Technology Steals Your Plot Devices?

Conspiring with a distant lover? Try texting. Lost in the woods/wilderness/Ionic Sea? Use GPS. Case of mistaken identity? Facebook!

Technology is rendering obsolete some classic narrative plot devices: missed connections, miscommunications, the inability to reach someone. Such gimmicks don’t pass the smell test when even the most remote destinations have wireless coverage. (It’s Odysseus, can someone look up the way to Ithaca? Use the “no Sirens” route.)

Of what significance is the loss to storytelling if characters from Sherwood Forest to the Gates of Hell can be instantly, if not constantly, connected?

Am much tickled by Matt Richel's piece If Only Literature Could Be a Cellphone-Free Zone in The New York Times, but the point he makes about how modern technology undermines traditional plot devices is food for thought.

But surely technology opens the door to new plot possibilities? An online friend told me how one day he was given a parking ticket by a very attractive traffic warden. Chatting her up there and then wouldn't be an option, so he slipped his handphone (an old one he didn't mind losing) into her bag without her noticing, so that he could ask her out on a date later. (And yes, the ploy worked.)

Or there's the wife who goes through her husband's handphone numbers looking for the names of women he might be having an affair with, and finds herself having a blazing row with a police officer in Bukit Aman with whom the husband had had some official business. (True story.)

These are just two scenarios I stole to jot down in a notebook, planning to use them for stories one day.

Times change and I'm sure that all down the ages there were some writers cursing some new technological innovation which rendered some of their devices obsolete, while others embraced the possibilities enthusiastically ... and still others (Orwell, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson - to name but three of many) were way ahead of it.

(Thanks for the link, Chet!)

The Shape of a Novel

Structure is such an underestimated aspect of writing that people don't even mean the same thing when they talk about it. Sometimes the word seems almost synonymous with plot, but there's a distinction. At its simplest, plot is what happens; structure is the order in which it happens, and the timing. Whether you're dealing with a thriller or a densely literary novel, structure is designed to make the story engrossing, convincing and unputdownable. "When you read a novel that isn't quite grabbing you," says James Scott Bell, author of Plot & Structure, "the reason is probably structure." There can be more than one structure in a story. In www.criticalreading.com, Dan Kurland talks about linear progression, with its building of suspense, unfolding of character, and resolution. But there is another structure: the patterns of actions and interrelationship of characters. You could also add the pattern of themes and imagery, and an aesthetic whole where everything clicks into place.

Jane Sullivan of The Age attends a fiction masterclass and ponders the structure of novels.

The three-act structure she mentions works extremely well for most fiction and for films as well. Those of us who were lucky enough to attend Jeremy Sheldon's workshop on plot when he unveiled his version of this, called "The Sheldon Curve" - honed from his experience of working with movie industry and with authors. If it seemed a bit formulaic and had the rebels inside us wanting to rip up the handouts, he more than adequately supported his theory with reference to numerous films and novels - even invoking Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. Just to play devil's advocate, we threw novels at him (no, not literally!) which we felt didn't fit the neat framework so obviously - my examples was Underworld by Don De Lillo, which I feel doesn't really have a plot as such.

But that doesn't mean of course that it lacks structure. As Sullivan says :

... structure is all about grabbing your readers: teasing and bamboozling them a little, perhaps, but luring them inwards and onwards.

and de Lillo does that very well indeed.

How Not to Write a Novel

As a writer you have only one job: to make the reader turn the page. Of all the tools a writer uses to make a reader turn the page, the most essential is the plot. It doesn't matter if the plot is emotional (“Will Jack's fear of commitment prevent him from finding true love with Synthya?”), intellectual (“But Jack, Synthya's corpse was found in a locked room, with nothing but a puddle on the floor next to her and a recently thawed leg of mutton on the end table!”), or physical (“Will Jack's unconstitutional torture of Synthya Abu Dhabi, the international terrorist, lead to the location of the ticking bomb?”) - as long as it compels the reader to find out what happens next. If your reader doesn't care what happens next - it doesn't.

Typically, the plot of a good novel begins by introducing a sympathetic character who wrestles with a thorny problem. As the plot thickens, the character strains every resource to solve the problem, while shocking developments and startling new information help or hinder her on the way. Painful inner conflicts drive her onward but sometimes also paralyse her at a moment of truth. She finally overcomes the problem in a way that takes the reader by surprise, but in retrospect seems both elegant and inevitable.

The plot of a typical unpublished novel introduces a protagonist, then introduces her mother, father, three brothers and her cat, giving each a long scene in which they exhibit their typical behaviors one after another. This is followed by scenes in which they interact with each other in different combinations, meanwhile driving restlessly to restaurants, bars, and each other's homes, all of which is described in detail.

There's a delicious extract from How Not to Write a Novel :200 Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs If You Ever Want to Get Published by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark on The Times website, with much more sterling advice for the wannabe.

The authors have more on their website, including this rather nice post called What About I, The Literary Novelist - which shows that writing crap is within anyone's grasp, MFA or not.

Oh, and then there's the "bookfomerical" (nice way of getting around saying "book trailer" which is copyrighted elsewhere) :




This is on my want list!