Friday, January 20, 2006

Picking Up a Plot

A friend asked recently about plot, and how you came up with a new and interesting one. The trick, of course, is that there is no such thing. Especially with genre fiction, you know going into it that the couple gets together in the end, the bad guy is defeated, and good triumphs over evil. The point of genre fiction is not WHAT happens, but HOW and WHY it happens.

So, if you're at a loss, you can pick your plot inspiration from many sources. You can turn to a legend, a myth, a fairy tale, a classic novel, a movie, a television show, or a song. (And yes, I know of works based on all of these things.) That will give you the WHAT, and then your job is simply to come up with the HOW and WHY.

For example, I based my novella "The Tower" (in the New Concepts Publishing anthology SHIFTERS) on the Chris DeBurgh song of the same name. (Go read the lyrics...I'll wait.)

The song established the set-up, of a lord hunting in the forest who accidentally shoots a shape-shifting woman. It gives the first turning point: Entranced by her beauty, he holds her captive until she will agree to marry him. The second turning point: When she recovers, she shape shifts and flies away. The resolution: Losing her means his death.

While it works in a song, which is of necessity short (even though this one clocks in at over five minutes), there are gaping holes when you try to turn it into a story. The central question, of course, is why someone who is self-centered enough to think he had the right to kidnap and imprison someone to force her to marry him would be so devastated at her loss as to die of a broken heart. So, in my story, he is a conquering general, desperate to hold the castle and region he has just conquered, since if he does the king has promised to award the land to him and allow him to retire. The woman is not just any woman, but the guardian of the land, and to win her to his side will win over all of the people he's just conquered. Losing her means failing his king, which is never a good thing.

Similarly, all the other references in the song have to be woven into the story. For example, "a terrible cry, brought thunder and lightning, rain falling down,Tears on the ground..." and "some sad lament she would sing" made me think that her voice holds magical power. So the general leaves soldiers guarding the tower, and returns to find that she has used her voice to influence them, and they are in the process of freeing her. He revamps the decaying tower with a new door and heavy lock, so that he is the only one capable of freeing her.

Once the basic brush-strokes are in place, you have to fill in the details. In this case, why was an abandoned tower not torn down for the building stones? And why was it still in good enough condition to hold her in reasonable comfort? I came up with the idea that a local legend embued the stones of the tower with the power of fertility, and local people would go there to make love to ensure pregnancy. (A detail borrowed from my tour of Honolulu, where the tour guide mentioned the problems a certain supermarket had because their landscape rock was taken from a local holy site, and locals continued having sex on top of it.)

Eventually, by filling in all the holes with WHY and HOW, you have a fully-fleshed plot. It's different from your source material, because you've put your own spin on it and stressed the things you thought were important with the theme. Often, your interpretation will change things so much that readers won't be able to recognize your story as being based on your source material unless you tell them.

I won't tell if you won't. ;-)

[Note: "The Tower" is a stand-alone novella in the world of the novels NOT QUITE CAMELOT and SHADOW PRINCE, released by Cerridwen Press.]

Posted by Jennifer Dunne :: Link :: 11:58 AM :: 7 Comments

---------------------------------------