Ansen Dibell - Plot by Elements of Fiction Writing

Author:Elements of Fiction Writing
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

PATTERNS, MIRRORS,

AND ECHOES

I'VE SAID THAT EVERY STORY makes promises to its readers,

promises the writer has to take care to keep. Mostly, those prom-

ises are unspoken ones. And some are made indirectly, through

pattern.

Just by writing, you're choosing what happens and what

doesn't, what's possible in your little world and what isn't. What your characters are concerned about becomes, automatically,

your story's concern as well. The kinds of people whom you se-

lect as your characters—their attitudes and capacities, the kind

of relationships they get into—all are going to add up to some-

thing.

Detail on detail, incident on incident, character on charac-

ter, the pattern begins to form: the implicit rules and realities of your fictional world. A reader may not notice the patterns at

first, at least not consciously; but if they're carefully orchestrated and controlled, they're what hold your story together, give it

both diversity and unity, and make it specially your own.

With enough accumulated detail, a shape starts to form.

Any two dots define a line; any three, a triangle. Even yarrow

stalks, tea leaves, and random Tarot cards fall into patterns from which people attempt to read meanings. It's part of the way the

human mind works: finding faces in clouds, seeking shape, seek-

ing meaning. So how could your story, which certainly has more

intrinsic significance than a few soggy tea leaves, hope to escape?

94

Patterns, Mirrors, and Echoes 95

Patterns are going to happen. The question is whether

you're going to guide them into symmetry and significance, or

whether they're going to spring up, sprout branches in eleven-

teen contrary directions, and then slump like weeds.

The problem, at its simplest, is recognizing your tentative,

partial patterns as they accumulate and strengthening them,

making them coherent, getting other things out of their way to

let them stand straight and tall. The next and harder stage is go-

ing beyond basic weeding to cultivating: creating patterns delib-

erately, to gain for your writing the immense but subtle power of

recurrence, the second level of meaning that can only be spoken

in echoes.

MANY HAPPY RETURNS

In school, you were probably taught, as I was, to avoid simple

verbal repetition—using "however" or "interesting" too often in a single paragraph.

That's not what I'm talking about.

The kinds of repetition that work in fiction, that make bur-

ied but not-quite-hidden connections that can hold a story to-

gether, aren't a matter of single words. They're part of a writer's larger vocabulary: image, incident, situation, character. Narrative structure. Plot in the largest sense—not just what happens,

but precisely how the incidents are presented and the patterns they make.

Return with Us to the Thrilling Days of a Galaxy

Far, Far Away

I'll ask you now to flip back to Chapter 5, near the end, where I

did a bit of commentary on the structure of The Empire Strikes Back. Reread that section, then meet me back here.

OK? You're back?

There, I was talking about parallel plots, and how they can

be held together with echoing incidents. Now, the focus is on the

incidents themselves.

9 6 P L O T

A threat of freezing, in the beginning of that story, mirrors

a threat of freezing at the end. A cave in one of the parallel plot lines is mirrored by a cave in the other.

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