Fri 28 Mar 2008
There are reasons I love technology. One, among many, is that I can get swamped for literally months at a time — moving, running after a toddler, writing a whole damn book — then listen to the original conversation that started m on this little project.
There are also reasons I don’t love technology so much. Like even after months of procrastinating and putting it off the Right Answer doesn’t magically appear on the tapes.
Thus, guaranteed of failure, I leap into the fray. Come on along.
Part one: Plot as Meaningless Term
Plot is like “time” and “love” — we all know what the word means until we start looking at it. I was on a plot with Melinda Snodgrass once where we all had to say what we meant by he word plot. Consider these:
– Plot is the literal events that occur in the story
– Plot is the scenes of a story in the order that the reader encounters them (as opposed, say to the characters in the story, which is the action)
– Plot is the sequence in which information is released to the reader — through either action or exposition — that forms the subjective experience of the story
In the end, I think we have the choice between true but imprecise (plot is what happens) and precise, but dodgy (plot is the way in which theme is literalized within the narrative). Seriously, this is a large part of why I kept balking at writing this section. I don’t think I’ve met two writers who meant the same thing when they said this word. The dark secret is, the word plot doesn’t actually mean any one thing. It’s like “dementia” or “autism” — it describes a cluster of related but non-identical things. It’s a spectrum diagnosis. So if I seem to hop back and forth between levels, compare apples to oranges and both of those to rhinos, forgive me. I blame to the tools.
Part Two: The Fantasy Ur-Plot(s)
In the Symposium conversation, Walter and George both brought up models of the fantasy ur-plot as described by John Clute and (haul that corpse out again) Jospeh Campbell. I don’t pretend to any great scholarship on eith of these folks, but I will do my best.
Clute’s thesis as I understand it can be unfairly simplified this way: At the beginning of a fantasy, nature (or possibly Nature) is out of balance. A spiritual malady expresses in the physical landscape (through war or famine or a deep and terrible shadow — whatever). The hero of the fantasy brings about renewal (what Clute calls “regreening”), in which the world is restored to its proper order.
Campbell’s version of this is the hero’s journey that we’ve all been slogging through since the generation raised on Star Wars got tenure. Briefly, the something calls the hero to his adventure. He (usually he) refuses the call. Then he’s pulled into it anyway. He retreats from the world into a series of numinous encounters and returns to the world at the end of the story, armed by his transformative experiences to save or at least improve the world.
Both of these analyses are much more cogently made by the men what came up with them, and both of them have real power. Clute is, as far as I can tell, more interested in the connection between theme and landscape. Campbell is more involved with the fantasy as psychological and spiritual metaphor.
With no disrespect to these schema, I would like to present a third alternative for the Basic Fantasy Plot. See what you think:
A farmboy turns out to be named by prophecy as he Chosen One who will defeat the Dark Lord. He (usually he) goes on a series of adventures, picking up colorful sidekicks, until the last few chapters where he faces the Dark Lord, almost looses, and then wins.
Okay. That was glib. But here’s the thing, that third one — cheesy, stupid, risible as it is — actually has a lot of power in it. When I was 16, I read that story until the spines broke and I had to buy another copy. Even now, I look at it and I’m torn between mocking the low, unsophisticated, stupid, triteness of it all and remembering with fondness bumbling around for five books with Garion and Ce’Nedra (I mean Ce’Nedra? What’s the apostrophe for? And when did I become such a sophisticate that I started looking down on that kind of name?).
One of the books I’ve read since the Symposium has shed some light on this. Compte-Sponville’s Little Book of Atheist Spirituality. He talks in that about one of the competing etymologies for “religion” being related to a word that meant “to reread.” The stories that we go back to again and again develop a depth and a power, or (in this case) a genre. If mystery novels are retelling the story of sin uncovered and romances are retelling the story of lovers kept apart by fate overcoming it (if it’s Pride and Prejudice) or dying in the attempt (Romeo & Juliet, Love Story), then maybe the farmboy and the regreening of the world aren’t as far from each other as it seemed to me at first.
Let’s turn for a moment to an example Walter made in the conversation. The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison v. The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien. The Worm Ouroboros has many of the trappings of epic fantasy: quasi-medieval courts, supernatural elements like goblins and imps and demons, wars fought with nobility and heroism. And yet, we don’t trace our genre to it. We trace it to Lord of the Rings.
Lord of the Rings is different in two ways (well, more than that, but two ways that seem interesting to me). First off, even with all the lords and ladies, the king returning etc. etc., the core story is about a middle-class protagonist. Frodo isn’t Lord Anything. Second, it isn’t a story about winning a war; it’s a story about disarmament. Gandalf and Galadriel could have beaten Sauron any old time. But the Ring would have corrupted them. The whole complex set of interwoven stories that *aren’t* Frodo and Sam Take A Freaking Long Walk details a distraction to keep the Dark Lord from noticing that a couple (well, with Gollum two and a half) humble people with no chance in the world against the power of Mordor were off to save the world. And that moral core is why this genre reeks of Tolkien and not Eddison.
So here’s my next proposal: The way mystery is about moral order being restored and romance is about star-crossed lovers being united, epic fantasy is about a person or small group of people who seem too small to face the challenges posed by an overwhelming evil in the world, and do anyway.
But wait! I hear you cry. What kind of plot is that? There’s no action at all! No scenes! How can you call that a plot? It’s more a vague theme-y thing. And sentimental too.
Yeah. Fair point. Like nailing Jello to a board, this.
Part Three: Plot Structure as . . . well, Structure.
Does it have to be a farmboy? Does he have to be the chosen of prophecy?
Well, of course not.
Another of the difficult, confusing things about taking on a concept like plot is that on one hand, you can clearly do anything, and on the other hand, you clearly can’t. Let me explain with an example.
Babylon 5 was five seasons of — let’s be generous — fairly spotty television. The dialog was wooden, the special effects while nifty in their day haven’t stood the test of time, the plots were so desperately unoriginal they often didn’t bother to file off the serial numbers, and the acting included some of the most hilariously awful performances of all time. Oh and the central love story was between two actors with the combined chemistry of bacon and ice cream.
X-Files, on the other hand, had everything that B5 didn’t. Great actors, smart scripts, chemistry that most writers would sacrifice limbs to capture.
And yet I watched the last episode of B5 and wept, and the X-Files, I just eventually stopped watching. B5 was an ugly success and X-Files a beautiful failure because Straczynski had a superpower and Carter didn’t. Straczynski knew where he was going.
I went back and watched the pilot of B5 not long ago, and it was much worse than I remembered. But it also had a tremendous amount of foreshadowing, some of which didn’t pay off until the last season, and in fact the last episode. Walter’s formulation of this idea of plot is something like this: you write a novel like you tell a joke — aiming to the last word on the last page. Every character you put in play, every subplot you add in, every huge battle and quiet love scene, is in the service of making that last scene in the last book satisfying. If it doesn’t do that, you probably shouldn’t have it there.
Babylon 5 did that if not perfectly, at least pretty well. X-Files just went on and on, adding mythological detail and confusion, false revelation after false revelation until it became clear that there wasn’t going to be a satisfying ending.
The same holds true here.
I started out thinking about plot in fantasy by asking myself what had to happen in a fantasy story. Did there have to be a hero who faces down a Dark Lord? Does prophecy have to drive everything? Hell, does the good guy have to win? And each individual question I posed, I thought “No, that doesn’t have to happen.” And there are a lot of examples. The farmboy could be a leper and a rapist, or a seriously depressed assassin, or a highclass whore who is deeply into her own pain. And they all work just fine.
There isn’t a plot structure that epic fantasy demands, except that there are taut, well structured plots, and lazy, wandering ones. The first kind is good. The second one’s bad.
Part Four: Summa
A good epic fantasy plot is one in which a person or group of people who appear too small to defeat great evil in the world do anyway, and the last scene of the last book ends the story that began on the first page of the first one. Beyond that, anything goes. Credo.
March 31st, 2008 at 7:50 am
We’ve had a report of trouble adding comments to this page. If you have trouble with it, please drop me a line at dja@danielabraham.com
March 31st, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Scheme #3 is not all that dissimilar to, say, Star Wars, which George Lucas later said was a conscious use of Campbell’s map of the Hero’s Journey (opinion is divided as to whether Lucas actually intended this at the time as he claimed). Campbell of course later went on to give a very cool series of interviews with Bill Moyers for PBS, at Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, which you should take a look at if you can find them. A very insightful man. There’s a lot to quibble with now, perhaps, but he did really dig down into some very universal archetypes.
“… an overwhelming evil …”
I’d quibble with this myself. I think epics, old and modern, don’t necessarily have to feature something evil. It just has to feature a crisis that is bad for the protagonists, and this crisis in itself doesn’t need to have any particularly negative moral dimension.
I’m primarily influenced by the ancient epics here — the Iliad has a crisis involving the theft of the most beautiful woman in the world, which is a problem but not really evil (doubtless the Greeks, given the chance, would have stolen the most beautiful woman in the world if she were Trojan).
The Cattle Raid of Cooley involves one petty kingdom trying to steal the cow of another petty kingdom for reasons of boosting its prestige, and this is a threat serious enough that one hero stands off an entire army to protect that cow … but they’d happily have done the same to their enemies, if the shoe was on the other foot.
Consider that depressed assassin — I’m assuming you mean Hobb’s Farseer. In the Farseer trilogy, the crisis is an attack from a foreign culture with a nasty weapon … but we learn that the foreign culture is attacking in part out of revenge for nastiness visited on them by the ancestors of their present victims. Certainly, the Red Ship Raiders were for a long time nameless, faceless brutes — “evil” — but Hobb complicated it a bit at the end if I recall correctly (and moreso when the second Farseer trilogy came out). Still, there’s definitely something epic there, because regardless of the morality of the enemy, the outcome — destruction of whatever the protagonist holds as worth protecting — is still bad. It’s still a crisis.
R. Scott Bakker has, I think I noted previously, some interesting things to say about crisis and the genre. I do think it is absolutely a key to epic fantasy. The crisis can be big or small, objectively speaking, but relative to the people involved it must be more important than anything else at the time that it presents itself.
“Oh and the central love story was between two actors with the combined chemistry of bacon and ice cream.”
Heston Blumenthal would think that’s a compliment.
I rate B5 higher than you do, I think, but regardless, yes, it was a success in my mind (a qualified one) in large part because JMS did know where he was going. X-Files had so many things going for it, but Chris Carter and co. didn’t care to actually let the story progress.
March 31st, 2008 at 3:54 pm
I’d be comfortable using “an overwhelming crisis” in place of “an overwhelming evil.”
I used the formulation I did because whatever the hero’s up against, it needs to be . . . well, undesirable seems weak. But bad. I wasn’t thinking of evil in a theological way (”all things of the devil”) so much as utilitarian (”global warming is the greatest evil facing our generation”). So s/evil/crisis/g isn’t a long jump.
April 1st, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Wow, great post.
(And, Hi. I’m Chris.)
Random comments:
1. In Tolkien, your theme doesn’t only appear in the Freaking Long Walk. It also appears in the small side stories. For instance, my favorite scene in the book as a teenager was the one in which Merry sees Eowyn about to be killed by the witch king; the “slow-kindled courage of his kind” is awakened; and he (small, weak he) crawls TO the witch king–who typically chases the mighty away by fear alone–and stabs him in the back of the knee. The book, in fact, is replete (now that you mention it) with such microcosms of this theme.
2. It seems that there may be something else that is standard in fantasy, and I’ll use Frodo as an example again. Yes, he was ordinary; but at the same time, and despite Gandalf’s protestations that Frodo wasn’t chosen for his wisdom, Frodo displayed a great deal of wisdom in his quest. Namely, he, perhaps above almost all the characters in the book, recognized *which things in the world were truly important*, and which were not. All the “good guys” shared this correct perspective (Aragorn, Gandalf, Faramir, etc.). The medium-to-bad guys tended to miss the boat (Saruman, Boromir, Denethor, etc.).
I conjecture that there is something POWERFUL inside us, such that:
(a) we find it difficult, in ordinary modern life–between career, family, politics, and generally ill-defined societal roles–to decide which things are truly important (especially in the absence of religious dogma, which used to provide this sort of thing to society);
(b) we find it difficult, in ordinary modern life, to follow through on those things which we truly believe are important, even when we CAN decide (family vs. work, say; or Changing the World vs. financial self-preservation); and
(c) we believe, deep down, that we COULD recognize what was truly important, and follow through, if only given the chance.
In epic fantasy, don’t we immediately recognize the protagonist as the one who “gets it,” even absent prophecy or Great Evil? The Hero is the one who correctly prioritizes the universe; the one who sees what is Truly Important.
Just a thought.
3. While your credo rings true to me, I’m having trouble identifying it in much of modern fantasy. In fact, the best current epic fantasy in my opinion is (wait for it) _A Song of Ice and Fire_. And yet, where are the ordinary people who have successfully beaten the odds of the big bad world? Perhaps you could argue that the ordinary people are THERE, and have been *set up* to beat the odds, and their doing so has been thoroughly foreshadowed…but they certainly haven’t done it *yet*, and hell if I know exactly where he’s going.
4. On the other hand, Jon and Sam, for instance, are clearly protagonists because they “get” that the Others represent the real crisis. Again we have microcosms. Characters are revealed as protagonists when they make choices that show their priorities are “correct.” Sandor protecting Arya, for instance; or Tyrion declining to bed an unwilling Sansa.
By contrast, Ned Stark misses on priorities (even though we perhaps don’t realize it at first) by putting Honesty and Prickly Honor above everything.
5. Another big epic series is the Wheel of Time. It’s interesting that apparently the general public LOVED the first *n* books (and n varies from reader to reader), but thought from n+1 on, the series was utterly boring. When you view this perception through the lens of your “fantasy theme” thing, it sort of makes sense. In the first n books, Rand et al were ordinary people, even the classic farmboys. But eventually (and it’s up for debate when it happened, which is perhaps why people differ on which book they begin to dislike?) the protagonists were inarguably No Longer Ordinary. They’re borderline nobility, they’re famous, and they’re among the Great of the world now. The thing that makes us love fantasy (therefore) is gone now. To get into technicalities, I’d argue that the Mat/Tuon story continues to be fascinating because Mat is VERY common in Tuon’s eyes, yet is great, deep down, in the best fantasy sense. Meanwhile, the Perrin story is boring (to many). Perrin (granted) is still common, but the problem he faces is NOT great, and in fact is not the “right” problem to be tackling. He’s fiddling around in the middle of nowhere doing nothing, in terms of What Really Matters In The Universe (or so I would argue).
Like I said, great post!
April 1st, 2008 at 3:41 pm
“While your credo rings true to me, I’m having trouble identifying it in much of modern fantasy. In fact, the best current epic fantasy in my opinion is (wait for it) _A Song of Ice and Fire_.”
Fair point. “Ordinary” may not be quite right, just the way “evil” wasn’t. *But* Ice & Fire is pretty ripe with characters who are apparently powerless (especially at the start). Danerys, Tyrion, all the Stark kids. None of them are in the driver’s seat when we meet them, and the story is set up to be those characters coming together to raise Westeros above its petty squabbling and face the Winter that is Coming. (Or that’s my read of it thus far.)
Even though all of them are of noble lineage, they’re also powerless. The Stark kids because they’re kids (and doubly Jon since he’s disgraced by birth), Tyrion because he’s a dwarf, and Danerys because she’s essentially a slave first to her brother and then Khal Drogo.
So, while it’s imprecise, maybe we could use “small” or “apparently powerless” instead of “ordinary”?
April 5th, 2008 at 8:38 am
I keep wondering where the line is separating epic fantasy and heroic fantasy, because I keep coming back around to the idea that the protagonists have to be — in some dimension or other — “heroic”, outside the ordinary, etc.
Bilbo, Frodo, Samwise — they’re all extraordinary by the standards of their culture (they left the Shire, which just ain’t done!)
The Stark children all get these direwolves — they’re clearly marked, in some fashion, for greatness (great evil or great good or just really great deaths, who knows), thrust into a situation far larger than they are in which they’re likely central. So, they’re extraordinary.
The three guys in the Wheel of Time have all become quite extraordinary — Rand became ruler of several kingdoms, a master swordsman, and a super duper magic user; Mat became a master spearman, has magical luck, and is the greatest general alive thanks to having the combined experienced of dozens of great soldiers in his head; Perrin became a lord, and then basically a king (but isn’t really aware of this fact), and of course he Speaks With Wolves and somehow managed to be a great fighter too.
They’ve moved into the heroic space (the latest book mixes it up a bit, I’ve been told, but that’s neither here nor there), and many of the sub-conflicts they were involved in after a certain point did seem a bit too small for what was the real stakes.
Still, the odds against them are so massively overwhelming, when all is considered, it can still be epic. Cúchulainn holding off Medb’s army was something only a superhuman hero could do, but it was something that really hung in the balance regardless.
June 1st, 2008 at 9:19 am
Hi Daniel!
I think that in great fantasy not just ANY person or group would do for beating ‘the great evil’ (When we’re talking about that kind of fantasy anyway).
there needs to be some sort of connection between protagonist and antagonist. And it doesn’t even need to be a prophecy or some such. They just need to be drawn to each other for some reason.
Look at Frodo, he’s got the One Ring. Sauron would never give up chasing him.
Harry Potter (although there was a prophecy involved) carried a piece of Voldemort’s soul in him. That was the true connection that binded them.
Somehow there isn’t a clear link like this between The Emperor and Anakin, if you leave the prophecy out of it. Maybe it’s the way they abused the Force.
Oh, and remember the second series about Belgarion, The Mallorean(?), his son got kidnapped by that Grolim that wanted him to be the next Child of Darkness. He himself was the descendant of Riva Irongrip, the first Child of Light (?long time since I read those books. Thoroughly enjoyed them by the way but got the same feeling of dissapointment when I found them in an old box a year ago).
I feel that if there no obvious ot convincing reason why hero and villain should ever seek each other out, be it a prophecy or not, the story would not ‘feel’ as logical as I would like it to be. No willing suspension of disbelief.
What do you think?
Martijn
June 12th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
[…] from entry Report on the Symposium: Plot: Plot is like “time” and “love” — we all know what the word means until we start […]