Monday, February 11, 2002
Chapter 3 is making me wait. I'm trying very hard to be patient. There's so much paleo' to do, anyway.
I wrote the following this morning in answer to a question someone asked in my Horrornet.com forum. I'm reposting it here because it links directly back to comments that I made a little while ago, regarding plot and contrivance:
By plot, I mean, simply, the story. What Margaret Atwood so astutely referred to as "a what and a what and a what." The narrative.
For a long time, I've been of the opinion that this part of any piece of fiction is a) exceedingly artificial and b) exceedingly simple to create. We learn to lie as small children, to tell stories, to embellish the truth, to make the mundane and perhaps plotless world more interesting. Writers keep doing this long after they grown up enough to know better.
But what irks me is to see reviewers (of whatever caliber) complain about any particular aspect of fiction being "contrived," when nothing can be so contrived as the very idea of plot. I shall make up a story. I shall contrive a beginning, a middle, and an end. I shall contrive only those characters that are convenient to the progression of the story along one form or another (Campbell's heroic wheel, Freytag's Triangle, Artistotle's unity of action, etc.) and none that inconveniently get in the way. I shall be sure to fashion my contrivance so that the plot is "accessible" and that, in the end, 2 and 2 make 4. And so on.
But "rustysharp" is contrived.
Story is easy. It comes naturally. If it doesn't, it probably can't be learned and time will only be wasted in the effort. Those who can tell stories (somewhat like grasping basic arithmetic) are ready (if they choose) to do something more grand, to write (which is more akin to calculus - no, this is a stupid analogy, never mind). Writing is far beyond the setting down of "a what and a what and a what."
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