Lars Eighner's Lavender Blue

5. Techniques of Fiction

Plotting

Adolescent writers, in the old days, sacrificed many trees to self-indulgence measured by the ream. Things have changed in this modern world. Now they use electrons.

My purpose here is not to make fun of children in general or of child writers in particular, however satisfying ridiculing and humiliating children may be as a pastime. I aim to knock over adolescent writing, which is a serious impediment to adults who want to write, and if some adolescents get in my line of fire, I can hardly be blamed for that. The problem is not that adolescent life lacks drama: world's depend upon what the snotty girls thinks, whether Josh and Sendi break up, and what may happen if one is grounded on the most crucial night of one's life. No, the problem is that very little of that drama has ever got onto paper or hard drives.

What we get are landscape poems dripping with the pathetic fallacy, extensive ramblings about the meaninglessness and tragedy of it all, sappy love letters, dutiful diaries of dreck, and perhaps worst of all, the adolescent story. The flaw of the adolescent story is that it is not a story, but we really can hardly blame the kids for that. Friends and mothers are notoriously credulous critics, and English teachers are starved to see something with two consecutive words spelled correctly. English teachers, if they do not themselves live in a fog of adolescent delusion, know most of their charges are meant to be cannon fodder or else to attend a prison until they are hanged, and if any write something other than a confession it will almost certainly be a business letter, a sick excuse for its own child, or if everything goes better than expected, a college essay.

In classes for those with the curse of giftedness, cadavers of very dead literature are presented on a slab for students to dissect. Students may gather that "To His Coy Mistress" has something to do with sex, that Mrs. Haversham is weird, and that every rose means something. Very seldom does the lecturer demonstrate the story line, and the result when this is attempted seldom provides the stuff to encourage any young Frankenstein to sew the pieces back together. You might think this would change if one of the little tads evades the hangman and the recruiting sergeant, goes to university, and after serving time as an undergraduate gets admitted to a writing program. But in the main it does not.

The number of great novels that have come from graduate writing programs is not entirely overwhelming. Now it is true enough that many good writers and even some great ones have taken creative writing courses. But I wonder sometimes if this is not a bit like the observation that many junkies started on mother's milk. I believe that writing can be taught to a willing and intelligence student, or I would not be wasting my time on the present writing, but it is really rather astonishing how bad a piece can be and still be held up in a creative writing class as fine work which sets a standard to which other students should aspire.

Now grow up and hear this: stories have plots.

Stories have plots.

If you want to write a story, you must have a plot. You may write many words before you know what the plot is or you may know what the plot is before you write a word of the story. That is right. You can plan a story instead of just waiting for one to happen.

(I will have to admit that there are natural story tellers. They create stories that have plots, apparently without ever having thought of plot. They cannot tell you in so many words what the plot of their story is, but their stories have plots, nonetheless. They seem to have learned by trial and error that just wandering around emoting does not make much of a story and that rescue by omnipotent superhero friends tends to get a little threadbare after a while.)

When you think you have a finished work, whether it is a five-page story or a five-hundred-page novel, sooner or later you will manage to get someone to ask you "What is it about?" Once you have cultivated so much interest, if you find you do not have an answer to "What is it about?" or if the answer is a dressed up noun, probably an abstraction ("It's about love." "It's about justice." "It's about my hometown." "It's about young love and justice in my hometown.") you do not have a story or a novel. You have an adolescent ramble.

Elements of Plot

Plot is conflict. Stories and novels often have many conflicts, but the plot is the conflict. The conflict or the struggle of the piece has been know from ancient times as the agon. Conflict is most easily developed when it is viewed as involving two parties. That is conflicts have a hero and a villain. Of in other words, the agon has two parties: the proagonist and the antagonist.

In sophisticated literature these elements are often disguised in various ways, but for the moment, my purpose is to make the elements as clear as possible. A plot is a fight between a good guy and a bad guy.

   good guy    <-  *fight*  ->    bad guy
             
   protagonist  <-  *agon*  ->    antagonist
   subject       active verb      object   

Yes, there is a little more to it than that, but if you don't have that, you won't get to the little more. What I am aiming at here is a one-sentence plot synopsis. This not merely a theoretical exercise. That one-sentence plot synopsis is the answer to the question: "What is your novel about?" (Or story, or screenplay.) Some writers write hundreds of pages before they try to find a plot in what they have written. Some have plotted a series of seven novels before they start the first draft of the first volume. Some time before it goes to market every work of fiction must face up to the one-sentence plot synopsis.

Two things are known about the one-sentence plot synopsis as soon as a plot exists: the subject of the sentence is the protagonist and the verb (predicate) of the sentence is an active verb. Often the active verb is very active: battles, struggles, smashes, pursues, fights, crushes, escapes, and so forth. In other cases the active verb is less bruising: develops, considers, regrets, decides, and so forth. The antagonist has to come into it somewhere, usually as one sort of object or another.

What we have now is something like: Batman battles the Riddler. That is a plot. If you have ever been a bit queasy when questions of plot arise, you should see plot is in no way difficult, complicated, mysterious, or intimidating: "Batman battles the Riddler" is a plot.

Now we have an embarrassment of riches, for "Batman battles the Riddler" is the plot of hundreds of stories which have been or could be written. It requires just a little more restrictive detail: "Batman battles the Riddler to free Robin from a death chamber." I have nothing else up my sleeve. That is a complete one-sentence plot synopsis, ready for a cover letter. (Pity you don't have the rights to Batman.)

Conflict vs. Situation

While it is a tad simplistic to say a conflict can be expressed in an active verb, perhaps aided by a phrase like "to free Robin from a death chamber," you will not go far wrong if your one-sentence plot synopsis looks very much like the one given. What is not true is that any combination of active verb and contributing phrase add up to a conflict.

Most stories, novels, and screenplays you have ever come across begin with a situation. There is a dead body in the living room. A cheap detective works in a grubby office over a store front. A well-to-do detective counsels a woman who wants evidence her husband is cheating. A robot with a holographic message is launched from a spaceship before the ship is overrun by Empire storm troopers. These situations often can be expressed in active verbs, and some of them involve some conflict: that is, some fight occurs, although it is not the conflict of the story.

You may see the victim struggling as he is garroted. You may see the fancy detective suck in his female client by insisting that she probably does not really want to know for sure whether her husband is cheating. There is a violent battle on the spaceship between the valiant defenders and the storm troopers. These things may be final conflict for the bit-players who die in them, but they are not the conflict of the story. They are situations. Even Robin is capture by the Riddler's inescapable death machine is a situation.

I will not try to be Socratic here: situation is not conflict until the protagonist enters the fray. And by "the fray," here I mean the conflict of the story, not just some fist fight in a bar. Again, this may be sometime after the protagonist first appears. The protagonist may appear before the situation. The criterion is not when the protagonist first enters the page. It is when he enters the fray.

So far most of the conflicts and situations I have mention have been clichés. I did this in order to remind you of stories you have read or motion pictures you have seen which were based on those elements (although I have to admit I do not remember the Riddler's death machine).

The power of suggestion.

Suggestion makes fiction work. Use suggestion in description, dialect, characterization: in every important aspect of the story.

When a cartoon character stands in front of a cartoon brick wall, only two or three of the bricks are drawn in. The two or three suggest all the rest of the bricks in the wall. The viewer of cartoons has adapted his perception to the necessary conventions of cartoons. The viewer knows, whether he knows he knows or not, that he must invest single lines with much meaning.

The cartoon character's eye is nothing more than a dot and an arc, his nose is a semicircle, and his mouth a little squiggle. That is all the cartoon character has with which to represent the whole range of facial expressions. The cartoon viewer must be alert to very small differences in these, if he is to understand what the character's facial expressions represent.

If all the other bricks of the cartoon wall were drawn in, the viewer's powers of interpretation would be worked overtime to no good purpose. All those other lines really mean nothing, but while the viewer is discovering this she is distracted from the subtle differences in the lines that do mean something. The two or three bricks suggest the wall as well without distracting from that little extra line in the character's forehead that means he is concentrating deeply.

In a like manner, readers have adapted themselves to the conventions of prose. Conventions are necessary and reasonable. The reader does not analyze or even recognize conventions when he reads them. He accepts. The reader accepts until a clumsy writer mishandles something, overexplains, or deliberately exposes the machinery in an experimental work.

The reason for using suggestion is that few writers feel capable of writing a complete description of anything and no reader would want to read one. Suggestion was fully developed before modern physics showed the inherent impossibility of describing anything completely anyway.

To establish a medicine cabinet: an empty razor blade dispenser, a half bottle of mouthwash, a thermometer stood in a dusty glass. Complete catalogs of medicine cabinets have been entered by Joseph Hansen, J.D. Salinger, and William Burroughs (I think). Whatever the purpose of those inventories, a medicine cabinet is as well created with three items as with dozens. The verisimilitude of the medicine cabinet does depend on the accuracy of the items.

The medicine cabinet is improved not by adding dental floss and hemorrhoid remedies, but by saying that the mouthwash was amber and that the razor blade dispenser was for double-edged blades that would not fit the razor handle on the toilet tank. Naturally such items are better when they contribute something to an understanding of the person who occupies the premises or contribute in another way to the story.

Some items, like Sherlock Holmes's Persian slipper, in which he kept his tobacco, acquire a life of their own. Not everything your characters use or touch has that quality. If your character has place to live with a bathroom, and if he goes about in society without giving offense, we will assume that he has the usual toilet facilities and that he uses them. In other words, there may be no good reason to bring his medicine cabinet into it.

Similarly, you may show us what sort of person your character is by the way he acts in a few situations. We may or may not need to know the state of his relationship with his parents or his boss or the newsdealer at the corner. We do not have to have the history of his life nor even a complete account of his daily activities to know what sort of person he is.

The radio-play theory of fiction.

Although the writer must avoid ambiguities that lead to confusion or nonsense, the ambiguity of language helps to create fiction. The writer describes something he sees vividly, something close to him, or something made of bits and pieces of things he has seen. Because language is ambiguous, the writer cannot describe the thing exactly. The thing the reader reads about becomes something close to the reader, something the reader has seen, or something made of bits and pieces of things the reader has seen.

Creative ambiguity is a key to fiction. The reader envisions the thing vividly, but he does not envision exactly the same thing the writer had in mind. The author who says: "But that was not what I meant," admits his incompetence or his ignorance of the principle of story telling. Like all powerful forces, ambiguity can be respected, controlled, and put to creative use, or it can be ignored, treated carelessly, and allowed to work destruction.

The writer needs to develop the ability to read his own work, no only recalling what he meant, but also ascertaining what the words could mean to others. To eliminate alternate readings is not necessary, not desirable, and impossible. What is desirable is to remove the nonsense.

When a character is drawn with only suggestion, only a few details, ambiguity can work to the writer's advantage. This is the radio play theory of fiction:

Sandy blond, kinky hair, evident hard-on in his grey pants, bare-chested, some muscles but not too many, red fuzz on a little bit of belly. Stance saying I'm just a regular guy and not too impressed with myself. He had stuck a rolled sandwich bag in the grove that curved between his torso and upper thigh. Through the silver layers of plastic I could see the bile-green herb.

"I could be mistaken," he said quickly.

"Oh?"

His erection arched hopefully, involuntarily I thought, in the baggy, grey material. "Nancy said you might help me."

I expect our narrator will help him. I expect many people would be happy to help him. But his description does not really tell us much about his looks. He could be any of the dozens of guys the reader has seen or known. He could be any curly-haired blond with a moderate build that the reader is interested in, that the reader wishes he could get ahold of. That is the point. Or:

Mike's a real skinny guy. He's got little black hairs on his chest that kink up in knots. But the major impression is skinny. Until he drops his jeans. Which he doesn't do until about two seconds before he cuts off the light and hops in bed. While he was gone to class I went into his dresser to look. This brand of underwear, I never heard of it, comes from a surgical supply place. It has extra material in the crotch.

Later, in case the reader has somehow missed the point, mention will be made that Mike has a great big cock. Now, is Mike white or black? The reader will imagine whichever he pleases, because nowhere in the story that follows will the author say.

A character has to have a handle, something the reader can hold on to. Mike has a great big one. It could be a tattoo, an extremely prominent muscle group, a combination of hair and eye color, a way of dressing or of being undressed, a characteristic type of speech. Whatever it is, it has to be drawn clearly so that the reader can hang everything else he learns or imagines about the character on it.

One of Wilder's characters had "a leprous affection one cheek and a complementary adjustment of rouge on the other." Her red wig was askew, too, if memory serves. Having read that description, who is likely to forget the Marquesa de Montemayor? Naturally, something more attractive is desired for the lead in a work of erotic fiction.

Another example:

Jess claimed to be half Mexican. He had straight black hair but his body was light enough to freckle. He said "aunt" like a New Englander, and couldn't tell if you called him a son of a bitch in Spanish.

He was about 6'4"---near enough to All that they would stand back-to-back and ask who was the taller. If I could tell, I would not say. They measured their reaches against one another, standing at arm's length, patting each other's cheeks and pulling each other's sideburns---though the hair on Jess's face was sparse.

Now, is Jess broad-shouldered? Narrow-waisted? Well muscled? Smooth-chested? Brown eyed? Well hung? More than likely he is all of that. He is a big strong guy and whether he or Al is the bigger and stronger is important to him. This last is indispensable to the story. The rest can be left to the reader's imagination.

Critic Stan Leventhal is of the opinion that detailed physical description is essential to a work of gay erotica. Since we know that the visual aspect is important in male sexual arousal, his theory cannot be dismissed. Having exhausted my modest library looking for something to steal for an example, however, I think the theory is not commonly put to practice.

Sometimes several paragraphs are devoted to describing one feature. In such cases the rest of the character's description is sketched lightly. Some authors continue describing their characters, bit by bit, throughout the story. The danger is that the author will put in something that contradicts the image the reader has formed. While each detail of description will add an appeal for some readers, it will also run against the tastes of others. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Leave it there.

In spare writing the scene need not be set in great detail. If the weather does not matter, do not give it a whole paragraph. If it is a beautiful spring day, do not give us four or five paragraphs on the greenness of it all and the birds and the flowers without portraying the effect of the atmospheric conditions on the nether regions of your protagonist. If your character has taken off gloves, a hat, an overcoat, and galoshes we will not need a mention to be convinced that the weather is frightful. If the weather is to play an active role in your story---for example if your characters are to be stranded by it---more than a mention will be required.

Things that will be used may well be introduced in the setting. Lamps that will be turned off, fans that convey smells, and sources of background music will sometimes be better if established before they are used. Do not place a lamp for the sake of light alone. Readers will assume there is some source of light if your characters see each other. If you do introduce the source of the light, whether it is track lighting, a bare bulb with a string, a goosenecked lamp, or a florescent tube turning pink and flickering, let it not only give light but also tell us where we are, and if we are in apartment, let it tell us whose apartment this is.

Plastic, Tiffany-style lampshades. Antiqued mirrors. Flocked, red and gold wallpaper. Scarlet carpet.

That in two lines is an apartment. Haven't we all had a regrettable experience in such an apartment? Didn't we know it was going to be regrettable the moment we saw the anthurium and bamboo bouquet in the entry. Why did we know there would be Beardsley prints and a bidet in the bathroom? Why do our mouths taste of cheap scotch when we think of it?

Remember where things are. Do not eclipse a gibbous moon or make a nearly new one rise at midnight. (These are astronomically impossible events.) If you write of real intersection in a real city that your readers may have visited, put the bar on the correct corner. Quick: which pocket does a right-handed man keep his change in? If a nude person produces a twenty-five-cent piece, the reader certainly will be curious.

A good work of fiction meets the reader at his own level. The surface story can hardly be drawn too strongly. Characters must be clear on the surface. No essential aspect may puzzle the reader---that is, the situation must be understood, although it may be a situation involving a mystery. Suggestion can create the surface level because the surface details are drawn with heavy strokes. When you draw the whorish apartment, go lightly over the bronzed baby shoes on the dresser. Amid the red Lava lamps, the leather sheets, and the sexual toys, it will go unnoticed by some.

A poet once wrote: "Uproar on the right; attack on the left." So it is with fiction. When the uproar on the surface is sufficient, you can cover many levels of meaning. Write "biker" or "cowboy" or "lumberjack" and you create in some readers an image so strong that you can safely contradict it for the rest of the story. This will amuse other readers and possibly provide them with some food for thought. A general once said: "When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow." This advice is a much sounder guide to erotica than to warfare.

All of this is to say, you cannot round a character unless you have established him well first. Deep in every cynic is a romantic; if he did not have his romantic streak, he would never have been disappointed often enough to become cynical. The attractive aspect of macho types is that they do have their softer spots; no one really wants to make love with a rock. But if you show us the tenderer spots first we will not know that your character is supposed to be a macho type, and if we first find him in a pensive, romantic mood, we will not understand that you mean for us to see a hardboiled, cynical detective.

Suggestion is, in a way, trickery. The object is not to fool the reader, but to entertain him. The craft of a slight-of-hand magician is similar to that of a pickpocket. But the one has an audience while the other has victims. Try to make of your readers an audience.

As an exercise, add sufficient narration to the following dialogue to make an erotic story of it:

"Please don't hurt me."

"What make you think I'm going to hurt you?"

"That look in your eye. That look."

"Don't you know what that is?"

"Maybe. Please don't hurt me."

"If you thought I was going to hurt you, why did you come out here?"

"Don't know. Look I don't have any money."

"Take off your shirt."

"What for?"

"For what you came out here for."

"I'm too skinny."

"You want me to contradict you?"

"That tickles."

"Shut up."

"No! What if someone comes out here."

"No one is coming out here."

"Look, this is a mistake. I'm going back in."

"No mistake."

"Let me go."

"No."

"Oh don't. I'll lose it."

"Go ahead. That's what you came out here for."

"I won't want to do anything back."

"Then me first."

"No. I don't want to."

"Sure you do."

"Don't force me."

"Take it."

"Not like this. Not here. We'll go somewhere."

"I don't believe you."

"Okay. Just don't force me. I'll gag."

"Get to it then."

"Why did you stop?"

"You were going to."

"Yeah."

"I don't . . . I can't . . ."

"Take it."

"Ouch. You're hurting me."

"That's right. Now get it."

"There. Are you happy now."

"Yeah."

"No. Don't do that. Just hold onto me a minute."

"Let me have it."

"No. Please. Let me do it myself."

"Shut up."

"You're ruining it."

"Just lean back and shut up."

"Oh just look. Look what you did to my shirt. I hate you."

"I'm here every Tuesday."

"Really?"

When this exercised appeared in the first edition of this book, a few editors accused me of being disingenuous, saying that they would have printed the dialogue as a story just as it was and that I must have known that was a story in itself. This merely proves the point about suggestion. We have no idea what these characters look like and only a general idea of what they are doing. We do not know where they are except that there is some possibility that they might be interrupted.

Yet I do not doubt that readers will immediately perceive this radio play as a story.

Now when you have completed the exercise check your work with the following questions:

What was the handle on the first speaker?

What was the handle on the second speaker?

Where does the dialogue take place?

Did you introduce any subtleties in characterizing either speaker or in describing the setting that go against stereotype?

The reader may wish to review and revise this scene after considering the chapters on dialogue and on the erotic scene. At those times, revise the dialogue itself if necessary.

Needless to say, not every writer writes prose so spare as the radio play theory of fiction suggests. But no one can do without suggestion. Some writers do succeed who give lush, even purple, descriptions of their principal characters, but the only way such a writer can ever complete a story or novel is by suggesting other elements, by skimping on descriptions of incidental characters or the setting.

Climactic order

The most important, interesting, and exciting parts of the work should come as near the end as possible. The high point of the work is the climax. The arrangement that puts the climax near the end is called climactic order.

The ideal of climactic order as taught in schools is often simplified. Tension is pictured as growing in a straight line to a peak, which is the climax. Beyond the climax, tension drops off sharply in the brief (one hopes) space between the climax and the end of the story. If we number the events in the story from the least dramatic (1) to the most dramatic (6), this simplified view of climactic order would have the parts of the story ordered: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, *; where * represents the little downward tail between the climax and the end of the story.

This simplified view may be sufficient for students who are studying the works of others, but as a model for construction of a story or novel, it is inadequate.

The first part of the work must be strongly interesting to persuade the reader to continue reading the story. This part is sometimes called "the hook," and commonly is second only to the climax in dramatic impact. Thus, a better model of climactic order would be: 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, *; that is with the second highest level of tension at the beginning, and the highest level at the climax.

Even so, one further refinement is necessary to produce a working model of climactic order. Although overall the story should build up to the climax from a low point just after the hook, action, interest, and tension do not build up smoothly, but in a saw-toothed pattern. At each event in the story things do not proceed directly to the next higher level, but there is a little relaxation before the ascent to the next peak. This is most evident in novels where each chapter reproduces, in miniature as it were, the climactic order of the whole work. Episodes in a short story should behave the same way.

Climactic order, in other words, governs not only the work as a whole but each of the parts and subdivisions. Climatic order should be observed in ordering words in a sentence (as far as syntax will allow), sentences in a paragraph, paragraphs in a chapter or episode, as well as in ordering chapters in a book or episodes in a short story. Climactic order is as important to ballads, lyrics, essays, and memos as it is to short stories and novels.

The writer, if properly advised, will often hear that stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Most of the content of that advice is that stories should follow climactic order. Stories begin with a high point, a point of interest or importance. Stories have a middle in which tension, conflict, or interest build. Stories end with the dramatic climax: the resolution of the conflict introduced at first.

At the story or novel level, the climax may be followed by a little tail in which the loose ends of the story are tied up and the heroes ride off into the sunset. Such housekeeping must be kept brief. Sometimes the tail ends on a little stinger that points back to the climax.

The climactic order of the whole is reproduced in each of the lesser structures. Consider this passage from "Smuggler's Moon":

What I recall: At one point, a body fell past the window. George made Al stop playing mumblety-peg, saying it would ruin Al's Bowie knife. That might be so, but I expect George wanted to save his precious floor. Dan puked on the floor anyway---a good explosive shot which surprised him as much as anyone. And one of George's blue antique bottles, which is what he calls anything he scavenges on the beach, was tossed out of the window.

Afterwards we didn't find the body where it would have landed, or the bottle for that matter. What we did find as things came back into focus, was Jess in Al's bunk.

The passage begins with a grabber: the body falling past the window. In another story this might well be the most important thing, but not here. What is the most important thing in this passage? Jess in Al's bunk. It is right where it belongs. Not only is the most important thing at the end of the passage, it is also at the end of a paragraph and the end of a sentence.

In some circles who wakes up with whom is not a matter of great significance. The author is telling the reader, whether the reader understands consciously or not, that this is a very important fact of the story.

The story is a tragedy in which the Bowie knife plays a part. Mention of the Bowie knife is necessary in some early passage, such as this one, but too much attention is not desirable. The knife is placed right after the grabber, in the most inconspicuous spot possible.

Did the author really think about such things when he wrote the passage? Does the Queen Mother squat to pee?

Unfortunately, there are technical limitations in what can be done with climactic order and structure. One limitation is the shape of paragraphs on the page. A typewritten line becomes about two lines in a magazine column, but sets up as only about one line in a book. A reader is intimidated by a paragraph that sets up as many more than five or six lines. The first paragraph of the passage above would have set up as more than twenty lines in a normal magazine column: much too large a block of type.

Fortunately for the author, his editor was the ever-alert Aaron Travis who had the story set in double-wide columns. The reader does not make the adjustment from magazine columns of normal size to double-wide columns or to book pages. Ten or twelve lines look gray and formidable, however wide they are. A speech of three or more lines looks like an oration. The principle of climactic order would be better shown if the paragraphs above were run together. But the appearance would be ungainly even in double-wide columns.

On the other hand, a succession of short speeches which looks good in a magazine may appear on the book page to be fighting a losing battle against a blizzard of white.

English syntax forbids perfecting climactic order in the sentence. No doubt the charm of Caesar's Latin owes something to his putting the verb where it belongs, at the end of the sentence. The writer of English seldom can.

Introductory phrases such as "however," "finally," "on the other hand," and similar literary throat clearing, when not revised out altogether, ought to be pushed into the sentence so that a more important element can take first place:

However, the bullet missed Kyle's head by . . .

The bullet, however, missed Kyle's head by . . .

The bullet missed Kyle's head by an inch.

Frank anastrophe seldom achieves the desired effect. Do not resort to the passive voice for the sake of climactic order:

not: Kyle's head was missed by the bullet.

not: Red and slick with Bill's spit, it glistened.

not: The bullet aimed for Kyle's head, by a mere inch, missed.

okay: The bullet aimed for Kyle's head missed.

How much strain with the syntax bear before it snaps? Better to err on the conservative side because when it snaps, it thunders.

The analogy between climactic order and the history of a single sexual encounter is obvious. The beginning is interesting and sets up the problem of the story: one character is attractive and the other is horny. The middle is building: a promising glance, a chance meeting, rising hope and desire played against the chance of rejection or worse. The end is the climax: the physical sex with its physical climax. The brief tail: they wave good-bye (or sometimes they move in together and live happily ever after). As far as the story line is concerned, even the most oblivious hack pornographer can hardly go wrong.

Similar formulas exist for other genres. The murder mystery begins with interest (at least for mystery readers): a dead body, usually found in perplexing circumstances. In the middle are the less interesting details: engaging the detective, her apparently fruitless inquiries, introduction of the romantic interest (which is a less interesting detail in a murder mystery); and then the building tension as the detective's discoveries seem to be adding up to something: someone is accused whom the reader knows or hopes to be innocent, the character the reader most suspects is himself murdered, a new discovery wrecks all previously plausible theories. Finally the climactic moment occurs: all the suspects are gathered in the drawing room and the detective reveal both the guilty party and the reasons everyone should have known the guilty party's identity all along. Then there may be the tail: the romantic interest results in bliss and gets off the stage quickly.

In a formula murder mystery the characters might have explicitly described sex. But a sexual climax is not the climax of murder mystery. The only possible climax of a murder mystery is one that untangles the mystery, but solving all the murders in Los Angeles will not do in place of the sexual climax of an erotic story. Sex is a necessary part of a coming-out novel, but the sex does not resolve the conflict---more than likely it leaves the protagonist more confused than ever. Scenes of carnage may occur in the war novel, but most war novels turn on something other than the course of the battle.

In fiction what is important is what the writer vests with importance.

Certainly the defeat of Hitler was very important. In our story, however, what goes on between two wounded GIs in a hospital far behind allied lines may be more important. Our GIs are not deciding the fate of Europe. They are deciding whether their affair is just one of those wartime things or whether it something else, something they should continue.

Should Joe go back to Akron, marry the girl everyone expects him to marry although (naturally) he now realizes he never cared for her. Or should he go to New York with Tim? There is no question of coming out of the closet: it is 1944. Tim is, you know, a bit on the flamboyant side, obviously artistic and sensitive. If Joe brought Tim home, everyone would know. The sensible thing to do would be to go back to Akron, be a foreman at Dad's plant, and try to forget Tim. That would be sensible. But Tim is beautiful. And devoted. And good in bed. Besides, Joe really knows about himself now. It would never be the same with a woman. No one in Akron, at least no one Joe knows, is like Tim.

Remember Hitler and the battle for Europe?

A philosopher could argue that in their own way Joe and Tim are as important as the defeat of Hitler. The author does not need to believe that proposition, neither need he convince the reader of it. This is Joe and Tim's book. The climax does not occur in the Führerbunker. The climax occurs on the Queen Mary as the evacuees sail for America.

The book does not open with arrows on a map of Europe. It opens in a hospital smoking lounge. Tim is giving himself a manicure. He has to stop every few seconds so he can get light right to see what he is doing with his uninjured eye. In Europe, Tim is so small that you could not see the speck on the map. But in the hospital smoking lounge, he is one of the most important things---one of the few human beings there. Because he is manicuring his nails in his pajamas and has adjusted his eye patch to a jaunty angle, he is one of the most interesting things in the room.

"I wish you wouldn't do that," Joe says.

"Why not."

"I mean I wish you wouldn't do that while the guys are watching."

"Nonsense." Tim looks up and focuses his good eye on Joe. "Lots of men groom their nails."

"Not any men I know of. They just clip 'em off."

Now what Göring is saying to Hitler is the most irrelevant thing in the world.

The story turns on Joe's conflicts about what people will think and what masculinity really is. The eroticism of Joe and Tim's relationship will be portrayed in smoking hot terms. That will not be the end of the story. The comeshot does not relieve the central tension of the story which is Joe's problem in coming out. In fact, hot sex only seems to make things worse. If the sex were not very good, Joe would not have to confront his homosexuality; he could rationalize it away as just another kind of masturbatory release. Then Joe would not be confronted with the choice between going back to Annabelle in Akron and starting a new life with Tim in New York. There would be no story because there would be no conflict.

Of course the opening could easily be adapted to make this a formula stroke piece. Then, the question would be only how Tim can get the hypermacho Joe into bed. Tim has a chance because men who are really straight, though they might keep their distance in the shower, would not confront him for doing his nails. The real rubes do not know what a faggot is. Joe knows, and he knows that a thing a faggot does is his nails. Perhaps Joe knows a bit more than that.

The sexual climax is the end of that story because the central question is whether Joe really wants to be done. Now if Joe decides in the last line to go to New York with Tim, it is icing on the cake: an improbability too rich to be swallowed. The groundwork for that decision has not been laid. Akron and New York are as much beside the point as Berlin and London.

A plot structure can violate climactic order in several ways:

Failure to introduce important, relevant elements at the beginning.

Strong, interesting openings are important (and can often be achieved by deleting the first two pages of the manuscript). All creative writing teachers advise: grab the reader's attention. But the opening must have something to do with the story, and like every other part of the story, must point to the climax. If it were not so, every story might as well begin with a train wreck at a nudist colony.

If a story opens with a murdered corpse in a locked room, that is interesting and exciting. Also it is the beginning of a mystery story, not the beginning of a romance. The climax must reveal how the deceased met his death in such circumstance. Grabbing the reader's attention under false pretenses is worse than starting slowly. The reader whose attention is grabbed by the corpse may get off when boy gets boy. He will not be satisfied until he knows whodunit.

In a whodunit surprise is a relatively important element. The author of a mystery may surprise the reader in many ways. The culprit may be someone no one would suspect. Perhaps all the suspects conspired in the murder. The corpse may turn out be someone other than the supposed victim. It might be suicide, made to look like murder, or even an accident that left misleading circumstances. Possibly the death was an elaborate fake, and no one is dead at all. The surprise cannot be that the narrator wakes up and discovers it has all been a dream---at least not before we learn who was guilty in the dream and why.

Stories do not have to belong any recognized genre. All that is necessary is that the story's climax follow, by however tortuous a route, from the story's beginning. In particular, a tragedy must be a tragedy from the first paragraph, preferably from the first line.

A story that begins with the firing on Fort Sumter is fairly obliged to proceed to Appomattox courthouse. A story that begins with Pvt. Grenville's part in the firing on Fort Sumter, on the other hand, may well leave off when he and the Yankee drummer decide they are done with the war and ride off into the setting sun.

Just as the essayist limits his thesis in his first paragraph, so the fiction writer must tell us in the beginning what is important to his story and must avoid misleading the reader by making too much of minor characters and incidents that have little to do with the story.

Beginning before the beginning.

The crack-of-dawn flaw in gay fiction most often occurs at the crack of noon. For some reason new writers think we will not know the sun is up unless we saw it rise, or that we will think the protagonist is asleep and naked unless we wake and dress him.

Oliver Twist begins with the birth of a bastard. But Oliver Twist is a weighty tome. In a short story we should choose to begin a little nearer the action. (Of course Dickens's did begin near his action, for his novel is about the situation of orphan children.) We will take it for granted that all characters were born, to circumstances more desirable or less, and that they had the usual and perhaps some unusual traumas of childhood. In particular we know that a gay childhood in America is not likely to have been characterized by unbounded bliss.

It is not that a character should have no history, but that the reader should be spared having all of it.

Naturally, the past has influenced aspects of the character's personality and some of her actions may result from causes that have long preceded. Some of these things may be brought in at appropriate times. But not many stories will turn on what the character had for breakfast a week ago Monday or put on her toothbrush this morning.

A particularly trying device is that of the character who wakes disoriented. Usually authors do this to have a chance to describe the character's usual surroundings as if the character were seeing them for the first time. Of course, this is not a flaw if there is a reason connected with the story that the character wakes disoriented---perhaps he has been drugged and removed to a strange place.

Neither is it wrong to wake a character at the crack of dawn, if what wakens him is a call from a friend who is in desperate circumstances. Even so, we must not dwell on the brightness of the light on the white bathroom tiles and our hero's normal toilet functions, but we must get him to the scene as quickly as possible to discover what the matter is. If he is not immediately arrested for indecent exposure, we will know he put on his pants.

Failure to resolve the conflict of the story.

A writer is not obliged to solve all the problems of the world with a single tale. Neither does it need to be the case that everyone lives happily ever after. The writer must solve the dilemma that gives rise to the story.

Let Jerry be money hungry. Poor in childhood, hating his poverty, determined to have money above all else. Perhaps Jerry had difficulty making money: he gets a little ahead and wastes it on a long shot, harebrained scheme that everyone else realizes is doomed to failure. Jerry ends up broke every time. Then Jerry meets Karl. Karl is built and has a huge cock. They go home and have the hottest possible sex ever after. The End.

That is not a short story. It certainly is not a novel. What about the money?

To make a story of it, perhaps Jerry was not deprived in childhood. Perhaps Jerry only wanted money because he thought with money he could get a cute boyfriend. Then Karl is the solution. Or perhaps Jerry decides to use Karl's looks to get money but thereby loses Karl or almost does. Perhaps he has to choose between Karl and money. Does he want Karl badly enough to give up his lifelong dream of riches? Can he stop scheming for money even if he wants to for Karl's sake? The dilemma introduced in the beginning of the story does not have to be static. It can be developed, even to the point that the resolution no longer has much to do with the original problem. What cannot be done is to shift ground on the reader at the last moment and present him with a pig when he thought he was after a hare.

We may begin with the question who killed Sir Reginald. At some point we may discover that Sir Reginald is yet living and the questions become; Whose body was found? And who killed him? Likewise, we may never answer the question of whether Jerry gets money or not, but to avoid doing so we must develop the more basic question of what Jerry really wants.

Needless to say, money is a difficult problem that many writers wish they could solve. Difficult problems lead to another kind of climactic disorder.

Plot abortion.

Various kinds of plot abortion have been recognized for a long time. They have in common the easy way out. Plot abortion is especially common in stroke fiction where plot, too often, is a vestigial part attached to explicitly described sex, but plot abortion is not rare in works considered great literature and in the works of the masters.

Deus ex machina is the sudden arrival of help from an unlikely quarter that extricates the protagonist from his difficulties with little or no action on his part. (Literally it is a stage device by which a stage deity is lowered into a scene like Peter Pan.)

Suppose Jerry wins the lottery. Or a previously unmentioned uncle leaves Jerry a previously secret fortune. These are miraculous solutions to the problem of poverty, and the most Jerry did for himself was, in one case, to buy a lottery ticket. Such solutions are unsatisfying for several reasons. We are not convinced that Jerry deserves such a happy ending. Many people are poor, but few win the lottery or discover rich, recently deceased relatives: we do not see much insight into the problem of poverty here. And here, the problem is not merely that Jerry is poor, but also that he is so desperate to escape poverty that he squanders what little money he does have trying to get rich. Neither solution deals with this latter aspect of the conflict, and the one that requires Jerry to buy a lottery ticket would encourage this flaw in Jerry's personality.

Either one of these miracles is an example of deus ex machina when it is offered as the solution to Jerry's problem. Another story, however, might begin with a person like Jerry winning the lottery. Some people, after all, do win the lottery, and a profound change of fortune, even if it is for the better, is likely produce the elements of conflict. Unlikely events are perfectly permissible in fiction. Most science fiction is based on the premise that people and ships can be made to move faster than light, a thing that is not only unlikely, but also theoretically impossible. The flaw of deus ex machina is in producing the unlikely event at the end of the story to solve the problem.

"He suddenly realized," is another form of plot abortion. With a change of pronoun, it was once very common in confession stories. What is wrong with "he suddenly realized" is the "suddenly." Jerry might come to realize that money is not the most important thing in life. But this change of heart does not appear out of nowhere on page nineteen of a twenty-page story. Something has to shake his faith in money, we have to see his doubt emerge, he must want something and find money useless for getting it, his doubt must grow, and he may finally have to choose between money, or the false dream of it, and something real he wants. Having done the groundwork properly, the author will resist writing: "He suddenly realized . . . "

The direct approach, although often successful in fact, does not produce good fiction. If instead of wasting his efforts and his little money on get-rich-quick schemes, Jerry works hard, saves what money he can, and invests wisely, then by the time he is fifty he is well-to-do and unlikely ever to be in want again. So what? That accurately describes how many middle-aged gay men have come to have good homes and big cars. It is no story. Neither is the extremely common formula piece that goes something like this: Biff is horny and hunky and has a big cock. Bill is hunky and horny and has a big cock. They spot each other and immediately head to the bushes and have great sex.

Such pieces work only when the writers exert exceptional effort in describing the sex act. Since there is no space for characterization or a real plot, the reader has no particular reason to care that either of these hunks gets off---any more than he cares about the very similar hunks in the next story. This is a fictional equivalent of a photographic model posed in front of a plain backdrop. Only a very striking physique can make up for the lack of context. In such a story, only very vivid writing can keep the reader from flipping to the pictures. This is specialty work. Not everyone can do it and not every one who can, can be happy doing it. After a while a writer must repeat himself. If you would be happy to write the same story over and over, you certainly can sell it over and over to several periodicals in the market.

Killing off inconvenient characters is just another form of deus ex machina. If news arrives that the plant in Akron blew up, wiping out Joe's fortune, family, and fiancée, that settles it. It is off to the Big Apple with the flaming, one-eyed manicurist.

Bumping off characters is fine in its place. Some conflicts can only be resolved by a duel to the death. In mysteries it is customary for the murderer or monster to strike again. In tragedy the properly setup death of a major character is inherent in the form. Sudden death can tie up a minor loose end if it is removed from the central aspect of the story. But it is unfair to remove the central tension of the story by sending a massive coronary from heaven to your antagonist or a crosstown bus to kiss off whoever else gets in the way. If an inconvenient spouse must be removed, do so before the story begins.

Superb writing and good characterization can overcome a poor plot. After all, there is no such thing as a threadbare plot, there is only hackneyed writing. Yet writing is so difficult that no one should undertake it with a flawed design.

Plotting, although writers go about it in various ways, is the least mysterious aspect of fiction. The creation of a suitable plot depends upon several elements. The plotless, pointless literary ramble is dead. Contrary to what some authorities teach, a short story is not primarily a character study. Before it is anything else, a short story is a story.

(I mean, of course, the finished short story. The story in the writing may indeed begin with a character study or with a plot outline or with a few pretty sentences or with a scrap of dialogue overheard on a bus or, as sometimes does happen, may spring from the author's head fully formed.)

The writer must have confidence in his ability. Plotting begins with supposing. Suppose Jerry is money hungry. Suppose Joe and Tim are in a military hospital. Suppose Mike is kidnapped. Writers prevent themselves from supposing such things if they doubt their ability to create a money-hungry character, a smoking lounge in a military hospital, or a gay private eye. Real writers suppose first and worry about how later. Assume you can carry it off. It is much the same thing as jumping into cold water. It will be a shock. It will be a struggle. You may cramp. But you won't drown. Probably not.

Many beginners have an overly elaborate idea of what plot is. The murder mystery is supposed to be heavily plotted. Here, the beginner thinks, he might create a mystery that cannot be solved. The beginner (and some masters) will not write "Chapter 1" until the castle and all of its secret passages are diagramed, the biographies of all the principals are written, and a working model of the blowgun is constructed.

Many working writers claim, on the other hand, that they begin a mystery without a plot. That is not entirely true. All murder mysteries have a plot: a murder is committed; a culprit is brought to justice (or at least is detected). The mystery writer may begin without knowing who has been murdered, who committed the crime, or how the guilty party was found out. He does know that someone has to get murdered in chapter one and that the crime will be solved in the last chapter.

If you undertake a coming-out novel you may begin without knowing much about your protagonist. What you do know is that in chapter one he is naïf and in the last chapter he is out, proud, and gay. As you write you will discover the natural hair color of his kindly protector, what tattoo the blackmailing hustler has and whether the best friend from high school turns out to be gay too.

The essence of plot is tension. Tension arises for conflict. This is conflict in its broadest sense and on virtually any scale; it may be intergalactic warfare or it may be a slight discrepancy in a single individual's values. At some point the writer must know what the tension is and who the parties (or what the poles) of the conflict are. The tension must be resolved. The conflict must have a winner. In murder mysteries, romance, coming-out stories, stroke pieces---in many forms, the tension and the resolution are defined by the form. Certainly a writer does better to choose a proven path rather than sit idly and bemoan his lack of ideas.

The mystery writer often commits the crime in chapter one with no good idea of the solution. By chapter ten, once he knows his suspects and the methods of his detective, he may see that chapter one must be redrafted to include an essential clue. Has the writer wasted his time? Of course not. He has written the novel. Whether if would have been more efficient to diagram the castle before he started is a matter of opinion. It is work to do the one thing and work to do the other. In any event, writing well is work.

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