In the genre of fanfic that I write (yes, fanfic has genres; why not?) there's a subgenre called the PWP, which stands for "Plot? What Plot?" This designation in a posting header (along with its movie-like rating system) signals that the "story" will be little more than a scene, sometimes in all its meanings, the purpose of which is to, well, let's just say it's the main purpose of most porn, even the literary type. PWPs tend to be short and to the point. Writer and reader (and characters) get, er, in and out in a fairly short order. Sometimes there's character development, but most often the pair is already established and the piece (I can't really call it a story) is just for the purposes of amusement. I suppose that's true of just about any story, but this type at least has a specific goal. Sometimes, PWPs become the kernel of a larger story and turn back into what they really are: just a scene lifted from a larger story.
So what's in a plot? I tend to think of plots in the old-fashioned sense of the word: a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but that's a little vague for my purposes here; even nothing more than a scene has a beginning, middle, and end. You start somewhere, go on until the end and then stop when it's over. Stories that are "a day in the life of" have those three elements, arbitrary as they are. Plots are more complicated and less arbitrary. A plot is framed more specifically (start here, end here), but it's what comes in the middle that sets it apart from the "slice of life" type of story. In these, there tends to be less of a sense of conflict, climax (which in the kind of PWP I'm talking about, is usually literal), or denouement, the traditional elements of a plot.
This is also true in novel-length PWPs. "Please tell me there is no such thing," you might be thinking. I'm sorry to inform you it's true. There are lots of plotless novels. They tend to be written by two types of writers: the inexperienced and the avant garde. Telling them apart is sometimes harder than you might think. For instance, as much fun as I think Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake novels are, they're largely plot-free in the old-fashioned sense of the word, and at this point, she's not an inexperienced writer. In her novels, Anita wakes up one morning (it could be any morning), stuff happens in rapid succession (any kind of stuff) without any really good reason, usually, and then stops. I know this sounds like a plot, but it doesn't build like one. It just hurtles along helter skelter in high gear in a random yet chronological sense, like any working mom's day, except the instead of getting the kids off to school, she mangles werewolves or raises zombies. The events are more a calendar of events to get through than a plot: Midnight: raise zombie for lawyers; 2 a.m.: check in with Jean-Luc about visiting master vampire; 3 a.m. clean visiting master vampire's clock. . . .
What's missing are the tricks of the trade: foreshadowing, complication, reversal, a concentrated conflict. But more than that, what's missing is the actual rhythm of a story, the sense of rising and falling action that plots (which are not necessarily "like life" though they can be realistic) usually have. What's often also missing is a subject. The story is not actually about anything. Taken as a whole, the Anita Blake series is about the assimilation of the "other" into society. Individually, they're more about Anita's character development and, in that sense, read more like fanfic.
Plotlessness doesn't happen just in genre fic or fanfic. What I think of as the Iowa Writers Workshop school of fiction (Raymond Carver et al) have made slice-of-life fiction the most common type of short story since the '80s or so. It's a minimalist realism with extremely ordinary characters to whom nothing much significant happens beyond what most of us experience every day. This has never had much appeal for me. My life is boring enough thanks, and the drama over other people's boring lives is too awful to bear.
What got me thinking about this was a review of Sarah Waters' new book, The Night Watch, by Grumpy Old Bookman, who opines:
The absence of plot is also deeply worrying. I do hope that Sarah Waters has not fallen into the dreadful trap of believing that she is god's gift to literature, and that she is therefore above such things. You may remember that E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, said something along the lines of Oh dear yes, there has to be a story -- as if the need for a plot was vaguely disgusting and perhaps best ignored; rather like the need to defecate from time to time. Forster took the view that a novel should just be allowed to stop, without the author having to bring things to a nicely rounded conclusion.
Generally, rounded conclusions are something I'm in favor of too, because the other alternative—just stopping—is so emotionally and spiritually unsatisfying. I can't tell you how many times I've tossed across the room in rage what has been until the last four pages a really good book, when the author chokes on the ending. The Historian, The Geographer's Library, and The Magus spring immediately to mind. I feel cheated when this happens. Worse, I feel insulted, as though I've been led on through this roller coaster ride of a book and at the end I'm just expected to fold my hands and walk quietly away, like I'm getting off a literally ride? I think not! That's like getting almost to the bottom of that last hill and then getting stuck there for two hours. By the time you roll up to the platform again, the adrenaline rush is gone. After that, dammit, I want some catharsis!
This is distinctly different from having everything neatly wrapped up. I can handle loose ends if the story has been emotionally satisfying. In fact, it's good to leave your audience wanting more: more of the characters, another story about them, more of your wonderful writing. But this doesn't happen if a story just stops. What's needed after the climax is some kind of closure—generally a word I hate, but appropriate here since we're bringing a story to a close. Otherwise, it becomes either a cliffhanger, or an exercise in illustrating the pointless random futility of life. If that's what you want, fine then. But don't offer it to me. I think about that every time I get out of bed to go to work.
I'm in the camp of readers (and writers) who wants not just diversion but a feeling of accomplishment, an sense that I've somehow been changed when I read a story. If there's not some point to it other than mimicking my random episodic life, why tell the story? Stories are a distillation of human experience, concentrated, heady, patterned, and with a point. If it has no point, it's like listening to the endless monologue by your idiot coworker about his Club Med trip to Cancun.
Endings are hard. They're harder than beginnings, and far harder than middles. Knowing when to stop and how to stop a story—how, in essence, to frame it—is the trickiest bit of learning to write. It's a lot like learning to crop photographs. You have to teach yourself how to see all over again, not in panoramic 3-D super vision, but in discreet sections. It's an aesthetic, and therefore almost impossible to teach, though it can be learned. Just push on to the bottom of the hill, and bring the tale into the platform with your readers panting and wiping their brows.
As the author of many a pleasantly diverting PWP...sadly, frequently *with* plot and characterization, I have to agree. I like even my porn to have beginnings, middles and ends.
It absolutely enrages me when I read an author who is allowed to get away with mealy-mouthed and half-formed endings, because they were too lazy to do their work properly. (coughNealStephensoncough) It can really leave a bad taste in your mouth if a good novel is tanked by a weak ending.
The path to good endings have so many pitfalls, it's easy enough to get trapped. My personal problem is that I frequently am so enamored of my characters (original or "borrowed") that I can't quite bring myself to turn the TV off, if you will. :-)
But while we're on PWPs, let me indulge in a semi-related rant about Alan Moore and his so-called "intelligent porn." It is certainly porn, in the sense that the women enact a variety of trysts for the pleasure, not of themselves, but of their viewing audience. (This is *MY* definition of porn. I ask no one else use it, but when characters are into each other for the sake of each other and the viewing/reading audience need not apply at the door, I call that erotica. I find it far superior to stories constructed with the implicit/explicit understanding that the wanker in the corner is the real star.)
Mr. Moore has posited than no one has EVER written intelligent porn - i.e., porn written for wankers with glasses and advanced degrees - ever before! Can you BELIEVE it? Well, as you and I know perfectly well (and have written perfectly well,) many a PWP is damn intelligent and funny - and often sexier than anything the misogynist Mr. Moore will ever dream up.
If anyone wants to read *my* idea of PWPs, they are welcome to do so at my website: http://www.worldshaking.net
Intelligent readers only, please. ;-)
Cheers,
Erica
Posted by: Erica | September 18, 2006 at 09:54 AM