Stein on Writing (13 page)

• They are written by people who want a relationship so badly that they are willing to advertise for it.
  
• What they want is a mate, which is a high category of desire and the subject of much fiction.
  
• The ad writers are doing two things at once: they are trying to describe the kind of person they want to meet; they are describing themselves (sometimes unknowingly).
  
• The ad writers are frequently fantasizing about their ideal as well as about themselves.
  
• Readers of the ads usually get a far different impression from the one the advertiser intends.
  

The personal ads I’ve seen that are useful appear in
New York
magazine, the
Village Voice, L.A. Reader, L.A. Weekly,
and the
New York Review of Books.
Some are available nationally at better newsstands or by subscription. The
New York Review of Books,
a highbrow biweekly with a large international following, is a fine source because some of its ads are quite imaginative. I quote one of my favorites:

VERY UNUSUAL MAN

I’m looking for a very special woman—probably someone who rarely if ever, answers ads. Very well-educated and extraordinarily bright, funny, beautiful, athletic, sophisticated, outdoor oriented, honest, nurturing, vulnerable, financially secure, very sensual and able to be open and present to other people. Someone who is very successful in her own way, courageous and psychologically grownup. Probably 35-45, with a great appetite for exploring life with another person. I’m extremely well-educated, post-doctoral in humanities, and work at the top of the business community. Handsome, 6’, 180 lbs., athletic, very, very successful financially and professionally. I am a psychologically secure, well-balanced man who is totally natural and curious, sometimes brilliant, intuitive, funny, honest, genuine, direct and very open. I spend two to three months a year off doing interesting things other than work. I am a very complex, very special man with deep values and a good heart. I need to find someone who has gotten to the same place in her life and is headed in the same direction. Note/phone/photo a must.

I’ve read that ad at a number of writers’ conferences. Invariably, the audience keeps laughing throughout. They laugh because of the discrepancy between their image of the advertiser and the person’s self-image, ideal stuff for stories. If several writers were to choose the same ad as a
source for a character-based plot, I can guarantee that they would come up with entirely different plots. Personal classified ads are a good emergency resource.

In this chapter we have covered the elementary essentials of devising a plot. Now let’s take a look at some innovative ways of plotting.

The Actors Studio Method for Developing Drama in Plots

A
plot consists of scenes: What follows is an excellent way of creating almost any scene.

In mid-twentieth century, the home away from home for most superbly talented American actors was a white wooden church on scruffy West 44th Street in New York City that had become the locus of the Actors Studio. The building contained offices and rehearsal areas, but its core was the auditorium one flight up with its makeshift stage and hard seats. The physical environment didn’t matter. All who entered there knew they were in the cathedral of American theater, where the most talented aspirants got a chance to be scourged by Cardinal Lee Strasberg and where celebrated stars honed their work.

In time an associated Directors Group brought some of the best stage and film directors to work in the Actors Studio. Missing were writers, the playwrights who needed to see their work-in-progress being performed by professional actors, guided by experienced directors, all willing to commit long hours of rehearsal and performance without compensation except for the arduous pleasure of work and the spurt of hope that once in a great while a scene coming to life at the Actors Studio might turn into a production and a job.

In 1957, along with Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Molly Kazan, and Robert Anderson, I was one of ten founding members of the Playwrights Group of the Actors Studio in New York. As word of the group got around, it expanded to include talented newcomers like Edward Albee and Lorraine Hansberry, and novelists like Norman Mailer who hoped to write for the theater. Writers could now see their new work performed by superlative actors guided by talented directors. During its earliest years, the weekly meetings of the Playwrights Group included a trial performance of a play or a part of a play before an audience of
fellow writers, directors, and actors, who would afterward comment on the work.
[2]

For us writers, a high learning time came from the less formal exercises that did not require weeks of rehearsal by actors. In these exercises, writers were transformed into actors for the benefit of their colleagues. I was one of two writers picked by the director for an early exercise. The other writer was Rona Jaffe, the author of several bestselling novels. The director who worked with us that day was Elia Kazan, director of five Pulitzer Prize-winning plays and winner of two Academy Awards. For the writers in the audience—and for the “victims,” Rona Jaffe and me—it was an experience that gave us one of the most valuable techniques a writer can have.

We were to improvise a scene for which there was no script. I was to play the part of the headmaster of the Dalton School, a private establishment in New York for the privileged young. Rona Jaffe was to be the mother of a boy who had been expelled by the headmaster. That’s what the audience knew.

Then Kazan took me aside, out of everyone’s earshot, and told me that the mother of the expelled boy was coming to my office, undoubtedly to try to get the boy reinstated. This incorrigible boy had disrupted every class he was in, did not respond to the warnings of his teachers, and under no condition was I to take him back.

After this briefing, which took half a minute, I returned to the makeshift stage and Kazan then took Rona Jaffe aside. What do you think he told her?

None of the writers—myself included—knew what Kazan told Rona Jaffe till afterward. He told her that she was the mother of a bright, well-behaved boy, a first-class student, that the headmaster was prejudiced against him, had treated him disgracefully, and that Rona had to insist that the headmaster take the boy back into the school immediately!

Rona Jaffe and I were turned loose on the stage to improvise a scene in front of the audience. Within seconds we were quarreling, our voices raised. We both got red in the face and yelled at each other. The audience loved it. We were battling because each of us had been given a different script!

That’s what happens in life. Each of us enters into conversation with another person with a script that is different from the other person’s
script. The frequent result is disagreement and conflict—disagreeable in life and invaluable in writing, for conflict is the ingredient that makes action dramatic. When we get involved with other people, the chances of a clash are present even with people we love because we do not have the same scripts in our heads. And the tension is even greater when we are involved with an antagonist.

You are now armed. The secret of creating conflict in scenes you write is to
give your characters different scripts.

Over the years, in teaching writers at the University of California and at writers’ conferences and workshops, I have stage-managed an exercise involving members of the audience that enables these principles to be remembered. In teaching the Actors Studio method of creating conflict, I ask for one male and one female volunteer. I take the male student around a corner out of earshot and tell him that he is to visit a woman he loves and tell her,
“I got your message.”
No matter what she answers, he is to insist he got her message. I then take the female student out of earshot and tell her that a fellow she thinks is obnoxious is coming over. She didn’t leave a message for him. She just wants the money.

When both students come on stage in front of the group, the male student arrives at a make-believe door, knocks, is let in, and says,
“I got your message.”

The woman, as instructed, answers,
“What message? Did you bring the money?”
The usual reaction is loud laughter from the audience. Whatever the man and woman then say, the audience enjoys their adversarial dialogue, each relying on a different script.

That’s what you do with your characters. Whatever scene they are in, give them different scripts and you’ll have conflict in the scene and an entertained reader or audience. This technique works well for scenes in both commercial and literary fiction, with the scripts in literary fiction differing more subtly. This craft technique contains a range of possibility for every kind of writing.

Let’s clarify this simple procedure. You are imagining a scene with two characters. Before you write the scene, make a note as to the “script” or tack (keep it simple) of the first character and then of the second character. Make sure the scripts are different and at odds. Only you will be privy to the scripts of both characters. Let them play out the scene in front of you as you write. And if you have a third character in the scene, give that character a script different from the other two.

A “script” in this exercise is not the actual lines of dialogue, only
the intent of the character in that scene.
Think of the character as getting in
structions from you, the writer. It is important to keep the instructions brief. In the example devised by Elia Kazan, my script consisted of knowing who I was supposed to be (the headmaster of the Dalton School) and that I had thrown out a badly behaved boy. Rona Jaffe’s script was equally simple: the headmaster was in the wrong and she was determined to get her marvelous boy reinstated.

One of the values of using this method is that if Kazan had used two different writers for the exercise and given them the same scripts, the audience would have heard different extemporaneous dialogue and perhaps the scene would have taken a different direction than it did with Rona Jaffe and me. If you gave those scripts to a dozen different writers, you’d get a dozen different stories.

As an exercise, jot down the scripts of each of the characters in a given scene of any novel you may be reading. The writer probably wasn’t thinking of the character’s positions as scripts. The Actors Studio technique is a shortcut to the intuitive and learned processes that experienced writers use in creating dramatic confrontations in stories and plays.

It’s a wonderful technique. Use it well.

The Crucible: A Key to Successful Plotting

I
n the previous chapter, we were privy to the Actors Studio technique, giving your protagonist and antagonist different scripts and letting them tangle. While two characters can have different scripts throughout a book, the Actors Studio technique is most valuable for planning individual scenes.

For plotting an entire work, I especially like the use of a
crucible.
In ordinary parlance a crucible refers to a vessel in which different ingredients are melded in white hot heat. The word has come to mean a severe test, which leads us to its use in plotting fiction. Author James Frey refers to a crucible as “the container that holds the characters together as things heat up.”

Characters caught in a crucible won’t declare a truce and quit. They’re in it till the end. The key to the crucible is that
the motivation of the characters to continue opposing each other is greater than their motivation to run away.
Or they can’t run away because they are in a prison cell, a lifeboat, an army, or a family.

The following examples are drawn from memorable fiction that most writers will have read:

• In Hemingway’s
  The Old Man and the Sea,
  the man and the hooked fish are in a crucible: neither will give up to the other.
  
• In Flaubert’s
  Madame Bovary,
  Emma Bovary is married to a man she loathes. Divorce, then, was impossible. Her marriage is the crucible.
  
• In Nabokov’s
  Lolita,
  Humbert is in love with a young woman who is still a child. For most of the book Humbert and Lolita are in a crucible because she has nowhere else to go. When a third character, Quilty, provides an exit for her, the crucible cracks.
  

A crucible is an environment, emotional or physical, that bonds two people. It can be a scene or a series of scenes, but more often the crucible is an entire book. The crucible is a relationship, often one influenced by locale. Two prisoners in a cell are in a crucible because of where they are, and their confrontations are accelerated by the fact that they are thrust into the cell with different scripts.
The Kiss of the Spider Woman
is an excellent example. In my novel
The Magician,
the crucible is a high school. The villain, Stanley Urek, goes to the school, and so does the protagonist, Ed Japhet. Neither is free to go elsewhere. The crux of the conflict between the two boys derives from Urek’s role as leader of a gang that extorts protection money from the other students and Japhet’s refusal to pay. Both boys must continue in school and live in the same community. The school, and in a sense the community they live in, is their crucible.

In
The Best Revenge,
Ben and Nick start out as archenemies. Ben is producing a play for Broadway that is in deep financial trouble. Nick is a gangster nouveau, a new-style moneylender whose terms are severe, but Ben has no choice except to borrow from Nick and involve him in the production of the play. They are locked in the crucible of the play Ben is producing and Nick is financing. Ben is forced into a relationship he cannot leave. Nor does Nick want to leave once he gets a taste of the excitement of being involved in theatrical production. Remember that the essence of a crucible is that the characters are drawn more to the crucible than to escaping from it. In the end, the enemies, Ben and Nick, become friends, their lives melded in the crucible.

In his book
How to Write a Damn Good Novel,
James Frey came up with some excellent examples of characters caught in a crucible. I have adapted them and added others for use by my students:

• All the people in a lifeboat are in a crucible.
  
• Business partners, one a workaholic, the other lazy, are in a crucible.
  
• A wife and husband, bonded together by marriage, love, and duty, remain in conflict until separated by death or divorce. Their crucible is marriage.
  
• A father and son in conflict are also bonded by a relationship that even death doesn’t end. They can walk away from each other, but neither can get the other out of his memory. Their relationship, for better or worse, is for keeps.
  

Some situations do not lend themselves to creating a crucible environment in fiction, but you’d be surprised how many do. Test the
possibilities. If the locale you have chosen for a particular scene does not add the stress of a crucible, can you change the location of the scene, making it difficult for one of the participants to leave? Or is there anything that you can add to the background of either or both characters that would link them in a crucible and thereby raise the stress of their relationship?

Putting two characters in a crucible is an excellent way to proceed in plotting. Some writers, however, prefer to work with a simpler concept, that of a
closed environment,
the locale where the action takes place. Here are some examples to illustrate the difference:

• An astronaut who gets deathly ill during a space mission is in a closed environment. The location is a crucible, but as yet there is no overwhelming relationship that keeps him there. He is caught in a capsule in outer space.
  
• Robinson Crusoe and Friday on an island are in a closed environment. While their isolation from the rest of the world is the most important fact of their lives, their relationship gradually dominates the reader’s interest.
  
• In
  Moby Dick,
  Captain Ahab’s ship, the
  Pequod,
  is a closed environment. The most interesting relationship is that of Ahab and the White Whale. Therefore, it is not the ship that is the crucible, it is the vast ocean that contains both Ahab and the whale.
  
• In Jean-Paul Sartre’s brilliant play
  No Exit,
  which every writer should read, all four characters are in a closed environment, giving the play its dramatic intensity and its theme: Hell is other people.
  

When devising a locale for a scene, it always pays to give a few moments thought to the possibility of choosing a closed environment. It will invariably increase the tension of the scene. The ideal time to think of that locale is when you are first imagining your characters. What crucible might they be in? If you can find the right crucible, you will be on the way to a mesmerizing plot.