Plot: Between Plan and Possibility

“A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be.”––Aristotle, Rhetoric and Poetics

Recently a writing friend asked me for my thoughts on plot. When writing should one start with a plan and faithfully follow it through to the end, she asked, or should one simply sit with one’s characters and hope a plot emerged from their actions to form a meaningful whole?

Yes, I told her. Regarding this question I have too many thoughts and all of them contradict.

First, early on in a project, any path is the right path. To begin, one must write, entering through action––writing as verb, not noun. Any step the writer chooses here will naturally lead to a next. Taking a first step is, therefore, of utmost importance.

Outline away, if that helps you. For me, however, the necessary fluidity required of prose is difficult to generate from such plans. In fact, an outline, especially in the early stages of a project can stifle surprise, and surprise is a worthy destination for writers and readers alike.

Perhaps it’s better then to begin writing, without agenda, and see where our sentences take us.

On the other hand, if a plan helps a writer begin, then by all means begin with a plan. And there are certainly some kinds of writing projects that demand it. Argumentative writing that depends on the careful development of a logic and fact, for example. And, I think, for some fiction writers creating inside of some genres, texts do need to unfold in precise and logical sequences of cause and effect, something Aristotle certainly championed.

Most importantly for our poor writing nerves, however, it helps to cultivate a constant awareness that much of how a story unfolds, how it wants to be written, is outside the writer’s control.

Perhaps it will ease anxiety if the writer first reads a lot about plot, and then sits down to write without any of what he read in mind.

Reading many texts about plot, one after another, each toppling the argument that preceded it, may be especially helpful. The following four texts complement each other in exactly this kind of delightfully cacophonous manner: The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle; S/Z, by Roland Barthes, Reading for Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, by Peter Brooks; and Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, by Helene Cixous.

Above all, we can trust that we are story-making beings. Archetypes and familiar narrative shapes seem to live within us, part of our biological structure transferred from one generation to the next along with our DNA. These living strands of history, culture, psychology, and biology may surprise us with the directions they want our stories to take, and something surprising is probably always better than the thing we planned.

Perhaps that is why writers get into so much trouble (and our stories quickly fall apart) when we try to impose an order on our prose, forcing it to make a meaning it doesn’t want to make. I find comfort in Barthes’ idea that the writer is only a small part of the reading experience. So our stories may, indeed, stagnate the more an Author (capital A) tries to exercise control.

At the same time, writing often includes a lot of apprehension for its initial creator, the writer herself, and having a place to land, even if it’s a shitty predictable spot in a well-travelled part of the swamp is better than no destination at all. It’s fine, even comforting, to head there as long as we’re ready to relinquish control of our creation once it starts moving somewhere else.

So, friend, write your story and see where it lands. Then be willing to play more and to relinquish control, and to establish a beginning, a middle, and an end in highest Aristotelian fashion, and be willing to do all of it at once!

Blame and Responsibility

“Yes, he is at fault. But she is responsible for the well-being of her own feet.”––Sharon Theocharides, Tango Teacher

To talk about tango as a metaphor for human relationships is to repeat a a thing stained with overuse. In fact, tango is not a metaphor for human relationship; it is human relationship––human relationship set to music. This truth is apparent from one’s first attempt at dancing it, so in stating it here I hope to avoid the cliché and further the fact.

Which is also to set aside any romantic notions one might have about tango. It is difficult to get along with another while doing something as impossible as maintaining one’s balance, while pivoting on one foot and simultaneously twisting one’s torso in the opposite direction in order to maintain perfect alignment with a partner who is also twisting, pivoting, balancing as you each do your best to move across the floor in time with one another and the music.

In those first nervous moments of a beginners’ class, it is common to hear a ripple of blame roll around the room with first this partnership then that trying to assign fault for a dance phrase gone wrong.

But at any given moment, a hundred small things could be going wrong all at once; she could be losing her balance because of a weakness in her ankle, while he is also pulling off her axis with the ill-placed tug of his hand on her waist. He could be stepping into her space, while also holding her so tightly she is unable to move freely about him as he had intended. On the other hand, he might be giving a very clear indication through the line of energy moving through his chest that he’d like her to take a long step back, and yet her leg glides a mere inch along the floor, which does her no good when the weight of his leather-souled foot is pressed painfully against her toe, which is naked and exposed in her glittering heels.

Perhaps, that is why there has long been an adage among tango dancers: it is always the leader’s fault. This helps avoid tiresome arguments that help no one learn to dance. Tango requires cooperation and without it, the dance can’t go. Freeing a couple from trying to determine why a move isn’t working (i.e. it’s always leader's fault) means the pair can proceed to do their best to learn to move in union.

Sometimes, I try and pretend to friends back east that tango is a non-gendered dance, and it is only by accident that men usually take the lead role and women the follower’s position. I might explain, that once, long ago, in Argentina the dance was a dance between two men, which may account for the importance of the upright chest and forthright macho confidence with which he’s meant to move.

I can also point to the many classes where leaders alternate roles only with other leaders, so that they are enlightened, in a gentle way, about the real challenges of dancing in the follower’s position. Plus, in my experience, the best teachers, of both followers and leaders, are the women, the women who with time and lots of practice have mastered each role.

But that doesn’t explain why there remain so many codes of dress and behavior that emphasize the traditional gendered relationships. Women in high heels, tight dresses, never being allowed to ask the man for a dance but, in the most formal of milongas, waiting patiently along one wall for him to invite her to the floor, which he signals with eye-contact and a slight bow of his head––he in his suit, flat shoes, and often a small hat, meant to convey authority, virility, and strength.

How is it, then, that I’ve ended up here, wanting to master this most difficult of dances because of its many charms and despite some of them too?

I like socializing, and tango is socializing with lots and lots of rules, rules which help me feel I know what I’m getting into without having to engage in the kind of small talk that leaves me feeling anxious and exposed.

Let’s just say, I’ve loved many times. I like the drama and joy of romantic connection, but as a younger woman it turned out I was more fascinated with chaos than was strictly safe. Overtime, I’ve learned every choice comes with a consequence, and I’ve met mine. Just because I found chaos initially intriguing didn’t mean I wasn’t surprised, even devastated, by the ill effects of having it in my home. In such circumstances, it was easy enough to blame the other.

Suddenly––No! Not so suddenly––from the beginning, everyone but me it seemed could see it! He was an unsteady man. My metaphor: he had difficulty holding himself up. Isn’t it then only natural that, in such moments, he clung to me, hoping, I suppose, I could help him avoid the heavy fall?

That I fell too, well, yes, he was at fault. But on the dance floor and everywhere else, a partner who is not present in mind and body and soul is not prepared to dance well. After all, throughout any given dance she must find and relinquish and regain her own axis many, many times, while moving backwards and stepping forward and leaning into him and standing upright once again––all to a beat that is meant to guide them both.

Her safety must be foremost in both their minds for the dance to go well. If he hasn’t mastered that fundamental premise, then it’s irresponsible for her to accept his invitation, much less be surprised by a bruised toe.

Beauty and its Discontents

“According to Bibiano, he was describing an angel. A proudly human angel? I hazarded quoting Blas de Otero. No, dick-head, replied Bibiano, the angel of our misfortune.”––from A Distant Star, by Roberto Bolaño

Last winter, I took a long drive across the South Western United States.

I did so listening to an audio recording of Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star, and once again every moral imperative fiction has ever ignited in me, ignited all over again.

That experience––driving from California toward Albuquerque then taking a dramatic right turn toward everything south as Bolaño’s words rang in my ears––became a most dynamic literary experience.

In Distant Star the fundamental neutrality of language, even aesthetic language, and its potential to support a violent act as much as a beautiful one is foregrounded in a narratively audacious manner. The pursuit of beauty becomes justification for one writer to silence his poetic brothers and sisters with torture and death.

The earnest young poets of the novel’s early chapters, among them the Garamedias sisters, are caught up in Chile’s post-Allende period. I gasped when those sisters were rounded up, tortured, and murdered on orders from their former poetry workshop colleague, a writer calling himself Carlos Wieder.

Though I know a small something about this period in Chile’s history, I was pained that Wieder, a character who sincerely loved poetry, could also love fascism. Afterall, Wieder was just as motivated by an impulse to create beauty as the unsuspecting sisters. In the hours before he kills their aunt and ensures the sisters will be imprisoned and later executed, the poets sit peacefully, unsuspecting, discussing the great artists who preceded them. Each loves language with seemingly equal devotion.

Bolaño depicts resistance to Pinochet far less dramatically and heroically than is typical in a piece of fiction. Among the writers who stand against the regime are Distant Star’s narrator and his friend, Bibiano. These two never gain half the writerly reputation as the fictional Wieder. Ambitious but nevertheless failed poets recur in Bolaño’s work again and again. I must admit such characters fascinate and repel me.

I too am an ambitious writer. I too am mired in the problematic pursuit of beauty, all kinds of beauty through language. I too have a belief that literature can somehow save us, even as I carry the undeniable realization that language can just as easily blind us to our crimes and help perpetuate them. Literature silences some voices just as easily as it amplifies others.

Again and again, Bolaño makes this aspect of narrative and poetic language part of a larger moral landscape.

In this manner, my drive through a North America desert was linked to political events in a country far from my home, a country nevertheless shaped by the historical forces set in motion, in large part, by my native land––the United States. Distant Star connected me to the moral complexity of creating fiction and the dangers of such an unsteady tool as language.

Hot-spots Energize Revision

“…as an event being struck by lightning is singular, frightening but somehow welcome, a sign that I partook in the energy, the light from distant stars.”––from The Yard Behind the Yard, by Amelie Prusik

As students of writer Kevin McIllvoy (Mc), Amelie (Lee) Prusik and I were each introduced to hot-spots––a term meant to indicate a spark in a draft, a bit of energy inviting more from the writer. Lee seemed to grasp immediately the power of hot-spots as a tool. I, alas, did not. At least not until Lee came as a visiting writer to the small rural community college where I teach, and she introduced hot-spots to my students for the first time.

After her presentation, my students enthusiastically began marking their drafts as never before, slicing them open, expanding scenes, and adding more images––it helped me recognize what I had earlier missed. Hot-spots allow for an articulation of a subtle but important aspect of revision: a source of energy in a text doesn’t mean a writer feels good about that spot; a hot-spot can just as easily arise from something she is trying to avoid.

As I understand it, yes, a hot-spot can be a warm and inviting for a writer, but it can also be “too-hot-to-handle,” inciting anxiety, even fear. He may feel heat emanating from his words, but without really knowing what lays beyond them. It’s as if a more powerful thought were hidden behind a closed door. Once opened, will the writer meet smoke or flame?

The genius of hot-spots as presented by Mc and Lee, is that the writer is given a very tangible task when approaching a draft, a time when writers can often be overwhelmed and feel unmoored.

Try it. Pull out a highlighter or pen and mark up your draft wherever you feel energy.

• Where is the heat?
• What do you want to go back to?
• What spots are you avoiding?
• What is currently confusing, yet you lack ideas about how it might be clarified?

Likewise, searching for hot-spots is a great task for writers to do in small groups or pairs.  By exchanging drafts and marking spots where the reader feels energy rising, energy which can include confusion or awe, the writer gets very specific feedback without the sting of “I don’t like this part,” or  the bland and feeble praise of “It’s good.”

Often someone else will find a hot-spot in our writing, we didn’t even know was there.

I know this first hand. I was blessed my Mc’s hot-spot insight on one of the drafts I sent him as his student in an MFA program. He marked a small paragraph and wrote a brief comment, something like, “This needs to be three times as long.”

I read the note and sighed. I was sure I had nothing more to say there. To me that section was ugly, a little too full of itself with a lot of fancy language and embarrassing, even sexual imagery. It was “too-hot-to-handle” not because of the imagery, but because I felt my faltering ambitions as a writer were on full display. Still I did what Mc suggested and opened up that hot-spot, my only goal to make it three times as long. I wrote, and wrote, and wrote some more, and in the process found not only an ending for my story but its climax too.

It turned out that under my writerly embarrassment and shame was a great deal of creative energy, energy that could be used to strengthen my draft.

Since Lee’s visit, I’ve introduced and re-introduced hot-spots to my students many times, and each semester I witness, once again, the beauty and power that underlies one little term. In the process, I’ve identified three hot-spot types.

A Hot-spots Taxonomy:

One: The hot-spot that welcomes

This is best described as a place where its possible for a writer to slow down. It invites more detail. It may mean expanding a scene to include images and dialogue or better define an argument through greater specificity and precision––the very things that excite readers most. Signs a writer has encountered that kind of hot-spot are likely to be a small excitement in the belly, an impulse to return to the writing, or an overall pleasant sensation of curiosity.

Two: The hot-spot that initiates fear

This is another kind of energy all together. Here the writer isn’t encountering warmth but heat, a sensation that something is too complicated or just wrong. This is a place we’d like to avoid, even as our language screams out for return. Encountering one of these spots in texts might create fear, fatigue, nausea, irritability, even shame for the writer. For readers, though, these are often the most exciting spots in a draft, a place where the writer has been unable to hide. More exposure is often the best response.

Three: The hot-spot that masks uncertainty.

This is the most amorphous type. It often occupies only a tiny space in a text, perhaps one sentence or just a short phrase. This is a place where the writer wished to say something with clarity but clarity was not achieved. Encountering such a spot may make the writer feel inept, but because it seems so small and inconsequential in comparison to the larger work, she may avoid drawing on the energy that lives there. Nevertheless, if the writer opens the door and enters the smoky room, she may find flames with the power to transform an entire piece. Here the writer learns what she’s been meaning to say all along.

Perhaps it will serve writers best to develop their own unique taxonomy, thus increasing the complexity, variety, and possibility held inside the hot-spots term.

Why This Blog?

“Why write?” ––Question posed by Don Rothman, former director of the Central California Writing Project, in the first minutes of its annual summer institute.

One day, without warning, all thirteen of the blog entries I’d posted over the course of a year, disappeared. On the one hand, it hardly mattered. I mostly had no idea who actually read them.

Overtime, though, I’d gained about 6,000 page views. A very small sum in internet-land but a meaningful number for me. Plus, every now and again, a dear friend would send a sweet message regarding something I’d written, and that became reason enough to keep posting.

I chose the site because it required membership of its commenters. I found this feature immensely attractive. When I started my blog, I was afraid of appearing foolish. If some anonymous someone let me know that through faulty reasoning, a self-pitying tone, or an embarrassing grammar or usage error I'd displeased them, I might stop writing all together, and I didn’t want to stop.

Still, in my more than tens years of writing for newspapers and magazines, I’d felt the keen pleasures of audience. Getting one, via the small literary journals where I sent my work, was more difficult than I had anticipated upon enrolling in a prestigious program for writers. Now that I’d earned my MFA, and lost the close and careful feedback of my advisers and peers, I began to feel if I didn’t engage an audience somewhere, the urge to write might vanish all together.

I was doing other difficult things too: dealing with the deaths of beloved family members, teaching at a rural community college, and trying to learn tango. It helped to be writing about each of them.

Plus, in writing a blog, I was able to be my own editor, which meant I could write in the nearly undisciplined manner I had always wanted to. As I’d grown older, I’d become wary of certainties and attracted to contradictory ideas, things that meant more than one thing at a time, or perhaps nothing at all. Also, I took pleasure in tangents, especially if the language arising was lively and full of mystery.

In my blogs, I let a lot go: clarity; causation; sometimes sense. I, who had once been a journalist where every piece was required to have a singular idea and be free of digression, allowed myself to experiment and play.

Then, just then––when my blog became a certain kind of space––one that held my ideas in a small but public manner, one that I could sometimes look upon when bored––well, it disappeared. Without notice. Without indication it had ever even existed.

The writer’s collective that hosted it closed shop, apparently warning no one. In place of its familiar home page, it posted a note hinting it might be possible to access old content via a spotty web archive and let the world know its domain name was up for sale.

The common statement is to post on-line with caution, for what we post will never disappear. But my work did, and it felt strange and mysterious that it had. I was reminded, all over again: in the end, nothing remains unchanged from one moment to the next, even things that seem most permanent.

Alas, I wasn’t ready to let my blog go. Instead, I’ve reconstructed it here, and look forward to posting new entries soon.

Why this blog?  To push against loss, I think, or to try and reclaim it with another name. Call it change, perhaps, or movement. I write this blog to connect with my fellows and to, I hope, really hope, celebrate those changes, that movement, the transition between one thing and the next.