Lott Yes! No! But Wait...!

The One Thing You Need to Know To Write a Novel
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-80075-222-1
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Yes! No! But Wait...! is the most straightforward book on writing a novel ever published. It is also the most practical, honest and useful. Tim Lott admits he can't teach someone how to write a novel (that's one of the myths propagated by the novel-writing industry). But he can help anyone construct a solid platform on which they can stand to discover whether they have the talent, will and imagination required of any novelist. A distillation of a lifetime's reading, writing and thinking about stories and how to tell them, Yes! No! But Wait...! is the one book any aspiring author needs.

Tim Lott is the author of ten novels and a memoir, The Scent of Dried Roses, which won the PEN/J.R. Ackerley Prize and is a Penguin Modern Classic. White City Blue won the Whitbread First Novel Award, Rumours of a Hurricane was shortlisted for both the Costa Best Novel Prize and the Encore Award, and his young adult book Fearless was longlisted for the Guardian Children's Book Award. He has been published in sixteen countries and has worked extensively as a screenwriter. Tim has been teaching writing for the last ten years. He's taught at the Faber Academy, Guardian Masterclasses, the Novelry and Brunel University. He has lectured at the University of East Anglia, the How To Academy, the Idler Academy and the School of Life. For his website and info on mentoring services visit www.timlott.co.uk Find him on Twitter @timlottwriter or at Substack on timlott.subtack.com

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lott, Tim

Leseproben

1

Plot (Part One)

Introduction to plot:
What is a plot anyway?

Plot has long been unfashionable among certain sectors of the literary elite.

The screenwriting guru Robert McKee notes the persistence of this anti-plot trend in his book Story (1997).

‘Over the last 25 years,’ he notes,

the method of teaching creative writing in American universities has shifted from the intrinsic to the extrinsic. Trends in literary theory have drawn professors away from the deep sources of story toward language, codes, text – story seen from the outside. As a result, with some notable exceptions, the current generation of writers has been undereducated in the prime principles of story. [Chapter 1: ‘The Story Problem’]

Many writers themselves seem to cheerfully sign up to the war on plot.

‘Well, fuck the plot! That is for precocious schoolboys. What matters is the imaginative truth,’ said Edna O’Brien.

‘Plots really matter only in thrillers,’ declared Martin Amis.

‘As far as I’m concerned, character is everything. I never did see why I have to throw in a plot too’ – is the view of Anne Tyler.

It’s not even a modern point of view.

‘I have never troubled myself much about the construction of plots,’ said Anthony Trollope (1815–82).

However, to me – despite the fact that I admire all of the above writers – such statements seem to be partly a form of aesthetic bravado and partly a defensive strategy peddled by writers who struggle with plot (which is practically every writer I know).

Try telling any great screenwriter, like David Chase (of Sopranos fame) or Jimmy McGovern or Russell T. Davies or Sally Wainwright, that plot is for ‘precocious schoolboys’ and you are likely – with respect to O’Brien, Amis, Tyler and Trollope – to be met with either extreme scepticism or, more likely, outright incredulity.

As Richard Skinner, head of the Faber Academy, puts it in his book Fiction Writing (2009):

Somehow fiction that is plot-driven has over the years become synonymous with poorer quality, cheapness, contempt even. Malign it if you will, but ignore it at your peril, for plot is the ‘thrust’ of a narrative and its genetic code [my italics]. Without it, a narrative seems lifeless, without energy, inert. A narrative that is weakly plotted feels as though it will never get started and then you think it is never going to end.

This part of the genetic code, however, can be frustratingly elusive.

This is why, as a writing teacher, I can’t help but notice that the primary problem that plagues an overwhelming number of my clients is usually the same one.

This problem is articulated perfectly by one of the greatest storytellers of the twentieth century, Patricia Highsmith, in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966):

The beginning writer’s most frequent snag may take the form of the question, ‘What happens next?’ This is a terrifying question, which can leave the writer shaking with stage fright.

———

What happens next?

It’s certainly the question that scares me most as a novelist.

The problem with this problem is that I don’t really have a solution.

I can make suggestions, but it’s your book, and you have to decide what happens next.

It has to arise from your own imagination and be delivered in your own unique voice.

However, there are elements of the craft of storytelling that can assist you in deciding what happens next.

They are not rules or principles.

They are simply clues.

Before we get on to what some of the clues are, it’s first worth asking two questions.

The first question is: ‘What is a plot anyway?’

The second question is: ‘Is the plot in a story the same as what happens in life?’

The answer to the second question is the simpler.

It’s ‘no’.

Plot isn’t the same as life.

It couldn’t be more different from life, in fact.

True – in life, stuff happens, just as stuff happens in a novel.

However, I don’t know about your life, but most of my life is routine – not to say meaningless, chaotic and, as often as not, boring.

I scrub my teeth. I meet a friend. I watch TV. I cut my nails. I go shopping. I go to sleep. I wake up. I eat. I breathe. I read my credit card bill. I panic. I pick my nose. I water the plants. I stub my toe. I argue with my partner.

And so on.

In other words, like history, it’s just one damn thing after another.

There’s no particular order to it, other than that imposed by necessity, or chance, or the pursuit of desires or the avoidance of pain.

A plot is different.

George Saunders, in his book on writing, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021), writes:

The story is faster than real life, more compressed and exaggerated. A place where something new always has to be happening, something relevant to that which has already happened. [‘A Page at a Time: Thoughts on “In the Cart”’]

Alfred Hitchcock said of film plots that they were ‘life with the boring bits taken out’.

But Hitchcock’s definition is a very partial one.

It’s not enough to take the boring bits out.

Because it will still be boring.

A plot also has to be meaningful.

That is, it will possess a particular architecture, designed consciously by the author to express something that author wants to communicate to the reader.

It is governed not (like life) by randomness, but by causality and theme.

It has a discernible beginning, middle and end (yes, in that order).

It is, as Aristotle wrote, ‘the organisation of events’.

Plots have a shape.

And, remarkable though it may seem – in classic storytelling at least – they all have roughly the same shape.

We will come to the fascinating outlines of that universal shape later in this book.

For now, let’s address the first, more penetrating, question.

What is a plot anyway?

What holds a plot together?:
Towards unity

John Yorke, in Into the Woods (2013):

A story is like a magnet dragged through randomness, pulling the chaos of things into some kind of shape and – if we’re very lucky – some kind of sense. Every tale is an attempt to lasso a terrifying reality, tame it and bring it to heel. [Chapter 22: ‘Why?’]

Jean Rhys:

To give life shape – is what a writer does.

Without unity, stories are just like life – a chaotic salad of events and happenings that have no shape or meaning.

For any novelist – or dramatist, or screenwriter – a story has to be transmuted into a coherent and unified plot.

How is this to be achieved?

By means of theme, causality and purposefulness.

———

The theme of a story is one thing that might be said to hold a narrative together.

In this instance, events are arranged in order to demonstrate a point that the writer wants to make or to communicate, an idea they care about enough to spend years trying to express that idea at book length.

That idea, which will usually be too complex to be expressed directly, will be demonstrated not in words as such, but through a sequence of actions.

Action, not words, is the grammar of storytelling.

As one author once remarked about novel writing, ‘Work out what you want to say, then spend the book not saying it.’

As McKee pointed out in a lecture, story is the ‘dramatisation of truth… the living expression and proof of a controlling idea without explanation’.

A ‘controlling idea’ is the same as a theme.

You don’t have a character saying, ‘Well, that proves it! Crime doesn’t pay,’ at the end of a detective story.

Or the heroine stating, ‘Well, that proves it! True love conquers all,’ at the end of a romance.

The action explains the meaning.

———

When I worked as a screenwriter – I penned maybe a dozen commissioned screenplays in all – I spent a great deal of time in meetings with producers, directors and script editors, all of whom scratched their heads and worried away at the same question.

‘What is this story really about?’

Once we’d solved that question, everything else began to fall into place.

Because finding the solution meant that we had discovered the theme.

The central idea binding the plot of King Lear together is that spiritual pride leads to a downfall (a common theme in classic stories).

Lear is about a very great deal more than this. Many volumes have been written about the nuances of that remarkable play. But at its heart, it is the depiction of a man who has let his great power go to his head so that he has become spiritually blind and emotionally stunted.

(His putative ally, the Earl of Gloucester, becomes physically blind – partly as a result of a similar mix of pride and naivety. Both the main plot and the subplot reinforce the theme.)

By the end of the play, Lear can...