Plotting - Melody Cryns

“Something bad has gotta happen! Make them suffer!” Floyd Salas shouted in the classroom, pacing back and forth. He shouted often, not just because he was passionate about all this stuff, but because he was hard of hearing as well – but this poor new student probably didn’t know that. I knew it because Floyd and his wife Claire were my good friends. But in the classroom I was still the student and Floyd would always be my teacher. It would never change over the years.

He’d yelled at me several times – “You’ve got good stuff here! This is fun gossip – put it into FORM! Use the five-point plot plan!!!”

I don’t know how many times Floyd would yell at me about the five-point plot plan. I knew it by heart. You start with a problem/conflict, then there’s the first crisis, and then the second crisis, the climax and the conclusion. We talked about it in my graduate creative writing classes even – at least variations of it, but always pretty much the same.

One time Floyd ran right up to me and looked me right in the face and yelled, “Don’t forget the five-point plot plan!”

But do I remember the five-point plot plan when I first awake in the morning and stumble to my computer to write? Nooo, of course not. I just pour the words on to the white screen and hope for the best. Later, I can think about the five-point plot plan and picture Floyd yelling about it in the classroom – or hear all my wonderful teachers offer their input. Sometimes my muse is stubborn. She doesn’t like form much – she’d much rather just go with the flow. She’s just a kid, that muse of mine, and she doesn’t like structure or that a word, what is it? “Authority.” So I have to keep feeding her with all this knowledge about five-point plot plans and rising action – over and over again until she gets it right.

“Make the main character mean – he doesn’t hit his kid just once and feel bad – he does it several times and then he feels bad! Make lots of bad stuff happen! What you don’t want to write, we wanna hear!”

In Floyd’s weird way, he got it right. I was reading over Aristotle’s Poetics the other day for my teacher’s aid stint I’m doing in my master’s program – I’ve gotta read all the same stuff the students do. And even though Aristotle wrote Poetics at least a couple thousand years ago, he kinda got it right when he said something to the effect that everything that happens in your story, each part of the story, must be a part of the entire story – that is, if you can take a part out and it doesn’t change the story, then you don’t need it. Aristotle thought plot was the most important element needed in a poem (which were stories back then – no novels or movies, just verse and made into plays).

Guess things haven’t changed too much in a couple thousand years.