"Invisible Ink is a powerful tool for anyone who wants to become a better screenwriter. With elegance and precision, Brian McDonald uses his deep understanding of story and character to pass on essential truths about dramatic writing. Ignore him at your peril."
—Jim Taylor (Academy Award?- winning screenwriter of Sideways and Election)

Friday, October 26, 2012

What 33 years of teaching taught Charles Johnson about writing students

Charles Johnson National Book Award winner and author of Middle Passage

For the first time in the history of The Invisible Ink Blog I have asked someone to "guest post" -- if that's what it's called?My guest is friend and distinguished authorDr. Charles Johnson.He was awardedthe 1990 National Book Award for his novel Middle Passage, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and was a l998 MacArthur fellow.

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During the thirty-three years I was a college professor and taught the craft of
fiction to creative writing students, both undergraduates and those in one of
(at the time) ten best MFA programs in the country, the single greatest
stumbling block they faced was the challenge of plot. As aspiring “literary”
writers, they’d probably been taught in their literature classes that concern
with plot was beneath them or was strictly the province of commercial
fiction-writers. Whatever the case, in my workshops I discovered that many, if
not most, of my students between 1976 and 2009, were unable to distinguish
between “story” and “plot.” Put another way, they didn’t understand that there
is a significant difference between writers and storytellers (the late, great
Ray Bradbury identified with being the latter.) They were also unable to discern
different forms of storytelling such as the sketch, parable, fable, tale, yarn,
and the modern short story, which was literally invented, in both theory and
practice, by Edgar Allan Poe. Unable to see the rich possibilities in the
ancestral forms of storytelling that are our inheritance, unable to see how
those literary forms each have a plot structure with its own logic (and vision
of the world), and finally unable to see how one might be inventive and original
with form itself, my students inevitably settled into the easier narrative
strategies they felt most comfortable with: namely, plotless, unimaginative
stories in a naturalistic style. Sad to say, those students might receive a
passing grade in a writing workshop, some would even go on to publish, but they
would never become journeymen writers capable of executing well any storytelling assignment that came
their way during the course of their careers.

I remember one academic quarter when I incurred the wrath of most of my
17, supposedly “advanced” fiction-writing students. What I asked them to do was,
I thought, simple enough, something every professional writer or journeyman
could accomplish. I gave them what is considered to be one of the shortest
short-stories ever written, penned by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. I asked them to
complete that fictional narrative in a story of 1,000 words. To open up and
develop its terse, skeletal yet suggestive sentences.I could see how on that first day of class
they were afraid of this assignment. What I didn’t know was that they would seek
revenge for my giving it to them. Here’s the story: A woman is sitting in her old, shuttered
house. She knows that she is alone in the whole world; every other thing is
dead. The doorbell rings.” My writer friends (one a director of theater and
film, the other a screenwriter with 40 years experience in Hollywood) loved this
idea, and immediately sent me their versions of what they thought “happens
next.” And my students? Although they begrudgeningly turned in the assignment,
they hugely resisted entering into its spirit. About a third of them made the
old woman a murderer. At least one student had a character with my name killed
on the pages of his fiction. After a deep breath, I let them write whatever they
wanted for their next story, and with no word limit. Predictably, what was
turned in---what they were used to turning in when they were in beginning and
intermediate short story-writing classes---were thinly disguised, plotless,
autobiographical stories about their youthful unhappiness and/or sexual
misadventures. None of that work was publishable.

I concluded my academic career feeling that it’s tragic that creative
writing professors do not hold their students’ feet to the fire and make them
learn how to distinguish story from plot. In fact, I did try to do that by
requiring my students to write a 2-page plot outline for a new story every week
for ten weeks. (See my essay, “A Boot Camp for Creative Writing” in Writer’s Digest, March/April 2009.) And
on the first day of classes I gave them the judicious distinction made between
plot and story by E.M. Forster in his now classic series of lectures, Aspects of the Novel:

“Let us define plot. We have defined a story as a
narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative
of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died, and then the queen
died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.
The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Or
again: ‘The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was
through grief at the death of the king.’ This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form
capable of high development. It suspends the time-sequence, it moves as far
away from the story as its limitations will allow. Consider the death of the
queen. If it is in a story we say ‘and then?’ If it is in a plot we ask ‘why?’
That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel.”
(Italics mine)

What Forster defines so clearly as plot is a fundamental aspect of all
good storytelling in the novel, short story, screen or teleplay. The question we
ask of plot---“why”---is what makes storytelling important as an interpretation
of events that have a causal basis. It’s the reason, as Brian McDonald has
pointed out often, why stories are tools for our survival. They clarify events for us. And it is for
this reason that my own mentor, novelist John Gardner, once said, “Plot is the
writer’s equivalent to the philosopher’s argument.” When we experience a good
story we replay in our minds all its parts and pieces, asking ourselves if they
seem logical, if they are consistent, coherent, and complete (which is the very
same criteria we bring to a philosophical
argument.)

Charles Johnson and Brian McDonald 2010

Furthermore, a story is not just any sequence of events. We choose a
particular sequence of events from a character’s life precisely because it is at
that moment that the character is
living for high stakes. In fiction, “flat” characters like the necessary sales
clerk who sells the protagonist his smartphone do not change. They are not
involved in a process of personal evolution. But a story’s protagonist is, and this is why we refer to him or
her as a “round” character. During the course of the story, during its process,
we watch the protagonist deal with his or her problem(s) through dramatic
scenes. They (and one hopes also the reader) will not come out of the story as
clean as when they went in. Psychologically, and possibly in terms of a change
in their fortunes, they will be at a different place by the story’s end than
where they were when they were introduced in Act One in terms of what writer
John Barth once called the “ground situation,” also known as the story’s
“conflict.”

The shape of a story is that of a funnel. The big end is at the start of
the story. There we are in the very open realm of possibility. When the story begins, we
can select any conflict or setting or physical details we want for our
protagonist. We can make that character male or female, black white or
otherwise, stout or thin, living in the country or the city. But as soon as we
make those decisions we despoil
possibilities, even in a story with fantastic characters. For example, if we say
a young dragon can only breathe fire when he has heartburn, then we cannot say
later in the story that he breathes fire in the absence of his having heartburn.
That despoiling of possibility takes us to the second part of the story, the
realm of probability (or, if you
like, Act Two). Here, as the character acts, it is probable that he or she will
perform in a certain way based on the decisions made about him or her earlier by
the writer. Finally, those actions take us to the end of the story, the narrow
end of the funnel, which is the region of necessity. There, all of its energy (energeia for Aristotle, the potential
inherent in a story) will be expended, and all questions raised by the story
will be answered. If a writer has done the work of plotting and storytelling
well in the first and second parts of the fiction, then the final part will have
as much “organic story flow” as the first two parts, moving to its conclusion
almost as if the story is writing itself, with inexorable necessity, and the
precision of an equation or a logical proof.

Some years ago, I outlined in more detail the plot structure I described
above in an essay titled, “Storytelling and the Alpha Narrative” (The Southern Review, Winter 2005, pages
151-159). But journeymen and master storytellers feel this structure from within when they are composing a
story. They learned it in their childhoods the way we learned how to ride a
bicycle, and they never forget it, for it guides them from one stage of the
story to the next. It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that a story
should generate suspense. It should make the audience care about “what happens
next?” It should be economical and efficient, with all its parts and pieces
reinforcing each other. And so, even though most of my creative writing students
disappointed me, as a teacher I had to be patient. Some, I knew, would before
the academic term ended have that “Aha!” moment when the structure of a story
became clear to them. When it becomes part of the DNA of their imaginations. For
others it might take months or years for structure to become second-nature or
instinct. Even for accomplished storytellers, the discovery of the possibilities
for plotting is new (and exciting) with each tale they tell. And isn’t that
really the reason why we keep returning to this activity all the days of our
lives?

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P.S. Filmmaker
(WHITE FACE) and Author (INVISIBLE INK, THE GOLDEN THEME) Brian
McDonald joins us in a shootout to see whether or not Clint Eastwood's
1992 Oscar winning film UNFORGIVEN has stood the test of time.

2 comments:

This is the essence of the story. Look at any Shakespeare play--you can lay out the plot in five or six steps. I'll always remember Charles Johnson challenging me to tell the PLOT of a novel one night over dinner; when I responded with bland generalizations about the style, narrative, theme, etc., he shouted "No, tell me the PLOT. In five steps." It was hard at first, and then became much easier. Every great work of literature lays out in this way. It's a great lesson.