The Art of the Short Story Part II Plot

I covered the first part of The Art of the Short Story, mostly insights from the 52 authors featured in this brilliant book yesterday and didn't get around to talking about the last section of the book, Part III "Writing".

The Elements of Short Fiction

Plot

Characterization

Point of View

Setting

Theme

Style

An interesting note from looking at the Table of Contents for this section is that Plot is covered over a total of 6 pages, Characterization over 3 pages, and Point of View over 2 pages while Setting, Theme, and Style are given a mere page each.

The section on Plot opens up with Aristotle's "Poetics", which also gives first importance to Plot.

"A beginning is that which does not come necessarily after something else, but after which it is natural for another thing to exist or come to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which naturally comes after something else, either as its necessary sequel or as its usual (and hence probable) sequel, but itself has nothing after it. A middle is that which both comes after something else and has another thing following it. A well-constructed plot, therefore, will neither begin at some chance point nor end at some chance point, but will observe the principles here stated."

The book states that it is rare for a first attempt at a short story to observe such "obvious" balances of proportion. "A typical first attempt at a short story may include an elaborate beginning of four or five pages, a page or two of summarized dramatic events, and a slam-bang ending of a single paragraph that includes a hail of gunfire and screeching brakes".

The plot of the story, the book says "is first a movement in time; second a movement in casuality; and, third, a movement in dramatic tension".

The section goes on to list stories contained within the book that present unified plots, that is, plots where events happen in real-time. Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" takes place in one continuous hour. Jack London's "To Build a Fire" closely follows the last hours of a Yukon traveler's life.  Edgar Allan Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" is the real-time confession of a deranged killer.  Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" takes place between supper-time and bedtime. Another thing to note is that stories with a unified plot also tend to take place in a carefully limited locale.

Plots with longer periods of time are called episodic plots, which oblige the writer to make transitions between scenes. As a writer when I read whether it's a short story or a novel I tend to find that a good number of writers have difficulties making transitions. 

One writer who springs to mind is George RR Martin, author of A Song of Fire and Ice (aka Game of Thrones, which is the first book in this series). I'm convinced that his "Point of View" style is simply because he cannot make transitions - not from one character to another nor from one locale to another. I can understand how this would be a problem given that no one character is the main anything - who the protagonist or antagonist is depends almost entirely on locale. This interests me because as the series begins to draw to a close it's obvious that the various characters will have to come closer and closer together and that there will be less and less locales. I'm interested to see how Martin handles the transitions or if he will switch from an episodic plot to a more unified one as many epic stories tend to do towards the end.

Take for example the author that Martin has seemed to borrow from primarily, JRR Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings". There are a number of changes in locale and the transitions seem logical and streamlined. I think Martin will make a similar attempt to unify in the vein of LOTR meaning that eventually Martin's characters will move towards the Iron Throne in the same way the characters of LOTR move towards Mordor, as the Iron Throne is what unifies the majority of the characters in terms of their motives.

A primary feature of an episodic plot is the ability to move backwards and forwards through time. Additional information is provided by flashbacks while the author is free to leap forward over periods of time that hold little dramatic interest.

The book cites Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilych" as a story that finds its punch using flashbacks. It begins at the title character's wake and continues backwards through the character's childhood, education, marriage, rise to prominence, and finally his fatal illness. The unusual time scheme underscores his assertion that his protagonist's life "had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible".

I can cite a number of stories and novels that fall flat when using flashbacks and if the advise of agents or writers or the desires of publishers are to be taken into consideration, writers are encouraged to not use flashbacks especially in the beginning of the story. 

I cannot necessarily agree with this idea, but one example I can cite is JK Rowling's first book in the Harry Potter series. I don't like the Prologue much but at the same time, the information contained therein about the circumstances that bring Harry to the Dursleys door are extremely important to the story. The next time we see Harry he's a boy of 10, but because of the previous exposition of the essential information  - the who, what, when, where - the reader knows what they need to know to keep on reading.

If the Prologue to the Harry Potter books is exposition in the theme of the traditional fairy tale "Once upon a time", there is another variation, one which seems more in favour these days called the in medias res (in the middle of things). These stories and novels open after the conventions of the old epic poems in the midst of some event or other and it is not until later that the characters and their relationship to the one another or to the story itself are made clear.

Stories that begin in medias res skip the first part of plot (exposition) to the complication or conflict. The rising action of the story (or what Aristotle would have called the essential middle) may or may not be the bulk of the story, but it is always building towards the next part of the plot the climax.

The climax is the greatest point of tension in the story, which brings about the falling action of the story, in which the built up tension is finally released.

The final part of a plot is the dénouement or resolution. The word dénouement refers to the untying of a knot which returns the characters to another stable situation.  Just as fairy tales traditionally end with something akin to "and they lived happily ever after", many stories conclude with what the future holds for its characters.

The dénouement may be either closed or open. A closed dénouement ties everything up in a bow and explains all unanswered questions the reader might have, as in the "Elementary, my dear Watson" explanation found in any of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales.  On the other hand an open dénouement leaves us with a few tantalizing loose ends.

I can think of any number of stories or novels that end by tying up everything nicely, but fewer who manage to pull off the trick of leaving the readers questions unanswered in a way that is successful that isn't in the genre of sci-fi and or about dystopian futures, which I think are more inclined because of the impending future that cannot be answered to be able to pull this off.

Many of Borges' stories come to no neat conclusion, such as "The Immortal". Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", contained within this book comes to a conclusion without providing answers to the reader as well. If you can think of others that do this successfully, please leave suggestions as I'm very curious about this mostly because at the end of six seasons of LOST I wanted to hunt the writers down and torture them for answers.

What this book doesn't really say is what makes a good plot? Should I worry that as a writer I myself can't define or distinguish a good plot from a bad plot even though I'm able to nitpick other elements of stories to excess?

A search on Google for "What makes a good plot" turns up a number of answers and I've clicked through a good number of them now without finding any answer better than the definition of plot itself:

plot: is a literary term defined as the events that make up a story, particularly as they relate to one another in a pattern, in a sequence, through cause and effect, how the reader views the story, or simply by coincidence

* I'd also like to mention that the "elements" of plot in this post taken from The Art of the Short Story were taken from Gustav Freytag, which you an read about on Wikipedia here. Also Aristotle's Poetics is a must read for well, everyone.