8

Plot

Plot is different from characterization. Plot equates to events. A character must have experience; but if there are no events in your story, what can your character experience or react to? In Hard Times Dickens places his two characters, Louisa and Thomas, whose lives are micromanaged by their practical-minded father, Mr. Gradgrind, in the path of a traveling circus, at which point we find “Louisa peeping with all her might through a hole in a deal board, and…Thomas abasing himself on the ground to catch but a hoof of the graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower-act” (18)! It is a singular event that has enormous consequences as the unimaginative and well-ordered lives of two characters are ruptured by the possibilities of the artistic and unrestrained, consequences which result in a succession of dramatic events. So give your story interesting, character-testing events. Does your character get pushed out of a car on the way to school or does that malicious girl two houses down fall out of your character’s front yard tree and land on his head? How your character reacts to the events he experiences can define his character.

As your mind swells with events, you must consider how you will structure those events in order to form a story. When you consider the structure of events as a whole, you will realize that your story must begin somewhere and end somewhere else. A story is, after all, a story. It requires a beginning, middle, and end. Your story, therefore, should begin at some interesting point, travel upward as it builds on that beginning with rising action and character development, reach a climax involving the peak of a character’s problem or the most alarming moment of a character’s experience, and finally make a short descent as the story achieves some kind of resolution to that problem or experience. This structure is formerly known as the Fichtean curve (i.e. the upside down check mark).

Remember, a story that doesn’t start somewhere is a story that never gets written. So you must begin at the place you think is most interesting. An interesting beginning could involve an event such as a perilous situation for your character (a man braces himself against a rope at the sandwich shop as a St. Bernard plants its paws on his chest) or it could involve something embarrassing (a girl, picking her nose behind the wheel of her car, gets honked at by that cute guy from the baseball team) or it could involve an image or description such as the milieu of the country corner shop or a row of daisies bobbling in the wind. It is interesting if it engages both the reader’s imagination and emotions.

In Hard Times Dickens chooses to begin with “the one thing needful” (9) and that is to talk about “Facts”: “‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else’” (9). In this way, Dickens establishes point of view, characterizes a central character, engages the central conflict, and sets his story’s events in motion.

The story begins with dialog which allows us to see that a character is speaking. We may, therefore, conclude that the character is speaking to someone. Furthermore, his dialog is provided in quotes, which tells us that someone is narrating his speech. The facts tells us that this narrative is in 3^rd person point of view, a point that is confirmed when the 3^rd person narrator writes, “The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a schoolroom, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations, by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve” (9). These external descriptions of scene and character indicate conclusively a 3^rd person point of view. In the first two paragraphs we also learn a great deal about the physical, psychological, and physiological characterization of Mr. Gradgrind. He has a “square forefinger,” he is obsessed with “facts,” and the fact that he is standing in a schoolroom giving a speech tells us he is an educated, possibly middle-to-upper class, man. Moreover, we are presented with the central conflict. Are facts alone wanted in life? What about imagination, creativity? Are they not also wanted in life? This dichotomy forms the basis of all conflict within the story, and Dickens presents it in his opening lines. And finally, the tangible action of Dickens’ character standing in a schoolroom giving a speech to an “inclined plane of little vessels” constitutes an event.

After your story has had a character and events that occupy both space and time, it then must end at a higher plane than it began. The peak of this higher plane is called a climax. The climax occurs when the character has reached the highest point of internal and/or external crisis, the point from which the story must turn if your character is to make it out alive. Every story’s climax is different. It is the point at which only you can determine. It is the point at which your mind tells you the struggle will never end even as your heart tells you it will.

As your story makes its short descent from the point of climax (ultimate conflict), it must reach for and achieve some kind of resolution, at which point you have arrived at the end of your story. While that resolution could be achieved by way of a dramatic turn, it could also be achieved by a simple shift in direction.

A dramatic turn achieves an obvious resolution (Gradgrind’s daughter, Louisa, confronts her father about her upbringing and “[curses] the hour in which [she] was born to such a destiny” (208); she has made an obvious turn of mind, heart, and action, and the resultant change is distinct: “‘I shall die if you hold me!’ she says. ‘Let me fall upon the ground!’ And he laid her down there, and saw the pride of his heart and the triumph of his system, lying, an insensible heap, at his feet” (212)); whereas a shift in direction achieves a more subtle resolution (the relationship between Stephen and Rachel is unclearly redefined: “he avoided every chance of seeing her; for, although he knew that the prohibition did not yet formally extend to the women working in the factories, he found that some of them with whom he was acquainted were changed to him, and he feared to try others, and dreaded that Rachael might be even singled out from the rest if she were seen in his company” (143). This shift shows that their relationship has been “muddled,” as opposed to abolished, due to the un-communicated fear of potential disgrace arising from their association.