Years ago (precisely 23) I heard Kurt Vonnegut Jr. give a talk in which he suggested that there were only three kinds of plots for a story: the first, he said, involved a person of great success or good fortune who steps on a cosmic banana peel and falls horribly into tragic misery; the second was totally the reverse–the “Cinderella” plot wherein a “wretch” gains good fortune. The last was a yo-yo affair in which the main character goes up and down and down and up–with lots of variants.
Although I adore Mr. Vonnegut’s work and treasure his memory I think no one should wholly believe this, especially if you plan on writing creative prose. Plot may be materially limited to the scenarios above but a great piece of writing isn’t driven by plot any more than your car is driven by its tires. In short: plot is simply the incidental journey. Or to put this another way: the frame of the story is the thing that matters.
This is especially true in the fourth genre known as creative nonfiction. The non-fictionist has to write about things that have happened either to the writer or to other people. Sometimes he or she must write about the globe and its hurricanes or about nations afflicted by war. Whatever the subject the thing that matters is what the writer makes of the incidents and not the incidents themselves. In the writing trade this is called dramatic or comic irony. What does the narrator know “now” as opposed to yesterday or a decade ago or even ten minutes ago? The cultivation of this irony is the literary variant of what Daniel Goleman has called “emotional intelligence”. It is a tricky craft. Done poorly it sounds like Dorothy at the end of “The Wizard of Oz” who tells us she’s learned never to search for happiness beyond her own backyard. Done correctly the voice of the writer assumes a quiet and confident quality–a thing that is often delicate and emotionally quiescent.
Here is a lovely example of the technique from Christopher Buckley’s moving memoir “Losing Mum and Pup”–an autobiographical treatment of his famous parents’ complex marriage and their final challenging years. Its a book that many with ageing parents will take to heart and for those of us who have lost our parents its a superb paradigm of narrative quiescence to say the least. In sum: all too often there is no good or bad fortune in real life save what we imagine in our times alone. I’ll end with Christopher Buckley:
“Yesterday, I was driving behind a belchy city bus on the way back from the grocery store and suddenly found myself thinking (not for the first time) about whether Pup is in heaven. He spent so much of his life on his knees in church, so much of his life doing the right thing by so many people, a million acts of generosity. I’m–I shouldn’t use the word–dying of curiosity: How did it turn out, Pup? Were you right after all? Is there a heaven? Is Mum there with you? (Grumbling, almost certainly, about the “inedible food.”) And if there is a heaven and you are in it, are you thinking, Poor Christo –he’s not going to make it. And is Mum saying, Bill, you have got to speak to that absurd creature at the Gates and tell him he’s got to admit Christopher. It’s too ridiculous for words.”
“Even in my dreams, they’re looking after me. So perhaps one is never really an orphan after all.”
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 