Introduction to Effective Report Writing for Business Audiences
Lionel Trilling, one of the influential critics of the mid-twentieth century who was also an
infrequent but interesting writer of fiction, declared that fiction at its heart involved the
differences between classes. While this observation is invaluable to writers of fiction, it
is also a match tossed into flammable material. The fact that acute differences exist
between social and cultural classes seems to be acknowledged in most of the world, but
in the United States, where democracy is often confounded with egalitarianism, even
the idea that social classes exist has long been taboo. It is, however, a writer’s specialty
to deal with taboos, to speak the unspoken, to reveal, to uncover, to show in the
interaction of people the difference between what we profess and how we act.
Moreover, because touchy subjects arouse emotion, they are especially useful for the
writer who knows that arousing the emotions of his audience is the test of his skill.
When we discuss cultural differences, we are not talking about economic differences or
equal opportunity. Cultural differences arise from inherited characteristics, upbringing,
and individual temperament. The best literary fiction often confronts these differences.
Even transient or popular fiction can benefit from an awareness by the writer of this rich
lode.
Wonderful stories can be crafted about people’s inherited characteristics, upbringing,
and individual temperament. Characters, just like people, can strive to overcome this
baggage and training. Some people succeed in doing so, some can’t, and the same is
true of the characters available to our imaginations.
Many dramatic moments in theater and film come from clashes between characters
based on differences in background. How can we overlook the source of audience
interest in Shaw’s Pygmalion or its rendering as a musical in My Fair Lady? Put the
garish and tacky Eliza Doolittle in touch with Henry Higgins, and you have a clash of
social and cultural differences instantly recognized by millions.
These differences are at the heart of what is in my judgment the best play by the best
American playwright of the twentieth century, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named
Desire. The play and film derive their power from the cultural conflict between Blanche
DuBois, the fallen “lady,” and Stanley Kowalski, the blue-collar brute, who strip each
other’s pretenses, witnessed by Stella, who married beneath her, and found herself in
the world of card-playing, beer-swilling male animals.
Characters of different cultural classes caught in a crucible are, of course, ideal for
fiction. The dramatic heat generated by cultural differences, inherited or nurtured,
added to the differences of individual temperaments, can help writers create wonderful
stories.
These differences are a valuable resource for scenes as well as entire plots. It is the
underlying basis of conflict in fiction.
Most people, regardless of their background, prefer others whom they think of as “their
own kind.” Which means that there is a widespread prejudice against “the other kinds.”
While this prejudice can be controlled and even overcome to some degree in life, a
vestige of feeling about “otherness” remains even in most people who deny it. That
feeling of “otherness” is useful to the writer in plotting because readers’ emotions can
be quickly committed when they observe two characters of differing backgrounds in the
same story.
It is useful for writers to step onto the thin ice of this subject matter with a clear
understanding of terms and meanings.
A culture consists of the behavior patterns, beliefs, traditions, institutions, taste, and
other characteristics of a community passed from one generation to another. The
adjective “cultured” is usually used to connote a superior level of aesthetic and
intellectual development that results from education and training.
A class is a stratum of society whose members share cultural and social characteristics.
“Class” used by itself—as in “she had class”—connotes superior style or quality.
Good writers have come from every imaginable social class, and some stand ready to
defend their turf. A writer has to squelch his emotional reactions consciously in order to
get enough distance to use them in his work as a writer.
People in civil society usually try to overlook the kind of differences we have been
talking about. But they don’t succeed. Their attempts to cover up noticed differences
sometimes fail, hurting others. In general, cultural differences are noticed by almost
everybody. When people learn to set aside cultural differences, we speak of them as
“open-minded.” Yet “open-minded” people sometimes say inappropriate things to make
people of other social classes feel “more at home.” This makes the others feel less
comfortable, not more comfortable. Therefore, despite noble intentions, social and
cultural differences can be a source of high feeling and high drama. As we shall see, for
plotting purposes, differences are more important than similarities.
Action movies categorize people into good guys and bad guys. In many of the films that
are nominated for Academy Awards, the discernment of differences becomes more
subtle. That discernment becomes a necessity in the best literary and mainstream
fiction.
The butting together of characters of differing backgrounds can be extreme, as in D. H.
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It can produce comedy if a good old boy joins the
ladies and gentlemen of Virginia on a fox hunt. What we expect of a good old boy is
that while he, too, hunts for pleasure, it is in the company of men who hunt in packs,
dressed in rough clothes, who would laugh at the gaudy dress of traditional fox hunters.
Social and cultural differences strike sparks both for the writer and the reader.
In literary fiction, the clash of differences is often more subtle than in My Fair Lady or A
Streetcar Named Desire. One of my favorite stories, which won a place in The Best
Short Stories of 1991, was Kate Braverman’s “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta.” Let’s
look at the beginning of that remarkable story and observe the clash of background and
values:
It was in the fifth month of her sobriety. It was after the hospital. It was after her
divorce. It was autumn. She had even stopped smoking. She was wearing pink aerobic
pants, a pink T-shirt with KAUAI written in lilac across the chest, and tennis shoes. She
had just come from the gym. Her
black hair was damp. She was wearing a pink sweatband around her forehead. She was
walking across a parking lot bordering a city park in West Hollywood. She was carrying
cookies for the AA meeting. She was in charge of bringing the food for the meeting. He
fell into step with her. He was short, fat, pale. He had bad teeth. His hair was dirty.
Later, she would freeze this frame in her mind and study it. She would say he seemed
frightened and defeated and trapped, cagey was the word she used to describe his
eyes, how he measured and evaluated something in the air between them. The way he
squinted through hazel eyes, it had nothing to do with the sunlight.
“I’m Lenny,” he said, extending his hand. “What’s your name?”
She told him. She was holding a bag with packages of cookies in it. After the meeting,
she had an appointment with her psychiatrist, then a manicure. She kept walking.
“You a teacher? You look like a teacher,” he said. “I’m a writer,” she told him. “I teach
creative writing.” “You look like a teacher,” Lenny said.
“I’m not just a teacher,” she told him. She was annoyed.
“Okay. You’re a writer. And you’re bad. You’re one of those bad girls from Beverly Hills.
I’ve had my eye on you,” Lenny said.
She didn’t say anything. He was wearing blue jeans, a black leather jacket zipped to his
throat, a long red wool scarf around his neck, and a Dodgers baseball cap. It was too
hot a day for the leather jacket and scarf. She didn’t find that detail significant. It
caught her attention, she touched it briefly and then let it go. She looked but did not
see. They were standing on a curb. The meeting was in a community room across the
boulevard. She wasn’t afraid yet.
“You do drugs? What do you do? Drink too much?” he asked.
The narrator and Lenny come from different worlds. We find out how different as the
story goes on. Lenny is invading her world just as Henry Higgins invaded Eliza’s and
Blanche DuBois invaded Stanley’s—with different intent, of course. The reader senses
the difference early from the clothes they are wearing, from the woman’s fear and need
to be polite, and Lenny’s impolite, aggressive questioning and assumptions.
The process of identifying different worlds for the reader can be accomplished quickly
through markers, easily identified signals that to the majority of readers will reveal a
character’s cultural and social background. Clothing, as we’ve seen, is a useful marker.
A woman in a tailored suit suggests formality. Would we expect to see that woman
walking in the street with a man wearing a totally sleeveless “muscle” shirt or a cap
with a slogan on it? The reader assumes they are not together because they have the
appurtenances of widely different backgrounds. But if they are walking arm in arm,
what is the reader to think or feel?
Today, people of every background seem to wear jeans. But if a man wears designer
jeans with a pressed crease do we assume he’s just come off his job at a construction
site? Suppose the reader sees someone on a construction site who is wearing designer
jeans with a pressed crease, what does the reader think? He thinks phony. Phoniness
can be useful to a writer.
While no marker is an absolute designation of background or class (there are
exceptions to almost all of them), the reader will feel a reaction to the markers. For
instance, if we are in a courtroom where a young man is being charged with a criminal
offense, what do we expect to see? We expect that his lawyer will have made him get
dressed up, often with a suit and tie. If in that courtroom that same young man is
dressed in his usual cut-off blue jeans, dirty sneakers, and a T-shirt with an obscene
slogan, what would we think? That his lawyer had neglected to do his job? What would
the judge think? Surely the judge knows that lawyers dress up their clients. Will the
judge think that the lawyer or client is showing contempt for the dignity of the court?
The reaction to
clothing is often a reaction to the surroundings in which the clothing is worn. Keep that
in mind when you’re describing a character in a specific scene.
When in fiction, theater, and film the writer brings together people of differing social
and cultural backgrounds, he needs to step back to watch the inherent drama of
differences explode. Differences assume opposition. That’s what makes writing
dramatic. If dealing with social and cultural differences makes the writer uneasy, that’s
good. Emotion-inciting material is the most desirable kind. If social and cultural
differences between characters excite emotion, the tension of any story will surely
increase.
Many aspects of cultural class distinction have been used in fiction. Some
characteristics that once denoted upper and lower classes have diffused in time.
In countries with diverse cultures like the United States, regional differences sometimes
become more apparent than class distinctions. Generational differences also produce
changes. For instance, while a conspicuous tattoo still suggests “lower class” to the
reader, and the larger the tattoo the lower the class, in recent years some young
people of all classes have had themselves tattooed with small objects such as a heart, a
rose, or a butterfly.
Though the characteristics that once connoted “lower class” and “upper class” to
readers are no longer absolutes, they still work as markers in which readers find
connotations and associations. Those markers continue to be invaluable to the writer.
Let’s look at some common markers, some of which have been overused:
Hair worn in curlers under a head scarf in public usually connotes “lower class” to
readers.
For a woman, fingernails the size of animal claws and garish nail polish used to make a
statement about class. Clawlike fingernails and excessive rouge continue to suggest
unsophisticated artifice, which can be useful to a writer. Black under the fingernails of a
man dressed up to go out might be a marker of a person who does dirty work with his
hands and never quite gets them clean. The writer doesn’t have to say what I’ve just
said. All he has to show the reader are the fingernails; they are effective markers.
Public conduct with children is an immediate marker. A woman walking with a “dressed-
up” child connotes one thing. A woman screaming at her children in the supermarket
suggests another.
What does the incessant chewing of gum suggest about a character? What would an
ankle bracelet convey to a reader about a character? What about a man wearing
multiple large rings, or a diamond ring?
Mannerisms can be important markers. How does the reader react to a male character
who publicly picks his nose, scratches under his arms and in his crotch? Would the
reader instantly assume that the character is couth or uncouth?
Even the transportation used by a character can be a marker. If a reader knew nothing
about a character except that he owned a pickup truck, a motorcycle, and a souped-up
car with oversize tires and a noisy muffler, what would the reader think about that
character’s background?
Food, drink, and the places they are consumed are markers. If the reader knows a
character drinks popular brands of American beer, rye whiskey, and chilled red wine,
what does the reader guess about the character’s background? If the character drinks
Scotch, Perrier, and martinis straight up, does the reader have a different view? Of
course. These markers are useful. Fizzy wine or coolers would not be the choice of
people with educated palates. Nor would you be likely to find people with educated
palates on line in a fast-food take-out joint. Conversely, a construction worker, even if
dressed in his Sunday best, is likely to feel mighty uncomfortable in one of Manhattan’s
posh East Side restaurants, where all the waiters are dressed in black tie and the menu
is in French.
If your character brought his mouth down to his food rather than his food up to his
mouth, the reader would likely draw an instant assumption about his upbringing.
However, some distinctions in eating habits are poor markers because they are too
complex to describe succinctly. For instance, the British use a fork in the left hand and
a knife in the right. The left hand brings the cut food to the mouth. Americans keep
switching hands and bring food to the mouth with the right hand. Distinctions of that
sort are not good markers for the writer because they require too much description and
readers might still not get the point without the author telling them explicitly. A marker
should convey its point instantly.
Perhaps the most frequently used marker is found in the vocabulary and expressions of
a character’s dialogue. If a character uses words like “ostensibly,” “exacerbate,”
“primordial” correctly, and with ease, what would you, as a reader, think about them?
That vocabulary is indicative of someone who is well educated. But it could also reflect
a pompous person. One of the most common vocabulary markers is heard on television
when a police officer talks about a “perpetrator.”
In most of my novels I have at least one character with an accent, a distinguishing
marker. In The Best Revenge at least three characters have accent markers that differ
noticeably from each other. Many politicians speak in incomplete sentences peppered
with clichés. Street people use four-letter words and vulgar expressions. All of these
markers characterize quickly.
The content of a character’s speech can also generate markers. If a character displays
knowledge of what went on in previous centuries, is interested in international issues,
reads books and appreciates them as physical objects, and votes regularly as a matter
of principle, what will the reader think about his or her background? Markers provide
the writer with an opportunity to show the character’s background instead of telling the
reader about it.
Attitudes can also be used as markers:
Arthur came to New York expecting to be insulted or mugged by every passerby.
An inexperienced attitude toward travel can be an important marker, for instance, a
preference for group tours, being intimidated by foreign languages and customs, or
buying up mass-produced souvenirs. However, be wary of cliché markers such as an
American tourist abroad in search of a restaurant that serves hamburgers.
I have a strong preference for action markers, that is sentences that describe what a
character does and at the same time reveal something about the character’s
upbringing or background:
Every time Zelda ate in a restaurant, she found some reason to send food back to the
kitchen. Louis always played it safe by overtipping the waiter.
As usual, Angelica let her food get cold because she was busy watching everyone else
in the restaurant.
We have just seen three quite different instant characterizations in the same location, a
restaurant.
I have sometimes found that even accomplished writers neglect to ask themselves
some fundamental questions about their important characters that could provide useful
markers. For instance, what trait inherited by the protagonist has most influenced his
adult life? What custom of the protagonist’s family still haunts his life? Which personal
habit has he tried to break, unsuccessfully, for years? What family tradition has had the
most positive influence on the protagonist? What is the single most important factor in
the villain’s upbringing that contributed to his reprehensible conduct?
If you are presently writing a novel, have you examined it to see if there are some
social or class differences between your two most important characters? How do those
differences influence the story? If you have neglected such differences, how might you
bolster your story by adding some social and cultural differences that arouse emotion?
And now that you’re mastering the creation of characters, it’s time to ask, “How do you
plot that story?”
Chapter 6
Thwarting Desire: The Basis of Plotting
We are driven through life by our needs and wants. So must the characters we create
be motivated by what they want. The driving force of characters is their desire.
Inexperienced writers, sometimes ill read in the great works of their own and previous
times, often try to write novels with a relatively passive protagonist who wants little or
has largely given up wanting. I have met more than one writer who says that his
character doesn’t want anything—he just wants to “live his life.” That always brings to
mind something Kurt Vonnegut said:
“When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their
characters want something right away even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters
paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to
time.”
The most interesting stories involve characters who want something badly. In Kafka’s
The Trial, Joseph K. wants to know why he is being arrested, why he is being tried, what
he is guilty of. In Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the central character constructs his life
with the sole object of reuniting with Daisy, the woman he loves. In Flaubert’s Madame
Bovary, Emma Bovary, her head full of romantic notions, wants to escape the
dreariness of her husband and her life. If your character doesn’t want anything badly
enough, readers will have a hard time rooting for him to attain his goal, which is what
compels readers to continue reading. The more urgent the want, the greater the
reader’s interest. A far future want does not set the reader’s pulse going the way an
immediate want does. The want can be negative, wanting something not to happen, as
in Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, in which the reader hopes that de Gaulle
will escape the assassin’s bullet.
In the chapter on characterization, I suggested that some of the most memorable
characters in fiction were eccentric. To carry the point a step further, I suggest relating
the character’s deepest desire to the character’s fundamental difference from other
characters, especially the character of the antagonist.
Which brings us to the essence of plotting: putting the protagonist’s desire and the
antagonist’s desire into sharp conflict. If the conflict isn’t sharp, the tension will be lax.
One way to plan is to think of what would most thwart your protagonist’s want, then
give the power to thwart that want to the antagonist. And be certain there is a two-way
urgency: your protagonist wants a particular, important desire fulfilled as soon as
possible, and the antagonist wants to wreck the chance of that happening, also as soon
as possible.
Those are the three keys: the want and the opposition to the want need to be
important,
necessary, and urgent. The result should be the kind of conflict that interests readers.
A word of caution: these plotting guidelines are basic and to some degree simplistic.
They are intended to provide the writer with the easiest route to publication. The well-
read writer will be familiar with complex plots that deviate from the norm. What they do
not deviate from is the fierce desire of the protagonist and the conflict engendered by
obstacles.
The essence of dramatic conflict lies in the clash of wants. You need to be certain that
the conflicting wants are connected significantly and are over something that the
reader will view as important. For instance, if the hero wants to preserve his valuable
stamp collection and the villain has stolen it and intends to sell the items in it
piecemeal to conceal his theft, their wants are clearly on a collision course. However,
ask yourself, does the reader care enough about the stamp collection? If the stamp
collection belonged to President Franklin Roosevelt, an avid stamp collector, the theft of
that collection could have interfered with matters of state until it was resolved. The
reader will care about the stamp collection to the degree that he cares about the
protagonist and what the protagonist loves. That’s one of the reasons why the best
plots develop out of character.
It is easier for the reader to identify with a want that is close to universal and not too
specialized (a stamp collection is relatively specialized). The wants that interest a
majority of readers include gaining or losing a love, achieving a lifetime ambition,
seeing that justice is done, saving a life, seeking revenge, and accomplishing a task
that at first seemed impossible.
In transient fiction (sometimes called “commercial” or “popular” fiction), the wants are
less personal and often more melodramatic. Events happen rather than grow out of
character. Though my personal preference is for literary fiction, I have worked with a
number of highly successful professional bestselling novelists who didn’t seem to care
whether their characters were remembered years later. They mastered craft; their
storytelling was suspenseful and compelling for large numbers of readers. The wants of
their characters tended to be different from those in literary fiction. For them and other
writers of popular fiction, the following wants were paramount:
Defeating the plans of a national enemy.
Blocking an assassin out to kill an important person.
Rescuing someone close to the hero.
Solving an important crime.
The clash between your characters can be based on almost anything as long as it is
involved with their desires. The most common causes of a clash are money, love, and
power. Power connotes control, usually over other human beings. Therefore, in a
community of two people, if one has power, the other doesn’t have it. Some of the most
interesting plots involve a character who has power in one arena up against a character
who has power in another arena, and both characters are caught in the same crucible.
(We will deal with the crucible in its own chapter.)
When planning your story, it is important to remember that small clashes result in
stories that seem relatively trivial. Larger clashes resonate for the reader. Ask yourself
these questions: Does the conflict you are working on lead to profound unhappiness,
injury, or death? Or is the conflict over an object that is exceedingly valuable to the
main
character? Is the conflict over an important life decision—to move far away, to change
one’s career, to leave for another partner, to follow a hazardous opportunity, to avoid
intolerable circumstances?
Ask yourself, will the clash between your protagonist and your antagonist seem
inevitable to the reader? Have you avoided coincidence as the cause of their clash? Will
the clash take place in a highly visible environment so that the reader will see the
action?
If you have some concern about the intensity of your plot, ask yourself, Does the
conflict you’ve invented involve the best possible thing that could happen to your
protagonist? Is what happens a surprise to anyone? Can you make it surprising by
setting up an action and then showing the opposite of what your reader is likely to
expect?
Would the conflict you have described result in a verbal or physical struggle? Would
that struggle call for strong scenes in which your characters clash in an exciting way?
Remember your book is told in scenes each one of which should produce an excited
reaction in the reader.
If any scene seems not yet exciting enough, think of introducing a new character into it,
which always generates possibilities for conflict, especially if the new character has
something important at stake in what is happening in that scene.
If you get stuck, there’s another device some writers use. Think of the worst thing that
could possibly happen to you right now. Don’t censor. A layman instinctively covers up.
A writer disciplines himself to uncover.
Now think of your very best friend. Conjure up a picture of him or her in your mind.
Remember the good times with your best friend. What is the worst thing that could
happen to him or her at this very moment? It has to be something different from the
worst thing you imagined happening to you. It should be linked to your friend’s
character, ambitions, or desire.
Now imagine the same worst thing happening not to your best friend but to the
character in your story. Would that create a suitable obstacle in the plot you are
developing?
The protagonist’s biggest obstacle is usually the antagonist and what he does. But
there can be numerous other obstacles that will thwart the protagonist on the way to
achieving his goal, including, perhaps, what you imagined happening to your friend.
There are other techniques to get your plotting motor going. By thinking of certain
conventional obstacles, less conventional obstacles will occur to you. For instance, your
character needs to get someplace right away. The car breaks down. (In a melodrama,
the breakdown may have been precipitated by the villain or an accomplice.) Or the
weather changes drastically and impedes progress. If the weather won’t do, think of
any unexpected, uncontrollable event.
Here are some other stimuli. A deaf person fails to hear something. A blind person fails
to see something. A recluse refuses to tell what he has seen. An airplane flight is
aborted on takeoff. Water is needed immediately for an urgent purpose; suddenly there
is no water in the tap.
There are larger obstacles that can stimulate your plotting: a sudden illness of an
important character. Help is unavailable. An accident happens on the highway to
someone the reader cares about. Or an accident at home—someone falls in the bathtub
or off a ladder. A natural disaster (flood, earthquake, hurricane, forest fire) puts your
character at great risk.
It’s common to think of the obstacles of all being generated by the villain, but we’ve
seen that acts of nature can also be obstacles. And there are always other people
butting in. You can devise an unwanted intervention by someone who wants to help but
makes things worse. Or you can have an unwanted intervention by someone unrelated
to the villain who wants to block the protagonist for reasons of his own. You can have a
previously absent person return who causes problems because she is not up on what
has transpired during her absence. The list could go on. But you get the point. You can
always check your daily newspaper for obstacles in the lives of people in news stories.
One caution. Some obstacles need to be planted ahead of time so as not to seem
arbitrary devices of the author.
Writers who feel the need of discipline in plotting can sometimes benefit by preparing a
list of every obstacle they plan to use in their plot. They then can ask themselves, is the
first obstacle strong enough to hook the reader? Do the obstacles build? That means as
each obstacle is faced and overcome by the protagonist, an even greater obstacle has
to present itself.
I know novelists who have very strong first obstacles, but they do not follow up with
stronger obstacles, with the consequence that the reader feels the story winding down.
As a result, the reader either gives up reading before the end or, even if he’s persistent,
won’t rush to get that author’s next book.
Some writers I’ve worked with find it difficult to develop plots because they’re not sure
their plot ideas would be of interest to readers. Here are some clues to areas of reader
interest:
Reading about enemies trapped together. In life, one of the most
uncomfortable experiences people have is being with someone they don’t want
to be with. In fiction, when readers observe someone else in that predicament,
it engages a strong concealed emotion. The reader wants to know the
outcome.
Experiencing a character’s embarrassment involves the reader. Causing a
character to be embarrassed will almost always create an interesting plot
development.
Experiencing a character’s fear creates enormous tension. It can be fear of
mortal danger, of course, but experienced novelists generate fear from small
things. Eric Ambler’s The Light of Day has a scene in which the protagonist is
chauffeuring a car with a loose door panel concealing smuggled arms. As the
screws rattle, so does the reader, afraid that the car’s owner in the backseat
will hear the rattling. The scene is full of tension.
Change in a relationship invites the reader’s tense interest in the outcome. In
life, people get bored when nothing changes even though changes in life are
fraught with peril. If the perils of major change happen within the covers of a
book, the reader will be absorbed.
Readers enjoy being surprised. Nice surprises are one of the pleasures of life.
We like to receive surprise presents, good news, the announcement of an
unexpected visit by friends we want to see. Bad surprises in life bring hurt,
sadness, misfortune. But in books readers thrill to the unexpected. A new
obstacle, an unexpected confrontation by an enemy or a sudden twist of
circumstance all start adrenaline pumping and pages turning. Novels, stories,
plays, and screenplays
thrive on bad as well as good surprises.
Surprises are not difficult to create. Look at each important incident in your plot and see
what you would normally expect to happen next. Then have the exact opposite happen.
At least half the time an idea will suggest itself that will surprise your characters as well
as yourself.
You can surprise yourself (and your readers eventually) by picking an unusual locale
that you know well enough to depict accurately. Then choose a character you have
already created who is most unlikely to show up in that locale. Put that character in that
locale. Imagine what happens when the character shows up there, and other characters
react.
Finally, I would like to suggest an easy means for getting character-derived plot ideas.
Sometimes even experienced writers get stuck. I counsel them to examine the
classified personal ads, which frequently have the following characteristics:
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.
Chapter 7
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.
2 I deal with the sexual politics, outrageous experiments, glories, and shenanigans of
this interesting group in a work-in-progress entitled Passing for Normal. Here I concern
myself solely with the technique playwrights learned that can be used to advantage by
writers of fiction and film.
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 instructions 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.
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