he watched her. Then, as if a cloud cast a shadow on her confusion, the frown changed. "Don’t," he saw her say. "Please." Julian was about to take his foot from the ladder . . .

One last thing -- good fiction writers keep readers wanting more. The momentum of a novel is created by building up to small climax after small climax and by not resolving all the conflicts within the chapter that produced them. End the chapter when the reader is still hungry and won’t be able to resist turning the page to find out what happens next.

. . . but then, before he heard it, he felt the steely white flash of electricity and saw his fate in Clarissa’s wide eyes.

Besides mastering the skills that allow one to communicate clearly and effectively in writing, plotting is probably the most difficult task for a fiction writer. Even though some people today look at worldwide events and say that fiction has no relevance and at best only allows people to escape their real-world concerns, I disagree. Stories, at the very least, do those things, but they also help writers and readers put things into perspective and remind us of the worth of ordinary people and the absolute significance of their everyday lives and the values and beliefs that lead them -- and us -- to act. Plotting fiction requires vision, imagination, and trust in one’s judgement and in one’s characters to reveal the stories that they and we need to tell and which our readers need to experience.

(Randy Koch teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Texas A&M International University.)