Thursday
Thursday Craft: Let's Discuss Steve Almond's Mini Essay on Plot
It’s been a bit of a Steve Almond month here at FlashFiction.Net, with an article about his advice on withholding information from readers (Don’t!) and Todd B. Stevens’s review of Almond’s This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey. Almond gave FlashFiction.Net permission to reprint a craft essay and flash fiction piece from This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey, described by the Harvard Book Store below:
This Won’t Take but a Minute, Honey is a quirky resource for budding writers, a sort of freaky Strunk and White. Read through in one direction to find tiny little short stories of a page each. Flip the book over and find mini essays on the psychology and practice of writing. Whichever way you look at it, you’re sure to find a nugget of inspiration for your next project.
Reprinted with the permission of Steve Almond © 2009
In the essay previous to this one, Almond gives a great (and brief, maybe partly great because it’s so brief) definition of plot: “Plot is the mechanism by which your protagonist is forced up against her deepest fears and/or desires.” That definition becomes the measure against which Almond evaluates plot’s tendency to go awry. Here are some thoughts on Almond’s above list of five.
- One reason I think I ended up becoming a writer: wanting to avoid the world and its chock-fullness of compelling fears and desires. So it makes perfect sense that I tend to avoid these things in my writing. Also evinces is a cool word, with its root vincere, to conquer.
- “Readers don’t want typical.” The supernatural quality of story-world ensures that characters might not get exactly what they want but what they need. Eliot, who we learn cannot feel what others feel, doesn’t get just any visitor, he gets the alien E.T., whose supernatural ability forces Eliot to feel what the alien feels so that the alien becomes no longer alien, so that Eliot’s heart glows red too, something both warm and painful, that adult kind of empathy, not exactly what a teenage boy might want to find but perhaps the very thing he needs.
- The introduction of numerous plots originates, for me, within that deep, deep well of self-doubt. “If you don’t like that one,” I seem to be saying to readers, “then maybe you’ll like this one.” In giving them a lot of things to choose from, I’m really giving them nothing.
- You promised stakes and end up with chicken. Well, I recently heard Eddie Izzard argue that chickens should actually be symbols of bravery, for that way they run around with no-heads, refusing to yield to death. That aside, I often run around the moment of truth promised at the end, because, as Grover has taught us all, the monster at the end of books is ourselves. And who wants to face that?
- “All of the above deployed….” I like the deployed, with its image of troops being sent out to create this wall of protection. Writing, for me, has always been the thing that arises to protect me from the world’s desire for my own nothingness; it is what I set against such a fate, a somethingness, and if indeed writing allows me to feel, well, feeling leads to hurt and that leads to more feeling and more feeling might just kill me, giving the world what it has always wanted, my nothingness. Yes, it’s completely whacked. But it’s a lot to ask of me to allow writing to make me feel, to make me become “emotionally involved.” Just so you grasp the stakes of what’s being asked here.
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net’s suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
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posted on 26 Mar 2010, 4:04 PM
Oh this is wonderful. All the things I believe in especially the one about being chicken. Most pieces I wrote when I started had chicken shit written all over them. Haha. Now all I can say is "bring it."
posted on 26 Mar 2010, 4:26 PM
I really like Steve's idea of a character that is at the bottom of a hole.
posted on 27 Mar 2010, 9:23 AM
Yeah, Todd, that's a good one.
posted on 26 Mar 2010, 5:32 PM
Such good thoughts! As for the writer protecting herself, "no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader". Writing is not an escape from life and feeling, but a way to cope with it.
As for "maybe you'll like this, or this" - well, anyone with the guts to put himself or herself onto the page is already way ahead of the game. Who cares if they like you? Let them do better. If they ARE better writers, then they need to have compassion for someone coming up through the stages they, too, passed through.
posted on 27 Mar 2010, 9:25 AM
Hey, Elizabeth. Oh well, for me writing is very much an escape from life and feeling, but I do see that as being problematic. I think the "maybe you'll like this or this" had more to do with wanting readers to like the story than with wanting them to like me.
posted on 27 Mar 2010, 9:22 AM
Thanks, Gay. "Bring it!" I like that attitude.