Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See

Author:Carolyn See
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307415967
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Plot

Your characters have got to have something to do. That’s “plot.” I think men and women have very different feelings for plot, and traditionally, men enjoy the advantage.

The Iliad and The Odyssey, for instance, are long, male action-adventures with clear-cut beginnings, middles, ends. Every basketball, football, and baseball game is an event with a beginning, a middle, and an end, victory and defeat ensured. Men have been building bridges and buildings, and destroying bridges and buildings, and raping and pillaging women and children, or stoutly defending women and children, since the beginning of time.

They’ve been trained to do all that stuff and then they’ve been trained to talk about it. Men are raised to have enough self-esteem to take it for granted that whatever they do is interesting. Women have been trained to listen. Have you ever heard a garage band playing and you go take a peek and there are five or six girls just wailing away while their boyfriends sit politely waiting for them to finish? No. Because it would never happen.

Plot implies that not only does art have a beginning, a middle, and an end but that life does, too. And that’s more or less true. We’re born, we live, we die: beginning, middle, and end. But plot is not very good at addressing the endless hours when you’re taking care of a sick kid or the couple of hours you can spend talking on the phone with a friend and at the end you can’t remember all that you’ve said, but you feel better. Plot thrives on event; it thrives on conflict, even though most of us go through our days routinely, contentedly, and, generally speaking, without much conflict at all.

From a man’s point of view, all the stories may already have been told. Men have certainly been at it long enough. Maybe all the explorers have already left home and discovered the world and come back. Maybe all the bridges and buildings have been constructed. Maybe all wars look alike.

Feminist critics complain that women, through history, have been stuck with all the wife/mother/lover plots. In fiction, it does tend to be true: Women get stuck being the wife, the mom, the lover—even in novels written by women.

In the twentieth century, it was fashionable for a while for men to sell plot short in relation to character. Character-driven literature was seen as superior to plot-driven narrative. That may only have been because the male literary elite attempted nothing more strenuous than lifting martinis to their lips and jumping their friends’ wives. (I think, particularly, of John Updike.) But all along, other men, who saw life differently, were writing excellent novels based mostly on plot.

I just did what I told myself I would never do during this project. I checked out Anne Lamott’s marvelous book about writing, Bird by Bird, to see what she writes about plot, and she says what I thought I remembered her saying: “Don’t worry about plot. Worry about the characters. . .

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