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#4 Enter Deus Ex Machina; Exit Reader

July 31st, 2007    Subscribe To Our Feed

Enter Deus Ex Machina; Exit Reader

Ben Elton was being steered away from committing the crime of ‘Deus Ex Machina’ by a master of plot-writing. ‘Deus Ex Machina,’ translated literally as “god out of a machine,” is an unexpected, artificial, or improbable character, device, or event which drops into the story from nowhere. Its sole purpose: to resolve a situation or untangle a plot. Is your hero bound and gagged next to a time-bomb? Have a passing rat chew through the rope! Or maybe he’s in a dimly-lit basement surrounded by very pissed off gun-toting enemy agents? Have his watch emit an ultra-high frequency sound wave that pops the room’s single light-bulb!

The reaction of your target audience? Groan. The suspension of disbelief collapses taking all your carefully crafted characters with it.

Although this plotting boo-boo bears a Latin moniker, it was the Greek dramatists, notoriously Euripides, who applied the ‘technique’ with such great frequency and gusto. At the time, it was quite acceptable - the ‘God on the Machine’ was the actor playing Zeus who was lowered onto the stage by crane at the critical moment. The first recorded criticism came from Aristotle no less who argued that good tragedy should be plausible. True enough. And that was 2000+ years ago. In today’s world, unless you’re writing a ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’-style romp, you simply cannot get away with such blatant coincidence.

So, how do you fix it?

It all comes down to considering what a plot actually is. If you see it as a chain of events that sweeps your main character along from beginning to end, there’s a strong chance you’re going to be employing gods on cranes. As we’ve already seen in this series of articles, plotting an effective story stems from the motive of your characters: what they want, the obstacles preventing them getting it and what they have to do to overcome them. Once we are engaged in the character’s struggle, be it internal or external, we will not tolerate something outside the frame of the story bursting in to do what the main character couldn’t. Aristotle was right - we demand the story to be plausible, but we also demand that it is meaningful, that our main character wins or fails on her own terms.

Another aspect of the blunder is the appearance made by the machine itself. We don’t want to ’see the plot’ or hear it creaking. Not only do most kidnapping destinations not come complete with gnawing rats, nor MI6 operatives carry watches that emit UHF sound-waves tuned to the exact frequency to shatter a light bulb, we really don’t want to see the author’s little tricks. They get in the way. They spoil the fun. Why? Because as a reader, you’ll feel duped. You lowered your guard and committed to the author’s story world. Then the author let you down. She betrayed your confidence. And there’s only one form of revenge: close the book. Forever.

To wrap up, there are no short cuts to story resolution, or at least there haven’t been since about 350 B.C. It might help to picture your story as a well-constructed building. A Deus Ex Machina would be equivalent to not bothering to put a roof on. Even if your readers don’t roll their eyes and lose confidence in your ability to constuct a complete edifice, they’ll notice the draught. Nobody hangs around in a draughty house for long.

#3 Facing up to Conflict

August 8th, 2007    Subscribe To Our Feed

#3 Facing up to Conflict.

In Chuck Palahniuk’s ‘Fight Club’, Tyler Durden gives his followers a special task to fulfill before they meet again: to pick a fight with someone in the ‘real world.’ As they find out, most people will go to any lengths to avoid being embroiled in a conflict. In fact the only person that fights back is a priest. Why is it so important for Durden’s muppets to seek out conflict? Why do writers have to do the same with their own muppets?

Conflict fuels change. Durden, and Palahniuk’s, point was that you can’t really begin to gain self-knowledge or realign values to cope with a new situation unless you engage in open conflict with that situation. The same is true for fiction. Palahniuk attended numerous writer courses and seminars while cutting his teeth as an unpublished writer, and this is reflected in ‘Fight Club’s’ central theme of applying plot-generating techniques to ‘real life’ with fistfuls of irony thrown in - well worth a read…

The first point to make here is that fiction requires conflict. Without conflict there can be no change, or no resistence to change. If there’s no change or resistence to change, there’s no fiction. This is so self-evident that very few writers make this kind of mistake when planning their plots.

However, the second point to make leads us to our third biggest plot-writing blunder - ’serial’ or ‘incoherent’ conflict. In such stories, the main conflict is resolved in Chapter 2 only to replaced by a new conflict that is resolved two chapters down the line… and so on. While it might be OK for TV series that runs a new, 30-minute episode every week, a a ‘Serial’ conflict structure never manages to build up enough suspense to keep us turning 400+ pages. A story that is made up of ‘Incoherent’ conflicts - conflicts that don’t involve the main character - will have us wondering what the point of all this conflict really is, and have us throwing our hands, and the book, up in the air.

Why? The answer is simple: motivation.

Popular fiction (as opposed to unpopular fiction) tracks the changes a protagonist is forced to go through to reach her goal. It takes incredible willpower to consciously change - witness how hard most people find giving up smoking. However, if your main character is driven by internal obsession (love, revenge, that sort of thing) she will not be able to avoid the kinds of conflicts that most ‘normal’ people would steer well clear of. In Philip Roth’s ‘The Human Stain,’ Coleman Silk is so driven by his ambition that he reinvents himself and cuts all ties to his family, cultural and even racial roots (I don’t want to give too much away - it’s well worth reading). His classic character flaw forces him to deal with a succession of conflicts. All the conflicts make for a powerful, coherent story because they can all be traced back to the same source - Coleman’s lie.

The other type of conflict propellent is the external situation that forces a normal, non-obsessed person to face up to a conflict that demands qualities and struggle outside of their normal life experience. Ian McEwan’s remarkable ‘Saturday’ shows us what happens when a well-ordered middle-class life is thrown off-cilter by a chance event. The protagonist is forced to contemplate his own value system, examine his own internal conflicts to gain the strength to stand up and fight. It is not until the situation gets very out-of-hand that he comes to realise what he stands for, gain a deeper understanding of his own family and call on the qualities required to deal with his assailant. Sometimes personal revelation is the hardest part of undergoing change - and all that on a Saturday.

Both the ‘Human Stain’ and ‘Saturday’ are character-driven plots that charge forward at a break-neck pace. We become entangled in the protagonist’s dilemmas, we understand their motives and we want to see them emerge unscathed but stronger. In some ways they are facing up to conflicts that we all shy away from in our everyday lives, and their strength and resilience whether in triumph or eventual defeat helps us all to examine our own motives and values without ever having to go through the bad stuff ourselves. It all makes a good paperback well worth the price.

#2 Story Structure - The Journey Without and Within

August 13th, 2007    Subscribe To Our Feed

Writing a Structured Story

I remember one of my good friends approaching me after completing a story - the first of his that went on to get published - and saying, in a state of awe and wonder, ‘Structure is everything.’ He had a point. It was certainly addressing structure that had changed his writing from promising to published.

Structure is the weak component of many stories and covers a multitude of sins. Symptoms include:
1. an unidentifiable main character (readers asking, ‘Whose story is this?’)
2. poor scene-setting
3. lack of coherent conflict
4. premature scene climaxes
5. protagonist/plot mismatch, in which the main character’s internal/emotional dynamic would never allow him to do what the external dynamic of the plot requires him to do - or it would allow him to do everything easily, without experiencing much of an internal struggle.

To address these problems, it’s important to drop the idea of structure as a cage you erect around your story to stop it wandering off. It’s not a formula, but a map that you and your reader can use to explore the issues that your story broaches. Maps answer the questions, ‘Where are we?’ ‘What obstacles are around the corner?’ and ‘How are we going to get out of here?’ Your story poses similar questions. Your main character, and your character alone, has to find the answers.

Asking the Right Questions

Most of our understanding of story structure has been gleaned from our own reading. Good stories sweep us along. We rarely become conscious of the story’s underlying structure. It’s only when a story goes wrong that you notice the nuts and bolots sticking through. But it is often difficult to see the nuts and bolts sticking out in your own writing. Analysing the structure of a story can feel forced and unnatural. That’s when it can be helpful to get outside help and critques from other writers in a community like Edit Red.

In an attempt to find a more organic approach to structuring a story, Chris Volger developed the ‘Writer’s Journey’ in which the main character makes his way through a highly-charged (meaningful) sequence of life-shaping events. This led to a ‘12-step’ approach which is often cited by Hollywood scriptwriting courses. The journey in question is really a psychological one, mapping the changes someone we care about has to go through to overcome conflict and reach a goal. So the questions we need to ask are:

1. What does she need to overcome?
2. How does she need to change?
3. What conflicts must be resolved?

In popular fiction the protagonist’s journey is often one that leads to greater maturity, self-knowledge or happiness. In literary fiction the journey might well lead to despair, alienation or disillusion, but will still involve personal change. The protagonist has learnt to do something that she couldn’t at the story’s opening, or has earned something valuable like love, self-acceptance or a home.

It’s easy in stepped plans to miss out a couple of steps and mash a few together - at least it’s easy for me - but this doesn’t really matter. Why not? Because we’re not trying to create a formula to churn out stories. We’re trying to maintain our focus on the main purpose of the plot: to provide your main character with a reason to change or resist change.

For example, your complex detective novel would need to be more than a puzzle for your readers - they have suduko for that. It is the account of your character’s journey toward growth and change. When we are forced to go through personal change, we draw on resrves of strength, endurance and courage. These qualities give meaning to our story, and help our readers identify with the characters we have created and the sruggles they go through. We are all creatures of habit. Novels are not long descriptions of habits. They are a dynamic illustration of a character’s development from one set of habits and values to a set of entirely new habit and values. We track the change, scene by scene, showing our readers how our hero copes with each obstacle on the the way.

Suddenly our story is full of impetus and purpose.

The Internal Journey of the Protagonist

Let’s take a look at how this can work in practice. Remember our priest who was forced into solving the murder of a cardinal in #6: ‘Dull Beginning, Sagging Middle, Lame End’? The murder took place in a cathedral, and the cardinal’s body was discovered just after Mass, as our priest made his exit through the sanctuary. So you already have three powerful ingredient in place:

1. Premise - murder in a cathedral (not that uncommon through the ages, but always fraught with controversy and political tension)
2. Situation - the hierarchy of the Catholic church (the archetype for all stuffy, corrupt institutions and the abuse of power)
3. Plot - a cardinal murdered by a bishop who hoped to be named as his replacement (power corrupts…)

The whole story is to be tied together by the character of the priest who discovered the cardinal’s body. His goal: to identify the perpetrator. His motivation: justice.

So our priest is questioned by the police and gets close to their initial investigations when they suddenly arrest a homeless teenager. Although the police seem satisfied that the case is closed, the priest is far from convinced. He starts to do some digging of his own, and before long an attempt is made on his life - now he knows he’s on to something. He narrows the list of suspects down to a member of the archdiocese then finds a way to get all the main suspects together, in classic Agatha Christie fashion, and tricks the murderer into giving himself away.

Mmm. All the external components for our story are in place: premise, plot and situation. But there’s something missing… something to make us care. We need some emotional involvement. We need to send our priest on an emotional and psychological journey. And we need to be there with him. In short, this has to be more than a blip in the priest’s life that we get to share. It has to be a life-changing experience.

That’s where the internal conflict comes in - whatever internal issue or problem the plot forces the protagonist to confront. This adds an additional layer to your story as well as greater coherence and plausibility. After all, most people aren’t driven to risk their lives to unmask a murderer - that’s why we pay for a police force. Our priest has to have a good reason, however unconscious, for putting his own life on the line.

Coherence - Knitting the Internal and External Factors Together

The overall thrust of story coherence is to have everything in the story working together to create a profound overall effect. This is served when the events in the story are developed to bring the priest’s own unique internal conflict to the surface. This won’t affect the external structure - he will still hunt for clues, put them together and solve the murder. However, each scene will take on greater significance and emotional charge as the story not only progresses toward solving the murder, but also reveals and resolves the priest’s internal conflict.

It is this internal conflict that shapes the course of the plot - his journey - and serves to heighten the dramatic tension of each scene. So the question remains, how can we do this in this story?

The trick, once again, is to ask the right questions. In this case,

1. How is the priest going to be affected internally by this story?
2. What character will be most profoundly affected by the events we have outlined above?

Our story seems to be about challenging authority: firstly, the bishop brings down the cardinal by murdering him and usurping his position. Secondly, the priest disregards the authority of the police and brings down the bishop. The type of person to be least affected by this would be a rebellious type. Such a man would be following his own natural mistrust of authority figures: no internal conflict, no need to change, no dramatic tension. Boring.

So who would be most profoundly affected in this case? Someone who trusts authority. Someone who adheres to the rules laid down by those above. Someone who believes in the underlying goodness of the system. The former altar boy, turned priest, who wants nothing more than to rise to a high position in the institution he venerates. Such a person is going to be wrestling with himself in a story like this one. Such a person is going to have a terrible time. Such a person is goint to have to change.

The priest is loyal to the church, to the hierarchy and to the bishop. In fact, we could tighten his ties to the bishop by making him the bishop’s own personal prodigy. The bishop has hand-picked him form the streets as a boy, nurtured him through seminarium and given him his first position as a priest - a position much higher than a novice would be expected to fill. In return he has earned the priest’s fierce loyalty - a heroic quality in itself. But in this case, it is loyalty that makes the priest prejudiced in favour of the bishop - the murderer!

Now we have the seeds to create plenty of conflict and get plenty of dramatic tension into our scenes. All we need to do now is to knit the internal and external events of the plot together. In other words, we need to have the external events provoke the internal conflict in the priest in order to drive him to challenge his views and feelings for the bishop, the church and authority itself. We need to provoke Peripetia.

The Turnaround - Peripetia

Peripetia is Aristotle’s term for the turnaround. It occurs in a story when everything that seemed to be true turns out to be false; good turns out to be bad; right, wrong. The dramatic tension, the character’s internal struggle, peaks at the moment of peripetia. Everything he believed in turns out to be false; who he is and his place in the scheme of things is exposed as naive and false. Scary stuff.

What we want to achieve is a total turnaround. To make this effective, again we have to knit external and internal elements together. We have to experience the priest’s loyalty and respect for authority before we force him to betray everything he believes in. So, when the police are investigating, perhaps the priest is outraged at the questions that are being asked of his mentor. So what if his surplice was found at the scene of the crime? Our priest can become embroiled in the investigation because he rushes to the defense of the bishop. Then he begins to uncover a few pieces of ambiguous evidence. Things stop fitting the bishop’s story. Still he refuses to believe that his mentor could be guilty. But it’s already too late. He’s already on a road strewn with conflict and suffering. Bad for him, but great for the drama in our story.

In fact, it would be good for our story if he came close to proving the bishop’s innocence. He could quash his own doubts and help everyone else in the case do the same: the cleaner was in a hurry that day and admits she might have dropped the surplice on the floor, herself. The heated conversation between the bishop and the cardinal moments before his death, which was overheard by the teenager shooting up in the confessional, might well have been about football. The teenager was in no fit state to say. By the middle of the book the priest looks as though he has saved his bishop, the reader is thinking, ‘So it was just the junkie after all,’ when he learns something that turns everything on its head - the moment of peripetia.

Now, he can keep quiet and save his mentor, or he can speak up and save the junkie. But the bishop isn’t the man he seemed to be. And the priest’s faith in his own belief system has been challenged. The key dilemma: does he place his deep-felt loyalty above the truth?

It’s important to point out that it’s not the bishop who has changed. He can still be an essentially good man worthy of devotion and respect, who is in the grip of the powerful institution that has corrupted him. Or it may have been an accident, and the bishop’s only real crime is in trying to cover the whole thing up and implicate the junkie to save the good name of the church - two problems solved in one, as it were. And in the heat of the moment… well, you get the idea. The bishop is not evil. It is the priest who has to confront his own internal daemons, and this is where the drama of the story lies.

The choice the priest makes will cause fundamental changes in his identity. If he turns in the bishop, he has come to value truth over loyalty and justice over authority. Thus, the outcome of his choice will determine the answers to the central questions posed by both the internal and external plot questions.

At the end of the story, the events carry a much greater portent than the bringing to justice of another murderer. We witnessed the fundamental change in our protagonist. He can never go back to being the man he was before. We have managed to transform an admittedly complex sequence of events into a real story that resonates deeply on both an individual and universal level. It is by combining character and plot (the internal and external journeys) that we have arrived at the essential stucture of our story.

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