To go beneath the surface in
your story, or shall we say beneath the plot, the writer needs to ask why what
happens in the plot matters to the protagonist or the characters in the story.
As Lisa Cron of Story Genuis fame
says, the plot gets its emotional weight based on how it affects your
protagonist who is in pursuit of a goal.
Let’s
see how it works in two books I enjoyed.
The
Boys in the Boat, Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936
Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown is an historical non-fiction book told as a riveting story. The plot is about how these nine
disparate, poor American college boys finally come together as a team to win
the eight-oared crew race in the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany. [Eight oarsmen,
1 coxswain = nine American boys in the boat]
That’s
what happens.
But
who would really care if not for the why it matters to one particular boy in
the boat, Joe Rantz. This book is mostly his story. Of course, Brown
brings to life all of the crew members, the coaches, the boat builder, Joe’s
family and girlfriend, the Depression, the Dust Bowl, and Hitler’s Nazi
Germany.
What Joe has always wanted is a
family who cares about him. The reader watches Joe’s attempts to get his father
and step-mother to care about him, to be proud of him. And we feel Joe’s pain
as he is abandoned again and again by his family.
We see his misbelief become a
reality, that he can’t trust anyone to be there for him. The reader is part of
his search for family and connection. And he finds it in rowing and realizing
that he can trust his fellow crew members.
In
fiction, John Grisham’s The Client works the same way. The plot is about the suicide of a mafia lawyer who knows about
the mafia cover-up of a murdered Louisiana senator.
Okay,
it’s about the mafia’s dirty works. Why should it matter to regular folks?
It
matters because the protagonist, an eleven-year-old, street-wise but poor boy
named Mark Sway, tries to prevent the lawyer from committing suicide.
Okay,
so what?
It’s
the backstory in any story that helps the reader understand why the plot
matters to the characters.
Mark’s
always wanted security for him and his mother and younger brother. He’s been
taking care of them since before his abusive father left.
What
happens in the plot matters to the Mark because he feels responsible for
bringing a mafia threat into his family. A heavy load for an eleven-year-old to
bear. Like any good story, problems escalate. Not knowing who to turn to, Mark
retains a lawyer for his family with a dollar. Together Mark and his lawyer
Reggie Love, a woman with her own complicated backstory, end up in a race to
discover the body before the mafia moves the body.
Again,
this all matters to Mark because he doesn’t want his family to live in fear of
the mafia killing them.
I’ve
only given a basic outline of what I’m trying to show here with the above two
titles. It’s easier to show how the questioning system works with finished
stories. It’s much harder to do this in your own work of creation.
In
each scene, the writer needs to know:
What the characters go into the
scene believing,
What they want, and
Why what is happening in the
scene matters to them.
By the end of each scene, the
characters need to change; their outlooks on the situation, their feelings, or their
next moves, even if it is just slightly. Writers need to let the reader into
the character’s head.
In the first scene of my memoir
about attending college as a mother of five, Victoria is at school with her
special needs’ daughter Marie. They are meeting with the guidance counselor from
the high school to choose a curriculum for Marie.
Victoria enters the scene
believing that she’s inferior to college-educated professionals, but if she can
only get the counselor to understand Marie’s needs and what Marie wants to do
in life [attend college to become a teacher], choosing the curriculum will be
easy.
What Victoria wants in this scene is for the counselor to
listen to Victoria. [Counselor ignores Victoria.]
Why what is happening in this
scene matters to Victoria is because she is reliving her own struggle of trying
to convince her parents that she desired to attend college, and Victoria, too,
was told that she was not college material.
Victoria changes by the end of
the scene [only slightly] by deciding, as a mother, to give her daughter the
opportunity that Victoria was denied so long ago. Victoria allows her daughter
the opportunity to at least try to attend college. [Counselor makes Victoria
sign paper stating that if Marie fails high school it’s Victoria’s fault
because Victoria wouldn’t follow recommendations made by teachers and the
Special Education Department, people who are more educated than Victoria, who
wanted Marie to stay in Special Ed classes.]
Writers of fiction as well as
memoir need to remember that we never just
give us the what in the story. We need to always dive into the why. In other
words, when creating story, writers need to know the questions to ask of every
scene, every character:
What happened?
Why did that happen?
What did the character do as a
result?
If we keep asking why and where
the feeling is coming from and what does it mean to that person, we can
discover the true meaning of our story.
I want to thank JennieNash of Author Accelerator and Lisa Cron for helping me to understand
which questions to ask for each scene in my memoir.
*As before,
please offer any insight or comments you may have about my college memoir.
Thank you! *
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