So I used to worry about imposing the false scheme of plot onto the delicate creatures of my creation, a grid descending with sharp edges pressing down. My friends and I spent so much time talking, and characters in books spent so much time doing; the distinction troubled me, for I was after capturing some slice of reality, even as I increasingly disallowed myself that term. (In the blush of a kind of neo-primative post-modern undergraduate view of the world, such terms were of little use to me.)

These days, I still spend plenty of time talking. Processing. Planning. Imagining. Figuring and fixing. But that’s all sandwiched between actions, big and small. Birthing babies; wiping down surfaces in the kitchen. What I mean is, I believe in plot now because it’s hit me in the reality. Deaths, traumas, births, transitions. Nothing is theoretical anymore.

I planned this whole blog out while pinned down by a baby on either side during afternoon nap. All that remains is the title.

I’m rereading Charles Baxter’s helpful little book Subtext: beyond plot. He talks about having your characters make scenes; making scenes is how characters become visible to themselves. I’m also reading Egri on The Art of Dramat!c Wr!t!ng. (The title is printed that way, with the exclamation points.) The pivitol character is the one who makes change happen, who triggers the change.

I remember Stephanie Moore, my wonderful teacher who died so fast and relatively young, talking about how writers (or people who wrote in her classes) always want a character to go from being a little bit angry to more angry, or from a little bit happy to more happy. We shy away from reversals, from BIG transitions. I guess we learn to do this in life, too. Po Bronson says that most people have transition thrust upon them, even when that change turns out to be wonderful, a life-shift for the better. People want to change, but they are afraid. They don’t make things happen in their lives until they are forced to do so. And writers are afraid of change, too, and afraid of scenes.

Stefanie Moore, by the way, was a lithe blonde woman who could dance and swear and hear one page aloud once and know what it needed. She was still gorgeous when she died at age fifty-five and I don’t think she was afraid of anything except running out of time.

So this is a hodge-podge of other people’s wisdom by which I want to say, in the words of the proverbial t-shirt: shit happens. Let it rip. I’m telling you stories. Trust me.

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