Reconsidering 'Plot' in fiction
Thinking about how the Malaysian feature film Abang Adik—release to much acclaim!—worked the death penalty into its plot made me reconsider how to write a piece of short fiction I've been trying to complete.
For a long time, based on an exchange with someone I knew a long time ago, I wanted to write a short story that was, vaguely, about how someone could be so good in one way, and bad in another, and who got to see they were bad or good, and what that said about human relationships. I also had the idea that I would bring the death penalty to the story somehow, since I had reported on it myself as a journalist and could bring some perspective to bear.
But I didn’t start the story until an image came into my head one day, triggered by a completely unrelated childhood memory. As it continued to radiate in my head, I wrote it down and suddenly, I had a beginning, and then my first scene—but then I didn’t know where to go from there. That has generally been my problem writing short fiction. I’ve written what I think to be several promising beginnings but they don’t have any middle or ends. For a while I just sort of accepted that I couldn’t do “Plot”, so fiction wasn’t for me. But that was because I was thinking about plot as this big idea that had to be scaffolded from the start, and then filled in, even if I were to fiddle around later with the chronology and shape of the story.
But I’ve been going back to George Saunders again lately, who is unreservedly one of my favorite writers, of both fiction and nonfiction. I haven’t actually read his novels, but I love his short stories (the Tenth of December collection especially) and also his essay collection The Braindead Megaphone (the title piece is a must-read in our times). I’m also now reading him—and all fiction, truth be told—through the lens of his book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and his newsletter Story Club, which present a series of lessons on how to read and write short stories, particularly inspired by what he has gleaned from the Russian masters such as Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol—since, as he points out, “They weren’t as found of interviews and craft talks and process-related discussions as we are.”
In these lessons, Saunders offers a less pressured, lower-stakes way out. He talks about writing line by line, feeling out what happens in a story by continuous tinkering, one sentence after another. It’s a process of discovery, not something planned ahead, so you don’t need to have a “plot” to begin with. There is so much liberation in this, and it already makes me (just a little bit) less afraid to face the blank page. Here’s an excerpt of this idea from his book:
Early in a story, I’ll have a few discrete blocks (blobs? swaths?) of loose, sloppy text. As I revise, those blocks will start to… get better. […]
As the blocks start to fall into order, the resulting feeling of causation starts to mean something (if a man puts his fist through a wall, then joins a street protest, that’s one story; if he comes home from a street protest and puts his fist through the wall, that’s another) and starts to suggest what the story might want to be “about” (although part of this process is to shake off that feeling as much as possible and keep returning to that P/N [Positive/Negative] meter, trusting that those big thematic decisions are going to be made, naturally, by way of the thousands of accreting micro-decisions at the line level). […]
When I first found this method, it felt so freeing. I didn’t have to worry, didn’t have to decide, I just had to be there as I read my story fresh each time, watching that meter, willing to (playfully) make changes at the line level, knowing that if I was wrong, I’d get a chance to change it back on the next read.
The kernel of this idea is also captured in this video:
As I wrote in this newsletter, a couple of plot points in the film Abang Adik felt a little forced to me. I may be completely off the mark, but it felt like the storytellers wanted a particular end in the film (for someone to be on death row), and so it seemed like they had to reverse engineer the narrative to make it happen, which required two twists in the story. The first didn’t feel too convincing, and then you realize you were right to feel that when the second twist came, which then felt over the top coming right after the first. I can think of other paths the plot could have taken… but would they have elicited such strong emotions? I don’t know. Maybe this was what felt most right for this story to the scriptwriters in the end. In fiction, there are so many possibilities. How to decide?!
Regardless, I say this not to critique the film (I loved it and was very moved by it), but because it felt like a reminder to myself to not reverse engineer this short story I’m working on. Maybe there is no need for a murder, and no one has to be on death row. Maybe the themes I thought I wanted to explore may even morph into something else. I suppose it should be possible to bring the same level of drama and tension to a lesser transgression, if one were writing specifically enough, empathetically enough.
Well, I’ll find out.